You're assuming that there is nothing else going on in space other than war. By the time space war becomes possible, that's pretty much not going to be the case. (Neglecting for the moment the argument that ICBMs are a form of space-based warfare)
In order to be able to 'project force' into space, there has to be an existing space economy to a degree. This may involve mining, colonies, power generation or habitats, or some combination of these.
Consider the large number of naval blockades in the past that strangled countries economies. Back ten thousand years, if you isolated most countries totally by sea, essentially nobody would die. Do it today, and (for example) about a third of the Japanese population would.
The maximum transmissible frequency of sound is proportional to how fast stuff is bouncing off other stuff. Even in a fairly dense cloud, of 1 atom a cubic centimeter, this interaction happens around every billion kilometers, and thousand years. This means that the highest frequency that can be transmitted over long distances is about one pulse every ten thousand years.
The fundamental problem with MASERs is the M. Microwave.
What you need to bear in mind for near-term optical and RF beam weapons is the Airy Disk.
(see wikipedia). In short - if you have something emitting lots of energy, it's generally a good idea to have it able to hit the enemy, rather than shoot off into a broad cone.
If you want to make a 1m spot on a craft with a beam of light, at 10000km, you need a mirror (about) 12 million wavelengths across. For microwaves, this is about 120km across. Generally problematic. For green light, 25m.
And yes, this means that you need to focus the beam weapon - for the green light case, if you're off by 1000km in range, the spot grows to 3.5m, with a tenth of the energy per unit area. Instead of melting the mirrored surface, it bounces off.
I was primarily addressing 'high end' stuff. For the low end, it's a lot easier. If you can do meaningful debugging with a DMM, or even a LED and a resistor, and your chips have a dozen or so leads and have been around since 1970, things get a lot easier. I was referring to a hypothetical phone design, when I referred to the cost for a single 'compile', with one device.
It's not solely 'not many people understand HDL', or 'not many people can read schematics', though I wasn't really attempting to address FPGAs and similar.
Part of what I was trying to address is that even a person skilled in electronics, faced with a circuit diagram of a modern device with complex digital chips in, can only look at 'trivial' issues.
Do all the LEDs have current limiting resistors? Is there a probably sane level of decoupling? Do all chips have power connected?
This isn't useless.
But, to do more in-depth debugging, you need a _lot_ of context.
To jump from 'is power connected' to 'is the RAM connected correctly' may jump from a 0-2 minute glance at the circuit and/or datasheet, to a close reading of the RAM chip spec, followed by a close reading of the CPU spec, followed by checking that the power is in fact of the right sort.
The plus is that once you've done this, you can probably answer a lot more questions about the circuit without more reading.
But, Linus's law 'With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow' doesn't apply. Your average skilled person, looking at a complex schematic, may find the shallow bugs.
But most bugs are _not_ shallow, and require a level of knowledge of the particular unusual components in the design.
Oh - the above doesn't address making actual silicon! If you're manufacturing actual silicon, then add several zeros to those costs. Open-source in an amateur sense has limited application where a 'compile' can take millions of dollars to get the first chip out.
I'm not saying it's doomed. I'm saying there are extreme challenges. The above largely does not apply for very simple circuits that can be made on small 2-layer boards.
For devices that can work on 2-layer PCBs, which can be meaningfully debugged - especially if input can be gotten from others to critique the PCB (Here I'll mention ##electronics over on irc.freenode.com ) a new design gotten working for $10-20 isn't impossible.
The closer you approach the cutting edge, the more expensive and hard things get.
Why open-source software works is: Widely available repository of code. Many people able to review it, or sections of it, and understand it. Ease of submitting tested patches.
Hardware has problems that don't really fit well with this. The open schematic is the trivially easy part, and not really a problem. (though in practice, you need a schematic with copious links to design documents, which isn't well solved by open tools).
The number of people who can review it is rather smaller - as you can't open up a c file, and see a clear error or awkwardness in code that can be edited.
