Not impossible, but they did have to deal with gas leaks and a WW2 grenade, and this is a rail bridge on an actively used line.
Still, there's an undeniable sense of "why is this more expensive to replace than it was to build in the first place?" with a lot of infrastructure in the modern world.
Some firms prebuild bridges and slide them in. 20-30% more expensive apparently but a lot faster. Lets say $2M by quading it. Gas line is a nothinger, they would need to shut it down and reconnect it anyways. Grenade removal, they do it in war zones and it is not that expensive in my opinion.
The USSR would have taken over all of Europe, not just Eastern. What would have happened to the former British and French empires? Presumably they'd have been turned communist, but would their struggles for independence have gone the same way?
The Manhattan project would have been announced before it went anywhere, undermined during development and produced no real result. Japan would not have been nuked, but also would not have been invaded and the Pacific theatre would have in general developed in a completely different way. Without the American nuclear arsenal, the world may have skipped the cold war and nukes, or perhaps other states would have made them and used them in a heavy mutual bombardment without restraint.
Eventually in Europe, glasnost and perestroika would still have happened, and the USSR would still have fallen; but the geopolitical and economic importance of the USA would be little different to that of Brazil.
Even if we don't spur the development of home grown operators (and IMO launch on the scale of Starlink is somewhat unrealistic any time soon), it will at least prevent us getting get another incidental dependency on US systems which we can be threatened with loss of access to at any point.
> Asked whether European companies should fear retaliation, Puzder told the FT that they “should be wary that it could happen and it would be very devastating for those companies”, given the size of the American market.
Would this even be "devastating"? Would any of them been able to sell in the US anyway, given the position Starlink is in? I see occasional headlines that Starlink is forcing out other US providers, from the US, but even without that kind of thing going on, this doesn't even feel like much of a threat.
I think it's analogous (though obviously a very different scale) to the difference between me, as a single individual, being able to build and install a grid-connected PV* system for my home where I get to claim "net zero" energy use without having to care who uses what I export or what generates for me at night, vs. a genuinely off-grid system where I need to own the storage and have to deal with it when whatever solution I invest in is insufficient for my needs.
Of course, both China and Denmark can do much better than me at every level, but like I said, analogy.
* I think theoretically I am allowed to install a wind turbine, but same applies.
> are on track to make an ultraintelligent thinking machine, the risks I'm worried about are: killing most jobs, concentrating most wealth, and putting ourselves at risk of literal extinction. All I could think when reading this was, "this person really did not think this all the way through." I'm sorry.
While two out of those three risks do not require anything "ultraintelligent", for killing most jobs it's worth remembering that their track is an appropriation of intelligence, and the speedups happen where it's easiest to measure more than where the tracks correspond to economic value.
Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect for safety, and can still do a lot of wealth concentration even if it doesn't end all jobs.
> When people think of flying cars what they generally have in mind is not a car that can do a flip, it's car that can take them somewhere without needing a road so that it doesn't get stuck in traffic. This car can't do that. All it can do is backflips in a parking lot. That's not nothing, but the novelty will wear off very quickly.
Aye.
That said, on previous stories about flying cars I tend to bring up how the helicopter meets such a standard.
I'm a "they", and no we don't all want to be in the USA.
In fact, many of us are exactly as hubristic about our nations' popularity as you seem to be about the popularity of the US.
Before I left the UK (for Germany), I encountered people who seemed absolutely convinced that all 8 billion humans would move to the small, moist, sheep-filled rock if not for even stronger enforcement of immigration policies.
The US may be physically larger than the UK, but no, the world doesn't want to move to you. We don't want to regularly share the road with what are, by our standards, monster trucks; nor do we want the 2nd; nor strip malls; nor the nuclear arsenal. Many of us have our own alternatives to Mount Rushmore, to the Statue of Liberty, etc., and don't really care about yours.
Quite a lot don't care for the language as spoken and written in the USA, and for a long time that has even included British people, "two nations divided by a common language".
Still, there's an undeniable sense of "why is this more expensive to replace than it was to build in the first place?" with a lot of infrastructure in the modern world.
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