Hitler actually reduced firearm ownership restrictions starting in 1938. Jews weren't allowed to buy guns, of course, but most Germans could buy long arms and ammunition without a permit, it got much easier to get a pistol permit, and members of the Nazi Party (and some other groups) were exempted from gun control laws altogether.

The laws that Hitler used to disarm portionsthe populace were actually from the previous government, the Weimar Republic. The Nazi Party just took advantage of what was there.

UPS and FedEx don't manufacture their trucks, but they're heavily involved in the development of the vehicles they use (other than perhaps the tractor-trailers). They have engineers that work directly with manufacturers on the layouts, materials, aerodynamics, and powerplants to find a mix of cost, fuel efficiency, security, and even safety.

SpaceX is trying to break into a business with a completely new cost model, and a relatively new rocket model (mix of some proven technologies with some new ones and even some completely experimental items. They have every incentive already to become more reliable, especially since the goal is reuse of at least Stage 1. If NASA wants them to buy insurance to cover future failures, that's NASA's call, but it will ultimately come out of NASA's pocket and won't change the push for highest possibility reliability all that much.

Without buying extra insurance, you're limited to what the carrier is willing to pay out as specified in the contract agreed to at the time of purchase. In the US, both UPS and FedEx cap their payout at $100 unless additional insurance is purchased.

China, perhaps (there might be regulatory issues associated with moving US loans overseas, even if China had banks chartered in the US), but probably not Chinese banks which would be interested in relatively solid loan portfolios. US securities are still seen as guaranteed payoffs, so even if the economy sours, they can still be as certain as possible of a return. Loan assets don't have that luxury.

However, I've had concerns about the Chinese economy for a few years. They're much more shadowy about these things than Western government, and it's hard to say how much money they have. The Chinese government may be hiding a fiscal nightmare that is worse in percentages than Greece and will certainly have more worldwide impact than a complete collapse of the Greek economy.

The bond purchases are at trick that might get used more often in part because of the slow rate at which additional money enters circulation. Social Security has done it for decades, but that's been even more of an accounting trick because the first step of the money stays within a smaller group (namely, retirees and the disabled). The profits from the Fed can get paid out to government contractors, employees, tax refunds, and anything else the government chooses to spend its money on.

There's a tipping point, of course, but I think it's far above what's being used now. Still, QE purchases ended last year because the Fed believed the economy to have stabilized sufficiently, so if it does get used again, it's going to make a lot of news, and may rattle the markets.

That's an historic claim, and one that keeps the people happy (they want to believe their country is the strongest in the world, or at least in the region), but it's one they need to let go of because it's based on China's power from centuries ago, and it could lose an actual naval war if all of the other countries with claims to the area fought against it, even if the US didn't get involved. The problem is that they can't figure out how to do that and save face with the people. The government fears the people far more than it lets on largely because a country with 1.3 billion people and only 3 million soldiers (including reserves), it's in a precarious position, even if all of the millions of national and local police could be pulled in.

They are a very long way from their roots. Deng Xiaoping threw off the last of Maoism, and since Deng's death, the country has only expanded its capitalist tendencies. They don't have the unquestioned authority that they once did. One of the major reasons for the highly public corruption purge (and probably private power consolidation) is the perception among the people that the entire government is corrupt all the way through. Public protests, once almost unthinkable in China, grew to be so common and vocal that the government decided to let them happen on occasion, as long as they are somewhat limited in time and size and don't call for government overthrow. That provides a vent--at least for now--for public anger, but it may not last.

China's past economic moves of shuffling people from the fields into the cities to boost the economy by providing cheap labor can only happen once or twice more because so many are in the cities now. It's an effective move in the medium-term, but Beijing wants to keep it as a last resort because it knows it's limited in how many more times it can happen. I think a lot of companies were relying on that to continue, and that's a big part of the construction drive. Few hedged their bets, and now entire residential blocks and apartment buildings sit empty, their owners unable to pay their mortgages, and their banks unable to collect and so unable to issue new loans. A similar effect happened to Japan in 1991 when the commercial real estate market crashed, taking the rest of the country with it. They're still trying to get out of that morass 20+ years later, barely keeping an average GDP growth rate above zero even before 2008.

So many people have been claiming that China is eating us alive because they focused only on Treasury bond purchases and see China's economy as this monolithic block when the situation there is very complex. China would not have bought those bonds if it didn't think they would pay back. They may end up being part of what cushions China as that $1.2 trillion returns over time, but I think the next few years are going to be at best very shaky, and at worst could see China plunge into recession or even depression. That will not bode well for the rest of Asia, and if the EU doesn't improve soon, could see the world economy dragged down again.