For all but the most basic errors, you are going to have to sit down and read several hundred pages of hardware documentation about how the chips in question work, in addition to having in-depth knowledge about the circuit design, and costings of likely changes.
Now, you've done this, and generated a patch that you think (for example) lowers the supply current by 1%.
Compile - test. On a PC, this takes a couple of minutes.
For something of a smartphone class, a one-off PCB may cost several hundred dollars. Then the parts will cost another several hundred dollars in small quantities, as well as being difficult to obtain. Now, you have to solder the parts onto the board, which is a decidedly nontrivial thing - and if you decide you want someone else to do this, it's probably another several hundred dollars.
So, you're at the thick end of a thousand dollars for a 'compile'.
Now, you boot the device, and it exhibits random hangs.
Neglecting the fact that you are going to need several hundred to several thousand dollars of test equipment, you now have to find the bug.
Is it: A) The fact that unlabled 0.5*1mm component C38 is in fact 20% over the designed value, as the assembly company put the wrong one in. B) C38 has a tiny bridge of solder underneath it that is making intermittent contact. C) The chipmaker for the main chip hasn't noticed that their chip doesn't quite do what they say it will do, and the datasheet is wrong. D) You missed a tangential reference on page 384 of the datasheet to proper setup of the RAM chip, and it is pure coincidence that all models up till now have booted. E) Because you're ordering small quantities, you had to resort to getting the chips from a distributor who diddn't watch their supply chain really carefully, and your main chip has in fact been desoldered from a broken cellphone. F) Though the design of the circuit is correct, and the board you made matches that design, and all the parts are correct and work properly, the inherent undesired elements introduced by real life physics means it doesn't work. G) A completely random failure of a part that could occur with even the best design, and best manufacture.
G - may mean that it's worthwhile making two or more of each revision - which of course boosts costs.
Hardware is nasty.
This gets a lot less painful of course for lower end hardware. For very limited circuits, which can be done on simple inexpensive PCBs, and be easily soldered at home - costs of a 'compile' can be in the tens of dollars, or even lower.
Money isn't always good. If you want cargo delivered economically, you don't pick a design based around making a supersized carbon fibre version of a Delorian.
You want a vehicle designed from the ground up to keep costs low. NASA has historically been extremely bad at this, for many reasons.
I'd vastly prefer SLS be axed, a billion spent on a kick-ass party for Congress, and the rest spent on actually doing stuff as inexpensively as possible. You can do a hell of a lot more commercially at this point.
I note that the development cost of SLS up to the first launch is $18B. Assuming modest savings if you order that amount of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, you can with the same money launch spacestation components for a station ten times the mass of ISS, ten times the mass of all the Apollo missions. and have room left over!
I had a Microwriter Agenda (indeed, I still do, though I'd need to replace the battery and see if it boots).
I spent perhaps 20-30 hours attempting to learn the text entry system. In short - while I got to the stage that I had no real problems chording any given alphanumeric char, I did not exceed 10wpm on it.
I can do this - easily - on even the worst on-screen keyboards, and I hit ~35wpm on my phone keyboard with a comparable amount of practice.
Any truly innovative bits will be patented. Any non-innovative bits can generally be reverse engineered for relatively little money, by buying a device, and having it closely analysed. The notion that the manual being secret buys you anything much, once the device is released is basically laughable.
The chips are rated for one thermal cycle. Doing multiple ones is beyond the manufacturers recommendations. In addition, you have to replace the 'balls' on the BGA after you desolder it, and you end up with a part that's - probably - going to work.
It will never be as likely to solder on without errors as the original part was.
This works for 'mundane' chips. Not so much for ones that are either hard-to-use. Yes, you may be able to get samples. But only if you qualify as a vendor likely to buy _large_ quantities.
Contains the boilerplate 'This product is intended for high-volume wireless OEMs and ODMs and is not available through distributors. If your company meets this description, please contact your TI sales office.' - and they mean it.
