They went from working jet aircraft to Sputnik in under 20, and from Sputnik to Apollo 11 in 12. And since then? No one has gotten beyond low earth orbit in over half a century. It's been far more profitable to spend the resources killing brown people al over the world, and profit is now king.

The Western business world has changed its focus completely to short term high profit business, because the executives' pay packages are focused on quarterly returns and yearly stock price rises. China on the other hand typically takes the long view. For one example, which is currently receiving a lot of attention:

They saw companies abandoning low-profit long-payback mineral mining and refining operations and picked up the majority of that industrial sector. It's taken decades to pay back the investment, which they planned on, and now they control the critical resource streams feeding our modern civilization. Every Patriot air defense interceptor requires two kilos of rare earth elements, several of which China controls 90-100% of WORLD supply. A Patriot missile requires 2 kilos of REE, an F-35 over 30 kilos, modern advanced radars require gallium, which is ONLY available from China. As someone here on SlashDot remarked a while back, "China doesn't feel a need to help the US to build the weapons it wants to use against them", and they're banning suppliers from selling to Western weapons makers.

This is a very interesting Substack that I follow, this American lives in China and works in the export business, which is mostly what he writes about (with occasional insightful digressions). https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

Even better would be a camera on the other side of each unit, facing outward. The resolution of each individual camera wouldn't have to be that great, the sheer number of them and their exact known position and orientation would effectively be a giant 360 degree telescope. (I may be way off on the utility of something like this, but it seems to make sense.)

It's almost certainly the latter. Manufacturer's engineers almost certainly said, "We need a camera capable of X, Y, and Z", and Purchasing found one in a catalog that checked off the boxes for a reasonable (or cheap) price. I'm fairly sure that most Western military robots are put together that way, after all profit is far more important than security.

Pretty much. Apparently they mostly make sonars. Prior to the drone sales, which don't even show up on their web page, they were crowing about a tremendous $13 million in annual sales.

https://www.krakenrobotics.com...

It also provides a much needed laugh.

I had never heard of plated-wire memory, the whole computing system of the Voyagers is interesting. Apparently a bunch of the original staff (those who are still alive) keep NASA updated with their contact information just in case they need to be contacted with any questions.

Ah, haven't lived in Michigan since the early '90s. Guess I'll have to use a different state for example now.

That's why property taxes pay for schools, so rich neighborhoods have nice schools and poor ones have crappy schools. Schools in Benton Harbor, MI, haven't been painted in 20 years and some classrooms are unusable because of roof leaks. Three hours away the high school in Gross Pointe Shores has a heated swimming pool and they go on class trips to Europe.

That's logical and practical, but unfortunately this is happening in Louisiana where logical and practical are outlawed.

This is an interesting article:

https://hackaday.com/2024/05/0...

There are no microprocessors in the CCS. Rather, the processors are built from discrete 7400-series TTL chips. The machine does not have an operating system but rather runs bare-metal instructions. Both data and instruction words are 18 bits wide, with the instruction words having a 6-bit opcode and a 12-bit address. The 64 instructions contain the usual tools for moving data in and out of registers and doing basic arithmetic, although there are only commands for adding and subtracting, not for multiplication or division. The processors access 4 kilowords of redundant plated-wire memory, which is similar to magnetic core memory in that it records bits as magnetic domains, but with an iron-nickel alloy plated onto the surface of wires rather than ferrite beads.

I mean that he's ignorant in the sense that he knows nothing about the wider world beyond his own social milieu, and has no interest in learning more. Also ignorant in that he does not even read the leading newspapers, so knows only what the butt-kissers tell him. (Apparently he was shocked recently when informed of the shortage of distance weapons and air defense interceptors, and screamed at Hegseth about it.) He's intelligent and cunning, but his overriding self-interest, utter amorality, lack of curiosity, and almost compulsive lying make him the most utterly incompetent president in the 250 years of the Untied States.

Where in Thailand they eat rice, in Peru it's potatoes. There are over 3,000 varieties of potato (really!) grown in the country, they originated there. They also eat rice, but it's just a side and almost always just the cheap short grain white variety.

One advantage Peru has over Thailand is that they have every climate there, from the Amazon rainforest, up to cloud forest, wet grasslands, tundra, dry grasslands, semi-desert, and down to the irrigated valleys on the coast in the Atacama Desert, the driest in the world. The terrain also kept communities relatively isolated so every area developed its own cuisine depending on what was abundant locally. Now that transportation allows mixing Peru has become a foodie 'Mecca'.

But he is senile, willfully ignorant, and surrounds himself with butt kissers who keep him ignorant.

They also are now building the world's largest windmills at a site just off their southern coast. They're so large they've had to construct a special ship just to transport and install the blades.