The US still leads in research and development, by a pretty large margin, but most of it is in theoretical work. This means that the US is ahead of the curve on things like quantum computing (though that's decades in the future, realistically), though the near-term breakthroughs are in photonics (products starting to come out now).

The US is very, very good at moonshots, but has fallen behind in practical manufacturing.

The problem's end result is that the US immediately ships its IP off to China, and even when it doesn't it does a shit job at security and industrial spies easily take it.

It's likely because China's business environment is so incredibly cutthroat that nobody wants to be the one that takes a risk. It's not that the Chinese can't do it, it's just not in their business or academic culture.

And really, that works for them. Quite well. They're way better at the faster-cheaper-better (pick two) optimization than the west is. The west can't do cheaper, and is bad at doing things faster. The west can only do better, slowly, at great expense. The Chinese are very good at doing "good enough", either faster or cheaper, only falling down when they opt for fast and cheap (which is the default unless the customer/government demands "good enough").

And the west is so bad at fast or cheap, that even when one is prioritized in China, the other is still often better than the west can manage.

Saturation artillery fire/saturation bombing against cities hasn't been a thing for the US military in half a century. So no, not "all through" the 20th century. Everything since then has been about precision artillery/individually-targeted buildings. MLRS multiple fire is sometimes used but only against open areas/bases.

The Russians tried that at first in February, but when it didn't get a quick victory they gave up and went back to their tactics of leveling everything, just like they did in Chechnya.

The US fights wars very, VERY differently now. The most buildings destroyed by the US recently was in Fallujah, but every shot was called in by a spotter of some sort. The reason so much was destroyed there was because so many buildings were occupied by combatants.

In the 21st century, the US has bombed only one active hospital (Kunduz). While the initial response from the military was unacceptable, it was also a huge scandal in the American media, and the US wound up formally apologizing and payed millions in restitution to the victims. (The US bombed a hospital in Mosul at the request of the Iraqi government, but it was inactive at the time -- imagery clearly shows ISIS tanks there, and there was active heavy weapons fire from the building.)

The US has bombed one other active hospital post-Vietnam, in Belgrade in 1999. While the US has yet to apologize for it, the bombing was widely reported in western media and condemned openly.

When Russia bombs a hospital it is not a scandal on Russian media -- it is only denials, if it's mentioned at all, and it never gets addressed.

And, by far the most ridiculous thing, the Russian state-controlled media talks near-constantly about how they are going nuke the western world in a first strike situation. No western country does anything like this. Not even China does. This is North Korea-level behavior.

So yeah, I would much prefer to be on the receiving end of an attack from the US instead of Russia. As a civilian, I'd stand a much better chance of survival.

And on the attacking side I'd ALSO much rather be in the US than Russia. During the Iraq War I marched against the war along with a million other people across the country, and the police didn't round us up for protesting (or even calling it a war).

So when the US does do bad things, we're free to condemn it. Our NATO allies are free to condemn it. When a war crime committed by US troops is discovered, it is the leading story in the US media. The leaker might be punished, but the information itself is not suppressed.

But ultimately that's still whataboutism and not really relevant to opposing what Russia is doing right now on its own merits.

Lots of well-off people commute to Manhattan on Amtrak. The Northeast Corridor is pretty fast on conventional trains (125mph), especially on Acela (though mostly due to express service rather than going particularly faster).

Depending on traffic it's faster than driving, and more comfortable. It's also generally faster and less of a hassle than flying unless you have a private jet.

Joe Biden famously used Acela to get to the capitol building from his home in Wilmington, until he became President and wasn't allowed to travel in public anymore. (Though I'm sure he could revive the private presidential train, which I believe FDR was the last president to use).

Amtrak stopped running into Grand Central once the tracks on the west side of Manhattan were rehabilitated (now called the "Empire Connection"). This was in 1991.

Amtrak *occasionally* reroutes some trains to Grand Central when there is a long construction project that creates congestion. The last time this happened was in 2017.

It makes more sense for all Amtrak trains to come to Penn, since it enables more transfers.

