busdriver

Modern social media is the youtube comments section, without the videos.

Link Per the Gazette, the coaches who broke the rules were fired, and USAFA self reported to the NCAA.

Double stack 1911. So yeah, kind of. Except the design is from the '90s.

I suspect that one is gonna take some tinkering or a trip to a smith (that's familiar with competition guns) to get running correctly. At least the 5 inch one, that's a lot of mass for "normal" 9mm. Or go with Bul Armory, Staccato, Masterpiece Arms, Atlas Gunworks, Infinity. In increasing cost.

Friends don't let friends buy plastic guns. At least not as range toys. Just commit to the real deal, buy a 2011. You'll never look at tupperware the same again.

Agreed. The point that I missed was basically: Russian tech industry sucks, and they can't build anything advanced without access to intermediate goods. So they can't replace their advanced military systems.

I like Matt Yglesias mainly since he's 100% lefty but generally sees past the polemic BS that's ever present in our modern politics. He also just wrote an interesting piece on how badly Russia screwed this thing up. Most interesting to me was that I missed the impact of sanctions removing Russian access to intermediate production products (chips as an example). https://www.slowboring.com/p/russias-military-and-economic-strategy

And reads nothing like what Rand produces.

I think what you're alluding to is the so called small, modular reactors. In my estimation, the primary advantage of these is less their size, and more the standardized safety design(s). In other words, a 300Mw reactor could have 1-4 pre-approved configurations (# of reactors in the facility), which would hopefully make the regulatory approval process shorter, and allow new facilities to get started in a reasonable timeline. In any event. Agreed.

I'm watching Aptera as well. I actually think their manufacturing techniques/ideas are more interesting than the car. Honestly: Elon. He made electric vehicles cool and up-market. Everything previously was an over priced econo-box. I suspect the weight/cost penalty doesn't work out well. A single train car carries something like 4 semi-trailers worth of stuff. You can amortize a lot when you're carrying that much, and weight is effectively irrelevant on a train. I'm confident that the battery tech will be much better in the not-too distant future. There's a shit load of money to be made in that sector. What gives me pause is the energy levels needed to charge an electric semi. Megawatt level charging, for one truck, is insane. Now multiply that by however many charging stations at a truck-stop, and they'll have to hang out for 30 minutes while charging. I keep coming back to the electricity demand increase if our species dropped all fossil fuels, and I can't wrap my head around it without nuclear power.

Nope. There's about 5-6 kwh worth of space on top of a big rig. Volvo's prototype (link) has a battery capacity of 540 kwh. The efficiency numbers in that article don't match their range numbers, and their average speed was 50mph, but regardless you're talking a ~4% increase in energy over a four hour drive range. To put the energy needed for a truck into perspective: the average home solar installation is about 8.5kwh. Electric truck stops are looking to be at megawatt levels to get a charge done over lunch.

A lot of people underestimate how cheap fossil fuels are, and how much that influences industrialization. Hydroelectric dams are good, but limited by geography. Nuclear has been historically laden with political problems, but I agree that renewed development into nuclear power is an actual path forward. But developing the level of new technology, with the inherent risks makes for a pricey proposition. Solar is not tenable at the moment. Without grid level storage, it's a non-starter. With grid level storage, it is still limited by geography and subsequent long distance transmission requirements. All of which makes it expensive. Although it may be big business for sub-Saharan Africa to sell energy to Europe. Wind has the same problems. There are hopeful potentials, but anything new is 10-20 years away. Modernized countries don't use less energy, they use a lot more. On a per capita basis, China emits about half of what the US does, but about double on an out-right level (that's all 2018 data). That's not because their shit is so good. It because there are still shit loads of Chinese folks living in non-modern conditions. The global energy demand is going to be gargantuan in the future. There are a bunch of industrial processes that become extremely energy intensive (or not currently possible) if you attempt to move them from fossil fuels to electricity. Smelting ores, firing concrete kilns, etc.

I'm tracking your sarcasm right to the last sentence. And then, I'm confused. I'll assume sarcasm and just say I agree.

It isn't a moral matter of China, or Africa, or India. They don't have a choice. Industrial development and modernization requires the use of fossil fuels. At least right now. Saying the developing world needs to cut CO2 emissions is functionally no different than saying you want them to not modernize (and lose out on all of the quality of life improvements).

