US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise those might be.
Just recently a US navy tanker ran aground and now they're scrambling to find some way to fuel the carrier group in the middle east because for some reason that's the only one that was available. The navy logistics group is woefully understaffed und under-equipped.
What are the priorities in actuality? Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
> Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
I think Yamamoto Isoroku gave the answer to this challenge: just keep a booming manufacturing industry. When he was trying to convince the Japanese government not to have a war with the US, he said that he saw so many chimneys when flying over Philadelphia. All those factories would turn into a giant war machine if a war ever broke out.
That is, the economy of scale matters. When the US had its entire supply chain domestically, replacing a special screw could cost a few cents. When we were in good terms with China, it would cost a few dollars as we had to order the replacement overseas, but well, it was still cheap. Now that we are trying to cut China off, then what will do if we'd need to get a replacement? Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed.
> Setting up a shop from scratch with little expertise and no supply chain to back it up? Well, such replacement would then cost a few thousand dollars and we would be screwed.
You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch. Most of our manufacturing is automated these days and so it doesn't appear in many of the reports people care about, but the talent is still here.
Of course just like WWII, if war breaks out it will be several years before the US can ramp up production.
> You were correct up to here. However the US has a lot of manufacturing and so is not setting things up from scratch
This is music to my ears. I read somewhere that the average age of the technicians in the US shipyards are well over 55 years old, hence I worry that we are losing key talents. There was also a NYT article more than 10 years ago that analyzes why the US can't make Kindle even if we want. Also, when people were outraged that the air force spent more than $20K per toilet more than 10 years ago, I read somewhere that it was because our law mandated that certain percentage of the components have to come from domestic manufacturing. Unfortunately the air force had a hard time finding such components, so they chose toilet. In order to do this, they had to find a factory in the US, which caused really high unit price. And then a recent article explained why it was so expensive to replace components on weapons: usually these components are custom-made. It would be cheap if we had a vast supply chain domestically, as it would be inexpensive to set up a custom mold or tooling chain for a few such component as the cost can be amortized over millions of other regular components. Without such supply chain, we wouldn't have such luxury. Hence came my worry.
We have a high dollar value of manufactured products, but volume is way down, and the supply chain is ragged or totally broken. If your factories are warehouses where you assemble Chinese feedstock with German tools, how much local expertise do you have, or is it just LEGO kit stuff for tariff evasion?
> It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China
Is it? What is the theory that the US could keep up with China? That would be the US vs the globe's industrial superpower with an arguably larger real economy. It doesn't seem plausible that the US can fight a long sustained war.
The plan as far as I can see it is to make use of a large network of allies and partners as well as aiming to finish the war quickly by cutting off materials like food and industrial inputs to stall the manufacturing engine. If it turns into a slugfest where munition reserves start to matter that seems like it would favour China.
One of the big surprises out of the Ukraine war is that the US isn't in a position where it can easily bully Russia. If that is the case it is hard to see it coming out ahead vs China in any plausible conflict.
>One of the big surprises out of the Ukraine war is that the US isn't in a position where it can easily bully Russia.
The US hasn't been fighting Russia - if they'd deployed F35s in 2022 then Moscow would be called West Alaska by now. Don't conflate "doesn't" with "can't".
But if they "doesn't" fight Russia now, why are they going to fight China in the future? Pretty good odds they won't because the cost is too high.
What we appear to be seeing is they don't really have a lot of tools that can be used against an uncooperative nuclear-armed power; and many of those tools would probably fail against China.
Nobody wants to fight China because the cost is so high - we are talking about lives more than dollars here (though dollar cost is high too).
What everyone worries about is being forced to fight China anyway. China is not playing nice with the US on the world stage. They are clearly supporting Russia over Ukraine (while pretending to be neutral). They are siding with Iran in the middle east. They are doing things in Africa that are against US interests (the US doesn't have a good record in Africa, but the US generally has supported democracy while China is fine with dictators which leaves lots of room for China to be worse though only time will tell). They escalating with Taiwan and the Philippians. Those are the major reasons I'm aware of to be worried about China, there is more that I didn't write.
How will this turn out - we can only guess. But there is reason to worry.
> but the US generally has supported democracy while China is fine with dictators
In the Middle East the US's #1 ally is indeed a democracy, but is currently fending off various challenges [1, 2] accusing them of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Their #2 ally is an authoritarian regime run by a gentleman who can be identified with phrases like "the bone saw incident" let alone the Kingdom's long record of barbarism and human rights abuses.
