The checklist is one's own ethics and morale guideposts --- every interaction with others has to be done with a consideration for the long-term strategic goals rather than short-term gains --- Clausewitz argues that the will of the people of whom the military is an extension of and their ethics and mores have to be taken into account and all actions done in accord with what will make an acceptable news story.
Consider the old adage:
>Never do something which you wouldn't want your grandparents to read about in a newspaper, or to discuss with them over Sunday dinner.
By extension, a military force should:
>Never do anything which when shown on the evening news would result in a Congressional inquiry (or a War Crimes Tribunal).
I'm all for "Be excellent to each other", but in war, the first and foremost consideration is whether the strategy is effective. I'm not a big Clausewitz scholar, but I can't imagine that he or any other general would accept a strategy that prioritises the well-being of the opposing side to the point of their own side admitting defeat.
As I see it, the only way that we can have "Rules of War" is by proving that a war can be won while maintaining them. Otherwise (and unless you have a magic wand to make humans non-aggressive), these rules are worse than useless, because they limit the more ethical side, while making them lose to the less ethical.
Friend, I have respect to where you are coming from, and ask you to please think a little longer term.
You don't prioritize the well-being of the other side, but you do want to avoid radicalizing them. The more reasons they have to surrender, the more likely they are to surrender, thus ending the conflict sooner AND keeping the end conditions one they are comfortable living under.
If instead they feel they are in a fight to the death, then you have a much tougher battle on your hand because they will fight to the death. You'll still win (maybe) but it's going to cost you in personelle and time and money.
Next aspect. Moral of your troops. Everyone wants to be a hero, very few people join the military because they want to kill. And those that are in it to kill tend to be toxic leaders which is really bad for the rest of the team.
"Rules of war"/"rules of engagement" are methods that allow your troops to maintain their humanity and sense of purpose under horrific situations. You give up that and you are now undercutting the fighting power of your own forces.
The military did not come up with these ideas to make themselves weak. They came up with them and enforced them because they are the source of strength.
But that's the question - how do you fight honorably and win? How many examples can you offer (from any time in history), where the winning side conducted the campaign in a "gentlemanly fashion" (or however you want to call it), won, and got the respect of the losing side and lasting peace?
To address your concern-- if two people are fighting and one thinks "I won't hit below the belt" that person is at a tactical disadvantage. Even worse if they think the other side has also agreed to that rule.
So in that sense you are absolutely correct.
But I invite you to think bigger. If one side lays siege to another side's city, and offers terms of surrender, the city needs to believe that the terms will be honored otherwise they don't surrender.
Which is a large part of European history during the period from the middle ages up until Napoleon figured out how to use artillery, i.e. hundreds of years of examples where "fighting honorably" was the winning strategy.
Notice that Germany and Japan are now strong allies.
Also notice that many people think the cause of WWII was that the WWI surrender forced unsustainable terms on Germany thus fueling the resentment that lead to WWII.
> Also notice that many people think the cause of WWII was that the WWI surrender forced unsustainable terms on Germany thus fueling the resentment that lead to WWII.
And many historians dispute it. Partly because those terms were standard for the time and better then what Germans themselves planned to enact after they win.
And partly because the German population never believed they lost the war. They believed they would winning absent "stab in the back". That is why the allies insisted on actually conquering Germany with no in between solution. The victory had to be absolute.
I wouldn't quite say that the former Confederate states fully respected the Union's victory as saying something good about the North [0], and in some ways still don't, but otherwise it is a good example.
if you can't count on your troops to be disciplined enough to follow your rules of engagement, how can you count on their discipline to follow your other orders? If you cannot show them that you are also disciplined, how do you expect them to maintain their respect for you as a leader?
If you don't have honor, what are you fighting for? Troop moral is what wins wars.
what's worse than death? Not having anything worth living for.
very very few people find honor in being the most evil person. And those few who do make very bad leaders; you either avoid having them in your armed forces or you limit their impact.
