Beretta_Vexee

The A-12 was not developed from scratch, whether in terms of its design, production facilities or in-house expertise.

Design is a very different matter when you have a workshop full of skilled workers and machinery right on your doorstep, who can critique your work and explain what they can and cannot produce. A lot of engineers discovered this the hard way when companies started outsourcing to the other side of the world and lost control of production process.

Designing parts that look nice but are impossible to machine or assemble is simple.

Designing the plane may only have taken four years, but training the staff, organising the workshops and mastering the production tools took much longer.

Just look at the struggles faced by all the organisations that stopped producing anything for a long time and then wanted to restart production. Whether it’s ships, aeroplanes or nuclear power stations, each time it takes something close to ten years to restart.

When they manage to do so.

The assembly of the tube bundle in a nuclear steam generator is still carried out mainly by hand, using hundreds of shims, anti-vibration bars and supports.

At the other end of the spectrum are stamped-plate heat exchangers, which are mass-produced using a press line.

Each has its own specific application, and they are neither comparable nor interchangeable. The comparison makes no sense.

> with CNC and robots we can achieve far superior results for a fraction of the cost.

This is only true for mass production, where the set-up costs are spread across thousands of units. For small batches, the cost of automation often exceeds the cost of the batch itself. CNC machines are not magic; they require qualified and competent staff.

The same applies to quality control, fitting and assembly.

I don’t think they’re planning to start mass producing of SR-71s.

> because the job had become obsolete

You are greatly underestimating the number of parts, welds and inspections carried out on critical equipment that are done by hand or in small batches by highly skilled workers. The fact that they use a CNC machine does not make their job obsolete. In fact, quite the opposite is true, its require more skills.

Apart from the turbine section, virtually nothing on a helicopter is produced with a high level of automation or in large batch.

So titanium alloys are not completely resistant to all forms of corrosion. They are particularly prone to galvanic corrosion, which means that specific tools must be used, all forms of ferritic contamination must be avoided, special tools must be used, and they must be stored separately, etc.

This is very labour-intensive, which is why it is generally carried out in dedicated workshops, with specialised equipment, and so on, by staff who have been specifically trained and do nothing else.

If you add jigs, production-specific tools, and so on, all of that has been lost and needs to be recreated: staff need to be trained, QA defined and workshops need to be reorganised. This can take decades to return to the expected standard. You can throw as much money at this sort of problem as you like without actually being able to speed things up.

Finding the drawings and dimensions is the easy part of reverse engineering a mechanical device. The real challenges lie in identifying the manufacturing processes and quality control procedures, and achieving the expected performance with an acceptable scrap rate.

If I place a monocrystalline turbine blade on your desk, you’d be able to draw up the plans for it. But that would tell you absolutely nothing about the processes required to produce a monocrystalline ingot of a nickel superalloy.

Source: former mechanical engineer in the nuclear industry, managing obsolescence was one of my day-to-day tasks.

There are a whole host of microstates and more or less autonomous overseas territories that use the euro. If Mayotte can use the euro even though the island is on the brink of collapse, I don’t see why that would be a problem for Iceland.

I don’t think this is a problem for the EU – quite the opposite, in fact. It strengthens the euro’s position in international trade, increases the number of users and boosts the volume of trade. More customers for the EU’s financial services sector.

There are a number of countries that unofficially use the US dollar as their currency for major transactions without asking anyone’s permission (Cambodia come to mind).

This is one of the main reasons for the discussions. The Icelandic króna is a very small currency that fluctuates significantly. It is a small economy, and the difference in currency complicates access to European financial services. Switching to the euro would enable them to eliminate exchange rate risk with their main trading partners.

There are countries outside the EU that have switched to the euro for this reason, such as Montenegro and Kosovo.

One of the factors leading them to reconsider EU membership is monetary policy. The Icelandic króna is a very small currency that fluctuates considerably. Switching to the euro would protect them from exchange rate risks with their main trading partner.

One solution for Iceland would be to join the eurozone without becoming a member of the EU, as Kosovo and Montenegro have done. However, this would only be desirable if there really is a deadlock over fishing rights.

There’s a small cinema in Paris that still screens 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' once a month; at certain times of the year, there’s even a troupe of amateur actors.

When I went to see it, it was a joyful shambles, with rice, water, ad-libbed lines, and drag queens surfing the audience.

The Keynesian debt theory, the government should run up debt and support the economy during recessions, and then repay that debt quickly during periods of growth. This is not what is happening.

Repaying the interest on debt held by a Norwegian pension fund has only a very minor impact on the US real economy.

The principal is repaid by issuing new bonds at maturity. This can be sustained for a long time if interest rates are low, but for much less time if rates rise. The volume of bonds being issued becomes so great that rates have to be raised to ensure they all find buyers.

It is not as though the US Treasury can afford to wait until it finds a buyer at lower yield. It absolutely must sell these bonds to pay off the principal on the old ones.

