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Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

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Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#151

Post by TeMPOraL »

saiya-jin wrote: post #142
TeMPOraL wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that. Not only this is counterproductive, it would be definitely something those hypothetical Chinese agents would say! This sentiment is what you call "the dumbest part of America" - one of personal responsibility when facing dangers that are by design above most people's threshold of self-control. If there is on…

You call it 2 extremes, from European point of view there are just mild variations of the same right wing approach, and result differences are even milder (ie democrats starting/expanding wars, conservatives allowing recreational cannabis etc). Not criticizing or anything, but actual extremes look significantly different, wake me up when a proper anarchist sits in White house for example

I call it two extremes because a lot of people insist on viewing them as Completely Different Things. After all, they have opposite names - "right wing" and "left wing". I'm from Europe too, and to me the extremes both look the same. The specific beliefs may be opposite, but that's just a free variable. The intellectual dishonesty, the belligerence, the hatred, they're all the same.

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#152

Post by newaccount74 »

saiya-jin wrote: post #142
TeMPOraL wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that. Not only this is counterproductive, it would be definitely something those hypothetical Chinese agents would say! This sentiment is what you call "the dumbest part of America" - one of personal responsibility when facing dangers that are by design above most people's threshold of self-control. If there is on…

You call it 2 extremes, from European point of view there are just mild variations of the same right wing approach, and result differences are even milder (ie democrats starting/expanding wars, conservatives allowing recreational cannabis etc). Not criticizing or anything, but actual extremes look significantly different, wake me up when a proper anarchist sits in White house for example

I think it's funny they are calling it "2 extremes" when there's only one side forming armed militias.

Proper left wing extremists were the RAF who murdered people they fought against. Protestors are not extremists.

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#153

Post by bigger_inside »

pigeonhole123 wrote: post #146
bigger_inside wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to comment on the obvious projection inherent in the "the Chinese are forcing drugs on the US" narrative. But it's a classic. If you want to know the nefarious things the US is doing, just look at what the claim their adversaries are doing.

I think GP's point is the opposite. Most people agree that Britain's opium trade in China was exploitative.

I was seconding the comment I replied to, not arguing against a misreading? Though I might be misunderstanding who you mean by GP. I'm confused, sorry

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#154

Post by Anthony-G »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #113
sublinear wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that. Not only this is counterproductive, it would be definitely something those hypothetical Chinese agents would say! This sentiment is what you call "the dumbest part of America" - one of personal responsibility when facing dangers that are by design above most people's threshold of self-control. If there is on…

Which extreme do you consider to have “won the meme spreading battle”?

Genuine question: I purposely don’t spend any time on social media or any other blog/forum that makes use of Internet “memes” so I’m blissfully unaware of what kind of content is circulated. Also, as (another) European, I try to not let myself be overly distracted by American political drama. I need to have some awareness of what’s going on in the US as it influences the political discourse in the rest of the Anglosphere (Hacker News posts like this one suffice for that level of awareness).

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#155

Post by Steve44 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #37
nimbius wrote: post #36

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…

Given the difficulties trying to intercept Concorde over the years it looks like it would take an awful lot of planning, equipment working perfectly, and topped off with a lot of luck.

There are some intercept stories [1] and [2] about why there isn't a photo of Concorde at Mach 2. An F14 Tomcat [3] did get close once though. These were all controlled intercept attempts when Concorde was flying on a scheduled flightpath so quite unlike a wartime attempt against a Mach 3 SR71. Not saying it's impossible, just very very hard.

[1] https://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-505899.html

[2] https://theaviationgeekclub.com/not-a-single-photo-of-concor...

[3] https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-unknown-story-of-the-us-...

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#156

Post by trashtester »

sublinear wrote: post #87
anoy8888 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That is quite a non sequitur. Who is being forced to take drugs or listen to extremist propaganda?

Do you feel the same about he Opium Wars?

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#157

Post by trashtester »

Dah00n wrote: post #143
jraby3 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a pretty strong connection to them supplying fentanyl to the US through Vancouver. https://www.jordanharbinger.com/sam-cooper-how-the-west-was-...

Anyone being unbiased who claim to know enough about PRC to point at the state being behind it doesn't use the wrong and derogatory term for the Communist Party of China ("CCP", it's CPC). That's like 60 minutes making a documentary about the Federal Investigation Bureau or the Party Republican.

That's like claiming it would be derogatory to label the URSS as USSR or the KPD the German Communist Party.

Then again, I don't care if someone thinks that a reference to a communist party is negative, as long as the negativity is about the communism aspect (as opposed to the ethnicity or general culture of that country). Just like I don't care if the NSDAP would find it insulting if I call their party the Nazi party.

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#158

Post by sofixa »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #101

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Yuri_Gagarin Also see the R…

> They were also quite good at processing Titanium

Yep, and they had a revolutionary (arguably too early for it's time) submarine, Project 705 Lira NATO codename Alfa, that used a titanium hull and a lead-bismuth cooled fast reactor, making it significantly faster than US submarines and even faster than US torpedoes, scaring the US in the process (who bought the propaganda that this sub will be the backbone of the Soviet attack submarine fleet, instead of just a proof of concept that did work, but was expensive and hard to maintain and thus scrapped).

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#159

Post by trashtester »

dirtyid wrote: post #107
sublinear wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 man…

> PRC waging opium war on US comparison only works if PRC was militarily coercing the US to not enforce domestic drug policies.

Things can be similar even if they're not identical. If a state actor supports criminal forces to transport harmful substances into a country, it's not so different from supporting the East India Company in doing so.

Also, the purpose matters. When the EIC sold opium in China, the motive was probably profit. If China sponsors sale of opioids in the US, it's more likely to be motivated by a desire to cause harm, which most would consider worse.

> 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.

Well, this implies that you agree that the main purpose is not their own gain, but the harm they can inflict on their perceived rival.

What would it look like if the US developed the same kind of desire to inflict pain and suffering in China, as a goal in itself?

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#160

Post by [deleted] »

smcl wrote: post #140
fy20 wrote: post #45

Factories in the USSR often had a shortage of parts, but they still had to meet production quotas. This usually meant a reduction in quality, but it goes the other way too. I've heard stories that consumer appliance factories would run out of stainless steel, so they would use titanium alloy instead, as it was more plentiful. In my country, one of the most unique consumer appliances they made was a potato grating mac…

Is Titanium not famously quite hard to work with? I imagine that it would be hard to sub in for stainless steel, so for normal white goods I don't know if it'd be worth it.

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