If one of your squadmates is an "I'll do anything to win" person, how can you trust them not to ditch you if that is their best survival option? Prisoner's dilema situations are common in battle
I encourage you to visit a US military cemetery. You will sometimes see shrines to the military virtues. Courage, honor, pride, family, discipline all rank pretty high.
In WWII the Allies didn't take any steps to avoid radicalizing the other side. We implemented starvation blockades and fire bombed cities, killing millions of enemy civilians. They surrendered unconditionally because they were utterly destroyed and had no more capability it resist.
I think the lesson is that you can never be sure that you will meet your military objectives—failure is always a possibility—and the blowback from that failure will be more limited if you appear to have conducted your war with adequate respect for noncombatants.
Failing to conquer a nation (or depose its government, or secure some land, or defend a border, or whatever your objective is) may be shrugged off by your own nation, and you may even be able to normalize relations after some time. But if you abuse the noncombatant population, you often create bitter enemies, generational hatred, and global pressures on your society from third party observers. In the worst case this eventually escalates to mutual threats of genocide and total war.
Even if a nation wins a conflict through sheer brutality, they may lose the occupation, or the reconstruction, or good relations with important partners, or all of the above. And they may create an enemy who will one day return with a vengeance.
From my reading of history, there's no straightforward correspondence between the ethics of the winning side and its ability to have good relations with the losing side. As a clear anti-example, in later stages of WW2, the allied forces were very willing to engage in attacks on population centers to achieve a decisive victory faster (particularly: Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and the resulting relationships between the allied countries and Germany and Japan could not have been more positive even if the most optimistic poet in 1944 were to written lyric poetry about the best possible future.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for cruelty, but I'm wondering if going back to an approach of "surrender or we'll kill you all" would save more lives than the current situation of "do everything you can to avoid doing too much harm at any one time", which ends up prolonging conflicts indefinitely.
> resulting relationships between the allied countries and Germany and Japan could not have been more positive
I think there may have been a "lesser evil" aspect to that. The Allies had good relationships with West Germany almost immediately after the war because they were saving the defeated Germans from the USSR. Japan reconciled with the USSR but there are still tensions between Japan, Korea, and China over the war.
In both cases the aggressors were the first to engage in atrocities, and their atrocities were much more severe than those inflicted upon them. So both seem like a unique case. Additionally, both were part of a global conflict, which is uncommon. In a global conflict there aren’t many bystanders who can effectively implement sanctions or apply diplomatic pressure.
> I'm wondering if going back to an approach of "surrender or we'll kill you all" would save more lives than the current situation
This is just as likely to provoke a “fight to the death” response from the defender which is often enough to prevent you from achieving your objectives. There are very few large conflicts where the objective is simply “eliminate the defenders”.
The obvious counter example is WWII. The victorious Allied forces conducted widespread strategic bombing campaigns and starvation blockades against Axis civilian targets. This was highly effective and saved the lives of many Allied personnel but judged against some modern criteria could have been considered "war crimes": for example, see the fire bombing of Dresden. None of the Allied leaders were put in front of a tribunal because the strategy worked and Congress was fully on board. The uncomfortable reality is that sometimes the only practical way to win and preserve your own forces is to massacre enemy civilians on an industrial scale.
The strategic bombing campaign absolutely reduced Axis manufacturing capacity and fuel supplies. There is no serious dispute about that point. There is some academic dispute about whether it was the most effective use of Allied resources but by the second half of the war the US had plenty resources to spare so that dispute is kind of moot.
>Tactical brilliance could not guarantee strategic clarity—and each gain came at political and moral cost.
sums up what is wrong with modern conflict --- the abandonment of the moral high ground and a failure to take into account the will of people and their right to self-determination which Jomini (who had displaced Clausewitz after his inculcation at West Point as part of the brutal lessens the U.S. learned in Vietnam) failed to consider, and which Clausewitz took to heart and studied deeply, and thought long on.
It wasn't that long ago that the collapse of the Soviet Union was viewed as "the end of history" and a global acknowledgement that liberal democracy was the means of government most widely accepted --- hopefully articles such as this will be a guidepost to getting back on that track --- every moral failure simply recruits others to fight on the opposite side.