This is very, very common for higher performance more difficult to integrate chips, or ones aimed at certain markets.
In short - they don't particularly care about small designers, only about ones likely to build 100000 of them in. It takes more or less the same amount of product support to support a vendor making 100, as a million. Support is expensive.
Indeed - the OP offered no solutions, just made a rather bland accusation.
The hard part is not in many cases causality being misleading. It's the evidence being poor, and not-well scrutinised. The OP mentions the fact that MRIs of people with back problems seemed to imply that physical defects lead to back problems.
But this is statistical nonsense, and is very often not followed up, because to do the other study is expensive.
If you're a doctor dealing with back problems, it's almost free to ask 100 of your patients if they'd consent to their details being published. The resultant information may seem to have some statistical significance, and indeed it can possibly answer questions as to how many people with back pain have specific anomalies.
The expensive, and often omitted study is to take those 100 patients, and compare them with 100 people who have not had any back pain, but are otherwise similar.
The other common error is that science is lead by 'statistically significant results'. That is - results that appear to be 95% certain. This is problematic in two ways. The first is the obvious one, that one in twenty trials will produce a bogus significant result, when in reality the hypothesis is false. The second is the more corrosive. Only exciting results tend to get published. So, a study is done, and they get a lot of data. They analyse the data 20 different ways, and out pop two 'statistically significant' results. They do not publish the 18 'null' results, as those are uninteresting, only the 2 interesting ones. This means that it's likely that one of the two interesting results is bogus.
The only way to fix this issue is to get people who actually understand the statistics more involved, and to publish on failure too!
You can't actually buy the components involved in small (under 10000) quantities. In addition, desoldering and attempting to re-ball BGAs is not a good idea.
I'm one of the ones that requested a 'kit' - of the major components - I don't care about the tiny components, those are easy to source.
Why?
Several reasons. Amongst them: Because I can (maybe). Because the r-pi is annoyingly large for some use-cases. Because being able to trim the design to have just the required bits on can be useful.
Fundamentally - this is about education. Not software, but hardware education. Fostering a community of interested hardware engineers.
It's a lot easier for many people if in addition to the problems of actually physically constructing the board, (not the actual making the PCB, only insane people would try that), they don't have to do any significant software work to get the board up and working.
'Waste anything but time'. These are truly magical words to a bureaucracy.
When they were uttered, NASA became an enormously powerful agency, with a massive budget, and the resulting craft was guaranteed to be ridiculously expensive, and optimised entirely wrongly for an ongoing space program.
NASA then set the precedent for the 'right way' to do space - which proceeded on, helped by space being seen not as a place to do things in, but a convenient way to feed aerospace companies welfare.
For example, NASAs last attempt to 'reduce the cost of space launch' (x33/venturestar) had not one, not two, but three completely untried technologies on it.
SpaceX - by doing it in a much leaner manner, have developed a rocket and engines for a tiny fraction of the budget of what NASAs estimation tools say it'd cost them. And you know that it'd have overrun in reality.
If you look at a typical NASA procurement requirement, you do not see 'Must deliver cargo of mass M to position P with speed S'. You see a long list of requirements that are only incidental, but so happen to require expertise only available from the two or three 'usual suspects', meaning only they can make credible bids.
The lack of funding, and the clear utility of satellites may well have lead to much cheaper rockets being developed a lot sooner.
If you drive it like you stole it, it will shut down much, much sooner than normal. The 'shut down' may be in terms of reduced performance, admittedly, and it may still go at much reduced speeds. With pretty much any battery pack, if you discharge it very rapidly, you get potential issues from many areas, from thermal hot-spots on. The tesla is not immune to this, and will reduce power, and advise the user to pull over (IIRC) when it risks battery damage. Is this 'running out' - if you're on a track day - yes.