The US might win a battle of who supports better causes, but it isn't a can of worms to open either. There is no particular indication that it cares about the government system or actions of the people it supports.
[0] If the US didn't do it directly, they endorsed it.
Yes, the theory is that the USA should keep up with China and maintain a qualitative edge in order to contain them. Keep it up long enough and hopefully they will collapse or undergo an internal revolution, sort of like what happened to the USSR.
> That would be the US vs the globe's industrial superpower with an arguably larger real economy
Wouldn't it be sad if this were true? Since when US was no longer a "industrial superpower"? Just 25 years ago, Chinese government officials were astound by how wealthy and advanced the US was when they visited the US. They wrote articles after articles to reflect why China was so behind, yet now China is the "globe's industrial superpower". In Oliver Stone's movie Heaven & Earth, Joan Chen's character went to the US and was totally mesmerized by the abundance in a supermarket. That was how Chinese people was amazed by the US too. And now? It's definitely great for China, but isn't it sad for the US to be behind?
Or perhaps it was just inevitable for PRC, also a continental sized land power with 4x population to be ahead once they got shit together. Comparing US industrial stagnation in US lens frequently fails to grasp/comprehend that PRC industrialization at PRC scale brought forth another "weight-class" of industrial output. Last year, PRC ship building launched roughly same amount of tonnage as entire 5year US WW2 ship building program. IMO many people think US industry declined from 10 to 5, and maybe whole of system effort can bring in back to 10. Meanwhile PRC didn't just turn the industrial output dial to 11, it turned it to 20, beyond what US was ever capable of, and likely will be capable of. Same way US didn't so much leave British Empire behind in the industrial race as UK was never capable of running better than a 7 minute mile while US stalled at 5 minute mile (and now de-trained into a 6 minute mile), meanwhile PRC is now running a 3.5 minute mile. IMO ultimately, not about sadness but being realisitic about systemtic potential. Maybe US can AI/automate their way to overcome human capita disadvantage, but PRC playing that game too.
> It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population.
I don't think it's unclear at all. It's uncomfortable to call out an obvious truth: We couldn't even compare. The only hope we have is basically economic mutually assured destruction. If it comes to a hot war, it better be over (without going nuclear) within weeks or at most single digit months or it's more or less over. At least from where I'm standing.
It's unclear if the US could even get production ramped up on the scale of a decade. We simply don't have the people to train the people we need. Much less the people with the skills to do the thing.
> If it comes to a hot war, it better be over (without going nuclear) within weeks or at most single digit months or it's more or less over. At least from where I'm standing.
Why? There is essentially zero chance that China can mount an invasion of the mainland US or even strike at its heartland enough to disrupt an industrial ramp up, even if it takes a decade (which it won't). The US can literally wait out anyone except Canada and Mexico (which... lol) by defending its coasts, with plenty of domestic natural resources - including agriculture, metals, and oil - to supply not just its military but the entire civilian population.
There is zero chance of China invading the US or vice versa. But this issue isn't about a ground war in either place, it's about a war in some 3rd place.
It's not about "home country". The US doesn't need carrier groups to defend home country. It needs them to project power into other parts of the world.
Take Taiwan. If China invades there that represents a significant dilemma for the US. On balance, they'll likely make a token response, then fade away. Places where the US has enjoyed power (like the South China Sea) might be harder to protect.
Does the US have the stomach for wars in Taiwan, Japan or Australia?
> There is zero chance of China invading the US or vice versa. But this issue isn't about a ground war in either place, it's about a war in some 3rd place.
Agreed
> It needs them to project power into other parts of the world.
China can barely project power in its own backyard while the US has nearly a century of experience projecting around the world, with eleven carrier groups to China's two. Assuming they all get destroyed by hypersonic missiles within the first few months, the US still has military bases all over the world. As far as I know, China has zero military presence in the Western hemisphere except some surveillance balloons.
China may have a short term advantage in production and cost but the US has the advantage in every other area of logistics relevant to a military.
> Take Taiwan. If China invades there that represents a significant dilemma for the US. On balance, they'll likely make a token response, then fade away. Places where the US has enjoyed power (like the South China Sea) might be harder to protect.
Absolutely but it'd be a pyrrhic victory worth little except as domestic propaganda. If the US does help defend Taiwan, the invading Chinese fleet will likely be massacred. There's little room to hide in the 80 mile wide Taiwan strait against modern anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons. China's only real advantage will likely be air power, which doesn't win wars without lots of boots on the ground.