West Point is only one of three service academies, and it needs to teach only enough of the higher level of war to produce a reasonably competent Second Lieutenant. In fact it's arguable the service academies are a waste of resources as currently implemented as opposed to OCS and ROTC.
What matters is what is taught to the Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, Lieutenant Commanders, and Commanders 12-15 years later at the War Colleges. And as a graduate myself (if only by correspondence) I can assure you that Clausewitz and Sun Tzu were very much still on the books in the 2010s.
The war colleges are more intellectual than many people think. The curricula of those schools include most of the seminal works on war and statecraft from Thucydides to Kissinger.
I was disappointed they truncated the remote version of Strategy and War and we didn't get to dig into Thucydides and Corbett.
I will say getting that intellectualism to stick in the officer corps doesn't necessarily always work. There are jokes about "it's only a lot of reading if you do the reading," and oftentimes being able to spend a year in residence gets passed over in favor of sending people to other assignments and expecting them to do the War College syllabus by correspondence.
That said, the War Colleges are also heavily involved in things like designing and evaluating higher-level military exercises, red-teaming things, etc.
>sums up what is wrong with modern conflict --- the abandonment of the moral high ground and a failure to take into account the will of people and their right to self-determination
Pray tell, when in the whole of humanity's so often sordid history has warfare mostly been even within audible laughing distance of a tendency towards promoting moral high ground or taking into account people's right to self determination?
If anything, the wars of the last few decades have made more pretense of both those things (pretense, not necessarily real application) than any typical war at any previous time, when naked, crude, unvarnished conquest was the main justification most leaders felt inclined to think good enough.
actually smitten by your diction and writing style which stood out to me in an era of ubiquituous Strunk and White SAT essay form that everyone on the internet suddenly had a perfect grasp of.
If there were ~9 wars that followed purely imperialist logic and 1 where it could plausibly have been done for imperialist or humanitarian reasons, it was probably done for imperialist reasons.
Fragmenting Serbia and creating a puppet state within its borders did serve America's goal to project power in the balkans.
Future historians will judge America harshly for the now documented millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Lybians that died for no reason at the hand of America.
Wonder if it will be depicted as a modern Mongol Invasion equivalent, with all the cruelty associated with it
The Mongols were a mixed bag. Cruel in certain ways but surprisingly enlightened and pragmatic in others. Many of the conquered peoples lived better under the Mongols than under their previous overlords.
If you check out the thread, I think you’ll see it wasn’t me making it into a flamewar, but rather a bunch of folks with apparently no idea what Islam even is (like literally core tenets). And somehow thinking that me stating them is harshing on Islam, which seems really funny actually? Isn’t that the anti-Islamic sentiment in reality?
It’s like if people accused me of being antisemitic because I was just saying that Jews believe they have a special deal with god. Or that I hate Christians because I said they believe Jesus was the son of god. When that’s literally one of the core tenets of Judaism/Christianity.
I’m not hating on any religion here, just pointing out core tenets that are at the root of ideological conflicts!
Personally, I think this is a great example for surfacing the actual underlying problems here.
Which is that trying to apply your own core values to something/someone with wildly different core values from a position of ignorance produces bad outcomes for everyone.
And any sort of ‘high ground’ definition is just internal propaganda - which everyone does need - but has little to no connection to actual reality.
You took the thread way off topic into a generic argument about religion that is more or less guaranteed, in the general case, to end up in a flamewar. Since your account is the one that started it and contributed the most to it, you're responsible for it. Then you kept doing it repeatedly after I asked you to stop. Not cool.
Edit: We've had to ask you not to do such things in the past:
If you keep doing it, we're going to end up banning you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended spirit of the site from now on, that would be good.
Dang, this is like the 4th time you’ve done this on something that the reading of the thread later shows did not go in that direction.
Seriously, what do you expect me to do?