They certainly can take that money when it's rubles held in domestic banks. So about $133 million, but in rubles. They will probably extinguish it to help keep inflation in check. (They're at 15% inflation, which is not as much at western sanctions had hoped to achieve, but it's still worse than most of NATO except Poland and Romania, who are about the same, and of course Turkey has ridiculous inflation but they started with ridiculous inflation)

Pretty sure the Russians are already armed. The Soyuz survival kit comes with a pistol (ostensibly for protection from wild animals if they accidentally land off-target).

They even had a purpose-built pistol for this until 2006 but now they just have a regular pistol.

What I meant is they could've just said "invertebrates" and "fish". They didn't need to say mollusks and crustaceans, because they are already invertebrates. Invertebrates covers everything that's not a mammal/reptile/bird/amphibian/fish. Basically they're being the department of redundancy department.

I mean at least it could be turned into a metro. The tunnels are rather small, but London tube stock could be fitted into it to give it better capacity.

The experience at the Vegas convention center has shown that in its current form it doesn't even have enough capacity for busy days there. The two big problems being the large size of vehicles for the number of passengers, and the very slow loading/unloading process.

The Teslas could conceivably be replaced with cylinder-shaped PRT vehicles that supported walk-on/walk-off, and bench seating, which would retain point-to-point while greatly increasing throughput, but to totally replace surface road transit, allowing replacement of the wide surface roads with human-scale space, it will need metro-level capacity, which means ditching pods.

In China that compliance is "Print a RoHS logo on the box. Also print FCC, ISO 9001, 128 gigabytes soild state, and an Apple logo. The product in the box is a screwdriver."

If that happens, we have bigger problems.

Either that or we're doing awesome because we're on Mars and can see Mars transit the sun every single day.

Or look at it this way, you get to watch an Earth transit every 24 hours.

I wonder why they include "mollusk" and "crustacean" when they're covered by "invertebrate".

Comment shouldn't have been downvoted. The stripping-washing-machines bit is a bit farfetched. And even if it isn't true, it would just be a result of dumb soldiers hearing "We need chips!" and thinking stealing random chips from consumer electronics will somehow help.

I'm sure the person from the Ukrainian government who told the anecdote believes it too, because people don't understand how electronics work.

The Russians are stealing washing machines for the same reason anyone else steals stuff. They're valuable and Russian soldiers aren't paid shit (or at all, lately). Taking a nice modern washing machine home to your girlfriend in Siberia where you're lucky to have even a modern toilet would make a great trophy.

They're finding them with chips removed because the washing machines are getting blown up with the vehicles they're attached to.

Not sure how Luxembourg handles it, but in most places when you make transit free the transit fills up with criminals. I mean, the criminals fare jump anyway, but at least you can remove them if they haven't paid without having to catch them in the act of committing a crime.

In the SF bay area they tried making transit free during periods with high expected smog rates, and the result was spikes in crime, especially on Caltrain (which has fare enforcement on every train, so very few stowaways).

Um, they don't require "complicated guidance" any more than any other warhead. The delivery system and the warhead are separate issues.

Regarding warhead maintenance, yes if you let the warhead degrade it will not produce as big of a boom, but that's still a pretty big boom. The fusion secondary is actually more reliable than the fission primary. It's fueled by extremely-stable lithium deuteride and relatively stable plutonium.

Efficiency might go down in the secondary if the channel foam degrades, but it would have to get pretty bad.

The fastest-decaying part of the warhead is actually in the fission primary -- the tritium booster. If you don't refresh the tritium the yield goes down a lot.

That's it. That's basically all the maintenance you have to do to keep a warhead largely functional. Refresh the tritium, and don't let rust get into the detonator assembly. Eventually the chemical explosives might degrade enough to screw up the implosion lens and thus cause a bad fizzle, but that would take many, many decades (witness how WWII chemical explosives still blow up perfectly fine).

They're probably not in the best of shape. I wouldn't be surprised if they have the same 60% failure rate that their conventional missiles are showing. Of course even with a 95% failure rate, that's still a credible deterrent capable of tens of millions of people.

But that's why nobody is going to invade Russia, despite Putin's constant arguments that NATO is preparing to invade and eliminate the Russian people.