Hey man, congrats on the new job.

i think the difference is that only 2 countries have successfully landed on Mars while the amount of people earning 120k is quite high

Four governmental organizations have landed on Mars. Can’t forget the Russians and Europeans did it first. But that’s besides the point because I provided a hyperbole where my rate of change was significant but not newsworthy. We aren’t celebrating them because they went from there the fastest but because they went there at all. How fast isn’t noteworthy because they’re standing on the shoulders of giants. They literally copied the design of our rover from 20 years ago and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had stolen a lot of those tech specs from nasa long ago

I'd agree rate of change counts more if both parties were at comparable technology levels. When you're still playing catchup there's a lot of opportunities to take certain engineering shortcuts.

100% agree, like hiring Nazi scientists to kickstart your space program.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip