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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

#171

Post by faangsticle »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #151
saiya-jin wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hate to break it to you but the 2 party system is and has been broken for a very long time. You're choosing between two choices that are mostly identical. Introduce some extra parties if you want healthy politics.

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

#172

Post by TeMPOraL »

faangsticle wrote: post #171
TeMPOraL wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hate to break it to you but the 2 party system is and has been broken for a very long time. You're choosing between two choices that are mostly identical. Introduce some extra parties if you want healthy politics.

I mentioned I'm in/from Europe, not the US, so the 2-party system doesn't really concern me. More importantly though, my comments aren't about the two US parties, but rather the two seemingly opposite extremes of political ideas, that are typically referred to as "left" and "right".

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

#173

Post by masklinn »

basilgohar wrote: post #170
tedunangst wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "SR-71" is like a cheat code that completely inverts HN's skepticism to 100% credulity.

Almost every thing about the 60+ year old SR-71 Blackbird still seems like something out of the future...except for the leaking fuel while not flying part. It's as close to a real deus ex machina as we can get, and it captures geeks' imaginations as such in ways like you describe.

Even the stuff that’s resolutely from the past is really cool, like the foldable (hinged) signposts they installed along the hauling route between Burbank and Area 51: https://roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-12....

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

#174

Post by wslh »

nwallin wrote: post #42

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…

I found a possible pattern here: with lithium I see similar articles that are wrong regarding the worldwide reserves and country ranking. For titanium you can check https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233845/reserves-titaniu...

Not saying that these articles are specifically ChatGPT or other primitive generative tool but it is a journalist stupidity and/or copy/pasting/generative.

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

#175

Post by int_19h »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #128
8note wrote: post #7

> After all, they fraudulently possibly told their comrades that the United States was a lazy country that probably couldn’t even cook for itself. They need it to go out to buy pizza… This is a weird dig at the soviets, who were probs just happy to to find some customers to justify having already dug up all the ore. The fraudster seem to be the Americans in this case?

Don't exclude corruption as a motive here. Pizza ovens sounds just about like a good enough excuse some corrupt Russian official would be able to use with a straight face while making a nice profit selling titanium.

In USSR, this wouldn't make much sense, because where would you spend that money?

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

#176

Post by int_19h »

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.

FWIW, for a while (before the war in Ukraine), VSMPO-Avisma, the largest titanium extractor and exporter in Russia, was selling stuff like titanium gardening shovels, rakes etc on Amazon and eBay.

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

#177

Post by sidewndr46 »

aardvark179 wrote: post #63
nwallin wrote: post #42

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…

I agree there probably is an interesting story, but it’s also worth noting the things that weren’t true back in the 60s. I found some old declassified CIA reports that suggest the USSR controlled 70% of world titanium production, and that this was five times US production. Patents for the processes used in Australian production appear to date from 1960 onwards, and there is also a note that 80% of the titanium bought…

This isn't really true, the YF-12 in 1964 was used by the government to acknowledge the aircraft's existence without revealing its exact purpose.

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

#178

Post by smcl »

int_19h wrote: post #176
smcl wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FWIW, for a while (before the war in Ukraine), VSMPO-Avisma, the largest titanium extractor and exporter in Russia, was selling stuff like titanium gardening shovels, rakes etc on Amazon and eBay.

Ahh so maybe the expensive or difficult titanium work is the really high-end stuff like SR-71? I just recall from Skunk Works that they had a tough time working with it.

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

#179

Post by skeeter2020 »

faangsticle wrote: post #171
TeMPOraL wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hate to break it to you but the 2 party system is and has been broken for a very long time. You're choosing between two choices that are mostly identical. Introduce some extra parties if you want healthy politics.

While the alternative to a 2 party system may seem obvious, a 2+ party system that's not what you actually get. From a US-type "winner take all" with influential groups & individuals, to preportional representation you end up shifting negotiations into shadowy back rooms amongst unelected officials. In addition, that 3rd option is never coming from the middle. The sizeable movements are even more extreme, pulling the major parties further to some sort of preceived binary position on every topic.

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

#180

Post by skeeter2020 »

hervature wrote: post #141
CommitSyn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

While 4/5 is shocking any way you look at it, the stronger argument for why this stat is misleading is because it does not take into account how long the prescription lasts. Anecdotally, I was given basically a week's worth after all 3 of my surgeries. Tough to find stats on these things but I could see opiod prescriptions being 2x the number of prescriptions because the number of "doses" are half what other non-addi…

Yes, lots of opiod prescriptions for like 4-7 days, but there's got to be more for chronic treatment when you factor in thewy might be 30-90 days between refills.
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