They're not even in the list of makers that I know of:
That's because you probably don't live in China. They're actually a good sized player in the market. Also they are buying (have bought?) Motorola's handset operations from Google.
there are phones out now that are more powerful than my four year old LAPTOP. What the fuck do you need to make a fucking phone call??
Smartphones are not really primarily phones. They're small tablet computers that happen to be able to make calls. The phone feature is almost incidental since 90%+ of the time they are used for other purposes. I spend maybe 1-2 hours talking on my smartphone each month and probably 20+ hours doing other stuff with it like reading news, checking email, taking pictures, etc.
In coastal Connecticut, $100K a year isn't enough to buy a decent house if you're trying to raise a family at the same time.
Quite so. You can find a place to live but it's going to be a dump relatively speaking.
$200K might be enough to get a nice home around here, but $100K a year here is like making $40K a year in a rural area.
It's worse than that. Houses along the Gold Coast area cost something like 3-5X what they do out in the midwest where I live. A house that would cost me $100K in Michigan would cost me something like $400K+ anywhere along the so called Gold Coast. I know because I almost moved there at one point and went house shopping. The house I have now would have cost me well over a million anywhere remotely close to Greenwich CT.
Actually, a million cash would be about enough to fund a $60k a year income assuming you can get a good rate of return (6%...crazy these days).
Forgetting about taxes and inflation? To turn $1M into $60K/year of income you'd need a rate of return closer to 10-13% or so every year without fail. If you get less then your rate of return has to be higher the next year because you'll have dipped into your principal or you'll have to live on less for that year. Some years you will be almost certain to have a negative return.
As a power Excel user, you'd be a great person to create/reference an Excel/Google spreadsheet/Libreoffice Calc/others comparison table...
Such lists can be misleading. For example both LibreOffice and Excel have decent pivot table functionality but there are some quirks to each. Hard to explain the differences briefly in a table. Little things can sometimes make a big difference in which you might choose. For example I used LibreOffice Base to tie into an old database for some spreadsheets at my company. Access couldn't connect for some obscure technical reason.
Here is the Cliff Notes version:
Excel is probably the best overall but LibreOffice is good enough for most people unless everyone you work with is using Excel. The extra features and polish in Excel won't matter for 95% of the users out there. If you really use stuff like VBA heavily then it's probably ok to fork over the money for Excel. If you aren't tied to Excel by a userbase or specific feature need then go with LibreOffice. It's pretty easy to migrate to Excel if you have the need down the line in most cases. LibreOffice obviously is the easy choice if you use Linux. My company for example standardized on LibreOffice and it's been fine for our needs. There are other spreadsheets out there but unless one has a very specific feature need it would be hard to justify using them. For example Apple's Numbers spreadsheet is ok but it lacks some features and nobody really uses it so it's only really useful for personal projects.
The cloud versions (Google, MS, etc) are fine for simple projects and collaborations but if you have hard core number crunching to do or need pretty formatting or need to integrate with other office suite software then you'll usually go with Excel or LibreOffice. I expect the cloud versions will get better in time but they aren't there yet. Excel has better cloud integration than LibreOffice if that matters to you but neither integrates super well with Google's offerings.
How may air-to-air kills do the F-15 and F-16 have in decades? And those aircraft were purpose built to do that job...
The F15 reportedly has 104 air combat kills. Not sure on the F16 but its certainly a lot higher than the A10 which I understand has two helicopter kills.
List five firms that have made a greater contribution than Microsoft to the specific task of getting a personal computer on every desk.
I can think of three you could make a solid argument for. IBM, Apple and Intel. Microsoft would certainly fall somewhere in the top 5 though. Exactly where is an exercise for the reader.
What was available in the '90s that was ruined by Microsoft?
Web standards and web browsers is probably the best example. Third party OEM operating system installation though restrictive licensing agreements. Security - macro viruses in particular. DRM facilitation.
What was available last decade that was ruined by Microsoft?
Nokia comes to mind... The Windows interface also.
As a former financial analyst I could probably name 100 innovations in Excel alone.
