Bottom line: if you're a US company and you make sneakers, you can be (and many are) a design-only shop and your stuff can be made abroad. And the design work can happen overseas too. With aerospace this just isn't possible.

The economics and methodology are different. Here, labor costs dominate so labor is what gets skimped on. There, labor is cheap and material costs dominate, so the materials are what gets skimped on. You can design something to minimize touch labor but still not fall apart it you look at it funny, but if you cheap out on the plastic or the adhesives it's going to fall apart fast.

I mean exactly what I said. If you run an aerospace company in the US, you can't hire foreign nationals, subcontract parts of your rocket or satellite to foreign companies without an export license *for the system requirements in your rfp* and you can't have it launched abroad without an export license.

In practice this doesn't mean you can't have foreign parts, just that they need to be entirely off-the-shelf, which most specialized aerospace components are not.

Pissing on a whole service branch as "cosplay" by association because you don't like the guy who signed the legislation is boorish when a civilian does it and poor stewardship of the machinery of the state when an elected official does it.

Before it was a space force installation, it was an air force installation. The air force was split off as an independent service in 1947, having previously been a branch of the Army under the War Department. The Navy was its own cabinet level department, dating back to the days of the Confederation Congress. They were merged in 1947 under a single department.

Would a cape canaveral war station be more to your liking?

Much faster hollowing out aerospace manufacturing and giving it all away to the Chinese the same way much of the rest of American heavy industry and low/medium value manufacturing has gone.

Cheaper shit at walmart and on amazon doesn't make up for the fact that we can't even clothe ourselves without the CCP's permission.

Been going on since the 90s. Didn't change a thing.

but one of the big reasons the US has a world-leading space launch and satellite services industry is that it is just flat out illegal to outsource or off-shore it.

ITAR is an absolute pain in the ass, but it seems to be worth it on the whole and in the context of the hollowing out of everything else industrial in the country.

Something scary is in the news.

Do I assess my surroundings, my home, my skills, my mental state, identify possible weaknesses and act to remediate them, or prepare myself to work through the likely consequences?

No. I whine about how life is unfair and throw in the with the nearest strongman promising to make it all better by punishing the designated scapegoat, of course!

It doesn't matter if the scary thing in the news is ai, social media, smartphones, covid, or encephalitis mosquitoes. Children expect someone else to fix it for them; adults take action weather the storm.

timezones to tell us how according to science, year round standard time is better.

How about we split the difference and have more time zones 30 minutes apart without clock changes.

Now now. The french *are* a primitive people: they've yet to discover personal hygeine, intelligible speech, or the a way to feed themselves without resorting to consuming invertebrates.

Don't ask questions, just open your wallet.

enshrined in the First Amendment down here, eh?

Just sayin'

The very same attitude that closed down the schools "until it's safe" despite some places sending their kids to school in the middle of literal war zones on account of schooling is *that* important.

Zero days in third party or OS libraries are an act of God. Or will be declared so in short order should your wish become law.