Wikipedia is choosing to die. There is a lot wrong with a lot of what people are doing with GenAI but it is also super useful.

Even on for authors, of encyclopedia articles, and this notihing wrong with telling ChatGTP to, "take this list of bullets and write it up as a paragraph."

Nor is there anything wrong with asking it to make a diagram of some process etc.

Someone else is going to clone wikipedia and the authorship will no doubt migrate to where they are allowed to use contemporary tooling.

As opposed to your anecdote of zero (you are obviously lying).

I live in a country in which 96% of the population would be considered "nutbar" anti gun extremists in the US and I've literally never heard anyone say such a thing. Ever.

What happens is this. Someone makes a product with a 0.1% reliability.

This is a fallacy.

What happens is it'll be incredibly obvious in tests (which you can afford to do with cheap missiles) if the reliability rate is that low. Why would it be?

Everything about it screams these are a new cheap, almost worthless missile. Particularly the use of the word 'hypersonic' to describe a missile that the US would never call hypersonic (we reserve that word for advanced, hard to hit hypersonic cruise missiles, not hypersonic ballistic missiles that are easy to destroy)

Quantity has a quality all of its own.

Never mind that hypersonic is not a military term, but an aerodynamic regime. You (or pretentiously "we") don't get to reserve that word.

Mass manufacture of cheap propeller cruise missiles is enough to overwhelm the production capacity of expensive interceptor missiles. And hypersonic ballistic missiles aren't easy to intercept, they are possible to intercept. But, much harder than low speed missiles, so you need fewer to overwhelm the stocks of interceptors.

Imagine expecting an organization to have real plan and concrete assets in place to meet their defined benefit contractual obligations to employees.

I mean they should be able to use rosy predictions about asset performance and when it does not work just dump the bill on the taxpayers like state and local pension funds for teachers, police, etc do! Or maybe they should be like the cool kids in corporate American declare bankruptcy, sell all the assets to an other entity that just happens to be owned by the same people and again leave the problem to the tax payers with PBGC..

Nope congress is required to establish a post office but the post office is not an agency, constitutionally I suppose it could be but the model is more like Fanny/Freddie. Congress takes a supervisory role.

Plus they hired a military contractor to waste money making stupid ugly delivery vans that are way way behind schedule

Those vehicles are everything the administration hates: they're much safer for vulnerable road users, e.g. pedestrians and cyclists and much more accessible than trucks, with low floor, easy entry and so on.

It irks many of the anti-gun people greatly that shooting is part of several Olympic sports.

I live in a country with strict gun control that a large of the population support, and I've literally never heard anyone say such a thing.

let me disappoint you, that was one of the dumbest pieces of crap that one could watch that year.

To counter from the authority of the dude: that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Indeed, which raises the question especially in the cause of this court's prevailing theory that the law should be read in the context of Congresses other positions at the time, if PLCAA's existence should imply the congress did not believe liability would not extend to product manufacturers otherwise.

This is the right decision here, because to decide any otherway really would invite chaos. I mean what if drive some nails partly into a baseball bat, and beat someone half to death, are the hardware and sporting goods stores liable, how about the manufactures of the bat and of the nails, there is no rational place to draw any lines, except around the principle actor who formed the intent to do the unlawful act.

First they came for the amoral megacorporations run by lizard people!

Are you claiming that Zuck is a person (even if of the lizard variety)? I do not buy it.

You know of any "civilian grade" materials that won't burn up at hypersonic speeds?

Yes.

There's nothing magical about military grade stuff. The military is usually less buget constrained but not across the board.

There are "civillian grade" (whatever the fuck that means) cutting tools than can now hog out inconel while glowing orange continuously.

Also, you can you know just like buy a graphite crucible on ebay for cheap. Graphite sublimes at 3650 degrees C, which is higher than Tungsten's melting point of 3422 degrees.

I'm sure these will work reliably. Why didn't lockheed martin think of that?

Well, die-casting isn't really simpler. I mean sure you can die cast pot metal at low precision cheaply. Modern die castings which are large and complex use very expensive moulds, of the sort China is now well set up to produce, what with the manufacturing base. If Lockheed-Martin is selling them for 10 million a missile, they don't have the volume for die casting.

And what's the incentive for them to reduce the price?

I'm sure these will work reliably. Why didn't lockheed martin think of that?

If they are really that cheap, then even if the reliability is a risible 10%, they're still much cheaper.

You may wish to consider how far it is from Costa Rica to the US, and what is in between.

Or not!

Yes there are some laser counter measures being tested, but there is no way we are going to be able to reliably swat down handfuls of these things arriving on target at once.

Once they are cheap enough and China decides they are willing to sell them to anti-western regimes, the era of the air-craft carrier as a means of force projection is over. It won't be possible to park anything that big in hostile waters, at least without total sat-nav jamming in effect.

Everyone one bitching about Iran right now, needs to realize this was the final opportunity to leverage our force projection capabilities to break the back of adversary that has thwarted our policy efforts in the Middle East for decades. Yes its a mess, but the world is going to become a much much scarier place, where the Pax Americana cannot but sustained, and taking Iran out of it as a major power before that happens makes it just a little less scary.

Of course Trump and Hegseth will never say this because it is not raw-raw USA! Its not flex, so they can't admit it. Reality is though any regime that can scrape together a few million to buy some handfuls of missiles will be able to bite their thumb to any "Super Power" they wish.. Asymmetric warfare will now be so asymmetric no military budget however out sized will over come it.

except that up until now I have just been trying to get through to you what 'productiom' means.

No, you haven't. You smugly asked a rhetorical question about transport only it turns out that pineapples come by sea. Not only is that completely irrelevant for road EV transport but the big container ship companies are working on electric cargo ships and ranges are approaching the Costa Rica-USA routes.

So naturally you switched gears to a completely new question without even acknowledging the answer.

And that's because you are working from the position that EV's are not viable and attempting to prove that they aren't by asking pointed questions. Except EVs are way more viable in way more places than you realise so your questions are all off base.

Not one comment has had anything to do with production but rather distribution.

This doesn't even makes sense.

And yeah, before Amazon there weren't all kinds of trucks driving to deliver a box with a fishhook in it so any EVs they use on that side are just preventing them from adding more pollution.

Amazon didn't invent the idea of deliveries. We used to call it "mail order", remember? Some people took faxes. Some people even took orders over X.25 networking (in France, for example). Amazon grocery delivery has also been wildly unsuccessful in the UK for example where the major grocery delivery players were already established online before Amazon branched out from selling books.

But again this is just whataboutism. You are trying to claim EV's aren't viable. Changing delivery patterns because of the internet isn't some sort of checkmate.