Garmin GPS-12 13(?) years old. Nagivo 3100, closing on 4 years old. In addition, many GPS receivers in general aviation aircraft are _significantly_ more expensive than domestic units, and are not replaced merely because the battery wears out.
Well - I'd somewhat agree with this - but you've missed a bit out. The above wages part is true - for china.
In the 'west' - we are at the moment living off the investment our grandfathers and great-grandfathers put in.
We have good sewers, good infrastructure, and the tip of the pyramid of an economy.
Most of the rest of the pyramid - the 'boring low-paid' jobs have been outsourced to china.
When chinas middle class gets going in a big way - and becomes a sizeable chunk of the population, suddenly exporting to the 'west' becomes a whole lot less important.
At this point we have major, major problems.
Chinese demand for resources goes up, as everyone wants a nice car and fridge and house. We have little to export to china, as we have little manufacturing, and their firms are upskilling, and improving in quality. Commodity prices go way up globally. The lack of competitive exports means that foreign trade earnings goes way down, especially as fake-manufacturing companies like Apple get overtaken in the market by cheaper, shinier devices sold, designed, and with all the profit remaining in china.
Expect to see the price of Chinese goods _vastly_ shooting up, along with a weakening dollar/pound/euro, horrible fuel price inflation (which is one reason we should be decarbonising now!), and the west attempting to rebuild a manufacturing industry with almost no existing base.
Expect all social promises to be broken. You (or if you're lucky, your children) are not getting the pension they thought they were, or if they do, it'll buy a bare fraction of what it did.
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming that there is nothing else going on in space other than war.
By the time space war becomes possible, that's pretty much not going to be the case.
(Neglecting for the moment the argument that ICBMs are a form of space-based warfare)
In order to be able to 'project force' into space, there has to be an existing space economy to a degree.
This may involve mining, colonies, power generation or habitats, or some combination of these.
Consider the large number of naval blockades in the past that strangled countries economies.
Back ten thousand years, if you isolated most countries totally by sea, essentially nobody would die.
Do it today, and (for example) about a third of the Japanese population would.
The maximum transmissible frequency of sound is proportional to how fast stuff is bouncing off other stuff.
Even in a fairly dense cloud, of 1 atom a cubic centimeter, this interaction happens around every billion kilometers, and thousand years.
This means that the highest frequency that can be transmitted over long distances is about one pulse every ten thousand years.
You're not making any sounds.
The fundamental problem with MASERs is the M.
Microwave.
What you need to bear in mind for near-term optical and RF beam weapons is the Airy Disk.
(see wikipedia).
In short - if you have something emitting lots of energy, it's generally a good idea to have it able to hit the enemy, rather than shoot off into a broad cone.
If you want to make a 1m spot on a craft with a beam of light, at 10000km, you need a mirror (about) 12 million wavelengths across.
For microwaves, this is about 120km across.
Generally problematic.
For green light, 25m.
And yes, this means that you need to focus the beam weapon - for the green light case, if you're off by 1000km in range, the spot grows to 3.5m, with a tenth of the energy per unit area.
Instead of melting the mirrored surface, it bounces off.
I was primarily addressing 'high end' stuff. For the low end, it's a lot easier.
If you can do meaningful debugging with a DMM, or even a LED and a resistor, and your chips have a dozen or so leads and have been around since 1970, things get a lot easier.
I was referring to a hypothetical phone design, when I referred to the cost for a single 'compile', with one device.
Meh - I should read posts fully.
It's not solely 'not many people understand HDL', or 'not many people can read schematics', though I wasn't really attempting to address FPGAs and similar.
Part of what I was trying to address is that even a person skilled in electronics, faced with a circuit diagram of a modern device with complex digital chips in, can only look at 'trivial' issues.
Do all the LEDs have current limiting resistors?
Is there a probably sane level of decoupling?
Do all chips have power connected?
This isn't useless.
But, to do more in-depth debugging, you need a _lot_ of context.