Quantitative easing didn't work the same way that literally printing money does, something that many who don't have a solid grasp of economics don't understand. QE has kept the money circulating within a very limited span, and was used in part to purchase weak loan assets from banks. While those banks held them, they created significant risk and could impact the minimum holdings required by law. The Fed doesn't have the same kind of problem, and by purchasing the assets (which, collectively, are profitable) it could strengthen the banks and increase its own profit levels. Those profits are then largely sent to the federal government.

QE was also used to purchase a lot of Treasury bonds, but that's much more an accounting maneuver. When the Fed purchases the bonds from the Treasury, it holds them until maturity. When they mature, they're cashed in and the Treasury pays out to the Fed, which becomes part of the Fed's profits, the lion's share of which are turned over to the federal government. However, that part is closer to printing money because it increases the amount of money available to the federal government to spend in the more general economy.

This has turned into an important revenue stream for the federal government. In 2014, the Fed sent $97 billion of its $101 billion in profits to the Treasury. That number may continue to climb for a couple of years, but will decline over time as assets draw down; of the $4.5 trillion in assets held by the Fed, some $800 billion of that is in Treasury bonds that mature by the end of 2016. Other bonds will continue to mature, and loans will be paid off. The money created by the Fed will enter circulation eventually, but it will do so over time, and not in the same way as literally printing the money would have.

Every country with intelligence agencies, including the US, has "illegals" -- that is, spies who do not have diplomatic cover. Valerie Plame is one of the most famous examples, and the operation that pinned down Osama bin Laden's location and cut the power to the neighborhood almost certainly were operating without diplomatic cover.

Most intelligence agency employees of any country aren't in immediate danger and have mostly office jobs, but there are at least a few doing things that can land them in jail if only by being present in another country using false identification.

One of the things I've run into dealing with groups in India might be cultural, but it certainly can get in the way. Everyone has a job, it's strictly defined, and rarely does anyone do something that is not explicitly in their job, especially if it's explicitly in someone else's job. When it's in nobody's job, a manager can get it added to someone's job, but that seems to take a lot of discussion over who is the most appropriate person to do it, which can cause further delays. In one frustrating case, simply disabling a line in snmpd.conf to stop "public" from being an accepted community string took days to figure out whose job it was, even though several people had sudo access and could have made and documented the change.

Those were debts imposed upon it from outside. Greek debts were created from inside the country.

There may well be issues with graft, but there are also issues with taxpayers. Not paying taxes is a national sport in Greece. When Athens started looking at Google Earth and comparing addresses in rich areas with swimming pools (for which there is a separate tax) with the list of addresses paying the tax, they found that they were under-collecting by a factor of about 50: they had a list of 324 addresses and found at least 16,974 pools. In 2010, only a few thousand people in the entire country admitted having an income higher than 100,000 euros, and huge swaths of obviously well-off people (multiple houses and cars, successful businesses, etc.) claimed incomes less than 12,000 euros, exempting them from taxes.

Greece has to undertake a lot of reforms that will be painful for them (like raising the retirement age from 55). The creditors will almost certainly have to make some concessions of their own. It's not going to be pleasant for either side, but the potential cascade effects are potentially severe enough to knock Europe back into recession. Then again, being too lenient with Greece could trigger a cascade of its own with Spain, Portugal, and Italy coming back to demand more lenient terms for their loans, which would have its own problems.

The B-52 requires complete air superiority in the area that it operates because it can't hide from radar except by jamming, so just building a new version wouldn't really work. The B-1 has speed on its side (thought not as much as the original specs) and the B-2 has stealth. The tentatively named B-3 is supposed to replace all of the heavy bombers, though the B-2 will probably stick around for a few decades. That's a reasonable goal, unlike that of the F-35.

It's supposed to use mostly existing technologies instead of planning for advances as happened with (and expanded the cost and schedule of) the B-2, F-22, and F-35. Whether they can actually do that is a giant question mark, but the Air Force is allegedly targeting $500 million to $600 million per plane as the final cost.

Someone needed to talk to Boeing's crew that handles the designs of the AH-1 and UH-1. Lots of parts commonality, increasing as time goes on, and good at their roles, but different shapes for different missions.

The Harrier can't meaningfully hover with a full weapons load, either, and it really only takes off vertically at air shows. STOVL is short for "short takeoff, vertical landing". They've been planning ramped takeoffs and vertical landings at sea from the beginning, just like the Harrier uses.

I'm not fond of the F-35, but don't ascribe features to its (at least as problematic) predecessor that aren't there.