91–100 of 190 posts
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
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. It is obvious that all nations do not agree to this. E.g.: China on Tibet, Taiwan, 9-dashed line, etc., Russia in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine. Those authoritarian states think it is perfectly fine to…
> 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…
Wide berth between an imperial power and one that survives on a system of alliances. Balance of powers realism works, but it’s far more brutal than a uni or bipolar world order.
> the UN would itself be the world’s policeman, via a centralized military command to which all member nations would subordinate command of designated units of their armed forces for the purpose
Many states have tried this. It never works. Either you centralise command. Or you get the Holy Roman Empire.
Do we really need to OWN icebreakers? Maybe we could start a website where countries and companies who own icebreakers can operate them for the benefit of other countries and companies who want to use them. They just walk to the shore in the Canadian north, click the "Call Icebreaker" button on the app and wait for an icebreaker someone else owns to arrive.
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.
The last batch of such manufacturing apprentices went through in the mid-eighties. They're just about all gone from the workplace.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. Each business is free to do as it wishes... and if they wished to survive competitively, they moved their production offshore (helps avoid UAW strikes). Easy to know U.S. lost expertise, but tough question how do you get it back? Tariffs? A larger military-industrial complex? Even larger government?
> The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. Each business is free to do as it wishes... Currently US federal government spending is around 36% of GDP, which means 36% of the US economy is in fact centrally planned, albeit with some devolution in some cases.
64% of the federal budget goes to social security, medicare/medicaid, disability etc. That is, it goes to individuals. It's not meaningful to call that economic planning. It's not in the slightest like paying for defense contractors or research or infrastructure.
11% goes to interest payments, ie people who bought bonds etc. For individuals that's certainly not central planning, since they are the ones who decided to buy. A large amount goes towards paying of quant. easing etc, but it seems a little goofy to count that like we spend it every year still.
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.
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.
Does USA even have civilian dry docks to build ships? I thought everything was outsourced to Korea. I know it can build military vessels, but at horribly slow pace. Australia will get their nuclear submarines some time in 2040. I can not imagine building civilian nuclear ice breakers in US.
Yes. The NASSCO shipyard in San Diego. I worked there as a ship welder for a while after the first .com crash, and two of the three ships I worked on were civilian.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember a very old WSJ article about "swiss style machinists" and how there are no young American ones any more. This style of machinist makes tiny objects (think of how small things inside a mechanical watch are), where a day's production fits into a coffee cup. It takes a 10 year long apprenticeship to become productive enough that a company is willing to one of these machinists. All of the "younger" ones came f…
There's a lot of discussion about how tradespeople are retiring and leaving big gaps in the workforce, and there's a strong element of truth to it, but America is still producing large and small machined parts. There's still large machine tools being refurbished in Rockford, Illinois, Haas is building a large new facility in Nevada (delayed; thanks covid) for making CNC machine tools, medical and aerospace parts are…
Surprise, this is what happens when you shift everything in heavy industry or production in general off to India and China without keeping at least some production domestic or at least have everything documented and regularly (i.e. once every ten years) check if the documentation is accurate and workers can understand it to build a product that meets specifications.
The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. Each business is free to do as it wishes... and if they wished to survive competitively, they moved their production offshore (helps avoid UAW strikes). Easy to know U.S. lost expertise, but tough question how do you get it back? Tariffs? A larger military-industrial complex? Even larger government?