As a current accountant I can safely state that very Excel has barely improved in the last 10 years in meaningful ways. Sure there are some incremental improvements and it's gotten a bit more polished but nothing earth shaking. Probably the most useful thing added in recent years to my mind is conditional formatting which we saw back in 2007 if memory serves. Some added functions here, a few graphing improvements there, etc. Excel is a fine program but it hasn't been particularly innovative in quite a long time.
Sure, but what people get with this physical game cartridge is a really great story to go with their game.
Their REALLY bad game. They buried these cartridges for a reason you know...
I honestly cannot fathom why anyone would want one of these. A terrible game that won't be played for an obsolete system that approximately nobody uses anymore. The only sane reason I could see to dig the things up is so that they could be properly recycled. A huge waste of money, brains and time.
If they can pull apart a rocketdyne motor from the apollo program and reverse engineer it I think they can manage an A-10.
It's not that they can't do it. It's that it's not economically sane to try in most cases. A lot depends on how much of the original documentation still exists and what sort of condition it is in. I've had to do that professionally myself on much smaller scale products and I can absolutely guarantee you that there will be considerable amounts of data missing. Worse, a lot of the tribal knowledge that went into making it and the problems they dealt with has been lost. Could it be re-engineered? Sure. But it would be needlessly expensive and they could probably develop a better product with a new(ish) plane if they went about it the right way.
What would be economically sane to do is to pull the information still available about the A10 and do a clean sheet design while cribbing as much of what works as possible from the existing plane. There has been a lot of technological progress in the last 30 years. Simply copying an old but good design verbatim would be pretty short sighted. If the A10 continues to make tactical/strategic sense AND if we need more of them then a new design would be the best way to make it happen.
What we SHOULD HAVE done, is to revamp that A-10 production lines
What production lines? The A10 ceased production in 1984. There are no production lines to revamp. To get production started again you'd basically be starting over almost from scratch. Most/all the tooling is long gone. The assembly lines and supply chains are gone. The tribal knowledge from the team that built them is scattered to the winds and the original design engineers mostly retired or dead by now. There are drawings but I assure you that after 30 years there is a lot of missing information. Basically you cannot put it all back together again. It would be easier and cheaper to start over.
That being said, the A-10 is actually getting old, and could use a capable replacement.
Old isn't necessarily a fatal problem in and of itself. The B52 is much older than the A10 and is still serving with distinction. It does cause some supply chain issues but nothing that cannot be solved. The biggest problem is really attrition in the number of airframes because they aren't building new ones obviously.
The gau-8 fires projectiles at a velocity of 3500 feet per second. A jet traveling at mach 1400 miles per hour is moving at 2053 feet per second. So even if the jet was flying away from the a-10, the projectiles are still closing at 1500 feet per second.
So what? Even if your figures are accurate it doesn't matter. First off that only matters if the jet is flying in a straight line and not turning even a tiny bit. Second, having the biggest gun in the fight is NOT the most important factor. Having a big gun is great but being able to put bullets on target and evade bullets is FAR more important in air to air combat. Third, bullets slow down after leaving the gun barrel. Several thousand meters out and that bullet will be traveling at substantially less velocity than it left the gun barrel. Fourth, this discussion of the A10 in air to air combat is stupid. It's not designed for it and will never be particularly good at it.
The A-10 has demonstrated devastating anti-aircraft ability as well, with at least one known air-to-air kill.
The A10 shot down a couple of helicopters. That's hardly "devastating anit-aircraft ability". It's a great plane for shooting stuff on the ground of almost any description but let's not pretend it is some amazing air-to-air fighter because it is not.
This is an area that could easily be expanded: no known aircraft can survive the A-10's gun. It is the most powerful dogfight cannon ever put in the air.
Having the biggest gun in a dogfight doesn't mean much. It is FAR slower and less maneuverable and those matter hugely in a dogfight. The 20mm cannons on other jets are more than adequate to the task of shooting down other aircraft (including the A10) and having a big gun isn't much use if you cannot put the rounds on target. The A10 *might* win an engagement here or there but I certainly wouldn't bet on it winning against a purpose built fighter.
Put a new tech pack on the A10 and voila, it can do everything the F35 can just slower.
