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Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I think we're in some weird version of a neo-Dark-Age where the ways to do everything amazing that we figured out how to do start to atrophy along the same path as those things being taken for granted. Because they're no longer considered amazing, so they're reprioritized as such, and we forget how hard they actually are to do as well as they need to be done.

We sort of seem to end up with a built-in assumption that absolutely everything can be commoditized just because we're used to having it around, not because it is actually able to be commoditized effectively.

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I think this ties into the importance of living knowledge. Even the most meticulous notes must be interpreted and executed by someone, and there is no substitute for an experienced person. This has already happened with technologies like vacuum tubes. It isnt a simple matter of economics to restart production because much of the know-how must be rediscovered. In the absence of the original volume of demand that led to the first generation of tube engineers, it may be lost forever. There are some niche high power RF devices still using tubes from decades ago.

Even in something as important as nuclear weapons, the method of manufacturing a critical component was lost due to a broken chain of living knowledge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK

Probably why Idiocracy will not come to pass. And truly idiotic civilization will succumb to its competitors.

All the more reason to avoid a single global government. Besides never being able to escape tyranny.

Eh? This is China's first time trying to build a commercial narrow body airliner, isn't it? So its not like they used to have the capability and forgot how to do it, they're developing it for the first time.

In an ideal world, they would be able to start with all of the world's knowledge in this subject. Ie. they would start with where Boeing is now.

I think that is what OP is trying to get at.

Yes, this. Also, that even Boeing partially lost track of it along the way.

This is China's first time trying to build a commercial narrow body airliner, isn't it?

Second – the ARJ21 was the first.

Why not buy the remnants of fokker or dornier and carry on from there?

Dunno what's left of either of those two companies (or the willingness of the EU to sell to China) but neither really had anything that would compete with the A220/A320/B737.

The ARJ was an attempt at a refreshed MD-80 with tooling from McDonnell Douglas and a ton of outsourced bits and it still flopped.

Per the article COMAC is resorting to espionage, so I imagine they think going the legal route won't pan out for them.

Jonathan Blow gave a great talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

I stand by the assertion that we could not go back to the moon even if we wanted to right now. They had slide rules instead of computers, but a passion and attention to detail that I very rarely see in any workplace these days. Maybe they were just less distracted than we are today by our current culture of distraction.

They also had an effectively unlimited budget and hundreds of thousands of people to throw at the problem. You can often lay hands on some smart people under those conditions.

NASA engineer here. I assure you we would be on the moon right now if it was a top priority in the Decadal Surveys. Its not. Recently, there's been a re-rush to the moon policy wise, and its been utterly delightful to watch astrobotic and several other companies step up to the plate so we dont have to. I was, just last week, working on a robotic payload for just one of those lunar landers, and my friends are working on even more ambitious ones.

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