To jump from 'is power connected' to 'is the RAM connected correctly' may jump from a 0-2 minute glance at the circuit and/or datasheet, to a close reading of the RAM chip spec, followed by a close reading of the CPU spec, followed by checking that the power is in fact of the right sort.
The plus is that once you've done this, you can probably answer a lot more questions about the circuit without more reading.
But, Linus's law 'With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow' doesn't apply.
Your average skilled person, looking at a complex schematic, may find the shallow bugs.
But most bugs are _not_ shallow, and require a level of knowledge of the particular unusual components in the design.
Oh - the above doesn't address making actual silicon!
If you're manufacturing actual silicon, then add several zeros to those costs.
Open-source in an amateur sense has limited application where a 'compile' can take millions of dollars to get the first chip out.
I'm not saying it's doomed.
I'm saying there are extreme challenges.
The above largely does not apply for very simple circuits that can be made on small 2-layer boards.
For devices that can work on 2-layer PCBs, which can be meaningfully debugged - especially if input can be gotten from others to critique the PCB (Here I'll mention ##electronics over on irc.freenode.com ) a new design gotten working for $10-20 isn't impossible.
The closer you approach the cutting edge, the more expensive and hard things get.
Do puppies even use iphones?
To elaborate on why open-source hardware is hard.
Why open-source software works is:
Widely available repository of code.
Many people able to review it, or sections of it, and understand it.
Ease of submitting tested patches.
Hardware has problems that don't really fit well with this.
The open schematic is the trivially easy part, and not really a problem.
(though in practice, you need a schematic with copious links to design documents, which isn't well solved by open tools).
The number of people who can review it is rather smaller - as you can't
open up a c file, and see a clear error or awkwardness in code that can be edited.
For all but the most basic errors, you are going to have to sit down and
read several hundred pages of hardware documentation about how the chips in question work, in addition to having in-depth knowledge about the circuit design, and costings of likely changes.
Now, you've done this, and generated a patch that you think (for example) lowers the supply current by 1%.
Compile - test.
On a PC, this takes a couple of minutes.
For something of a smartphone class, a one-off PCB may cost several hundred dollars. Then the parts will cost another several hundred dollars in small quantities, as well as being difficult to obtain.
Now, you have to solder the parts onto the board, which is a decidedly nontrivial thing - and if you decide you want someone else to do this, it's probably another several hundred dollars.
So, you're at the thick end of a thousand dollars for a 'compile'.
Now, you boot the device, and it exhibits random hangs.
Neglecting the fact that you are going to need several hundred to several thousand dollars of test equipment, you now have to find
the bug.
Is it:
A) The fact that unlabled 0.5*1mm component C38 is in fact 20% over the designed value, as the assembly company put the wrong one in.
B) C38 has a tiny bridge of solder underneath it that is making intermittent contact.
C) The chipmaker for the main chip hasn't noticed that their chip doesn't quite do what they say it will do, and the datasheet is wrong.
D) You missed a tangential reference on page 384 of the datasheet to proper setup of the RAM chip, and it is pure coincidence that all models up till now have booted.
E) Because you're ordering small quantities, you had to resort to getting the chips from a distributor who diddn't watch their supply chain really carefully, and your main chip has in fact been desoldered from a broken cellphone.
F) Though the design of the circuit is correct, and the board you made matches that design, and all the parts are correct and work properly, the inherent undesired elements introduced by real life physics means it doesn't work.
G) A completely random failure of a part that could occur with even the best design, and best manufacture.
G - may mean that it's worthwhile making two or more of each revision - which of course boosts costs.
Hardware is nasty.
This gets a lot less painful of course for lower end hardware. For very limited circuits, which can be done on simple inexpensive PCBs, and be easily soldered at home - costs of a 'compile' can be in the tens of dollars, or even lower.
Money isn't always good.
If you want cargo delivered economically, you don't pick a design based around making a supersized carbon fibre version of a Delorian.
