The Washington Post is whatever its owner Jeff Bezos wants it to be.

but at what cost?!

I was going to say… does Ukraine think everyone has somehow forgotten that Russia is the nation that has had globe spanning satellite surveillance longer than anyone else? To make this claim about the US, Russia, China, Iran, or India is ridiculous.

I guess Ukraine forgot which nations maintain fully integrated domestic space launch capability and large military satellite constellations. Then again they aren’t one of those nations and it’s a capability exclusive to great powers. Ukraine isn’t even in the slightly larger group of nations that have bought a few commercial mapping satellites.

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In California, Oregon, and Washington the state governments stripped cities of most of their powers related to zoning in regards to blocking conversions to mixed use residential. As long as there isn’t heavy industry right next door (aren’t crazy, no one wants Houston), mixed use residential zoning is hard for cities to deny.

Los Angeles has the problem (benzene, hydrocarbons, heavy metals) of all the oil wells, pipelines, refineries, crude oil storage, and other oil field infrastructure hidden behind facades all throughout the city. The city and county are an active oil field, something that should never have been approved when there is residential or light commercial literally 25ft away from camouflaged wells, pipelines, and crude oil storage tanks. Then again people over a century ago probably shouldn’t have looked at the natural tar pits and thought to themselves “this is a great place to build a city”.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/09/oil-wells-in-la-nearby-residents-grapple-with-health-problems.html

New residential arguably is unethical in this situation, especially if it’s lower income housing. Btw, this is the reason building new public schools has been almost impossible in Los Angeles and existing schools all have soil that if there were alternatives would mean shutting them down. Los Angeles and Houston are more alike than anyone likes to admit. Can’t do the type of super fund site remediation (clean up) at the scale actually needed because it would mean tearing the city down to the bedrock to replace all the soil.

Uhhhhmm… I think the prefer to be called “tech bros” or “founders”.

Yeah. You build undersea HVDC lines. HVDC was pioneered for undersea cables because it allows smaller cables with lower transmission loss (greater distance) than AC transmission. The other reason is that HVDC is the only realistic way to import/export power between regional AC transmission systems that are not synchronized.

Infact the majority of undersea transmission lines are HVDC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable#Direct_current_cables

I hope this means the Chinese plan to create a High Voltage DC transmission super-grid connecting across over a dozen time zones moves closer to reality. It’s a development project needed for the renewable transition but a major issue is everyone believes both South Korea and Japan will never meaningfully get on board.

Who is pocketing the price difference:

Junshi partnered with California-based Coherus BioSciences to bring the drug to the US, and it is expected to become available within the first quarter of next year.

Gotta love how the US regulatory regime is structured so middle men always get their taste. It’s like how the US doesn’t produce much in the way of active ingredients, instead US companies import them from China, India, and Poland then package them under their own brand name into pill, capsule, or injectable formulation. During this process the price somehow increases 1,000% to 10,000% over what they paid for the active ingredient.

Russia secured the border between Ukraine and the break away regions where Ukraine had been massacring civilians. It has been mission accomplished for Russia starting at the point they expelled the Ukrainian military from those regions and fortified the borders to prevent Ukraine from retaking them. For almost a year now Russia has been using the Ukrainian military for live fire training exercises.

I’ve personally enjoyed watching all the admin meetings for the project on their YouTube Channel because it really gives an understanding of the insane inefficiency of the US system of private property rights and public-private contracting.

I laughed reading this because it reminded me about how bad the US was at building anything in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point US contractors charged almost 50 million dollars to build a single gas station and it never actually got completed. To be fair, US contractors are just as bad when hired to build infrastructure in the US.

Neoliberals are willing to lose a war if it means a handful of private sector US companies get to juice next quarters earnings call and pump up stock market capitalization.

Best printers out there. I’ve had the same b/w brother laser printer for well over a decade and it is still going strong. None of the bullshit associated with other brands of laser printers or inkjets. It can sit unused for over a year and will immediately print something no problem. Also gives me 7000 pages between ink toner replacements and only have to replace the drum every 3 or 4 tone replacement cycles.

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The 155mm artillery shell shortage is actually ridiculous. The US is choosing to only manufacture a few thousand 155mm shells per month and keep the price per shell high due to the terrible economies of scale when operating a factory with the capacity for over a million 155mm shells per month at less than 2% capacity. The real question is why is the White House deciding to not order 155mm shell production to one million units per month. Why is the White House intentionally allowing artificial scarcity and terrible production efficiency juice the price General Dynamics is allowed to charge per 155mm shell? It’s literally the US government defrauding itself by creating conditions where it has to pay the maximum price per shell when it literally doesn’t have to.

To explain:

All US 155mm shell production happens at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania. The plant is US government owned but staffed by defense contractors from General Dynamics. Even though it is a US government owned factory and the factory workers are paid by the government, the contrator General Dynamics is allowed to then sell the US government each 155mm shell the factory produces. By law this US government owned facility has over the years been steadily upgraded to ensure that it can maintain the ability to with only a few weeks notice ramp production back to its full capacity of a little over 1 million 155mm shells per month. The plant has been able to manufacture at this million 155mm shell capacity since the WW2 era and over the years due to upgrades like robotics similar to that used in automotive production if the US military asks for production to ramp to full capacity the factory only needs to hire 1/10th of the new employees it would have needed in the 1940s to maintain that scale of output.

Anyone with experience in how industrial processes work will find it comical that a facility with equipment spec’d for such large scale production is being intentionally run at around 2% capacity when ATM there is good reason to immediately ramp to full capacity. It is extremely inefficient and costly to run at such low capacity when a factory is tooled for a much higher production scale. At minimum capacity you are having to spend wasteful amounts of money to heat up massive furnaces and forges used to work raw steel feedstock into shells to only run a fraction of the material they are capable of handling through them.

Everyone always forgets that modern warships are mobile missile shield systems. They provide a few hundred miles of interceptor coverage. China has assets in the region and over the past week there are multiple groups staging missile or rocket attacks on everything from infrastructure to military bases in a half dozen countries.

China undoubtedly remembers how the US dropped five JDAM guided bombs through the roof of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.. Unlike decades ago, China has a modern navy and can position ships to prevent such US antics.

Lmao. Chinese officials proving to be experts at not taking the “denounce” bait.

As long as no one hits one of the two US carriers on station in the area there should be no worry about the US resorting to nukes. It’s something like an aircraft carrier getting sunk that would cause the kind of psychic damage required for US leadership to have an irrational knee jerk response involving nuclear weapons.

on a side note: does anyone else hate how because the people of the US are uniquely fkd in the head and have enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth lifeless, the rest of the world has to keep in mind what kinds of events might cause the US to have a complete collective freak out? In recent years I keep thinking about how throughout all of human history hegemonic empires would rise and fall but never before has the decline of an empire come with the very real danger that as they destabilize it could result in them killing everyone on earth rather than just themselves and their neighbors. It feels like being locked in a room with another individual who is experiencing deteriorating mental health and is in possession of a hand grenade no one can take away from them without risking setting it off.