To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

1970-01-01 wrote: post #106

moonchrome wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of practical/contextual knowledge that isn't documented, and what's documented isn't guaranteed to be correct or can be misleading (terminology changes, standards change, some things are implied because they are obvious at the time, etc.)

Give some examples? That kind of 'undocumented' knowledge is lost because better tech has completely replaced it. I'm talking about inventions like the Spinning Mule or the steam engine. We have superseded them with electric motors and logic boards.

Post by Pavel_KF » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 9:16 PM UTC

0xDEF wrote: post #91

cpursley wrote: post #64

Everybody likes to dump on Russia here but their nuclear icebreakers are something to behold: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/may/worlds-m... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaVhXn49xY

It is actually a surprising that Russia is not the manufacturing capital of the world. They have super-cheap energy, Soviet-era high-quality STEM education, and 50 million cheap workers from Caucasus, Siberia, Far East Russia, and the Central Asian countries.

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 9:17 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #103

dragonwriter wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OK, the who would you suggest should be the world’s police? > The post-WWII world order is predicated on the agreement that the age of imperialism is over and that invasion by force to annex another country is illegitimate. If that was true, it would be inconsistent with any one nation or narrow relatively fixed set of nations being the world’s police, as that would indicate that the age of imperialism was not over…

The age of imperialism is not over, except where someone enforces it. That someone is mostly the US, but UK and France also do a lot of work that I know of. None of them are perfect, all have a lot of blood on their hands, but overall imperialism is mostly dead despite many who would turn to it if they could. In economic theory there are good reasons to say that every country has better options than imperialism - but…

Post by vGPU » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

freefaler wrote: post #101

0xDEF wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually a surprising that Russia is not the manufacturing capital of the world. They have super-cheap energy, Soviet-era high-quality STEM education, and 50 million cheap workers from Caucasus, Siberia, Far East Russia, and the Central Asian countries.

And a very corrupted government and no rule of law. China is also corrupted, but the level of corruption in Russia is on a different level. Also declining population and worsening education. There is a statistically significant correlation between the level of corruption and economic growth: https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-rep... Putin has dismantled most of the check and balances in the syst…

Post by cpursley » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 9:26 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #97

0xDEF wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually a surprising that Russia is not the manufacturing capital of the world. They have super-cheap energy, Soviet-era high-quality STEM education, and 50 million cheap workers from Caucasus, Siberia, Far East Russia, and the Central Asian countries.

Russia is still structured as an empire, though the fraction of ethnic Russians is relatively high, historically speaking. That, together with its large size, requires a large section of the economy be slaved to the security sector. Frankly, Russia as a Chinese suzerainty might be one of the more productive alignments for the global economy, even if it isn’t great for America.