No it cannot. The A10 is a great plane but physics is a harsh mistress. The choices made in the design of its airframe mean that there will be some things it simply cannot do well. There are unquestionably things the F35 will do better just as a virtue of its design and vice-versa. And flying faster isn't some unimportant little detail, particularly in a contested airspace. I'm by no means suggesting we get rid of the A10 but let's not pretend we can drop in some avionics and turn it into a slow F35. Likewise the F35 by its very design will have to utilize different tactics than the A10. I have no idea which one would perform better (though my money would be on the A10 for the missions the A10 was designed for) but it would be hard to find two more different aircraft no matter what tech you pack into the A10.
WWII demonstrated that with Nazi Germany producing vastly superior tanks but because of their complexity, they were swarmed by cheaper, mass produced tanks.
The reasons the Nazi's lost were FAR more complex than you are implying here. Furthermore the Soviet T-34 tank was among the best tanks in the world at the time and even the German's thought and said so. The German's ultimately lost because they picked a fight with a much larger country with deeper resources including more land, more people and more natural resources. The only reason the German's did as well as they did was because the Soviets were behind the curve technologically and organizationally early in the conflict. Once the Soviets got their shit together the German's were pretty much screwed. They probably would have been screwed even if they hadn't tried to pick a fight with the rest of the world at the same time.
So in a shooting war against an enemy that can defend itself, the fighters we have dont matter as much as the fighters we can build.
In modern wars you aren't going to have the time required to build an entire supply chain for a modern jet, even a relatively simple one. Even if you do chance are good The fighters of WWII were FAR simpler and they didn't have to contend with enemies that can literally strike from halfway around the globe. It's simply not an analogous situation to WWII.
Not really economically feasible. While it is technologically possible, supply chains are fragile things and once they are taken apart it is VERY expensive and difficult to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I speak from personal professional experience. I'm both an industrial engineer and an accountant and I run a manufacturing company. A large part of my job is putting together supply chains. Once you stop production on something complex like an aircraft there is SO much tribal knowledge lost that it would be FAR cheaper in most cases to start from scratch.
For the programmers out there the analogy would that it is like trying to duplicate an entire operating system with huge amounts of source code missing, none of the build tools, and the original programming team scattered to the four winds. Yeah you can do it but it's easier and cheaper to start over most of the time.
Even with the cost of retooling and reopening the A-10's production line, we could probably build five of these for the cost of a single F-35. Ignoring the cost of tooling and opening the production line, we can build ten or eleven A-10's for the cost of an F-35.
I think we could come up with something brand new but very similar for a LOT less money than trying to redo the A10. Plus we could probably update for lessons learned in the last 30+ years presuming the A10 continues to make tactical/strategic sense. If they kept the A10's philosophy of being tough and inexpensive then it might make sense. Although honestly I think the Army should be given control of their own CAS even for fixed wing aircraft. (Yes I know they reasons why this won't happen)
On the other hand as good as the A-10 reportedly is, there is always the danger of trying to fight the last war. Surface to Air missiles have improved substantially and the A10 reportedly isn't much use in contested airspace. The A10 is apparently very good at what it was designed for but it's unclear (to me anyway) how long that will continue to be the case. Maybe it will be like the B52 and it will serve for 50+ years but then again, maybe not. I don't pretend to know.
"Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them." He added: "We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in."
And about 3 nanoseconds later this would be used to track citizens and violate all kinds of civil rights. If we actually aspire to be a free country we have to let people go about their business especially when we have no reasons to suspect them of anything.
The issue with the Mexican and most Central American economies is graft and corruption at the Governmental level.
As if those things don't exist in the US....
Short of overthrowing those Governments - there's not a lot we can do other than what we've done (open markets - NAFTA).
Not even remotely true that we have done everything we can. Our relationships with countries to our south is anything but friendly or productive. A lot of those countries don't like us at all because our policies do nothing to help them.
Maybe we should try better border enforcement and encourage the local populace to institute change at home, rather than run away...
