Quietly, Japan has established itself as a power in the aerospace industry

This ethos is increasingly rare in software as well, and I'm wondering if this is setting up those who have discarded the ethos for a long losing game with technical debt, or if they will be eventually vindicated as having correctly optimized for price over complexity management and quality.

I know many civil, mechanical, chemical, and electrical engineers that write good code to solve important problems. I know few programmers that know anything about circuit design, plumbing, carpentry, etc. But do believe that the programmers that frequent HN are probably more apt to be multi-skilled and a more renaissance-type of person.

I think the only difference, in this respect, is that one technology has been around longer and the other is still the cool new thing. Someday, in a forum about whatever the new thing of that moment is, someone will ask the same thing about people who work in IT.

No one would ever know unless I mention it, because I don't fit the ugly stereotype of tradework being the domain of the crude and uneducated. I used to talk about it more, but I got tired of the condescension. Tech in general is incredibly insular, and nowhere near as open-minded as the field thinks it is, so I just keep quiet unless something like this thread pops up.

There are a lot of us like this out there, and we tend to stay silent on the subject for similar reasons. I am happy to talk about engines or APIs. What I really don't like is the assumption that because I know about engines, anything more cerebral must be a hobby, because it would otherwise be beyond me as a profession.

Scotty Kilmer is an almost half-century veteran of the car repair business. (He's become the new Car Talk of 20-teens YouTube.) His position on the automatic transmissions made by most car companies, in the current fleet of used cars, is that they're a bit crappy. As in, you're a bit lucky to get 100k out of most of them trouble free, and you're very lucky to get 200k trouble free. One of the few makers of automatic transmissions that gets it right is Aisin, which is the supplier to Toyota.

One way this might change, is the use of computers to operate what's essentially a manual transmission on behalf of the driver. However, even that might fall by the wayside, outside of particular niches, with electric vehicles.

People 'change cars more often then before', but they don't do it by hauling their three year old SUV to the junkyard.

The car gets re-sold to someone else. Most cars end their life by being driven into the ground.

1UZ-FE, 1JZ, 2JZ are legendary engines. You can still buy overbuild cars today, but you will pay serious premium for it (Land Cruiser)

Camry V30s are pretty bulletproof

"Killing a Toyota Part 1 | Top Gear | BBC" : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xnWKz7Cthkk

Engineering standards are * very broadly* similar, worldwide, as auto companies do have to design and sell a vehicle for multiple markets. What was lacking in the U.S. is the actual execution of the build quality. You can engineer something to be really good, but if you don't build it well, there's no point.

A very good example of this is the year 2000 Ford Focus. It was winning car of the year/ best quality awards in Europe, while it was noted for having the most amount of recalls in the U.S for a Ford. Broadly the same product with some localized differences, built separately in EU and the U.S. - completely different execution/ build quality.

That certainly used to be the case, 20+ years ago. US auto makers have dramatically improved since the mid 1990s.

On reliability today Buick outranks BMW, Infiniti, Toyota and Mercedes. Chevrolet outranks Toyota, Audi, Honda, Hyundai and BMW. Ford & GMC are better than Subaru and Acura, comparable to Mercedes, and slightly better than Volkswagen. Lincoln is better than Honda, Nissan and Audi.

https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/jd-power-201...

Neither South nor North Korea has either commitment or capacity or historical precedent.

North Korea is a "fake it till you make it" media scarecrow. They would not go to agressive war and they never actually claimed they want to.

If you try to do "five whys" on "Why you should fear North Korea more than France" the topic will evaporate around the third "why".

If through some uncharacteristic set of events manage to pull their heads out of their asses, they are still well positioned to do awesome stuff going forward. Of course, the current kleptocracy is hopelessly inept and unlikely to get much done on this front. That seems to be the tragedy of Russia.