If my behavior was actually a problem, those threads would have ended up being actually a problem - but near as I can tell, they aren’t. And this it out of what, 5k+ comments?
The only way I can think of to avoid this situation is to be so bland that there is literally zero signal being added.
I expect you to stop taking HN threads on generic flamewar tangents and stick to the site guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516877 is an example of the thread going in a flamewar direction, and while that user shouldn't be breaking the site guidelines either, your account is the primary one responsible. If most other users didn't respond by breaking the guidelines, that is commendable, but random. In the general case, they certainly would. This means that the way you were posting was flamebait.
Tell you what dang. If tomorrow you still really believe this is true, please do ban my account.
It would be healthier for me to be spending more time with the real people in my life anyway - like the multiple Palestinian friends and co-workers who are refugees from Gaza. Instead of arguing with people on the internet.
Could you please more fully explain what you mean and how it relates to the parent comment? The parent and TFA offer examples of the conflicts of US vs. Vietnam and Russia vs. Ukraine, which don't clearly involve Islamic beliefs, but otherwise appear to be similar enough to demonstrate the same principles/issues.
Islamic teachings actively call for believers to punish those that 1) challenge teachings of Mohammed, 2) stop believing in the teachings of Mohammed, 3) stray from the teachings of Mohammed. Often with literal proscribed death sentences.
Including (under most interpretations) women who marry someone who is not a Muslim man, men who do not follow things like prayers and proscriptions on loans, etc etc.
This isn’t theoretical either, it’s actively practiced by wide portions of the religious population in most (but not all) Islamic countries.
These are fundamentally at odds with western thought, are they not?
The ideal ‘Good Muslim’ in most Muslim countries is nearly diametrically opposed to ‘Good Man/Woman’ in nearly every western country - idea-logically and in the details.
As someone who has lived in a country with a large Muslim population, it’s not made up.
To the point being hit on/flirting with a Muslim woman in these countries can get you targeted with physical violence in some cases.
Those are valid opinions (though I disagree with several of them), but what yo seem to be missing is that you barged into a general discussion in modern warfare to express your antipathy to Islam.
Islam isn't a big factor in the Ukraine Russia conflict, it's not a big factor in US domestic politics (which are tilting toward military conflict), it's not a big factor in Asian geopolitics. IF you want to make a point about Islam that's one thing, but ignoring the larger context and harping on your pet issue is distracting and rude. You could at the very least acknowledge the existence of the bigger picture and situate your concerns as a specific part of it.
I’m pointing out that a discussion about ‘high ground’ that ignores that it’s a subjective discussion where there are numerous other factions with wildly conflicting views of it is not a useful discussion.
And that the Islamic vs Western world split is a classic example where people seem to insist on projecting their western (often Christian derived if not strictly so) views onto a rather diametrically opposed set of values and then acting surprised when ‘the other side’ goes ‘WTF, no’ or even acts in ways that they consider abhorrent - but are not surprising if you actually know what is going on.
That people even consider this a religious flamewar (apparently) is quite hilarious because if you actually read the Koran and Hadiths, or have spent much time around many Muslim societies these aren’t even (generally) contentious things I’m talking about!
For example - you just don’t draw a picture of Mohammed. Especially not if it’s making fun of him, but even if it’s flattering, just don’t.
If you’re in a culture that has major Muslim influences, this is very very obvious. It’s not a flamewar topic, but it doesn’t come up much - for the same reason most people don’t talk about slapping strangers in the face either.
It’s still a thing. As are the calls to prayer. And not gooning on random Muslim women. And a hundred other things.
And when the ‘good’ thing by our standards is the monstrous behavior to someone else?
WW2 and the Japanese, as someone noted, provide many examples. For example, to the Japanese, the Allies taking prisoners was ritual humiliation - and death with a sword in their hand would have been preferable.
Sometimes, your high ground is another’s sewer (or even your own), and there is nothing anyone can do to change that.
Isn’t systematically humiliating an entire group of enemies being a monster too? It’s literally banned by the Geneva convention!