> Does the US have the stomach for wars in Taiwan, Japan or Australia?
I'm not sure about Taiwan, but I don't think we'd let Japan or Australia slip into war without assistance. (but what do I know? :-))
> China can barely project power in its own backyard while the US has nearly a century of experience projecting around the world, with eleven carrier groups to China's two
Today. China is clearly building up their ability. In a few years the situation will look different which is the real worry. Also China may not need to be as big - China isn't patrolling the ocean like the US and so it is their 2 carrier groups near Taiwan against whatever the US can afford to send
destroying taiwan would permanently cripple the supply chain for the us, japanese, and australian military. in iraq and armenia we saw what happens when a conventional industrial-age military banking on tonnage of explosives faces off against one with precision-guided weaponry, and since your comment we've seen it again in lebanon
circumstantial evidence suggests that, like the usa, china has extensive military presence in western hemisphere telephony and networking equipment
The recent incarnation of isolationism in American politics might manifest if the US had the wrong leadership during an invasion of Taiwan or, I guess, Australia.
Defending Japan is a reflex action. We have bases and troops there, as well as a mutual defense treaty.
The hypothetical war in Taiwan would likely be almost entirely naval/aerial so yeah the question is if US has enough political will. Don’t think artillery shells will be a huge factor and even on paper the Chinese navy (and probably the air force) doesn’t even come even remotely close to US (yet).
Actual invasions of Japan and Australia are even harder to imagine. How would that even work? And why?
Artillery and particularly guided artillery like Excaliber rounds are highly effective at resisting landings.
In the most recent US wargame, China succeeded in occupying parts of Taiwan which would make artillery even more important — as attacks from the mountain regions towards Chinese occupation would keep them from establishing a secure foothold.
War games can be very deceptive though. Back in 2019/20, 2 separate studies ( Polish and US) expected that it would only take Russia 4-5 days to get to Warsaw with Polish units sent to the border suffering 60-80% casualties.
To be fair NATO wasn’t taking really taking defense that seriously back and maybe they had a point, although considering what happened in Ukraine that seem like a very unlikely outcome (unless Britain/France/Germany decided to stay out and not risk their air forces ..)
I guess overestimating your opponents is usually better than the opposite. OTH had Britain/France not made that mistake in the 30s much of WW2 could have been prevented.
The purpose of wargames is to find holes in your defense and the shore them up. If your war game doesn't find holes you are probably doing it wrong. In the real world your enemy doesn't have spies everywhere, but in a war game you should give them spies everywhere just because you won't know where those spies are and so everything could be compromised.
China-Taiwan situations is technically still a civil war. Internal conflict to "China". Like war between Confederacy and Federation forces.
It is unlikely that China will invade Japan and certainly not Australia. I find it extremely more likely that USA will invade Mexico with some fake pretence like war on drugs.
There's not really any DSL. You just put some TS in the frontmatter for fetching/transforming at build time, TS in a script tab (if needed) and the html is just basic templating that takes props.
I don’t love js/ts but Astro is so nice. Don’t have to fiddle with react or graphql. Just upgraded to 5 beta and nothing broke. Really well managed project. Oh, and page load speed is insane.
If you don't love js/ts maybe you'd like Civet, which transpiles to js/ts and has Astro integration. (No relationship, I've just been looking at it myself.)
transpiling to JS that has if, if else structures instead of just early return if makes me not trust it (based on first "pattern matching" example on civet.dev site). I guess I have my prejudices.
(Except for Postgres, since Fly's solution isn't managed)
Heroku's price is a persistent annoyance for every startup that uses it.
Rebuilding Heroku's stack is an attractive problem (evidenced by the graveyard of Heroku clones on Github). There's a clear KPI ($), Salesforce's pricing feels wrong out of principle, and engineering is all about efficiency!
Unfortunately, it's also an iceberg problem. And while infrastructure is not "hard" in the comp-sci sense, custom infra always creates work when your time would be better spent elsewhere.
> Salesforce's pricing feels wrong out of principle
What do you mean exactly? If it takes multiple engineers multiple months to build an alternative on kubernetes, then it sounds like Heroku is worth it to a lot of companies. These costs are very "known" when you start using Heroku too, it's not like Salesforce hides everything from you then jump scares you 18 months down the line.