You can build the walls as high as you want and it WON'T MATTER. If there is money to be made they will keep coming. And frankly spending vast resources policing the border is hugely wasteful and will never solve the problem. They're ALREADY HERE in vast numbers. We have a far larger and less policed border with Canada and guess what? Canada is prosperous so there is no meaningful immigration problem. But the folks south of our border aren't white and don't speak English so we aren't so willing to help them.
As for encouraging the immigrants home countries to institute change is exactly what I suggested. You have to help them build their economies which in turn will spur changes. Right now the US trade policies are anything but helpful or friendly.
I know your ravenous hatred blinds you, but churches have had the most success in making the world a better place.
I would say exactly the opposite. Organized religion is the foundation of countless wars, conflict and suffering. Organized religion is nothing more than a cynical means of controlling people and exercising power via irrational and unproveable beliefs. The fact that they do some charitable works does not begin to excuse the harm humanity has suffered because of the tribalism that results from organized religion. I don't care at all if people want to believe in some bizarre ideas of their own but they should keep them to themselves, particularly around children. I have a huge problem with people who think we should base public policy on their religion and who think I should have to share their weird ideas sometimes literally at gunpoint.
Most hospitals and universities were started by churches.
Demonstrably not true on both counts. Certainly plenty of hospitals were started by churches but demonstrably not the majority. 20% of hospitals in the US have a religious affiliation and the majority of those are catholic institutions. And most universities have largely secular origins if you actually bother to look. Furthermore these charitable acts by churches are anything but altruistic. They are nothing more than a thinly veiled marketing effort. They have the clear ulterior motive of proselytizing in order to swell the ranks of their tribe. It is usually a soft sell but it is a sell nonetheless.
Churches care about addicts, unwed mothers and many other people that the world throws away.
So do plenty of secular organizations. And the secular organizations don't do so with the ulterior motive of trying to convert people to join their superstitious cult exactly at the time when those people are most vulnerable.
In the past the right has proposed incremental changes to the immigration system
You mean incremental changes like self deportation, building a huge wall, etc? Yeah, let's not pretend the US political right has been anything remotely resembling rational about this issue - not to mention routinely racist (see Trump). Their general stance has largely been one of xenophobic hysteria with a complete disregard for why the problem exists in the first place or the economic consequences of their stance on the issue. Let's also not ignore the fact that most illegal immigrants coming into the US are Hispanic/Latino and that the Hispanic/Latino citizens eligible to vote tend to vote democrat and they (mostly) oppose the policies espoused by the US political right. The republicans will need the Hispanic vote but they keep shooting themselves in the foot on the issue.
Furthermore we DO need comprehensive immigration reform. The problem is that the left and right disagree on what the reforms should be and there hasn't been much willingness to compromise on the issue from either side.
People are coming to the US because there is economic opportunity. If there is economic opportunity where they are coming from then there is little reason for them to come. Want to solve the illegal immigration problem? Help Mexico and Central America build up their economy and it will (mostly) magically disappear. But illegal immigration is NOT what you should worry about. What you should worry about is if they stop trying to come to the US. That means economic opportunity has gone elsewhere.
I am not familiar with any German software companies other than Software AG and SAP (both which produce uniformly terrible software).
Then you haven't looked very hard. Plus there are tons of German companies that make software that are not pure software companies. Siemens for example makes quite a lot of software.
Do we really want Google or Mozilla, or any other browser determining what content we can see or not see in a browser?
When it is a known security problem then I have no problem with it. As long as I have the ability to override the decision I don't really see it as an issue. Flash needs to die a hot painful death and this is probably the fastest way to make that happen.
What next, will they block? This seems like an awfully big slippery slope and people are just accepting it.
Not worried about it. If browsers start getting too exuberant with the blocking then market forces are almost certain to correct the problem.
Or you can get a $20 bluetooth GPS, and put it someplace with a good view of the sky, like under your rear parcel shelf if it's not made of metal.
Which does you no good at all if you are driving somewhere and don't have your smartphone handy. Not saying that your idea is bad but personally I'd rather I have navigation assistance even if I have to leave my smartphone behind for some reason. I use the built-in GPS in my truck 99+% of the time even though the data in my smartphone is generally more up to date and accurate.