US government bond yields are regarded as the rate of return on a risk-free asset. So, for someone to decide to lend you money or invest in your business, you need to offer them a higher rate of return. This extra return is the risk premium. So when interest rates are close to 0 per cent, mortgages are cheap and everyone is prepared to risk their money on a slide deck promising significant losses over the next three years. Because cash yields next to nothing, investors race to generate returns elsewhere, which artificially depresses the risk premium.

If US bonds are at 5 per cent, your banker will add their margin on top and your bank loan will be at least 7 per cent or higher if they fear a rise in interest rates and inflation. Investors will be much more discerning and demand higher risk premiums to move away from risk-free yields. As there are far fewer sectors capable of offering such returns, investment will concentrate on a very small number of sectors and companies (does AI ring a bell?).

It is therefore the bond yield that affects us directly, rather than the volume of debt alone. The volume of debt does have an effect, however, as the bulk of the interest is paid by issuing new bonds. If the government repays with cheaper bonds, it isn’t too serious; but if rates rise, the impact on budget deficits is exponential.

The thing is, the more debt and interest there is to pay, the more bonds need to be sold. To absorb this huge supply, the market demands higher yields to attract buyers, which in turn drives up borrowing costs for everyone.

It’s not quite the same when a schoolchild or a farmer has to figure out different train timetable formats depending on the railway company. It was the 1980s, and these were the first affordable watches available…

The SNCF doesn’t change its format when you travel to Brittany or Alsace.

For a very long time, China and India used a mixture of the 12-hour and 24-hour formats, which meant they had to convert the time or switch between time formats multiple times par day. That was the intended use of this button.

Both countries have now officially switched to the 24-hour format.

A Chinese and Russian troll farm employs people from French-speaking Africa for their French-language operations.

There are many Ivorians and Senegalese promoting the CCP’s ‘Community of common destiny’ on Reddit, for example.

Edit: Community of common destiny for mankind/‘Community of Nations’

There’s bots that automatically downvotes certain topics on HN. I post at times that often coincide with the middle of the night in North America, and I get 3–5 downvotes within the next 5 minutes.

Talking about a country that sets up fake think tanks is a good way of triggering them.

with a resolution of 640x480 or below !

> living in Berlin ... I don't think I will ever feel integrated.

I’d understood this was a typical Berlin experience even for German.

gaborkoos.com blog post, It suggests that the overflow is a sort of extension of the primary bucket, when it is a entry par entry collisions resolution mechanism.

The abseil documentation is dense but clear. What I get is Swiss tables are a sort of SSE optimized upside down Merkle tree.

This is one of the least clear explanations of what a hash map bucket and overflow are that I hav read.

Public or shared technical ducts and technical galleries, available to all operators, are a distinctive feature of France. The law strongly encourages the leasing of, or joint investment in, telecommunications infrastructure. All operators have sharing agreements; as soon as a block of flats or a house is connected to the fibre network by one operator, it is possible to subscribe to any operator.

In many countries, the ducts belong to the operator, who is under no obligation to lease or share access with other operators.

It’s not perfect, as technicians from one provider tend to neglect customers of another, and it’s not uncommon to be disconnected by mistake. But it does mean there’s a wide range of options and genuine competition in the services and price. It’s not as if we’re left with ‘Verizon’s the only option here’.

Major campaigns to install telephone lines took place in the run-up to and during the First World War. This enabled civilians and conscripts who were not trained in the use of radio to communicate with headquarters.

There were literally regiments drawing up lines as the troops advanced.

We mustn’t forget the context: FFmpeg and Videolan got their start in dorm rooms, where students used them to stream TV in the dorm and share movies.

The Polytechnique and École Centrale campuses are just a few kilometers apart, and both projects began around 1997–1998.

I don’t know about you, but as a student, I was too busy drinking beer to write clean code.

Perhaps you should limit it to capital cities or states with a certain population size. Including all the European microstates does not seem appropriate to me; Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican have very varying degrees of independence and geopolitical significance.

Meta on Facebook: posts about contraception, HIV or family planning will get you banned. Posting photos of drowned migrants on Italian beaches with hateful messages? That’s cool, bro free speech.

It’s those left-wingers and their ‘cancel culture’ that are stopping these oppressed billionaires from speaking freely!

It’s not just Europeans who are beginning to realize that the U.S. can’t be trusted; Australians are still waiting for a hypothetical delivery date for their AUKUS submarines.

The Gulf states find themselves with too few interceptor missiles and a war in Iran.

The Japanese and Koreans are building as many war ships as they can.

Don’t worry, hardware manufacturers are going to keep ripping us off with HDR encoding. HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and so on.

It depends on how long you've been using WordPress, whether you use plugins, whether they're well-maintained or not, and so on.

Back around 2010, there were security vulnerabilities in WordPress or its popular plugins almost every month.

"Installed battery storage in France rose 35% last year 1.61 gigawatts, according to grid operator RTE data."

1.5 GW are pumped-storage hydroelectric power plants (PSPPs). This article is shit.

DRM has always been a means of protecting a monopoly; copyright protection is merely the excuse given to justify the measure and the monopoly.