SF's CRM is also known to be expensive, and yet it's extremely widely used. Something being expensive definitely doesn't always mean it's bad and you should cheap out to avoid it.
Couldn't you move to AWS? They offer managed Postgresql. Heroku already runs on AWS, so there could be a potential saving in running AWS managed service.
I moved our entire stack from Heroku to Render in a day and pay 1/3 less. Render is what Heroku would be if they never stopped innovating. Now I’m thinking of moving to fly as they are even cheaper.
If you use containers. If you're big enough for the cost savings to matter, you're probably also not looking for a service like Render or Fly. If your workload is really "just containers" you can save more with even managed container services from AWS or GCP.
We are talking about moving from Heroku, I don't think being too needy for the likes of Fly is at all a given. (And people will way prematurely think they're too big or needy for x.)
People were arrested in America over the Capitol riots and messages online was used as part of the evidence.
What happened in the UK was exactly the same. We had violence and riots, millions of pounds of damages, innocent small business owners targeted because of their ethnicity. It was actually a much worse scale than the Capitol riots and thus people should absolutely be held accountable for their actions.
>Yes, USA is indeed the only country on the planet with absolute free speech. Most residents of other places doesn't actually want what the USA has.
The US does not have absolute free speech. Laws exist against slander, libel, perjury and making terroristic threats. The FDA regulates the speech of food producers and pharmaceutical companies. The FCC regulates speech on broadcast television and radio. It's a felony to lie to Congress. It's a felony to call for the assassination of the President.
Even speech in "public squares" is regulated by public nuisance and noise laws and curfews.
Yes, what's considered "hate speech" elsewhere is (mostly) legal in the US. But that doesn't make free speech in the US absolute, just more amenable to forms of racism and bigotry the rest of the world decided weren't worth defending after the consequences of World War 2.
Free speech should not be an absolute. No freedom in a society is absolute. Living in a society is a huge compromise.
EDIT: I am not in favor of the Chat Control proposal by the way. It is poorly thought out and will only serve to harm innocent people. True criminals will use encryption and such anyway.
It’s the only place that ever had it, if imperfectly. Everyone else pretends they have it, but it’s a joke. Everywhere else has these red lines they will simply pretend do not count as valid speech.
- In China you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t criticize Xi or though, that would be ridiculous)
- in the UK you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything untoward about anyone, that would be ridiculous)
- in Denmark you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything that would offend religious sensibilities — this is real by the way, Denmark has reinstated blasphemy laws as of 2023)
There's not a single place on earth that "has" free speech, it's all shades of gray.
The US government will have you jailed, tortured, or just ruin your life in other innovative ways if you dare expose their crimes, e.g. Snowden, Assange.
- "Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?"
I'm not aware of any other country with stronger protections, on the topic of the thing going on in the UK, of heated and violent rhetoric than the US has. US jurisprudence explicitly protects advocacy of violence and lawbreaking (up to the Brandenburg test is a very high bar), and I don't know if there's any other country with comparable protections.
(By which I specifically don't mean "has 'freedom of speech'" written on paper somewhere; nor "doesn't typically hassle people over tweets (but has legal options to do so should they choose)". I mean binding case law that weighs quasi-incitement to violence against the right to hyperbolic political rhetoric, and deliberately chooses the latter).
If people in Switzerland wanted that they could vote for it. But they actually prefer having limits on other peoples' speech more than they resent the limits on their own, so they don't.
Depends on what you publish.... if you just yell about different random people, sure... if you post a video of war crimes, well.. that's a different story now.
There’s also a bunch of stuff that falls under free speech most people don’t realize (at least in the US): what you can or can refuse put in your body, what you can refuse to say, how you spend your money, what you can hear, where you can read/write/speak/listen, etc
All of which has been being curtailed substantially in many ways since the 80s in the United States.
The US does not have free speech. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/pro-palestinian-... I’m not suggesting the UK is better, btw, just rather that free speech already doesn’t exist anywhere. Some of these you can criticize because they aren’t public universities, and perhaps that’s fair, and the rest you can criticize because they weren’t arrested for protesting, but rather having “illegal encampments”, but a rose by any other name is still a rose.
free speech is often not something one “enjoys”. If you are at a funeral and have protesters burning pictures of your dead child then you aren’t “enjoying” that.
Howver the US does not have free speech. It has some speech which is not allowed by law, some which is allowed in theory but not in practice, and some which is allowed completely.
So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).
reply