They were also quite good at processing Titanium, for example the monument to Yuri Gagarin in Moscow is made out of a Titanium alloy (the monument looks like superman, if you ask me).
They had to melt and cast titanium ingots in a vacuum oven, then assemble the components into the statue. This technique wasn't repeated very often, as far as i know.
If there is one thing that was conclusively proven by the now almost 40 year old "War On Drugs", is that controlling their supply does nothing for their demand. The US is tearing itself from the inside because of the inevitable conclusions of late stage capitalism: there is an unsustainable wealth gap, and entrenched systemic discrimination perpetuated by cultish religiosity. Blaming China for this (or even Russia) i…
> If there is one thing that was conclusively proven by the now almost 40 year old "War On Drugs", is that controlling their supply does nothing for their demand. Quaaludes have been effectively nonexistent globally (with the sole exception of South Africa) since the start of the 1990s and entirely because of the "War On Drugs".
If any of that was true I wouldn't be able to easily purchase MDMA, LSD or dozens of other synthesized drugs.
The reality is that the user base shifted to MDMA based products and other options such as valium or xanax. Quaaludes aren't as enjoyable because they can easily knock you out before you have any real fun..
Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one…
That is what China is doing to US now . Decades from now , Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable.
Xi has said that China was a great nation until the First Opium War, which he blames for plunging China into darkness until the Party took control. Though he will never say it out loud, in his mind, he might be running that same playbook in reverse on the West. http://gh.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/sgxw/202107/t20210704_906...
4 out of 5 pharmacy-filled prescriptions are opioids.¹ In almost every single case, those using these drugs are trying to escape the physical and/or emotional pain. They didn't wake up one day and say "I want to have fun, I'm going to do heroin" Almost every fentanyl user I've talked to in harm reduction work started out on prescribed painkillers. Whether they got the taste and moved up quick, or just couldn't get th…
4 out of 5 pharmacy-filled prescriptions is not 4 out of 5 prescriptions, let alone 4 out of 5 patients, nor does that statistic say anything about unfilled pharmacy prescriptions or the rate at which people did not develop an addiction. Also you would expect the proportion of pharmacy-filled prescriptions for opioids to go up if the more common prescription for pain is not opiods from a pharmacy.
> 4 out of 5 pharmacy-filled prescriptions is not 4 out of 5 prescriptions
As opposed to the non-pharmacy filled prescriptions people pick up?
Your argument is that the statistic only works because so many people don't pick up meds their doctor calls in for them?
I'm not a statistician so maybe I'm not understanding correctly, but that seems like a very weak argument.
One has to wonder if or how this ever paid off. Once the sr71 showed up the USSR not only met the challenge with the Mig 25 foxbat a few years later, but outproduced the sr 71 to create strong coverage over most of Russia's airspace. Alone it couldn't catch the 71, but its r33 missiles and 600 kilowatt radar could If you owned a 71 it was probably a pretty bitter realization a plane less than half the price could sho…
Could a Foxbat shoot down an SR-71? The latter is like 0.6 Mach faster. The former was built out of steel, had an underpowered radar, couldn’t climb as high as a Blackbird and carried AA-6’s, which would have to lock and hit their target before the solid motors ran out [1]. To my knowledge the MiG-25’s claim to fame is shooting down an F-15 in the Gulf War. In any case, it’s clearly been worth it. The B-2, B-21 and R…
The Mig top speeds quoted always involve a plane that had no ordinance and was essentially empty. Even then the plane couldn't handle mach 2.83 for longer than 5 or so minutes due to heat generated by air friction damaging both the engines and the air-frame. Meanwhile the SR-71's top sustainable speed was mach +3.
So basically a mig25 would have to be in the perfect spot and ready to have a chance at shooting down a SR-71. Even then the odds of success wouldn't be that great. The way bigger threat were the new generation of SAMs coming online that COULD give the SR-71 a lot of trouble.
The spin off industries related to the SR-71 was massive and well worth the research.
