Perhaps we just need to generate a little excitement.

Gladiators worked nicely for the Romans, maybe we could generate similar hype with a reality show to choose the governor of each new province. I think “Love Island, Argentinian Governor Edition” would be a real hit.

Hard to argue we don’t have the appetite after spending our first 150 years conquering territory roughly double the size of the Roman Empire at its peak

Can you imagine the Italians running everything? Sure there’d be plenty of good pasta and wine worldwide but I doubt we’d stay productive with three-hour wine lubricated lunch breaks every day

I say the USA needs to have a proper go at an empire. People could serve in the legion (navy) for citizenship and everything

They collect a tithe of 10% of members’ income from the entire congregation. Most people accumulate less than 10% of their income as net worth annually

So yes, quite possibly they do.

Full power 45-70 is extremely punishing to shoot out of a lever action rifle much less a derringer

Starship Troopers

The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.

People have no issue paying content creators.

Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.

Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.

If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.

Did you know they don’t eat garlic bread in Italy?

Ergo, “Italian Food” in America is better than food in Italy. They have to take us out as a matter of self defense

The US built the XF-85 goblin parasite fighter, which was supposed to be deployed using a robotic arm from the bomb bay of a B-36. The idea came from ww2 when we had escort fighters for most major bombing missions to keep the bombers safe.

It wasn’t practical to build a fighter with enough range to escort strategic bombers into the Soviet Union so they thought, “why not carry the fighter inside the bomber?”

Copying weapons is a completely different thing from an ethical and technical difficulty standpoint over reselling digital art.

Sure thing!

Honestly I wish we didn’t have to design manned spacecraft to be manually pilotable because you have to make design sacrifices to get there. However, that is unlikely to happen in the lunar program anytime soon

There was a significant amount of manual piloting in the Apollo missions

The guidance gets more difficult in the terminal stages and they didn’t really trust computers to safely control the spacecraft near the surface, so their solution was to have the computer fly 95% of the way down and have the crew take over for the terminal phase.

The Apollo algorithms work fine for non-manned missions as well, but you have to vet the trajectory targets more fully in simulation and add some active retargeting scheme to avoid obstacles near the surface.

Combine the added complexity of a robotic lander with groups like intuitive that have never landed one before, and this sort of thing happens

Superchargers come with massive parasitic losses, in many cases 10-20%, and there’s a decent handful of cars with clutches on the supercharger pulley. The MR2 is one.

I dunno, I am a engineer in the defense industry and pentagon wars got a lot right in terms of what it’s like