1. Within the realm of space flight, Russia has one of the most active launch programs in the world if not the most active. [1]

2. As far as overall military capacity Russia has by some accounts the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. [2]

3. With respect to current military strategy and tactics, Putin's campaign of disinformation using social media is a model of asymmetric warfare -- cheap to create and expensive to defend against.

Westerners discount Russia at their peril. They are worthy adversaries.

[1] https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/

[2] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohasw...

“We’ve got to change the way contracting is done,” Musk told the governors. “You can’t do these cost-plus, sole-source contracts because then the incentive structure is all messed up. As soon as you don’t have any competition, the sense of urgency goes away. And as soon as you make something a cost-plus contract, you’re incenting the contractor to maximize the cost of the program, because they get a percentage.”

From https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/elon-musk-knows-what...

One of the Fukushima reactors held a lot of that store.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/07/07/editorials/r...

"Today, the plutonium stockpile has reached 47 tons, including 37 tons stored in Britain and France, which have been commissioned to reprocess spent fuel from Japan’s nuclear power plants."

Japan's plutonium is reprocessed from commercial reactors and is not "weapons grade." This is a bit of a misnomer, however: weapons grade plutonium is really good for making weapons because it has a low concentration of the isotope plutonium 240. Pu-240 undergoes spontaneous fission frequently enough that it makes a pre-detonation "fizzle" (bomb blows itself too quickly to achieve useful yield) likely in a simple bomb design like that used during World War II. "Supergrade" plutonium, especially pure Pu-239, is also desirable for submarine-launched weapons because it reduces crew exposure to radiation from the stored warheads.

It is however technically feasible to make effective weapons from "reactor grade" plutonium containing more Pu-240 if the weapons designer invests in more sophisticated features like deuterium-tritium boosting of the fission device.

To quote Carey Sublette's excellent Nuclear Weapons FAQ,

"The fusion reaction rate typically becomes significant at 20-30 million degrees K. This temperature is reached at very low efficiencies, when less than 1% of the fissile material has fissioned (corresponding to a yield in the range of hundreds of tons). Since implosion weapons can be designed that will achieve yields in this range even if neutrons are present a the moment of criticality, fusion boosting allows the manufacture of efficient weapons that are immune to predetonation. Elimination of this hazard is a very important advantage in using boosting. It appears that every weapon now in the U.S. arsenal is a boosted design."

(My emphasis.)

https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-3.html

Japan could produce its own tritium by irradiation of natural lithium targets in commercial power reactors. It takes maybe 3 grams of tritium to make an efficient boosted weapon. Japan has enough plutonium for perhaps a thousand boosted-fission weapons in the 100 kiloton yield range, comparable in yield (if not efficiency) to France's latest submarine-launched warheads. I don't think it can produce tritium fast enough to supply a large number of weapons, given tritium's short half life and Japan's small number of operating reactors, but many reactors idled post-Fukushima are still in working condition and could be started up again in an emergency. Further, an opponent that does not consider dozens of nuclear weapons a rational deterrent is unlikely to be deterred by hundreds either, so Japan may not need many weapons to demonstrate a credible deterrent.

(Context: I started getting involved in space activism as a teenager in the early 1990s. The first conference I went to was a bunch of mostly-veteran Apollo and Shuttle engineers. I remember looking around the room and noting that I was the youngest person in the room by 2 or 3 decades, and also that there wasn't a single woman or non-white face present. Nothing against these guys at all -- they were great! -- but demographics like that will lead any movement to extinction. So I find it enormously satisfying to see how those demographics have changed.)

You're absolutely right that Japan's biggest challenge is its collapsing population. However, excluding half your population from meaningful participation in the workforce -- at the same time as your population is collapsing -- makes a bad problem significantly worse. In fact both problems have pretty much the same solution, starting with changing the culture such that it doesn't force Japanese women to choose between between being a mother and having a career.

Ogasawara has the added (and rather shocking, from a Japanese perspective) twist of insisting on being addressed by first name, which the journalist does after mentioning this.