DoughnutHole
Sometimes you just have to read to damn book.
They were still innovating in military technology in the 80s but analysis since their collapse analysis that they were at least 20% of GDP on defence, if not as high as 40%.
The West managed to match and surpass Soviet military and scientific advances without sacrificing consumer goods or the economic wellbeing of their people.
If anything the weapons kept the industry trucking on - if you want to develop and maintain a nuclear weapons arsenal then a commercial nuclear power industry is very helpful.
Luckily Ukraine beat back the drive on Kyiv. But if Russia’s success metric at the outset of the war (the complete capitulation and conquest of Ukraine) carried a credible risk of losing Moscow or even smaller cities closer to the front would they have been anywhere near as likely to have made such an attempt?
A plane hijacking can evidently cause enormous destruction with minimal equipment and personnel. Even just a bomb on a plane can easily kill 200-500 people depending on the plane’s capacity.
Ground-based attacks since 9/11 have been evidently less effective because a bunch of guys with guns attacking a train station or a rock concert can’t do as much damage as quickly as a hijacker essentially flying a cruise missile into a major office building.
The Simpsons just leant so far into 1-note characteristics that they became caricatures of themselves - and the term Flanderization was born.
What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.
This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.
If you stare at your GPS and don’t pay attention to what’s in the real world outside your windshield until you careen off a cliff that would be “blindly” following your GPS. You had data but you didn’t sufficiently hedge against your data being incomplete.
Likewise sticking dogmatically to your metrics while ignoring nuance or the human factor is blindly following your metrics.
Being deeply embedded in global supply chains and your allies’ economies makes it a lot more difficult for them to justify abandoning you to your enemies.
My biggest frustration with AI coding tools is that bad engineers are no better at judging the quality of AI code than they are at writing code themselves. So, their output has shot through the roof without an improvement in quality.
The productivity of good engineers has gone up as well but good engineers tend to actually think about what the their tools are doing, which slows them down. Bad engineers are now able to output more shit code than ever before.
I feel like I’m watching my company building a house of cards in real time.
It doesn’t wholly replace the need for human support agents but if it can adequately handle a substantial number of tickets that’s enough to reduce headcount.
A huge percentage of problems raised in customer support are solved by otherwise accessible resources that the user hasn’t found. And AI agents are sophisticated enough to actually action on a lot of issues that require action.
The good news is that this means human agents can focus on the actually hard problems when they’re not consumed by as much menial bullshit. The bad news for human agents is that with half the workload we’ll probably hit an equilibrium with a lot fewer people in support.
They make perfect sense in warm, sunny regions like the Mediterranean because they provide a shaded and comparatively cool area on hot sunny summer days.
The courtyard giving shade is a negative in England since it seldom gets very hot and so people are actively trying to enjoy the sun, not hide from it. And as a double whammy a courtyard means more exposed walls so a home that’s harder to heat in colder winters.
Of course plenty of Americans live in places much hotter and sunnier than England - but their English heritage has left them with standard building practices unsuited to their environment.
The mercantilist economic policy of the UK was an abject failure that made its people poorer and prevented the import of cheap food.
But the UK’s unwillingness to provide sufficient aid once the famine had already started was motivated by laissez-faire politics and a Malthusian belief that the famine was the Irish’s own fault for overbreeding.
Remember that the government with the support of the Whigs and Radicals actually repealed the Corn Laws, it was just too little too late. Ironically the Whig’s free market beliefs if enacted in policy much earlier might have prevented the famine from happening in the first place, while simultaneously meaning they weren’t interested in properly mitigating it once it did happen.
Engineering standards are built on piles of corpses. We’re lucky that most of the growth of our industry has been in non-life-critical areas.
But regulation and standards are coming eventually - shoddy code will just have to kill a few thousand people first.
There’s no double jeopardy in a civil case - it’s a matter of if someone has a claim of damages.
Libya’s been at peace for 4 years now, but it’s politically a mess. Syria has seen 18 times as many deaths as Libya with only 3 times the population.
Regime change and the overthrow of dictator’s is always messy. Frankly Libya could have turned out a lot worse.
Pretty much every nation bar the US was on the verge of economic collapse by the end of WWI (and Russia’s did). The financial burden of two world wars killed the French and British empires. Germany’s WWII war economy was totally unstainable and the USSR’s was bankrolled by the US lend-lease program.
It’s not a panacea - it’s just what you have to do to drive enough military production to sustain a near-peer conflict.
More recent examples include the both sides of the Iran-Iraq war and Armenia in its war with Azerbaijan.
GDP has implications for the productivity of an economy and the budget of the government.
41% of Russia’s government spending at the minute is on the war which means they have to either cut spending on other things weakening the state or drive massive debt and inflation.
There’s a reason you can only run a war economy for so long - eventually you win the war or bleed your economy dry. Russia’s had the advantage of huge legacy reserves of equipment from the USSR days and a larger population. We’ll see how long they can last tapping the well.
Unfortunately try as we might to get people to switch, the fact is that undamaged Teflon is more non-stick than anything else and most people don’t want to put the effort into seasoning their pans.
Teflon is popular, and Teflon owners could do with utensils that don’t destroy their pans or give them cancer.
There’s also a potential health argument against cooking with Teflon pans to begin with, but people do and those people shouldn’t be using metal if they want their pans to stay non-stick for any reasonable length of time.
In a similar vein different people in Xinjiang in China observe entirely different timezones - Han Chinese observe Beijing time (because China is insane and uses one timezone despite spanning 5), while Uyghurs observe a local time 2 hours behind.
It’s a small show of resistance, which is sometimes all a people have if they have limited control of their own affairs.
Anyone who has done their research know the experiment is bollocks. There’s countless others out there touting it as informative.
The modern lifestyle is incredibly sedentary and every civilisation is built on staple foods that can feed hours of manual labour (with modern snacks thrown on top).
Calling a major food group evil is just a good scapegoat because it’s much more palatable than telling people that they don’t move enough and eat too much food.
Having money doesn’t easily buy you a hereditary lordship. You might be able to buy a load of land but probably not a prestigious ancient estate because the families that own them would usually rather let them fall into disrepair than sell them.
Money will buy your kids a place in prestigious public (read: private) school so they can rub shoulders with upper class kids and have connections when they grow up. But those upper class friends will always know that you and your kids are really just jumped up middle class since your great great great great grandfather wasn’t the Duke of Norfolk or some such.
For reference Kate Middleton’s family are wealthy multi-millionaires, and have been wealthy going back to the 19th century. When she married Prince William the press still waxed lyrical about the fact that the Prince of Wales was marrying a “commoner”.
Really the only rock solid way to wash away the middle class stink from your kids is to marry into the real top level of the upper class.
In the US class distinction is (almost) entirely down to money. If you’re rich you can buy nicer things than someone poorer and so you can be immediately sorted into a higher social class.
In the UK just because you’re rich that doesn’t make you upper class. British society is riddled with subtle dress coding, language, and social cues designed to trip people up and differentiate the nouveau riche from the real old money aristocracy.