Thats a ridiculous comment. The thing about the space race is we were getting are ass kicked, then said 'Oh the finish line is actually this. Oh look we kicked your ass "
It was like we lost the first 9 events of a decathalon and then won the 1500 and declared ourselves the winner.
Actually, in Russia do they have a pitch for where they’d rather draw the finish line? I admit it is probably influenced by having a US upbringing, but “landing on the Moon” does seem like a natural finish line for a space race.
The move of picking an advantageous finish line is easily countered by… picking an obvious successor finish line. If they’d stuck a base on the moon that’d have been a pretty compelling “actually, here’s the next finish line.”
But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing, planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.
I think both sides broadly agreed on all of those as their "next big goal" (with slight question mark over the space plane, as you could reasonably say the Soviet programme was purely reactive).
The race ended after the fall of the Soviet Union (with the Challenger disaster being an additional factor), not because it had been definitively won.
> But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing,
I agree here, but it’s not really a game with declared rules or something. I think the US won in a game of oneupsmanship. Rather than try to make up rules, we can observe that the US always lost by little enough to plausibly claim that there was another more interesting goal right there. Then, won on the goal where, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a natural follow-up.
Of course, getting people to believe that the next thing you go for is a natural follow-up is itself an exercise in PR or propaganda. That’s why I’m mostly curious about how Russians saw
> planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.
There are definitely candidates for what could have been the “next target.” In my perception these just weren’t something people were excited about. But I wasn’t born at the time and I’m American so I know I got a biased telling.
Sure. So you could maybe add the first animals to safely return from space into the list too - the first win on the American side if you're counting sub-orbital flights, otherwise it'd've been Sputnik 5.
Russia has the first finish line -- Sputnik. You can pick a successor finish line to diminish the American accomplishment, but Russia will always have that first one.
That isn't the way it works, there's no "three strikes" law for Presidents. If all of his extant corruption, clear senility and incompetence, throwing the global economy into chaos tumbling ass over end into an unnecessary war he can't even win and the Epstein stuff didn't get him removed from office, then this won't.
What we need is a form of legal redress more effective than a stern talking to, which is all impeachment amounts to.
There is a form of legal redress - following through in the senate with impeachment. Trump had sufficient allies in the senate when he was impeached so they dismissed it but if instead they had a 2/3 vote he could've be removed from office.
They gave Trump presidential immunity partly because the remedy for addressing any perceived lawlessness, they figured, is provided by the impeachment process. If impeachment is forclosed as even a possibility, the president is truly immune from any consequences.
It boggles my mind that the government has privatized currency to these people.
Crazy-person-but-actually-really practical-idea:
Nationalize one if these networks. Maybe Discover.
The US government should provide us digital currency. The simplest way is to force the current systems to do that. All that rent they collect in terms of transactions fees shouldn't be profit for a private business but fees of the government.
PayShap in South Africa, not sure if it is being attacked yet. I use it a couple of times a week. It's awesome & better than EFT's, enables cheap instant transfer even between banks. It's not a third party private company either, its offered by the reserve bank / bankserv.
I think it is to reduce the amount of cash in circulation, get visible on small transfers and to relieve the EFT clearing houses.
Taking current political climate into account, Lula is too popular to straight up kidnap like the Venezuelan president, and the American-backed candidate isn't pooling incredibly well.
My experiences with the DMV have actually been pretty decent. I think a lot of their negative reputation is from how it used to be, but that they have improved substantially since then?
DMV is a state level agency and varies a lot depending on where you are. It's partially privatized here in Oklahoma and mostly painless (you only need the actual DMV for driver's tests, CDL background checks, etc.) but when I lived on the Illinois side of St. Louis I routinely heard of people spending hours in line.
Normally I'm not a huge fan of privatization but the way it's done here works great. The fees are set by the state and the agency gets a percentage, so if an area is underserved someone just opens another one.
I don't know if you're aware, but there was a whole lot of controversy around Central Bank Digital Currencies a few years ago. Mainly because the government can instantly see every transaction you do and will use it to decide if you're a terrorist or not, and they have a terrorist catching quota. They can also instantly block your account. And if such system is available, the government will phase out cash.
Each of those networks carry a lot, a lot of ancient stuff. Gov is better off building a brand new network from scratch and promote it as a standard for banks to join.
There are plenty of great examples from this century all over the world.
> Even Iran has a better payment infra than the US.
That is a big claim. What would prevent someone from setting up something equally as good in the US, aside from the network effect and users unwilling to try something new for uncertain gain?
End-users don't have much agency here, network needs banks.
In Iran, they simply don't have much choice, so banks use the only network available to them. It just happens to have been built in this century, so it's not as archaic as Visa.
Here in the US, I guess only regulators could realistically create a new network and have enough power to convince banks to adopt it.
Nothing, of course, stops anyone from creating a new network. But the network effect is THE driving force here, it's not a minor factor.
There was a trend for a while for waterless/flushless urinals to save water. Though I would guess those have higher cleaning costs so not sure how that worked out in the end.
not so long ago it was very fashionable to include DEI/ESG/etc lip service in those things, regardless of whether it made sense. for example, I've read a study comparing leather tanning compounds and it had a completely out of place paragraph babbling about climate change. the author wasn't even American, it's a global cargo cult.
Not trying to go ad hominem, but that's a very ignorant statement.
1. Which ones? I used to be able to stereotype with the best of them, but I cant quickly come up with any protected class that is assigned as teetotalers.
2. Saying you're not hiring someone because they don't drink is a perfectly valid reason for not hiring someone, even if it's a cover for not hiring them because of protected class membership. The laws protecting protected classes are super weak. It is virtually impossible to prove that is the sole reason they weren't hired. All you need is an actual other reason to not hire them--and of course don't put into writing that the real reason is their protected class membership.
Saying they won't get the job if they don't come out for drinks excludes (on characteristic) recovering alcoholics, pregnant women, and about a quarter of the world's population on religious grounds.
And just more broadly, some people have lives, family where they can't just be expected out on the piss in the afternoon.
Admitting it on forum is the in. Just like admitting you've been working while up on ket.
Religion is a protected class, and many religions don’t drink. If the reason they don’t drink is their religion, it isn’t a valid reason to state for not hiring them. Yes, most hr people in this case would use some other alternate reason that isn’t linked to the protected class.
It was like we lost the first 9 events of a decathalon and then won the 1500 and declared ourselves the winner.
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