You want a vehicle designed from the ground up to keep costs low.
NASA has historically been extremely bad at this, for many reasons.
I'd vastly prefer SLS be axed, a billion spent on a kick-ass party for Congress, and the rest spent on actually doing stuff as inexpensively as possible.
You can do a hell of a lot more commercially at this point.
I note that the development cost of SLS up to the first launch is $18B.
Assuming modest savings if you order that amount of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, you can with the same money launch spacestation components for a station ten times the mass of ISS, ten times the mass of all the Apollo missions. and have room left over!
(Around 20000 tons)
I had a Microwriter Agenda (indeed, I still do, though I'd need to replace the battery and see if it boots).
I spent perhaps 20-30 hours attempting to learn the text entry system.
In short - while I got to the stage that I had no real problems chording any given alphanumeric char, I did not exceed 10wpm on it.
I can do this - easily - on even the worst on-screen keyboards, and I hit ~35wpm on my phone keyboard with a comparable amount of practice.
Any truly innovative bits will be patented.
Any non-innovative bits can generally be reverse engineered for relatively little money, by buying a device, and having it closely analysed.
The notion that the manual being secret buys you anything much, once the device is released is basically laughable.
The chips are rated for one thermal cycle.
Doing multiple ones is beyond the manufacturers recommendations.
In addition, you have to replace the 'balls' on the BGA after you desolder it, and you end up with a part that's - probably - going to work.
It will never be as likely to solder on without errors as the original part was.
This works for 'mundane' chips.
Not so much for ones that are either hard-to-use.
Yes, you may be able to get samples. But only if you qualify as a vendor likely to buy _large_ quantities.
http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12494&contentId=4711&DCMP=WTBU&HQS=PlatformGuide+PR+wilink_4 - for example.
Contains the boilerplate 'This product is intended for high-volume wireless OEMs and ODMs and is not available through distributors. If your company meets this description, please contact your TI sales office.' - and they mean it.
This is very, very common for higher performance more difficult to integrate chips, or ones aimed at certain markets.
In short - they don't particularly care about small designers, only about ones likely to build 100000 of them in. It takes more or less the same amount of product support to support a vendor making 100, as a million. Support is expensive.
Indeed - the OP offered no solutions, just made a rather bland accusation.
The hard part is not in many cases causality being misleading.
It's the evidence being poor, and not-well scrutinised.
The OP mentions the fact that MRIs of people with back problems seemed to imply that physical defects lead to back problems.
But this is statistical nonsense, and is very often not followed up, because to do the other study is expensive.
If you're a doctor dealing with back problems, it's almost free to ask 100 of your patients if they'd consent to their details being published.
The resultant information may seem to have some statistical significance, and indeed it can possibly answer questions as to how many people with back pain have specific anomalies.
The expensive, and often omitted study is to take those 100 patients, and compare them with 100 people who have not had any back pain, but are otherwise similar.
The other common error is that science is lead by 'statistically significant results'.
That is - results that appear to be 95% certain.
This is problematic in two ways.
The first is the obvious one, that one in twenty trials will produce a bogus significant result, when in reality the hypothesis is false.
The second is the more corrosive.
Only exciting results tend to get published.
So, a study is done, and they get a lot of data.
They analyse the data 20 different ways, and out pop two 'statistically significant' results.
They do not publish the 18 'null' results, as those are uninteresting, only the 2 interesting ones.
This means that it's likely that one of the two interesting results is bogus.
The only way to fix this issue is to get people who actually understand the statistics more involved, and to publish on failure too!
The chips are not available from digikey, only directly from broadcom, in large numbers.(tens of thousands)
You can't actually buy the components involved in small (under 10000) quantities.
In addition, desoldering and attempting to re-ball BGAs is not a good idea.
I'm one of the ones that requested a 'kit' - of the major components - I don't care about the tiny components, those are easy to source.
Why?
