Here are links to some posts on the other ‘Safe-for-Work’ Blog.
Dune, Islam, Arab Nationalism and Star Wars
We can finally stop pretending that the Fremen are something other that Muslim Arabs in the Middle-East or that Arrakis is some place other than the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. Denis Villeneuve does a pretty good of highlighting this underlying subtext to the audience in a multitude of ways from how actors look, landscape, architecture, traditional dress etc. The similarities between how Harkonnen use aerial military power to attempt subjugating the Fremen has more than a passing similarity to scenes of conflict from the Middle-East, which we have all seen since the early 2000s.
Chinese E-Commerce Outlets Will Soon Destroy Their Western Competition
Yes.. most of the stuff you buy on American e-commerce sites is made in China, often in the same factories and on same assembly lines at the stuff sold on Temu, Shien etc. In fact, over the past 2-3 years, it is becoming increasingly hard to ignore that a lot of products advertised and sold on Amazon are identical to those on Temu, but significantly more expensive than on the later. Hence the first big perceived advantage of Amazon such as better quality and lower price no longer holds for many classes of products and this situation is only going to get worse for Amazon etc as sites such as Temu will start going after product categories higher up the value chain.
Ukraine Conflict Has Exposed the Mediocrity of Western Weapon Systems
Three decades of deindustrialization has left the West with an inability to build weapon systems at the rate they get consumed in a real armed conflict. This is why Russia can easily make over 5-6 times the number of artillery shells than entire military industrial base of NATO can produce. The same is true for many other consumables from ATGMs, MRLS projectiles, air-defense missiles, tanks, AFVs and much more. It seems the West can’t even rapidly scale up production of its mediocre over-priced weapons because the industrial and skilled manpower base to do so has decayed or was outsourced to China.
Enjoy!