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They're not even in the list of makers that I know of:
That's because you probably don't live in China. They're actually a good sized player in the market. Also they are buying (have bought?) Motorola's handset operations from Google.
there are phones out now that are more powerful than my four year old LAPTOP. What the fuck do you need to make a fucking phone call??
Smartphones are not really primarily phones. They're small tablet computers that happen to be able to make calls. The phone feature is almost incidental since 90%+ of the time they are used for other purposes. I spend maybe 1-2 hours talking on my smartphone each month and probably 20+ hours doing other stuff with it like reading news, checking email, taking pictures, etc.
In coastal Connecticut, $100K a year isn't enough to buy a decent house if you're trying to raise a family at the same time.
Quite so. You can find a place to live but it's going to be a dump relatively speaking.
$200K might be enough to get a nice home around here, but $100K a year here is like making $40K a year in a rural area.
It's worse than that. Houses along the Gold Coast area cost something like 3-5X what they do out in the midwest where I live. A house that would cost me $100K in Michigan would cost me something like $400K+ anywhere along the so called Gold Coast. I know because I almost moved there at one point and went house shopping. The house I have now would have cost me well over a million anywhere remotely close to Greenwich CT.
Actually, a million cash would be about enough to fund a $60k a year income assuming you can get a good rate of return (6%...crazy these days).
Forgetting about taxes and inflation? To turn $1M into $60K/year of income you'd need a rate of return closer to 10-13% or so every year without fail. If you get less then your rate of return has to be higher the next year because you'll have dipped into your principal or you'll have to live on less for that year. Some years you will be almost certain to have a negative return.
As a power Excel user, you'd be a great person to create/reference an Excel/Google spreadsheet/Libreoffice Calc/others comparison table...
Such lists can be misleading. For example both LibreOffice and Excel have decent pivot table functionality but there are some quirks to each. Hard to explain the differences briefly in a table. Little things can sometimes make a big difference in which you might choose. For example I used LibreOffice Base to tie into an old database for some spreadsheets at my company. Access couldn't connect for some obscure technical reason.
Here is the Cliff Notes version:
Excel is probably the best overall but LibreOffice is good enough for most people unless everyone you work with is using Excel. The extra features and polish in Excel won't matter for 95% of the users out there. If you really use stuff like VBA heavily then it's probably ok to fork over the money for Excel. If you aren't tied to Excel by a userbase or specific feature need then go with LibreOffice. It's pretty easy to migrate to Excel if you have the need down the line in most cases. LibreOffice obviously is the easy choice if you use Linux. My company for example standardized on LibreOffice and it's been fine for our needs. There are other spreadsheets out there but unless one has a very specific feature need it would be hard to justify using them. For example Apple's Numbers spreadsheet is ok but it lacks some features and nobody really uses it so it's only really useful for personal projects.
The cloud versions (Google, MS, etc) are fine for simple projects and collaborations but if you have hard core number crunching to do or need pretty formatting or need to integrate with other office suite software then you'll usually go with Excel or LibreOffice. I expect the cloud versions will get better in time but they aren't there yet. Excel has better cloud integration than LibreOffice if that matters to you but neither integrates super well with Google's offerings.
How may air-to-air kills do the F-15 and F-16 have in decades? And those aircraft were purpose built to do that job...
The F15 reportedly has 104 air combat kills. Not sure on the F16 but its certainly a lot higher than the A10 which I understand has two helicopter kills.
List five firms that have made a greater contribution than Microsoft to the specific task of getting a personal computer on every desk.
I can think of three you could make a solid argument for. IBM, Apple and Intel. Microsoft would certainly fall somewhere in the top 5 though. Exactly where is an exercise for the reader.
What was available in the '90s that was ruined by Microsoft?
Web standards and web browsers is probably the best example. Third party OEM operating system installation though restrictive licensing agreements. Security - macro viruses in particular. DRM facilitation.
What was available last decade that was ruined by Microsoft?
Nokia comes to mind... The Windows interface also.
As a former financial analyst I could probably name 100 innovations in Excel alone.
