Einstein's letter that called to start research on a nuclear bomb predicted that the bomb would be so big it could only be delivered by boat. Making the nuke is the first step. Miniaturization and vectors improvement are different efforts. People willing to bet that rockets improvement or nuke miniaturization were not around the corner were the crazy ones. It is a bit hard to understand in our era where we refuse to anticipate predictable progresses but the biases were opposite at that time. To paraphrase Arthur Clarke: "I predicted manned missions to Saturn in 2001. No one batted an eye. If I were to predict that by that time USSR would have fallen, I would never have been taken seriously"

I felt the line about the military not knowing what they wanted it for was unfair. Strategists of this time were trying to not redo the mistakes of the past by preparing for the previous war. They had to have plans for all-out nuclear wars, small scale tactical nuclear exchanges, hybrid nuclear-infantry assaults, space wars, arctic wars, etc... Read about the theory of nuclear warfare, it is fascinating and chilling. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only two uses of nuclear devices in conflict, were used to raze towns but a lot of different uses were envisioned: to create EMPs, to wipe out a navy, to dig out a lunar base. The radius of destruction of a Tsar Bomb seems ridiculously high when you center it on Manhattan, but when you use it to damage a spread out navy, it becomes small quickly. Bigger bombs led to consider different uses, so "make a bigger bomb, we will find a use for that" was not as stupid as it sounded, military-wise.

Hopefully we see more races like that.

There is more than that at stake. People are going to evaluate how good CCP's style of economic management actually is. 2008 handling of the crisis was mediocre in EU and meh in the US. Evergrande's default is not s surprise like Lehman's was. The govt decided to not bail it out and apparently believes it has all the tools to prevent a spiral of defaults. If that spiral happens, that's an indictment to the CCP's management. If Evergrande's fall does not goes any other fall, that's a huge success for CCP.

They probably honestly believe it and that's probably also a bad move.

How long before people who consider "intellectual property" to be a fraud will be considered PLA sleeping agents?

We indeed have the numbers, and getting vaxxed reduces the contaminations by a number ranging from 35% to 60%. That roughly means it divides R0 by 2. Individuals may not care about a 50% decrease of personal risks, but for fighting the pandemic, that's a great tool.

I thought blinding spy satellites that come over military bases had been a common practice from everyone? Note that this could totally be a gentleman's agreement: "I will be blinding your optics potentially destructively from a point at roughly lat:x lon:y when your satellite is visible. If you don't want to damage it, make sure your optics point in another direction."

Even if some important foundries are located in Taiwan, US and Korea, the whole chain is international. China tries to become self-sufficient but even for them, it is very hard to achieve. Nowadays, the key is not to become self-sufficient, but to have redundancy at every level, and not have a single point of failure.

You know, I am always torn between recognizing that Amazon does offer a valuable logistics service and seeing that their website is a cesspool of dark patterns. Ultimately I'd like to just access it through an API to do the searches I need and still purchase through it. I already wrote a small Stylus script to remove all the "sponsored" suggestion that clutter the search results. I find it weird that we can't search by delivery date or remove pages of identical items when looking for a specific part.

You probably would not be allowed the same SUV and pay much more on the fuel. That's fine: that's more tax money to fund electrical vehicles subventions and bicycle lanes.

If we can criticize tech companies for obeying Chinese censorship, I say we can criticize tech companies for participating in slavery where it still exists

I think we should assume that people like governors, who have access to experts and are actually required to run through them before making statements in domains they do not know, are liable when they did not do the job. Assume this person should have known and sue accordingly.

Also, many explosives decay over time, especially military explosives submerged in water. I suspect that if this known warship, in a peaceful region of a rich country was never neutralized, it is because the specialists estimate there is no risk of explosion anymore.

The suits are not there to create tools but to make money. They have nothing to learn, it is a good move. There is plenty of money to be made by killing stackoverflow.