Several reasons.
Amongst them:
Because I can (maybe).
Because the r-pi is annoyingly large for some use-cases.
Because being able to trim the design to have just the required bits on can be useful.
Fundamentally - this is about education. Not software, but hardware education.
Fostering a community of interested hardware engineers.
It's a lot easier for many people if in addition to the problems of actually physically constructing the board, (not the actual making the PCB, only insane people would try that), they don't have to do any significant software work to get the board up and working.
Compared to their results, yes.
They are efficient at funding US aerospace. They are very inefficient at actually doing specified tasks in space.
'Waste anything but time'.
These are truly magical words to a bureaucracy.
When they were uttered, NASA became an enormously powerful agency, with a massive budget, and the resulting craft was guaranteed to be ridiculously expensive, and optimised entirely wrongly for an ongoing space program.
NASA then set the precedent for the 'right way' to do space - which proceeded on, helped by space being seen not as a place to do things in, but a convenient way to feed aerospace companies welfare.
For example, NASAs last attempt to 'reduce the cost of space launch' (x33/venturestar) had not one, not two, but three completely untried technologies on it.
SpaceX - by doing it in a much leaner manner, have developed a rocket and engines for a tiny fraction of the budget of what NASAs estimation tools say it'd cost them.
And you know that it'd have overrun in reality.
If you look at a typical NASA procurement requirement, you do not see 'Must deliver cargo of mass M to position P with speed S'.
You see a long list of requirements that are only incidental, but so happen to require expertise only available from the two or three 'usual suspects', meaning only they can make credible bids.
The lack of funding, and the clear utility of satellites may well have lead to much cheaper rockets being developed a lot sooner.
If you drive it like you stole it, it will shut down much, much sooner than normal.
The 'shut down' may be in terms of reduced performance, admittedly, and it may still go at much reduced speeds.
With pretty much any battery pack, if you discharge it very rapidly, you get potential issues from many areas, from thermal hot-spots on.
The tesla is not immune to this, and will reduce power, and advise the user to pull over (IIRC) when it risks battery damage.
Is this 'running out' - if you're on a track day - yes.
Yes. I was attempting to point out that testing only new equipment, when the average age of installed GPSs may be considerable, is flawed.
Garmin GPS-12 13(?) years old.
Nagivo 3100, closing on 4 years old.
In addition, many GPS receivers in general aviation aircraft are _significantly_ more expensive than domestic units, and are not replaced merely because the battery wears out.
Well - I'd somewhat agree with this - but you've missed a bit out.
The above wages part is true - for china.
In the 'west' - we are at the moment living off the investment our grandfathers and great-grandfathers put in.
We have good sewers, good infrastructure, and the tip of the pyramid of an economy.
Most of the rest of the pyramid - the 'boring low-paid' jobs have been outsourced to china.
When chinas middle class gets going in a big way - and becomes a sizeable chunk of the population, suddenly exporting to the 'west' becomes a whole lot less important.
At this point we have major, major problems.
Chinese demand for resources goes up, as everyone wants a nice car and fridge and house.
We have little to export to china, as we have little manufacturing, and their firms are upskilling, and improving in quality.
Commodity prices go way up globally.
The lack of competitive exports means that foreign trade earnings goes way down, especially as fake-manufacturing companies like Apple get overtaken in the market by cheaper, shinier devices sold, designed, and with all the profit remaining in china.
Expect to see the price of Chinese goods _vastly_ shooting up, along with a weakening dollar/pound/euro, horrible fuel price inflation (which is one reason we should be decarbonising now!), and the west attempting to rebuild a manufacturing industry with almost no existing base.
Expect all social promises to be broken.
You (or if you're lucky, your children) are not getting the pension they thought they were, or if they do, it'll buy a bare fraction of what it did.
The study size was 350 participants.
If you break down the percentages, they are variations of two or three people in each sample.
This is so far from statistically significant, it's laughable.