Question 75

 

Question 75

From Twitter:
Big shout out to whoever it was that turned in 62 3D-printed guns for $150 each at a Houston gun buy-back.

On May 9th China reported that its goods exports to Russia fell by over a quarter in April, compared with a year earlier, while its imports from Russia rose by more than 56%. Germany reported a 62% monthly drop in exports to Russia in March, and its imports fell by 3%. Adding up such flows across eight of Russia’s biggest trading partners, it is estimated that Russian imports have fallen by about 44% since the invasion of Ukraine, while its exports have risen by roughly 8%.
A trade surplus

But we are not all good, neither is any of us good all of the time; in fact, one might say that the essence of human nature is that far from being “flawed,” we are not very damned good at all. And we know it.
The repression of this knowledge is an engine of human wickedness. And we’ve seen, in this last year, that once begun, it must escalate, like a fire searching for air.--mamet

Helsinki alone has more than 5,500 nuclear/chemical bunkers, with space for 900,000 people. Finland as a whole has shelter spaces for 4.4 million, in more than 54,000 separate locations.

Quality Assurance & Systems Manager Joseph Cox:
There are many other examples of this effect. In periods leading up to government personnel decisions in Chinese provinces, GDP figures are routinely inflated — when measured against harder-to-fudge information such as electricity and rail car usage. In fact, when comparing official GDP vs. nighttime electric light visibility, researchers have discovered a clear pattern: the more autocratic the government, the higher the deviation between GDP growth and the observable economic signal of electric light usage. In fact, authoritarian regimes inflate their GDP growth by a factor of 15 to 30%. Normally, this inflation is seen as a side effect of regimes wanting to maintain their own legitimacy.

The MIG-25 so frightened the US that they forced a complete re-engineering of the F-15. The MiG had been observed flying over Israel during the 1973 war at 63,000 feet and up to Mach 3.2. The U.S. spent $1.1 billion (real money in those days) to counteract the dreaded Foxbat. In fact, the aircraft’s performance was almost laughable. Effective combat range was 300 kilometers. And those very scary Israeli runs? They actually destroyed the engines, which had to be swapped out afterward. The whole aircraft was window dressing. It is quite possible the senior leadership of the USSR believed some of what the West did.
    In a way, the MiG-29 was even more revealing. It performed wonderfully in some ways, particularly mechanically. But the avionics were woeful. The Soviet war-fighting methodology was top-down and so MiG-29 pilots weren’t given the systems necessary to make decisions on their own. Targets had to be effectively called out for them by radar operators. The US was considering using its own stock of M-G-29s in Kosovo but decided against it because they were more trouble than they were worth.
    Both aircraft looked almost impossibly good. Senior management could easily believe they were. On parade and demonstration, they were stars. 

What explains the Great Enrichment is not material but a novel liberty and dignity for ordinary people, among them the innovating bourgeoisie. In a word, it was the first, modest moves toward social and economic and political liberalism, Adam Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty.”--MCCLOSKY