Probably so, a lot of the 90's are kind of a blur now for reasons. Also, the company I was working for at the time was notoriously cheap with IT costs. They were also the only company I ever worked for that allowed smoking in the office. Around computers. That's smart. The two old guys who ran the joint both died of lung cancer a couple years after I stopped working there. So... yeah.

I had to punch an AWFUL lot of deer to progress, back in the day. That was before Trammel or any of EA's WoW-Style gear grind nonsense. I did manage to get a mage to GM mage/GM Scribe and was at different times exalted and notorious. I probably still have a couple of shots around somewhere of the ol' guy. Made bank selling filled spellbooks, recall scrolls and rune bags to people. I had runes to damn near everywhere. That was another thing that was pretty unique to UO -- you could make a rune to damn near anywhere. And despite this, the world still felt HUGE!

Well, you have to factor in the Iranian cultural mania for disagreeing with each other. The Shah couldn't keep them under his thumb, neither can the mullahs, who have their hands full disagreeing with each other.

From a tyrant's perspective Iran is ungovernable, which doesn't mean elements in the government don't give tyranny a go on a regular basis. It's an ideal setup for producing martyrs. The futility of cracking down means you have a little space to rake some muck before official anger overcomes reason.

It is great to have the rovers on Mars, but a team of say 5 astronauts in 2 weeks could have accomplished at least as much as all the rovers did.

The rovers require large support teams on Earth. Is it really worth keeping personnel on for a decade to do what could be done in a few weeks?

Robots may be the answer, but right now they really suck when they are out of range of immediate control.

It works just if you removed taxes on work and income and replaced them completely with taxes on property. It is logical that this will cause people to behave in ways that are suboptimal for society as a whole.

Just be aware that income taxes ALSO cause people to behave in ways that are suboptimal for society as a whole. The proper solution is to try to spread the tax load over income/consumption/pollution/property/inheritance/... in such a way that overall harm is minimized. Most governments do so but obviously with very different emphasis on which tax they prefer.

Moderate inflation tends to be correlated with decent economic growth. Printing money is a completely valid way to pay for a part of the government budget. Alas, a fairly small part in normal economic times.

Personaly I find the best tactic is to not do what my enemies want me to do.

And you'd also need to see the same split for France.

(I can't find the numbers but I've seen claims that French private industry is about 5% unionised).

If they'd been a little less bitches, they could be like Dubai right now and dipping their balls in gold, regularly. Them and Iraq both. And yes, everyone in the world pretty much has been fucking with them for... well... ever, really. But there's a way to win against everyone in the world, and being stinky little bitches isn't it. But, you know, whatever makes them happy, I suppose.

The problem is that shoulder-launched AA cannot be negated that way. The A-10 used to be mostly immune to shoulder-launched missiles, they would have to be very lucky to take it down.

So you'd like to see the F-35 trying to mow down Ruskie tank columns trying to break through the Fulda Gap after air superiority had been achieved? That was the environment that the A-10 was designed to handle. The A-10 was designed to be a flying tank because it was meant to fly low and take enemy AA fire. Its air defense capabilities are really only useful against attack helicopters.

The F-35 can't take the beating that an A-10 would shrug off but it's unlikely to receive such a beating. In an anti-armor role the F-35 isn't going to do low and slow strafing runs with its guns and doesn't need keep its boresight on target to hit with its air-to-ground missiles. In the CAS role the F-35 has a much longer range, higher speed, and longer loiter time than the A-10. It can deliver precision guided munitions much faster than the A-10 and then scamper off to the next target.

The F-35 is also capable of carrying more combat payload than the A-10. It can carry more munitions faster and farther than the A-10, all with low observability (depending on payload configuration obviously). When it returns from a CAS or strike mission it can also re-arm and fly CAP.

The A-10 is a nice plane and obviously very survivable. Its replacement however does not need to have all of the exact same characteristics to perform the same tasks.

The first computer I bought for myself was a Vector II graphics machine. It was an odd beast -- integrated computer/video, MFM 10 MB hard drive, some number of kilobytes of RAM, I forget exactly, and most oddly a dual processor machine. It had both an 8086 and a Z80 chip in it and could use either one or the other to run DOS (I want to say 2.0) or CP/M. Mine came installed with CP/M. This was in the early 90's, just before the 286 really started to catch on.

For my hardware class, I brought it in, took it apart and handed the chips around the class. At the end, I reassembled the whole thing and booted it back up. Fun little presentation. That old hardware could really stand up to a lot of abuse.

Well, alright, lets take close air support in Afghanistan. What would have been the cheaper, easier-to-maintain solution with better time on station?

I distinctly remember it being promised that the F-35 would beat anything but an F-22 in air-to-air combat, at a fraction of the price. It was not part of the original concept for the system but it was definitely sold politically as being capable of acting as a poor man's F22.

I wonder about the helmet mounted display, whether that's something you'd consider absolutely necessary in an aircraft whose job is to hit surface targets in contested airspace.

To be fair, that was not the original justification for the thing. That was mission creep.

I think the original impetus was to have something stealthy that could do ground strikes in enemy territory. And it makes sense to do a naval version of the same thing. If they'd just focused on that they'd have been done a long time ago with a solid design, which of course in engineering nearly always turns out to be more versatile than you planned for. Adding STOVL and the whizbang helmet (cool as that may be) as necessary elements of the system turned this into an "everything for everyone" project, which almost always turns out less versatile than you hoped.

Sure you can identify scenarios where the A-10 is useless. But in the last twenty years it's been extremely useful in a number scenarios we've actually faced.

The idea that a system ought to play every role in every conceivable situation is why the F35 performs none of them very well. In hindsight the idea of accommodating the Marines' need for a STOVL aircraft in the same basic design probably dictated too many compromises in the plane's other roles.