As a current accountant I can safely state that very Excel has barely improved in the last 10 years in meaningful ways. Sure there are some incremental improvements and it's gotten a bit more polished but nothing earth shaking. Probably the most useful thing added in recent years to my mind is conditional formatting which we saw back in 2007 if memory serves. Some added functions here, a few graphing improvements there, etc. Excel is a fine program but it hasn't been particularly innovative in quite a long time.
Sure, but what people get with this physical game cartridge is a really great story to go with their game.
Their REALLY bad game. They buried these cartridges for a reason you know...
I honestly cannot fathom why anyone would want one of these. A terrible game that won't be played for an obsolete system that approximately nobody uses anymore. The only sane reason I could see to dig the things up is so that they could be properly recycled. A huge waste of money, brains and time.
If they can pull apart a rocketdyne motor from the apollo program and reverse engineer it I think they can manage an A-10.
It's not that they can't do it. It's that it's not economically sane to try in most cases. A lot depends on how much of the original documentation still exists and what sort of condition it is in. I've had to do that professionally myself on much smaller scale products and I can absolutely guarantee you that there will be considerable amounts of data missing. Worse, a lot of the tribal knowledge that went into making it and the problems they dealt with has been lost. Could it be re-engineered? Sure. But it would be needlessly expensive and they could probably develop a better product with a new(ish) plane if they went about it the right way.
What would be economically sane to do is to pull the information still available about the A10 and do a clean sheet design while cribbing as much of what works as possible from the existing plane. There has been a lot of technological progress in the last 30 years. Simply copying an old but good design verbatim would be pretty short sighted. If the A10 continues to make tactical/strategic sense AND if we need more of them then a new design would be the best way to make it happen.
What we SHOULD HAVE done, is to revamp that A-10 production lines
What production lines? The A10 ceased production in 1984. There are no production lines to revamp. To get production started again you'd basically be starting over almost from scratch. Most/all the tooling is long gone. The assembly lines and supply chains are gone. The tribal knowledge from the team that built them is scattered to the winds and the original design engineers mostly retired or dead by now. There are drawings but I assure you that after 30 years there is a lot of missing information. Basically you cannot put it all back together again. It would be easier and cheaper to start over.
That being said, the A-10 is actually getting old, and could use a capable replacement.
Old isn't necessarily a fatal problem in and of itself. The B52 is much older than the A10 and is still serving with distinction. It does cause some supply chain issues but nothing that cannot be solved. The biggest problem is really attrition in the number of airframes because they aren't building new ones obviously.
The gau-8 fires projectiles at a velocity of 3500 feet per second. A jet traveling at mach 1400 miles per hour is moving at 2053 feet per second. So even if the jet was flying away from the a-10, the projectiles are still closing at 1500 feet per second.
So what? Even if your figures are accurate it doesn't matter. First off that only matters if the jet is flying in a straight line and not turning even a tiny bit. Second, having the biggest gun in the fight is NOT the most important factor. Having a big gun is great but being able to put bullets on target and evade bullets is FAR more important in air to air combat. Third, bullets slow down after leaving the gun barrel. Several thousand meters out and that bullet will be traveling at substantially less velocity than it left the gun barrel. Fourth, this discussion of the A10 in air to air combat is stupid. It's not designed for it and will never be particularly good at it.
The A-10 has demonstrated devastating anti-aircraft ability as well, with at least one known air-to-air kill.
The A10 shot down a couple of helicopters. That's hardly "devastating anit-aircraft ability". It's a great plane for shooting stuff on the ground of almost any description but let's not pretend it is some amazing air-to-air fighter because it is not.
This is an area that could easily be expanded: no known aircraft can survive the A-10's gun. It is the most powerful dogfight cannon ever put in the air.
Having the biggest gun in a dogfight doesn't mean much. It is FAR slower and less maneuverable and those matter hugely in a dogfight. The 20mm cannons on other jets are more than adequate to the task of shooting down other aircraft (including the A10) and having a big gun isn't much use if you cannot put the rounds on target. The A10 *might* win an engagement here or there but I certainly wouldn't bet on it winning against a purpose built fighter.
Put a new tech pack on the A10 and voila, it can do everything the F35 can just slower.
