Except its not actually obvious. The US achieved most when they worked mostly by themselves. And the recent explosion in US activity, specially SpaceX is also highly separated from Europe.
There is a very credible argument to be made that excessive cooperation leads to incredibly heavy overly political programs that are completely static and can't adjust because of international agreements.
That doesn't mean working together isn't good but they way they have been has been pretty questionably in many ways (along with a lot of space policy).
Yeah the world piece like all the wars in the middle east, Vietnam, proxy conflicts all over the world and so on and so on. I'm not blaming the US for all of these wars but they also didn't prevent them. And the US did overthrow many democracies and often made things much worse, Iran being a great example, but there are many others. I could go on.
Peace in Europe was maintained mostly by people in democracies generally wanting to work together. Yes the US had something to do with that as they supported that after WW2 but over the last 50 years, people in democracies generally don't fight each other. And more so by the threat of the Soviet Union that was so clearly the more dangerous option. Its easy to make allies if Stalin is on the other side.
And outside of Europe the US hardly maintained peace.
Nuclear weapons maintained 'peace' between Soviets and the US more then anything else.
And Europe has always pulled its weight in science, technology and engineering.
The US was actually on the right side in that one (just like in Korea). The Communists were not exactly the good guys and their "agricultural and personnel reforms" lead to drastically reduced food production and starvation and death.
Blame the US for real things instead, such as supporting the wrong side in Afghanistan in the '80s or ensuring the survival of the Soviet Union in the '40s.
Tell it to cca 2 millions civilians that died in Vietnam as a direct result of failed US invasion (I really mean just civilians mostly bombed into oblivion, entire human lives list is around 3 million). As in, vast majority of them would be alive is US didn't try their failed adventure. Tonkin gulf is a classic US made up war for power mongering reasons.
Telling 'we're the good guys' while regularly bombing entire villages into oblivion with napalm on some vague suspicions ('we heard some gunshot when flying around so we blasted them' scenarios). My Lai and many others.
If this is how US population views their past fuckups then no wonder we are where we are, objectivity ain't easy if one is on the wrong side, isn't it.
Supporting wrong side in Afghanistan? Against Soviet invasion? Sometimes, often even there are no good sides.
If you guys didn't support Soviet union in 40s (which they vehemently denied since then but its their inferiority complex, the issue with russian mentality since forever), there would be no massive eastern front with most german losses and wehrmacht spread out too thinly, and D day would be crushed like nothing. History would be very different in Europe and globally.
You can go even farther back in time. If the US hadn't massively relieved the famine in Russia in 1920/21 there might have been a chance, Lenin and the Bolshevik regime wouldn't have survived.
I'm sorry but famine help is a good thing, not saving millions of people because it might potentially overthrow a government 'somehow' isn't a great plan.
One can argue FDR later embrace of Soviets was way to early and a direct stab in the back to France and other European powers.
It's not so simple, the rampant corruption under Ngô Đình Diệm, misappropriation of aid, etc. shouldn't just be swept under the rug. Hindsight says remaining capitalist probably would have been better for the average person, but it wasn't so obvious at the time.
Johnson was a warmonger, exaggerating (or possibly faking) the Gulf of Tonkin engagements to justify full escalation was a crime that led to the death of 60,000 Americans, hundreds of thousands more with PTSD, and 2 million+ murdered Vietnamese civilians. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of birth defects caused by agent orange and the still ongoing effort to clean up dioxins from the environment.
That is an objectively incorrect take. A common theme in disastrous US interventions was that they tried to prop-up a failing colonial power, which in this case was France - against the locals who wanted independence. Ho Chi Minh was a French-educated leader who only entered the orbit of the USSR after failing to secure support for Vietnamese independence frome the West.
The US only became actively involved in supporting South Vietnam a decade after it had achieved independence from France in 1955, after the negotiated division into North and South Vietnam in Geneva, and after the last French forces left in 1956.
The cause of that intervention was North Vietnam sending Viet Cong insurgents into South Vietnam, attempting to overthrow the government, and ignoring the South's sovereignty.
That doesn't justify the US's later transgressions while engaged in the war, but their initial support to South Vietnam was neither unjustified nor illiberal.
That is a very particular arrangement of the facts, that really doesn't have the shape of truth to it. Vietnam was a former French colony conquered by the Japanese WW2, that wanted to restore their independence.The Allies liberated South Vietnam, restoring French colonial rule and seeking to reconquer the whole nation. It was deeply unpopular with the people. Moreover the South wanted to conquer the north with French support and US financing, they fought to a stalemate and an uneasy peace.
Who violated the ceasefire under what circumstances is contested, but ultimately does not really matter - neither side wanted peace, and the hostilities would've resumed anyway one way or another.
The end result was that the US antagonized a people who were fighting for their own freedom, and found itself in an unwinnable war - creating an allied (or at least independent) country from a people you bombed to the stone age is an impossible task.
From this follows that no, the US military wasn't just another dozen bombed out villages away from final victory, when it was backstabbed by those peaceniks at home.
An ounce of diplomacy at the right place and time would've been the best for both the United States and Vietnam, and would've netted them everything they wanted on top of international goodwill.
Fair call on the funding, I know the US was paying for the French military's involvement for years. Still, by active support I meant troops on the ground, which happened significantly later.
