Some topics deserve a mention but not a full article and that’s what quick takes are for.
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I’ve written about US ship building problems before, but it’s not just about that, the Navy is retiring ships faster than they are being built. (And yes, China is building them way faster than it is retiring them.)
The US Navy is retiring ships faster than it builds them. pic.twitter.com/UXQkiKht9O
— Russ Greene (@GreenPlusAnE) January 25, 2024
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Seems that the extra surveillance for the Paris Olympics will become permanent. Surveillance state, HO!
Offered without comment:
Layoffs in a picture: pic.twitter.com/Xc39jpTa3H
— Aakash Gupta (@aakashg0) October 22, 2024
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Add to, “what a mystery!” and “Who would have expected!”
The analysis revealed that the mortality rate of Americans ages 1 to 19 rose by 11% between 2019 and 2020 and an additional 8% between 2020 and 2021.
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The new BYD Seagull EV costs $9,700 American, though that price is only really available to Chinese, they kick it up a lot even for countries without tariffs.
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ASML’s CEO previously indicated he expect China to learn how to make lithography machines and that ASML and the West would eventually lose essentially the entire market. What he didn’t say is that once China can make these machines, they’ll then take the entire non-Western market too. Truly sanctions stupidity.
Daniel Lynch
Re: ships. the future of all surface navies is uncertain because they are big, slowing moving targets for missiles and drones. The bigger the ship, the easier the target. Why should we spend money building ships that will simply be sunk?
Russia seems to be moving toward moderately sized ships that mainly serve to launch missiles, but those ships are still vulnerable, and missiles can be launched from anywhere, so I don’t see the point myself.
If a “real” war ever breaks out, surface shipping will grind to a halt –(witness puny Yemen shutting down Western shipping in the Red Sea — and there will be huge supply problems. To me, that reinforces the desirability of an economy that does not depend on imports. It also reinforces the undesirability of war!
StewartM
The cartoon about the top-heavy ship is too true to be as funny as it should.
As a colleague once griped, ‘we had a downsizing and a year or so later we have more new vice presidents than before’. The fact is that US companies can’t do because they’re chronically understaffed, especially when it comes to the ‘doers’ instead of the ‘paper shufflers’.
But given what Wall Street thinks is important, why should this be a surprise, when they think the ‘movers and shakers’ in an economy are those who sit on their butts trading stocks all day?
As for ships, it’s just a symptom of the corruption in our system. We can’t afford to built ships because a) we’ve laid off the doers at those companies for short-term profits and b) we’ve allowed companies to gouge the government for what they do build, and since we refuse to tax rich people any more the government must borrow money from them.
In a similar vein, I was looking a table of medication, and government programs to make them free or affordable to ordinary people. But the issue is, the US government still pays the pharma company their asking price (almost $2000 a month) for a prescription, when everyone knows that the cost of the drug (including R&D and regulatory approval) is nothing close to that. I mean, the markup is likely in the hundreds if not thousands of percent, not anything even like 25 % or 50 %, let alone 5 or 10%. Yet it’s supposedly austerity-bent ‘small government’ types who allow this gouging to occur.
mago
Yeah, well, since this planet is 2/3rds water it makes sense that humans would sail it, flail it, pollute and fuck it up in general.
Happened then. happening now and on and on and on.
Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink
Can there be no respite/can there be no peace.
No end to speculation/to ignorance and all the rest of it.
Paz y amor baby.
Dan Kelly
“Seems that the extra surveillance for the Paris Olympics will become permanent. Surveillance state, HO!”
The default position everywhere, not just in France, is the fact that the surveillance systems are inaccurate for ‘people of color’ and they are bad for protesters.
First, they are inaccurate for we ‘whiteys’ too. Perhaps in aggregate things are worse for ‘non-whites’ – perhaps – but how does that help the individual?
The much more important point is that these inaccuracies can be overcome with better ‘training’ of the tech.
So, absent a wholesale call by all sectors of society firmly stating “NO BIOMETRIC SURVEILLANCE, PERIOD” – sans that, this will continue without end.
This is how they play all sides.