In the end when conflicts like this happen, realpolitik/pragmatic application of force wins regardless.
The janny smacked you but I thought you raised a valid point. The "moral high ground" is and has always been subjective. Do the ends justify the means? Depends on the ideology. Is a soldier surrendering a dishonorable act, or should he be treated with professional dignity? During WW2 the Japanese thought that surrender was dishonorable and treated POWs very poorly. They also deliberately shot at combat medics, they didn't have any sort of taboo against that. Nor did Europeans, until most of the way through the 19th century, think much about leaving wounded soldiers to lay dying in the field, or even casually murdering the wounded as they lay helpless after the battle was already decided (these sort of behaviors lead to the creation of the Red Cross.) In all of these cases it wasn't because those people were fundamentally evil. They were acting according to the norms and expectations of their culture. When two sides with radically different norms encounter each other in conflict, both can feel as though the other is depraved. But that's not necessarily an accurate reflection of the mental state of the other guys. American soldiers in the Pacific thought that the Japanese were savage animals, but with cooler hindsight we know that the Japanese had and still have a strong sense of honor. The catch is that it is, or at least then was, a very different sort of honor that held people to different expectations than Americans were accustomed to.
Sorry if I was unclear, I was hoping for clarity about your argument and its relevance to urban warfare situations across different conflicts, not more detail about your take on Islam in general.
When two ideologically incompatible parties (as in what is good/bad, high ground or not) are fighting, it gets complicated and ruthless/very destructive. In large part because it’s about incompatible identities and trying to purge ‘the other’, rather than ‘mere’ control of a specific piece of land. It takes a potentially resolvable conflict (an area where there may be a stable compromise), and can turn it into an existential fight.
This becomes especially destructive in very dense environments like urban centers, because the level of hiding that can happen becomes almost fractal.
The fight in Gaza is one recent example, as are the others.
I’m not surprised that Gaza has escalated to the point it has (total war, essentially), because Hamas can’t actually give up without losing their entire identity and reason for being, for example. And the factions in Israel can’t back down without winning or ‘it would have all been for nothing’.
Or are you referring to tactics, because there are actual religions reasons/justifications for the nature of some specific tactics being used in Gaza.
> Islamic teachings actively call for believers to punish those that 1) challenge teachings of Mohammed, 2) stop believing in the teachings of Mohammed, 3) stray from the teachings of Mohammed. Often with literal proscribed death sentences.
Utter non sense.
You misunderstand both what Islam is about, the place it gives to the prophet and how sharia works.
Sharia explicitly protects non believers. Did you fail to notice that Jews lived for ages in the various Islamic empires?
As a non Muslim who has lived in majority Muslim countries multiple times, I’m shocked you can actually live in one and come out with such large misconceptions.
I don't know if Sharia law protects non-Muslims, but it most definitely prescribes the death penalty to apostates of Islam, which is what GP is saying.
An Islamic belief which can be worked with would be the mainstream liberal views which were gaining currency in Iran and Iraq back before the Shah and the Ba'athists.
Regimes which do not accord basic rights to all citizens, including women should simply be ignored until such time as they do, no matter how much oil they have.
Islamic teachings/belief tell you approximately as much as catholics teachings/belief which is to say next to nothing.
The Islamic world in as much as it exists as entity is not homogeneous in its belief and practices. It’s a collection of countries and groups and they don’t all agree.
I never said it was homogenous, I’m pointing out core beliefs that - while modified in a few places - are definitional for the religion, and are fundamentally at odds with other perspectives.
This isn’t hypothetical, this is a lived experience for a billion+ people.
So is the vast majority of secular western society according to hardline christian religion. I think what poster you're replying to is implicitly saying is just that religious institutions have to weakened and "tamed"
Islamic beliefs as some sort of bad monolith vs Western beliefs as some sort of opposing good monolith is a painfully narrow and frankly bigoted view of human existence, warfare, and statecraft. I'll point you at Gaza and rub your nose directly in it.