The non-good faith, polarized, monkey's flinging poop at one another nature of modern American politics plays a large role. It's also suspicious when a politician points to a crisis and then claims the solution is what they've always wanted. Anyways... Here's the thing with climate change, if you don't do a fair amount of digging, it's hard to sort out what comes from politics and what comes from actual scientific work. Anyone with a decent grasp of basic physics can pretty easily understand the basic concept of adding CO2 to the atmosphere will make the average temp go up. It's also not hard to verify it with a little research. It's a very well published topic. It's also not hard to grasp that overall, an increase in global temp will be bad for humanity. But after that it gets harder. You hear 1.5 degrees C a lot in various environmental pushes. Where did that number come from? Politicians asked the IPCC to tell them what would be required to limit the global average increase to that number at the end of the century. Here's the thing, we're already 90% of the way there as far as emissions. So hitting that number is basically impossible. It would require annual reductions that start with COVID lockdown level (~7-9%) to start and then further reductions of that same percentage every year there-after. How does that happen while also allowing the developing world to continue to develop? It's preposterous. The reality is, it is too late. To whatever degree that various models and estimates show potential outcomes of a global temp increase; those things are coming. Dealing with, mitigating, limiting, and potentially reversing it will be the actual challenge.

In April, four rural Chinese banks froze ~$6B in retail deposits. A housing development bond crash just wiped out $90B. Real estate is used as backing for financial assets, and the whole thing is propped up by massive debt. Three state owned corporations (PetroChina Ltd, China Life Insurance Ltd and China Petroleum & Chemical Co) just de-listed from the NYSE over company audit concerns. Somehow I doubt this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, but the cracks are becoming very obvious. (How's that for mixed metaphors?)

Everyone is going to pay for the war in Ukraine. One way or another. Goods are traded on an international market. Ukraine exports global rankings: #5 wheat, #4 corn, #4 iron ore, #1 seed oils, Russia is the #1 exporter of fertilizers and wheat, China is #2 fertilizer exporter and just reduced the max allowable export quota. Shit is gonna get even more expensive.

That will be the argument from the bureaucrats. The hick-up will be POTUS' plenary powers with respect to classification. The bureaucrats will have to argue that their process, whose authority is derived from POTUS, can also limit POTUS authority.

What are the odds this turns into a queep discussion about whether or not paperwork was done correctly after Trump declared a bunch of shit de-classified?

This isn't domino theory, or some half baked idea about the spread of an ideology. It is partly a realist (ie. Mearsheimer) perspective on great power competition. Basically, states will seek to ensure their security, through border control and eventually regional hegemony. Russia doesn't have naturally defendable borders (deserts, mountains, oceans). So expansion to control terrain that allows a defendable border is needed. And it has already done this recently (South Ossetia & Crimea). That perspective is weird to Americans. Our country has zero natural threats, an ocean on two of our four borders, and complete hegemony. Hence Ron Paul's theory that all we need as a military is some boats/subs on each coast. This part is not without merit, but if we're going to step back with a mindset of "we suck at predicting what will happen" then we have to accept that there are trade offs and just because historical second/third order effects stunk, doesn't mean that there weren't worse potential outcomes. Both war/death outcomes and economic outcomes.

And now I'm quoting myself. Just to add, I don't think Ukraine winning is a pre-requisite of what I think needs to happen. A pyrrhic victory for Russia would work. At least for the rest of the world.

Agree. If the Russian military is sufficiently beat down, they will then lack the ability to start another invasion. The more beat they are, the longer it will take to re-constitute. Hopefully Putin will be dead by then and they can have another chance to join the rest of the world. Preventing Putin from starting an invasion in a NATO country is the important part. They would lose badly. Which makes for a risky proposition given the nuke thing.

Something to consider: -Would Russia stop with Ukraine? There are geographic reasons to suspect they would not. Namely that Russia has poor natural geographic borders without controlling the Baltics, Moldova and about half of Poland. There's a reason it ended up controlling those areas after WW2 (negotiated). -Based on what we've seen of their performance in Ukraine, I don't think anyone thinks the Russian military would stand a chance against NATO in a conventional war. I'm not sure US troops would even be needed; but if the US is involved, it is for sure a forgone conclusion that Russia loses badly. -If you grant me those two points for the sake of discussion, does that increase or decrease the threat of a nuclear weapon(s) being used on the European continent?

Long term political viability of the current version of China I think it largely depends on what their actual demographics are. All we really have are lies and analyst estimates. I'd venture we won't recognize that they've become a paper tiger for about ten years. So maybe 20 years (10+10)? I think there's a real chance they try to do something with Taiwan. They changed the 2 child policy to 3 children, so they have to see the crash coming.

China is still a huge market. And as such still wields a lot of power, and will for as long as their population is buying a lot of stuff. But the manufacturing base is leaving, their population demographics are very screwed up, and their internal monetary policy is ridiculous. My point is our economies look to potentially be at the start of an un-meshing. Which also means the CCP is backed into a corner.