No it cannot. The A10 is a great plane but physics is a harsh mistress. The choices made in the design of its airframe mean that there will be some things it simply cannot do well. There are unquestionably things the F35 will do better just as a virtue of its design and vice-versa. And flying faster isn't some unimportant little detail, particularly in a contested airspace. I'm by no means suggesting we get rid of the A10 but let's not pretend we can drop in some avionics and turn it into a slow F35. Likewise the F35 by its very design will have to utilize different tactics than the A10. I have no idea which one would perform better (though my money would be on the A10 for the missions the A10 was designed for) but it would be hard to find two more different aircraft no matter what tech you pack into the A10.
WWII demonstrated that with Nazi Germany producing vastly superior tanks but because of their complexity, they were swarmed by cheaper, mass produced tanks.
The reasons the Nazi's lost were FAR more complex than you are implying here. Furthermore the Soviet T-34 tank was among the best tanks in the world at the time and even the German's thought and said so. The German's ultimately lost because they picked a fight with a much larger country with deeper resources including more land, more people and more natural resources. The only reason the German's did as well as they did was because the Soviets were behind the curve technologically and organizationally early in the conflict. Once the Soviets got their shit together the German's were pretty much screwed. They probably would have been screwed even if they hadn't tried to pick a fight with the rest of the world at the same time.
So in a shooting war against an enemy that can defend itself, the fighters we have dont matter as much as the fighters we can build.
In modern wars you aren't going to have the time required to build an entire supply chain for a modern jet, even a relatively simple one. Even if you do chance are good The fighters of WWII were FAR simpler and they didn't have to contend with enemies that can literally strike from halfway around the globe. It's simply not an analogous situation to WWII.
Reopen the A-10 production line.
Not really economically feasible. While it is technologically possible, supply chains are fragile things and once they are taken apart it is VERY expensive and difficult to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I speak from personal professional experience. I'm both an industrial engineer and an accountant and I run a manufacturing company. A large part of my job is putting together supply chains. Once you stop production on something complex like an aircraft there is SO much tribal knowledge lost that it would be FAR cheaper in most cases to start from scratch.
For the programmers out there the analogy would that it is like trying to duplicate an entire operating system with huge amounts of source code missing, none of the build tools, and the original programming team scattered to the four winds. Yeah you can do it but it's easier and cheaper to start over most of the time.
Even with the cost of retooling and reopening the A-10's production line, we could probably build five of these for the cost of a single F-35. Ignoring the cost of tooling and opening the production line, we can build ten or eleven A-10's for the cost of an F-35.
I think we could come up with something brand new but very similar for a LOT less money than trying to redo the A10. Plus we could probably update for lessons learned in the last 30+ years presuming the A10 continues to make tactical/strategic sense. If they kept the A10's philosophy of being tough and inexpensive then it might make sense. Although honestly I think the Army should be given control of their own CAS even for fixed wing aircraft. (Yes I know they reasons why this won't happen)
On the other hand as good as the A-10 reportedly is, there is always the danger of trying to fight the last war. Surface to Air missiles have improved substantially and the A10 reportedly isn't much use in contested airspace. The A10 is apparently very good at what it was designed for but it's unclear (to me anyway) how long that will continue to be the case. Maybe it will be like the B52 and it will serve for 50+ years but then again, maybe not. I don't pretend to know.
"Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them." He added: "We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in."
And about 3 nanoseconds later this would be used to track citizens and violate all kinds of civil rights. If we actually aspire to be a free country we have to let people go about their business especially when we have no reasons to suspect them of anything.
The issue with the Mexican and most Central American economies is graft and corruption at the Governmental level.
As if those things don't exist in the US....
Short of overthrowing those Governments - there's not a lot we can do other than what we've done (open markets - NAFTA).
Not even remotely true that we have done everything we can. Our relationships with countries to our south is anything but friendly or productive. A lot of those countries don't like us at all because our policies do nothing to help them.
Maybe we should try better border enforcement and encourage the local populace to institute change at home, rather than run away...
You can build the walls as high as you want and it WON'T MATTER. If there is money to be made they will keep coming. And frankly spending vast resources policing the border is hugely wasteful and will never solve the problem. They're ALREADY HERE in vast numbers. We have a far larger and less policed border with Canada and guess what? Canada is prosperous so there is no meaningful immigration problem. But the folks south of our border aren't white and don't speak English so we aren't so willing to help them.
