Probably sometime around the early 1800s

Malcolm Harris wrote a book “Palo Alto” about how this culture took root in SV long before it was called Silicon Valley: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/10/palo-alto-book...

I don’t agree with this at all when you look at how much founder reinvestment in other younger founders has driven the ecosystem over generations.

Are a few hand-picked winners from VCs hand-picking the next generation's winners _actually_ creating any sort of social prosperity?

The Spanish naval ship that is supposed to be escorting the flotilla is not shown in the list on this tracker.

On MarineTraffic it hasn’t updated its position in 6 days: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:56...

What should they be buying instead? The other available multi-role fighters that would all get blown to pieces by an F-35 before they knew what hit them?

They're really not. You're basing this on misinformation and propaganda. The only reason why nobody should be buying them is because the US has become an untrustworthy partner. Otherwise, there is no credible evidence of any kind that I've seen showing the F-35 is anything other than a great fighter jet.

Its stealth is good. Its EW and Avionics are probably good... now, after a decade of production, and with Block 4 around the corner.

As planes, they were terrible when introduced a decade ago, and mediocre now.

Too much functionality was promised too soon without adequate project management. Instead of modularity being the design philosophy for the NGAD, and shoehorned into the F-35 during production, it should've been the design philosophy for the F-35A/C from the start.

Too many compromises were made to make the three variants share a similar design despite radically different missions.

The F-35B should never have existed.

The parts commonality numbers say it all. Initially projected to be 70%, but when it neared production the actual commonality figure was 25%. I haven't seen that broken down, but I bet the F-35B is a large part of that.

If it’s critical infrastructure it should be nationalized

This is a very anti-USA way of thinking because it doesn’t allow companies to extract profit.

Healthcare, education, roads, prisons, electricity, transit, all of it is designed in the USA so a company can extract profit.

This is hardly a charitable interpretation. The lack of competition provides for little incentive for improvement. Now, for prisons, I think for-profit prisons are quite problematic because the incentives are abjectly antithetical to justice.

We have a national space agency that has had plenty of time and money to do the stuff SpaceX is doing.

Why wouldn't SpaceX turn into the funding and political football that NASA is, if it were nationalized?

Like, this isn't a hypothetical. SpaceX only has a market because of the incompetence of the "public option."

> We have a national space agency that has had plenty of time and money to do the stuff SpaceX is doing.

That's quite inaccurate. NASA doesn't do much themselves, they hire external contractors but keep significant control over them. SpaceX got more funding and less control and they didn't start from scratch, NASA gave them all of their technical documentation, now-how and working prototypes.

NASA could have done everything SpaceX does if they were given the same conditions and funding, however, they've never had funding for blowing up five spaceships in row, they were held to much stricter standards.

The entire story looks like a blatant attempt to take control of space operations away from NASA and thus from the government.

how do explain other governments funding efforts to copy spacex without success, its easy to hand wave away peoples efforts and achievements with hindsight

>NASA could have done everything SpaceX does if they were given the same conditions and funding

This may have been hypothetically possible, as are many things that never came to be, but it is impossible to know whether this really would have happened.

Challenger

enjoy the snap reaction brain drain as entrepreneurs move their efforts offshore, people are being disingenuous by saying its as simple as deciding to nationalise a company everyone said would fail and who china and Europe are desperately trying to emulate, all over retaliatory statements, be careful what sort of government behaviour you normalise because you happen to be on the winning side of that behaviour, seasons change

Apparently we’re going to bury our heads in the sand and prevent any discussion of the topic!

This is like paying doctors to say only evil foreign cigarettes cause cancer. Buy American!

This is laughable, even with your depiction of the events. The candidate in question (Georgescu) had a very popular platform, and was supported by a large bases or Romanians on the left and right.

He was, however, opposed to further expansion of NATO.

If these ideas are too scary to let general public even consider, then democracies have to step in and censor the media. And that begins by banning TikTok, the largest platform where a narrative like this can bypass the existing power structures.

The US has one of the largest contributions of all time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

No clue why this is being flagged. It's a clear example of a SAM being used against passenger aircraft.

Maybe because that incident happened almost 40 years ago?

Russia has a military with a lot of equipment that is at least that old.

The US shooting down that airliner is also mentioned in that WSJ article that this thread is about.

Yeah, it provides some history, and I wouldn't have flagged it personally, even though I don't think it was a particularly good response to the question. But then some one flagged my comment too, so maybe just trolls flagging everything.

