Jim: (If you’re tempted to ask, “Jim, did you really just idly read a sentence in a biography excerpt on a WordPress blog on the Internet and have the most perfectly relevant memory fragment of something you saw once over ten years ago and haven’t thought of again flicker-flash tap dance across your mind’s eye?” to you my answer is, “Yes: it happens all the time.”)
Bruce: ‘It will be better to destroy ourselves because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one’. Merkel’s East German heritage is straight from Adolph.
Bomag: ”We’re ruled by megalomaniacal fools.” They do seem interested in killing on a large scale; population transfers on a large scale; spending money on a large scale that endangers economic stability; society-wide programs with large disruptions (Covid, education reforms, more); etc.
Contaminated NEET: “fight China” We’re ruled by megalomaniacal fools.
TRX: Sounds vaguely similar to the British Windscale reactor back in the 1950s.
Jim: Furthermore, if a power plant costs less kWh to build than it generates over its operational life, it is an objective net addition to circulating kWh. Impliedly, the sovereign should build infinitely until the fiat-denominated price of electricity has fallen to “too cheap to meter”. It is impossible to adequately articulate just how completely this would transform the state that implements it first.
Jim: Simplicity, redundancy, and ease of deployment have a quality all their own.
bob sykes: The economies of scale dictate facility size. For every doubling of the size of any production facility, the cost of a unit of product is reduced by 20%. The cost of a kWh from an eVinci plant is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than a standard GW reactor. Microscale reactors, wind mills, water mills, a solar panels do have uses, especially for small, isolated demands. They are an appalling waste of resources for large, baseload demands.
Jim: The real answer is that manned airplanes are show horses in the age of Jeeps, and the nuclear umbrella means that combat efficacy doesn’t matter very much. This was less clear when they were still developing new airplanes but is more clear now that they are literally flying flying relics.
Jim: “When the Chinese downed their first Fire Fly in 1964…” To bury the lede…
Jim: What do they have to say about the Amazon’s weird soil?
McChuck: TL;DR: Only take medicine when you’re sick.
Alex J.: If those drones had a TV feed (as opposed to film cameras) they would’ve been useful for visually identifying BVR targets for F-14s as often required by ROE. Per McChuck: MGM-157 EFOGM AGR-20 Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) There was a laser guided Zuni rocket that got cancelled as well.
McChuck: In 1986, I saw a 60 Minutes episode about an anti-tank missile guided by a television camera. It had a five mile range, and could also shoot down helicopters. Problem was, the Army didn’t ask for it, it wasn’t made by the big defense contractors, and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. It was made by two Soldiers in their off time, using spare parts that were readily available. Congress ordered the Army to adopt it, but they slow rolled acquisitions for the next 20 years and...
Bruce: This is all expensive stuff. The drones that work keep getting cheaper and smaller, like the ones Hamas used on Israeli border guards- a model airplane built around a grenade. The DoD should have tens of millions of these by now. Why don’t they? The British Navy held off building ironclad warships until the US Civil War ironclads let the cat out of the bag. This was rational and in British interest. The British Navy had a lot of wooden ships ruling the waves, all doomed against ironclads....
David Foster: Financial benefit probably depends largely on route. If there are a lot of steep hill to go up & down, regenerative braking will have a good payback. Same thing if a lot of start-stop driving.
Bomag: Read a blurb about the opposition in Afghanistan buying weapons from the Taliban. Seems to be a thing forever in that country. I’m also reminded of fur trappers and such selling guns to the Indians in the Old West. Guy’s gotta eat. Could include the corrupt Ukrainian officials who played both sides early in the war, or just the Russian side, in case things went as expected.
Bomag: I’ll echo McChuck. They may be saving 36% of usual diesel fuel costs, but how much was the electricity? Plus all the externalities.
VXXC: “If you kill your enemies, they win.” Absolutely. That’s how the Germans beat the Russians in WW2, and how we lost to the Japanese. It’s also why the South won the Civil War [now I have your attention !]. “This will inflame your ____ to____” As it happens, we the fighting caste are stepping away, so y’all can show us how it’s done. Perhaps you can make a good death, but I doubt it. All you wanted ‘was to be left alone?” Right? Congratulations, you...
That is fantastic!