Miscellaneous News
- Thread starter bd popeye
- Start date
I agree on principle but even in China that dream is next to impossible to accomplish. People say that Chinese value collective prosperity but go see the driving culture—especially how scooters and E-bikes fly around with suicidal recklessness. I witnessed more 7 car pileups in 3 weeks than all my time in Toronto. It's a fucking free-for-all on the streets.
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
Hard to believe a TikTok deal happened separately when China is playing hardball on soybeans. At least when we hear from farmers, they squarely blame it on Trump’s tariffs on China meaning they want Trump to repeal his tariffs. It’s China’s tariffs that make American soybean cost more so they know what and who’s to actually blame. The question is when is Trump going to cave? When the US goes into a recession? A depression? It sounds like he’s expecting China to still give him everything he wants while giving nothing in return like with all his other supposed trade dealings with other countries. Is he demanding China give him hundreds of billions so he can build factories in the US?
I heard on the news that because of the shutdown anyone that calls a government office in the US gets a straight to recording message blaming Democrats for why they’re unable to reach anyone. Trump knows he’s getting blamed and that’s just a desperate attempt hoping there are enough dumb MAGA out there to make a difference. Who knows? There might be.
If there’s any lesson for the world out there it’s being a US ally makes you weaker not stronger. Look at how none of them can do anything to rein in Trump despite all the unnecessary economic baggage he has wrought upon the Western alliance. Then they think they can gang up against China? Well how come they haven’t? All of it only exposes how weak they are. So what does any country get joining up with them? The superficial romanticism they give of themselves that the weak-minded only buy. Look at how Japan and South Korea bought it. They don’t even have the fake independence that Europeans show. They just sit there like a Geisha passively waiting for others to decide their fate.
This point I completely agree. Only SOE can make weapons, and we need cutting-edge weapons.
To think of it, the internet, which is era-defining, came out of Arpanet, not that different from an SOE lab. And Beidou is mostly an independent tech (vs HSR being built on tech transfer) created by the SOE system.
During this discussion, I actually thought the most about what should be considered innovation. In the case of Starship <- Falcon 9 <- delta <- v2 <- Chinese fireworks, who are the innovators and who are the iterators? Steve Jobs once said ideas are cheap; it's the implementation that counts. The internet, smartphone, and LLM all took over a decade of breakthroughs to enable trillion-dollar $ wealth creation. What is the value of creating the first prototype?
Baloney. What about the IGBT transistor, quartz watch, pocket calculator, the VCR, the CD, the Walkman, the LCD TV, AMOLED, CMOS sensor, stereolithography, cup noodles, cell phones, the laptop computer, the white LED, secondary lithium ion batteries, NAND memory, the maglev train and other such Japanese innovations?
Japan tried to go into aerospace to go into other markets. But they were kneecapped here as well. The Mitsubishi SpaceJet is one example. They couldn't get FAA approval no matter what they did.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
And it turns out one of the two civilians killed died from police bullets.
I have been saying for years that western armed police carrying military rifles patrolling city centres is pure lunacy since those rounds are far too overpowered for the target and environment.
You can score a textbook perfect kill shot on a bad guy and still kill up to two civilians behind him if the stars were badly enough aligned for it.
For urban policing, 9mm SMGs should be the default carry long gun, not assault rifles. Especially in places like the UK where body armour isn’t remotely widely proliferated. And if terrorists where wearing level 4 plates, 556 wouldn’t do much anyway.
But just watch them throw the poor policeman who fired the shot under the bus and continue to use their ridiculously ill suited firearms.
The Aztecs were already consuming corn tortillas long before the Spanish Conquistadors came. It is not uncommon for them to wrap corn tortillas around meats and condiments. Tacos is just another offshoot from that tradition. What the Spanish Conquistadors changed was introducing wheat into Latin America, and wheat tortilla was born soon after.