Bwahaha, ignoring the religious and geopolitical situation and history (including Abu Bakr on) around Palestine is exactly how you end up in situations like Gaza elsewhere too.
Islamic teachings (active, and well documented historically in the Hadiths) are fundamentally at odds with western liberal thought, and anyone who ignores it is just being willfully ignorant.
An honest question - you don't have inner moral compass? Do you consider freedom (speech, movement, self-determination and so on) equal to oppression, restriction and tyranny?
I come from environment where these are clear, no doubts or murky waters. I lived and still live in such environment despite moving around quite a bit.
Simply put, I don't agree with what you say by any means, it just doesn't reflect the reality of the world. Maybe it reflects some distorted twitter version of subset of reality for some but thats about it.
>Do you consider freedom (speech, movement, self-determination and so on) equal to oppression, restriction and tyranny?
GP is saying that the phrase "moral high ground" presupposes an objective definition of "up" in morality. You can't cite a particular person's subjective moral "up" to disagree with them. Whether any given person values freedom or oppression more highly doesn't say anything about which one is objectively more moral, if any.
Besides that, do you think it unthinkable that a person would approve of some amount of oppression and restriction being placed on them in favor of achieving some goal?
If you ask a random Chinese middle aged man or woman, do you think they will agree with you or not?
In my experience, they think there are practical reasons why things are the way they are in China, and what you’re describing is a poisonous fantasy spread by idiots. (As one said to me quite clearly once in Singapore!)
Either way, I prefer freedom of movement, self determination, etc. but it’s pretty obvious that many cultures actively think it’s a bad idea and go out of their way to squash it in very real ways, especially against certain portions of the population. And I bet if we did a spreadsheet with various examples, you’d also consider some of them too much.
Like consensual vore. Personal freedom, or mental illness?
Ignoring that you’ll get a fight from any given culture on these and many more topics and we can all just ‘get along’ due to fundamental human awesomeness is just not how it has ever worked - ever - near as I can tell.
How is adopting the beliefs your society blasted you with since childhood an "inner" moral compass? I completely agree with you, but I recognize it's a product of my environment and "propaganda" more than some kind of intrinsic thing
This is spoken as if history converges to a point and then it _really_ gets to the end of history. There is no end, there will be endless fights and conflicts and one country taking the upper hand is just a temporary state.
"Win" here doesn't mean military victory over Russia. It means Ukraine's slow destruction of of Russia's oil and gas infrastructure and the West's sanctions make it too expensive for Russia to continue, so they withdraw from Ukraine and Crimea.
What a difference just 4 years the accelerated pace of technological development makes that happens in war makes. 4 years ago, Ukraine would have ended without the influx of Western weapons. Now the West looks at the Ukrainian battle fields, and ponders the relevance of their weapons against a $10k drone, made in Ukraine.
Russia is a one-trick petrostate that has been stuck in a three-year quagmire of a land war against the poorest country in Europe (that is a quarter its size).
Completely agree... though I wouldn't underestimate them: Their main strength, I'd argue, comes from their very successful use of the Firehose Of Falsehood (effectively managing to make the US self-own itself by turbocharging neoliberalism, among other things). They "James-Bond-Villain'd" the US (announced how they'd "take over the world") 28 years ago [0], and... well... look how that's going.
Nothing there seems to be dramatically different from the sort of wankery produced by think tanks like PNAC and their ilk. And it's not like the US or the UK or the USSR have ever shied away from using soft power to destabilize other countries.
The game everyone's playing is not that different, and Ivan isn't making some 400 IQ move in it.
Another more likely scenario in the next few decades is that Russia and/or China will collapse into violent revolution or civil way — as has happened multiple times throughout their long histories. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping aren't immortal. They have effectively concentrated decision making in their own hands and purged all other internal power centers, leaving no clear succession plan. When they die there's no way to predict what might happen.
We lost India to China because we were impulsive. Beijing’s “wolf warriors” had already done generational damage to China’s strength. We could have held the high ground for decades more.
