Yep, that actually checks out. Which is interesting, because just the purchase costs are much closer together (40-50 vs. 90-110 million).

Off topic, but the f35 is still doing a lot better than older stealth planes, from everything I’ve heard. The wonders of a few trillion dollars of engineering work.

The way to run it would be dispersed across the wilderness and not in the air for too long at any one time. That was Sweden’s plan (and why it’s built to resist ingestion of loose rocks among other things), and it would be Canada’s as well just on a much larger scale. That may or may not be enough to overcome the lack of stealth, though. It’s hard to say with public information.

The rest of the EU has a bit of a wilderness shortage, so probably it’s not a good fit. South Korea has an F-35 clone they’re selling, or the EU could just break their agreement with the US and code their own jailbroken software for the F-35.

They’re the same thing. War has casualties; in the long run the important thing is who runs out of stuff first.

That said, I’m not sure the cost difference is actually 10x, and the survivability difference could be quite large, especially if you’re running it out of a fixed airbase.

Yeah, not a good look when America is doing the same thing as a way of disappearing people.

Yeah. Once upon a time both were feared as massive threats to the established order, which was at that time still pretty empire-y. Now, there’s broad consensus that actually, Africans are people too, and that it’s good when there’s some social mobility. You’d expect classlessness and international siblinghood to be easier to sell because of that, but apparently not so.

Maybe it’s just the memory of the Cold War? Young people go left at least as much as right everywhere that I’ve heard of. On this side of the Atlantic there’s very little youth support for the far right, and it’s demographically evenly distributed in western Europe, while the hard left has youth support on both.

Is the message “for the people” not as sexy as “kill those who don’t look like us?”

I’m really not good at the sales part, but I think if you want to hit the monkey brain you go for “eat the rich”.

Honestly, I feel like the far left skips over the hard and complicated stuff far too much as well, although that’s not why they’re polling behind.

He did weirdly less than he could have in his first term. Most Americans did not directly suffer the way they and the rest of the world are now.

It’s also a two-party system, so it’s not super easy just to vote out one ideology.

Unburdened by any attachment to reality, they can paint a very appealing rhetorical picture.

Fascism did really well the last time around until Hitler got to do stuff, too.

Yep. All the funding they’ve already put into it will stay put. You can’t uncode FOSS.

You can also take an intermediate approach, actually. Usually I can tell from just the developer docs or whitepapers if something has a way of producing the guarantees it claims.

Look, you either check for yourself, or trust people who have. The only other option amounts to building your own parallel reality.

Go look at the code, then.

I mean, there can be weird exceptions, like the one person still collecting a US civil war pension because certain participants had kids as very old men. But yes, most people with an uncle of Tesla’s generation are very dead.

Never was, honestly. If it’s not on your computer it’s on someone else’s, and it’s only a matter of time until that’s somebody you don’t trust.

Yes, we call our dollar coins “loonies” as a result. By analogy, the bimetallic $2 coin is the “toonie” for two.

That looks like a joke written out, but it is not.

Yeah, exactly. He’s not even in charge anymore.

Don’t do it, Europe. Listen to your experts.

There’s also credit unions.

Knowing your nationality, some Canadian provinces do have a public bank too, like ATB in Alberta.

I wonder what you’re thinking of. On just about every issue there’s somewhere in Europe further right or further left. Since this is Lemmy you probably don’t mean we like immigrants too much.

You can still decorate your Euros how you want, so we could keep our beavers and loons.