As for encouraging the immigrants home countries to institute change is exactly what I suggested. You have to help them build their economies which in turn will spur changes. Right now the US trade policies are anything but helpful or friendly.
I know your ravenous hatred blinds you, but churches have had the most success in making the world a better place.
I would say exactly the opposite. Organized religion is the foundation of countless wars, conflict and suffering. Organized religion is nothing more than a cynical means of controlling people and exercising power via irrational and unproveable beliefs. The fact that they do some charitable works does not begin to excuse the harm humanity has suffered because of the tribalism that results from organized religion. I don't care at all if people want to believe in some bizarre ideas of their own but they should keep them to themselves, particularly around children. I have a huge problem with people who think we should base public policy on their religion and who think I should have to share their weird ideas sometimes literally at gunpoint.
Most hospitals and universities were started by churches.
Demonstrably not true on both counts. Certainly plenty of hospitals were started by churches but demonstrably not the majority. 20% of hospitals in the US have a religious affiliation and the majority of those are catholic institutions. And most universities have largely secular origins if you actually bother to look. Furthermore these charitable acts by churches are anything but altruistic. They are nothing more than a thinly veiled marketing effort. They have the clear ulterior motive of proselytizing in order to swell the ranks of their tribe. It is usually a soft sell but it is a sell nonetheless.
Churches care about addicts, unwed mothers and many other people that the world throws away.
So do plenty of secular organizations. And the secular organizations don't do so with the ulterior motive of trying to convert people to join their superstitious cult exactly at the time when those people are most vulnerable.
In the past the right has proposed incremental changes to the immigration system
You mean incremental changes like self deportation, building a huge wall, etc? Yeah, let's not pretend the US political right has been anything remotely resembling rational about this issue - not to mention routinely racist (see Trump). Their general stance has largely been one of xenophobic hysteria with a complete disregard for why the problem exists in the first place or the economic consequences of their stance on the issue. Let's also not ignore the fact that most illegal immigrants coming into the US are Hispanic/Latino and that the Hispanic/Latino citizens eligible to vote tend to vote democrat and they (mostly) oppose the policies espoused by the US political right. The republicans will need the Hispanic vote but they keep shooting themselves in the foot on the issue.
Furthermore we DO need comprehensive immigration reform. The problem is that the left and right disagree on what the reforms should be and there hasn't been much willingness to compromise on the issue from either side.
People are coming to the US because there is economic opportunity. If there is economic opportunity where they are coming from then there is little reason for them to come. Want to solve the illegal immigration problem? Help Mexico and Central America build up their economy and it will (mostly) magically disappear. But illegal immigration is NOT what you should worry about. What you should worry about is if they stop trying to come to the US. That means economic opportunity has gone elsewhere.
I am not familiar with any German software companies other than Software AG and SAP (both which produce uniformly terrible software).
Then you haven't looked very hard. Plus there are tons of German companies that make software that are not pure software companies. Siemens for example makes quite a lot of software.
I'd like to see in Firefox by default...
Since Firefox apes a lot of what Chrome does it shouldn't be long...
Do we really want Google or Mozilla, or any other browser determining what content we can see or not see in a browser?
When it is a known security problem then I have no problem with it. As long as I have the ability to override the decision I don't really see it as an issue. Flash needs to die a hot painful death and this is probably the fastest way to make that happen.
What next, will they block? This seems like an awfully big slippery slope and people are just accepting it.
Not worried about it. If browsers start getting too exuberant with the blocking then market forces are almost certain to correct the problem.
Or you can get a $20 bluetooth GPS, and put it someplace with a good view of the sky, like under your rear parcel shelf if it's not made of metal.
Which does you no good at all if you are driving somewhere and don't have your smartphone handy. Not saying that your idea is bad but personally I'd rather I have navigation assistance even if I have to leave my smartphone behind for some reason. I use the built-in GPS in my truck 99+% of the time even though the data in my smartphone is generally more up to date and accurate.