Did you type AI when you meant to write the cotton gin? Or mechanized agriculture? Or the Industrial Revolution? The automobile? Every single technological advancement has promised “fewer hands, more leisure” and we’ve always found a way to make that claim false. I have no idea how one can continue to claim it
The problem is, this mafia has a shitload of nuclear weapons. Without those, their vast land holdings east of the Urals would’ve already been taken by China.
Both China and Russia have concentrated vast amounts of power into a single person, it gets bloody and chaotic when the ‘one powerful man’ dies and there’s a power struggle.
The most corrupt government in American history (Trumps) is the one that is the most eager to give Russia everything they want. They are kind of trying to make America loose.
Morally purer government would do better in the competition between Russia and America.
Dr. Donald E. Knuth seems to be doing well --- made enough to at least include a mention of what he did with his royalty checks in an index entry in one of his books (royalties, use of points to a page with a graph which resembles the pipe organ which he had installed in his home).
There are always outliers (that's the whole point).
All he was saying is that when the market for technical books was new (because that was really the only way to get to speed on something) you didn't need to have Knuth-levels of knowledge and writing skill (Knuth is both incredibly knowledgeable and an exceptionally good writer) to make a decent living.
Steam power wasn't feasible until the Bessemer process and rolled sheet steel made the creation of pressure vessels a reliable and repeatable process.
An internal combustion engine requires that, plus ceramics and an alloy suited to high temperatures (for the spark plugs) as well as copper or aluminum for wiring.
>Steam power wasn't feasible until the Bessemer process and rolled sheet steel made the creation of pressure vessels a reliable and repeatable process.
Also precision boring to produce tight-fitting cylinders. James Watt spent nearly a decade trying to build a viable steam engine, but only succeeded after John Wilkinson invented a machine to bore cannon barrels in 1774. It turns out that making a hole that is straight, deep and round is fiendishly difficult without specialist equipment and expertise.
Newcomen's steam-engine, the first commercially successful one, was 01712. James Watt's steam engine was 01776. Trevithick's high-pressure engine patent, which is the point at which steam-engines started needing pressure vessels as opposed to vacuum vessels, was 01802. Trevithick's first steam-powered train was 01804. The Bessemer process was 01856, after the end of the steam-engine-driven First Industrial Revolution. But steel was still not in wide use for pressure vessels until I think about 01880, but I'm less sure of that.
Diesel engines are internal combustion engines that do not require spark plugs or wiring.
Ceramics are from about 12000 years ago, and copper is from about 8500 years ago. The hard part about wires is more the insulation than the wire itself.
Did you get your errors from Winchester's book? I usually think of him as more reliable than that.
To be fair, the atmospheric engine was just barely practical for pumping water out of mines. Newcomen sold over a hundred of them, but they were rapidly replaced by Watt engines or retrofitted with a new cylinder and a separate condenser. The atmospheric engine was however far too inefficient for use as a locomotive engine, or as a replacement for water power in most industrial applications.
No need for AI --- I used to work up automated typesetting systems for a previous employer --- feed in the database as a properly tagged XML file, provide all the graphics in a folder, and a couple of typesetting runs later, one had a fully paginated PDF w/ ToC and Index.
The problem is, no one wants to pay for this since no value is seen in such a paginated view --- even if AI could create such a typesetting routine.
I mean, what I'm after is a page layout that is designed with compactness and readability in mind. Going from a product database to that requires quite a lot.
Need to see how this looks on my Kindle Scribe --- I suspect that it will push me over to updating to the newly announced colour model when it becomes available.
It'll be a battery swap. There was that video of emergency battery pack ejection for battery fires, then you need a loading mechanism.
I haven't tracked LeMans much, I know the Toyota hybrids have been dominating it, but is it unrestricted hybrid drivetrains? Can builders make any kind of hybrid / regen / battery size / recharge drivetrain?
If not, I'd love to see what builders can do with go-nuts hybrids: wankel compact recharging, max-solid-state chems, etc.
https://github.com/davidson16807/relativity.scad/wiki/Human-...
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