I'm not aware of a mig25 actually shooting down a F15. The only incident I'm aware of was the "ambush" in Samurra. So I'd like to know what incident you're referring to.
>> Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable. > If they’re useless, how are they making chips and secret tech? My reading is they are trying to make us useless but we are not there yet? I assume it takes time, right? In any case, not like the west can comp…
> not like the west can complain after what we did in the opium wars? the west isn't one entity. Plus two wrongs don't make a right. Just because in the past, there has been atrocities committed, doesn't mean there's justification to do so now.
Historically and culturally, the west is absolutely a meaningful entity.
That is what China is doing to US now . Decades from now , Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable.
> they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable That is quite a non sequitur. Who is being forced to take drugs or listen to extremist propaganda? Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that. The instability of American culture is currently seen as an intrinsic virtue. China is not causing any change. They're just app…
Yeah, PRC isn't so much doing an opium war on US as watching US doing an opium war on herself and not helping. Which PRC did when relations where good. Now the relationship is bad, there's no reason to waste PRC domestic resources to assist the US war on drugs.
Also important to note it wasn't the Opium in Opium War that led to the century of humiliation - the humiliation was due to the War that weakened the Qing mandate and economic consequences of the unequal treaties. Great Britain via gunboat diplomacy forced Qing to open trade to opium that Qing tried to ban domestically by seizing stocks from British merchants. The shame/damage wasn't having citizens tripped up on drugs and the social ills that entail, but loss of sovereignty/state capacity over economic affairs that drained silver reserves and reversing trade surplus, which had knock on consequences. Wasn't addicts that brought down Qing, but the throne being weakened due to loss of sovereignty and inability to put down multiple uprisings due to loss of treasure. PRC waging opium war on US comparison only works if PRC was militarily coercing the US to not enforce domestic drug policies. As if that can happen. Does PRC propaganda benefit from US inability to curtail drug use domestically? Yes. But not enough to not cooperate with the US on drug trade when the relationship was good.
The US "intelligence" apparatus created a particular cover story. There's no actual information as to what the USSR actually believed at the time. If they weren't particularly interesting in competing in aerial surveillance then it may have been seen as worth the money they got in return. They were already in the business of exporting it, it's not as if we got them to create a special market based on this cockamamie…
> If they weren't particularly interesting in competing in aerial surveillance then it may have been seen as worth the money they got in return. You really bend it to fit your narrative. Not sure what the Soviets believed, but no sane country would want to help their adversaries to achieve stronger offensive capabilities, which surveillance would no doubt help. Bribery though, that wouldn't be too outrageous. I don't…
> no sane country would want to help their adversaries to achieve stronger offensive capabilities
The cold war was very much a one-sided affair. The USA may have seen the USSR as a military adversary, but the USSR did not see the USA the same way.
> not like the west can complain after what we did in the opium wars? the west isn't one entity. Plus two wrongs don't make a right. Just because in the past, there has been atrocities committed, doesn't mean there's justification to do so now.
Historically and culturally, the west is absolutely a meaningful entity.
But the west is far from a single coherent actor.
Even just consider that the hegemon that leads the west has changed from great Britain to the US.
> If there is one thing that was conclusively proven by the now almost 40 year old "War On Drugs", is that controlling their supply does nothing for their demand. Quaaludes have been effectively nonexistent globally (with the sole exception of South Africa) since the start of the 1990s and entirely because of the "War On Drugs".
If any of that was true I wouldn't be able to easily purchase MDMA, LSD or dozens of other synthesized drugs. The reality is that the user base shifted to MDMA based products and other options such as valium or xanax. Quaaludes aren't as enjoyable because they can easily knock you out before you have any real fun..
Synthesised, and natural. The growth in popularity for micro-dosing mushrooms and cannabis speaks for itself, and have weaned many off the really bad 'quaaludes', and also off the really bad, but ' considered lighter' Xannies and other benzo's.
"Made in a factory, or something that grows?", is a big factor in how people approach their ingestion.
I do enjoy, the mathematical difference between manufactured lsd and natural shrooms, though.