131–140 of 181 posts
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When I was growing up my father had an ashtray from his days in the navy, which was made from the bottom of a three inch shell. On the bottom stamped in the metal was '1944', which as a child confused me because I knew my dad was in the navy from 1959-1965, so I asked him. "Let's just say they made A LOT of those in 1944."
That's why there are military surplus stores all over the country. Great stuff to be had -- cheap!
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The production of armaments is a bit of an economic anomaly, to be honest. All businesses, including arms manufacturers, require a constant flow of business in order to cover their fixed costs and remunerate their investors (debt holders and shareholders). If governments only order weapons when they need them to fight a war, then the arms manufacturers would shut form at the end of a conflict and would take ages to “…
And what happens to those stockpiles...do they get smuggled around the world, feeding the arms race?
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I read an interview with an NRO scientist, who described his group as following carefully the progress of the Hubble team who were independently solving many of the same problems their teams had solved earlier. From a national security perspective, they had to sit on their hands and not offer any help, but from an engineering perspective, they valued having another team do it to see if they would validate their desig…
Is there an overview of the differences in design choices made?
I'm slightly confused; is the story that the state of New York bought equipment for Tesla worth $300 million dollars, and a sixth of it is currently unused (meaning five sixths of it is being used currently)?
The history of the Buffalo "gigafactory" is rather sordid... In a nutshell, Tesla and its subsidiaries made large employment and economic growth promises to the state of NY in exchange for massive subsidies (almost $1B total). The state wanted to stimulate growth in an economically depressed region, but those growth expectations have not materialized at all. And now, at least some of the NY state taxpayer financed eq…
That would be a new one, can you name a few?
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I love this story. Reminds me of Contact, one of my favorite movie quotes of all time: 'First rule of government spending: why build one when you can have two for twice the price?'
One of my favourite movie quotes ever. Up there with “the only winning move is not to play” from WarGames.
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> (That means that Rive and Musk are genetically half-siblings.) Apropos of nothing, I'm now imagining a world with forms of address based on the natural logarithm of shared genetic material.
Isn't this roughly how people talk about their relationship with Native American tribes? They don't do the log2 math, but they're happy to hit you with the fraction.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/02/09/583987261...
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The history of the Buffalo "gigafactory" is rather sordid... In a nutshell, Tesla and its subsidiaries made large employment and economic growth promises to the state of NY in exchange for massive subsidies (almost $1B total). The state wanted to stimulate growth in an economically depressed region, but those growth expectations have not materialized at all. And now, at least some of the NY state taxpayer financed eq…
>Multiple people have gone to jail for corruption / bid rigging on the project That would be a new one, can you name a few?
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The history of the Buffalo "gigafactory" is rather sordid... In a nutshell, Tesla and its subsidiaries made large employment and economic growth promises to the state of NY in exchange for massive subsidies (almost $1B total). The state wanted to stimulate growth in an economically depressed region, but those growth expectations have not materialized at all. And now, at least some of the NY state taxpayer financed eq…
>Multiple people have gone to jail for corruption / bid rigging on the project That would be a new one, can you name a few?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Billion#Government_inv...
I'm not sure this is all directly Tesla related, but rather all part of the "Buffalo Billion" thing and the factory was part of that, I believe.
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Reminds me how the US continually produces tanks despite the armies recommendations, to the point where we have enough tanks to essentially fight WW3 with purely tanks and still have some left over, just so some congressmen can keep jobs in their constituency. At least that was the situation in the 2000s, no idea if that wackiness is still continuing
The production of armaments is a bit of an economic anomaly, to be honest. All businesses, including arms manufacturers, require a constant flow of business in order to cover their fixed costs and remunerate their investors (debt holders and shareholders). If governments only order weapons when they need them to fight a war, then the arms manufacturers would shut form at the end of a conflict and would take ages to “…
This fact is supposedly a part of the reason the f35 went to lockheed vs boeing.