Who resumed the fighting does matter, as even though Diem refused the 1956 reunification elections that didn't justify resorting to an armed insurgency by the North. It's also not ambiguous, Hanoi's 15th plenum officially authorised that insurgency in 1959 and formed groups 559 and 759, and later the NLF (Viet Cong).
They were already killing hundreds of innocent South Vietnamese village chiefs, teachers, and officials by the late 1950s, trying to create a local insurgency and insurrection. That's what the US got involved with to oppose, and I really can't say it was a morally wrong decision at the time. Hanoi had the option of sticking with diplomacy and chose to send guerrillas south instead. You're giving only the US agency here.
You can be technically 'right' by some definition and an intervention still not being a good thing.
The Southern regime was incredibly corrupt and dominated by land owners. Look at the Philippines for an example of what happens to a US 'colony' where the land lords are in control.
Communist Vietnam did some bad reforms yes, but they also changed and eventually did a lot of good things, turning the country into what it is today.
The US spent decades of war propping up a regime that was mostly incapable and killed a lot of people in the meantime.
What nonsense, most Europeans who are not politically super active might watch some US movies and consume things from the US like IPhones, but that doesn't mean obsessed. Most people are just mildly amused by US politics. You have serious selection bias if you think something else.
Perhaps, but most people don’t think about those things as US things. As for iPhones they were “designed in Cupertino” but made in China like almost everything else these days.
Although you're right about the history of French Guiana, using that term to put on the same level as New Caledonia is nonsense. (Same goes for Martinique.)
I wasn’t talking about the historical aspect. Same applies = the same risk also exists due to geopolitics and distance. Heck, didn’t New Caledonia see a wave of protests that were crushed in the past year or two?
> Heck, didn’t New Caledonia see a wave of protests that were crushed in the past year or two?
Yes, that's why the risk is NOT the same between French Guiana and New Caledonia. Both of them are oversea territories far from the mainland with a colonial past, but their current relationship with the mainland is very different.
Around a quarter of the population of New Caledonia has been calling for independence for decades at this point, with 3 referendum organised during the last 10 years to resolve this issue. Only half of the population was able to vote to the referendums (and some local elections, like Congress of NC), due to local rules than are about to change–this, incidentally, is the cause of the protests you are talking about. On the geopolitical side of things, the independentists are probably propped up by Azerbaijan (https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/geopolitique-n...) and maybe China (https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/ambitions-geostrategiq...).
None of this holds for French Guiana. The risk between these territories is not the same. At all. Putting them on the same level by reducing them to their status as former colonies is nonsense.
Thanks for explaining. But I am not sure how this contradicts my point?
Sure, placing launch infrastructure in French Guiana is probably less risky than setting up shop in New Caledonia. Clearly, the risk profile is not the same for all of Overseas France.
My point is that if the decision is between mainland and Overseas France, the latter introduces elevated risk in the long term in general. French Guiana could be fine today, but it is not impossible that the next few years could see the rise of a populist pro-independence movement that would eventually impact launch infrastructure (similar to how it did for the USSR).
Just because you invest in it doesn't mean you end up with hugely cheap and scalable launch.
Europe has already invested far more in rocket then SpaceX did and isn't close.
If your capital efficiency is far lower, it might not be inexpensive. If you can get the scale because you don't have payloads, its going to be more expensive.
There is a incredibly long road between 'rocket can land' and 'cheap and scalable launch'. A long road most people don't see because its not as flashy as landing.
SpaceX was founded on making launches cheap. Arianespace only recently decided to develop reusable launch systems. Up to SpaceX demonstrating it was possible, the dominant approach to cheap launches was in making the expendable rocket cheap to manufacture. Nobody needs to be reminded the shuttle promised cheap access to space and failed at that.
But SpaceX built a cheaper launcher to manufacture as well as gaining reuse. There was no one making an expendable cheaper rocket before SpaceX either.
There was a team that did something like this, I saw a talk about it once. But I think they did in JS with Datomic in browser that somebody wrote. I might update this comment later with the relevant links.
But its really cool idea and I think very useful for some applications.
Full solutions like InstantDB or ConvexDB offer the syncing part, but they don't seem to be doing full incremental queries in the backend, but rather some combination of smart invalidation and then full recalculation of the subscriptions which then get pushed to the clients.
The point with RISC-V is that you can first pick the architecture and then have many potential providers and you are sure to never be stuck with one provider.
Its not the cost that is the major change, its the business model.
Granted ARM potentially gives you part of that, but its still tricky.
And of course this theory only works out if you have enough competitive providers. But that's always questionable.
Its funny because Bryan has spend a good part of the last decades walking around and telling people that they should have VM layer. And this criticism can credibly made against his company.
Interestingly he has mentioned that in the podcast and basically said, the industry has standardized on VM and in the kind of environments they run, there just isn't a good way around it.
But yeah, a world where Illumos based bare-metal containers had become the standard would be a nicer. But its not where the market is.
There is a very credible argument to be made that excessive cooperation leads to incredibly heavy overly political programs that are completely static and can't adjust because of international agreements.
That doesn't mean working together isn't good but they way they have been has been pretty questionably in many ways (along with a lot of space policy).
reply