I can’t say I know how much a “typical” dirigible cost a century ago, but a Time magazine article from 1927 describes a potential new dirigible — the largest ever, twice the size of the Los Angeles — as costing in the neighborhood of $4,500,000.
According to Wikipedia, Dreadnought cost £1,783,000, compared to the £1,540,000 for each of the Lord Nelson class. Eight years later the Queen Elizabeth class cost £2,300,000.
Bruce: “Alas, before Wolper could put his plan into action, the book began drawing criticism from Native American groups contending that it was an inaccurate portrayal of the Sioux.” Crab-bucket jealousy has ruined publishing for books about anything with an organized political entitlement class. Even writers of the right ethnicity get taken down if they are any good, like William Sanders.
Jim: And as for myself, I suspect that hard labor would do the lawyers, accountants, software developers, VC executives, bureaucrats, clergy, politicians, and so on a lot of good.
Jim: Capitalism is often described as a celebration of selfishness. That description misses its most extraordinary feature: a functioning market economy is a system of cooperation among strangers. Nearly every object in a modern household exists because thousands of people coordinated their activities. They may live on different continents, speak different languages, practice different religions, and disagree on nearly every political question. They need not love one another! They need only identify a...
Jim: The Constitution of the United States of America was simply a contract of a bloodline. That constitution then withered and died, in irregular increments, in proportion to the supplantation of that bloodline, in its own territory, by the global power which has, since approximately 1830, been shuffling around races en masse, beginning with the Irish Catholics dispatched to Boston, the seat of the American Revolution. Such is life.
Bob Sykes: The Enlightenment died around 1800, and it was replaced, after a while, by Romanticism. The various socialist movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries are the main product of Romanticism, along with Beethoven, Shelley, Nietzsche, Spengler, Hitler… Romanticism, itself, is pretty much dead, too, and has been replaced by Modernism, then post-Modernism. America’s Founding Fathers and their ideas are long dead, and so is the Republic they gave us. We couldn’t keep it. Their Constitution has been...
Wanweilin: Human existence, for thousands of years, has generally been nasty, brutish and short. Only in the last couple of centuries or so has this reality improved. Now as Christendom fades from Western Civilization we are returning to the average human experience. Electricity and water are already intermittent in many areas. Then the intelligent fraction that knows the how and why will die. Then only a few will remain to maintain an ever collapsing infrastructure. Look what happened in Africa when the...
Bruce: A biological attack on America would see the D party using masses of drug-addicted vagrants to shake down the taxpayers as a Godsend.
Jim: The logic of court eunuchry explains far, far too much of America c. 2026.
Phileas Frogg: Jim, Absolutely. The state’s willingness to employ coercive measures, even non-violent coercive measures, to achieve ends well beyond their prescribed scope should shock everyone with a conscience or self-respect. But then, they don’t want their court eunuch’s to have self respect, so all the better.
Jim: You know, compulsory and quasi-compulsory schooling is also a form of hostage-taking.
Not Fauci: Antibiotics work quite well. Panic only drives voter turnout to increase government power ‘for your safety’.
Bob Sykes: Hirsch is badly misinformed and confused. The function of the Ivies, and most modern “elite” schools, is not education but networking. They are the places where the children of the Ruling Class meet each other and begin to form alliances, or at least a common set of goals. The Medieval royal courts did the same job for the nobility, although the basic reason noble children were schooled and fostered at the royal courts was hostage taking to ensure against noble rebellions.
Jim: Is America actually worthy of this sort of knob-slobbering? Is the United State?
Bill: Even further back, in the 19th century, sodbusting American pioneers faced mental challenges in the plains: “Prairie madness or prairie fever was an affliction that affected European settlers in the Great Plains during their migration to, and settlement of, the Canadian Prairies and the Western United States in the 19th century. Settlers moving from urbanized or relatively settled areas in the East faced the risk of mental breakdown caused by the harsh living conditions and the extreme levels...
Phileas Frogg: If a government official is emphatically calling something, “evil,” that could, if pursued, accrue more power to the government, you know it’s evil.
Jim: Yeah… maybe. But Russia invaded the Ukraine, and some shady motherfuckers were running a billion bioweapons facilities there. As far as I know, nothing was ever released—and the war continues to grind on, I assume.
Phileas Frogg: When I was a child and I had all of the time in the world to be bored getting driven around in the backseat of a car, I used to look out at large buildings with strange corporate names and wonder what they did in them. I’d concoct stories about secret government programs, or occult meetings, or weapons research, etc. Then I’d imagine sneaking into them and discovering their nefarious schemes. As an adult I’ve come to realize, my boredom induced imaginative ramblings may...
I’m suspicious. The airplanes, maybe, but dirigibles were custom-built, not even anywhere near being mass-produced.
I can’t say I know how much a “typical” dirigible cost a century ago, but a Time magazine article from 1927 describes a potential new dirigible — the largest ever, twice the size of the Los Angeles — as costing in the neighborhood of $4,500,000.
How much did a battleship cost?
According to Wikipedia, Dreadnought cost £1,783,000, compared to the £1,540,000 for each of the Lord Nelson class. Eight years later the Queen Elizabeth class cost £2,300,000.