Sure, although at the time missiles weren't the biggest killer of airline passengers.

You could also argue that the earth is flat and lots of people do.

No one can rationally argue that that was partly the US' responsibility, though.

Not very seriously.

The Iranians shot down a Ukrainian jet with Russian missile. Blaming Americans for the stupidity of Iranians is ridiculous.

Maybe not entirely seriously, but there is a direct causative path initiated by the United States that you can follow which lead to this result.

Iran shot down this airliner after mistaking it for a cruise missile launched by the US, which was arguably a credible fear given the events of days prior. If the US didn't assassinate Qasem Soleimani (with a drone, near an airport), Iran wouldn't have made this terrible error, as they would not have made a retaliatory strike.

Additionally, you can go even further back and argue that if the US didn't withdraw from the nuclear deal struck in 2015, none of these events would have taken place.

There’s a direct causal path from any event to every event in its future light cone. You need more than “if not X then not Y” to blame Y on X. Otherwise you end up with ridiculous things like saying your cat saved your life by barfing on the carpet because cleaning it up made you late for your bus which crashed.

You can also argue if Iran did not have imperialist project over neighboring countries this event would've also not happened.

That's not a counter to the parent's point. The parent is saying there are many critical factors, one of which was the US performing an assassination.

Saying "there were other critical factors" both agrees with the parent post and doesn't counter the idea that the US was a factor.

This is absolutely a counter. There would be no assassination of an Iranian general in Baghdad had he not commanded the insurgency with the sponsored militias in Iraq.

That sounds like "another critical factor". A chain of events led to this. The parent is saying "one link in the chain is US involvement", you are saying, a different link in the chain is Iranian involvement. Both can be true, and neither invalidates the other. You've done nothing to invalidate the parent's post because you haven't removed their link from the chain, you've just added other salient links to the chain.

Stop treating blame like it's some simple, single element. It's a complicated, multi faceted chain of events.

> Maybe not entirely seriously, but there is a direct causative path initiated by the United States that you can follow which lead to this result.

No, there isn't. There's a direct causative path initiated by Xerxes I when he launched the second invasion of Greece.

Using this line of reasoning, you might as well go back to Cain and Able.

If country a starts a war and then country b defending itself accidentally shoots down a civilian airliner it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. You’re saying it’s completely ridiculous to blame country a?

Yes. We rightfully expect people with guns to have an idea of what they are shooting at. Firing wildly at anything that moves tends to earn condemnation.

If you qualify country A's actions as "starting a war" then country B had started many dozens of wars themselves in the previous decade, and subsequent one.

Irrelevant. You may as well walk back to the first mover and blame God.

That's basically my point. Ultimate responsibility lies with those who decided to fire a missile at a civilian airliner without doing any due diligence or applying common sense, not those who "created tension" or whatever you want to claim the US did in that situation.

If the iron dome accidentally shoots down in civilian airliner it’s ‘ridiculous’ to blame anyone other than Israel was your statement

I was assuming you were referring to the Ukrainian airliner shot down by Iran in the aftermath of the Suliemani killing, which is an actual example and not a hypothetical one.

It is. It's ridiculous when Israel hits aid workers with missiles and rockets, it's crazy when people wearing press jackets are killed even after communicating their position directly to military command and control. It's ridiculous when children die early, gruesome deaths because they sat next to a bad man with a pager at a Lebanese grocery store.

It's not the 1950s anymore, accountable nations are expected on the international stage to understand what exactly they are shooting at. Israel is under much closer scrutiny than Russia because they represent modernized doctrine and should be using their technological superiority to enable more targeted strikes rather than more indiscriminate ones. Modern Russian warfighting tactics have been under serious scrutiny since the Afghan retreat, then again in the Gulf War, and then again now during the retreat from Syria.

The only "clean" war Russia fought in recent years was Crimea, which was "won" by lying to the international community and breaking their trust forever. As evidenced by Ukraine, today's Russian republic cannot win a war with tactical prowess alone. The "special military operation" has devolved into IRBM fearmongering and rattling the nuclear sabre - Putin knows he's not the president of a world superpower anymore, he's a Tesco-branded Kim Jong-Un.

Except...the US isn't partly responsible.

This was mentioned in "The Brothers" about Allan and John Foster Dulles who directed the CIA to collude with right-wing French officers hoping to overthrow Charles de Gaulle.

That would be Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state John Foster Dulles.