True, but now you’ve just invented the Concorde problem again. How are you going to fill enough seats on a daily/weekly basis to justify a route? That’s if you even manage to make this economical.

Concorde was killed by the internet as major businesses could simply have a video call or email conference instead of needing to send physical delegates to major financial capitals. That took away their core repeat customer base, and they weren’t able to recover past that point. Who will be the main customer base for this?

I think you misunderstood what I meant by the word modern, I should have worded myself better, but what I meant is that even if prices were reduced significantly to 5-10 thousand dollars per ticket as compared to a current day valuation of the approximately 60,000 dollars that a 20,000 dollar concorde ticket would have cost in 1985… who is able to afford that price?

It doesn’t matter what technology comes into play, bringing the price of a suborbital liner to modern day airfare prices would be impossible. 5-10 thousand dollars from 60 thousand is already an astronomical drop. What customers have 5-10 thousand dollars lying around for a single flight?

There is no economy of scale for a niche luxury product with more economical alternatives. You have an incredibly small subset of customers, and dropping the price from 10 thousand to 8 thousand isn’t going to drive up business at all. Especially when a one way flight from New York to Beijing is 400-1,500 dollars, and as has been shown through endless industry studies, the primary concern for airline customers is by far price.

I know all this. Nothing you mentioned prevents Chinese companies from making bad or speculative investments. Regulatory authorities are not going to step in just because one company invested into a bunk project that went nowhere. Hundreds of companies go bankrupt in China every week, and hundreds more are formed, as it would be a bureaucratic nightmare for the central economic office to micromanage the investments of individual firms. Speculative venture capital is also not “gaming the system” as insider trading and short selling are, and the entire point is that there is a high risk to those investments.

I don’t see how you describing China’s mixed command economy is at all relevant to a small startup firm taking a risk on a single aircraft frame. A bird in a cage can still choke itself on a poor investment and die.

What worries me is that those profit calculations don’t mean that Chinese firms aren’t just as susceptible as western firms to speculative investing and venture capital interests.

Hopefully this goes somewhere, but even with a modern price of 5,000 dollars. I’m still confused as to who this plane is meant to serve. It is outclassed by trains for regional travel, and is entirely uneconomical for long distance flights since while it can save fuel while cruising, it will chew through a massive quantity of fuel while accelerating and climbing.

Also the Blackbird sacrifices a LOT to be as light and aerodynamic as it is, as is evident by the pilot requiring an entire spacesuit. That’s not really conducive to commercial travel.

Didn’t the internet essentially make the Concord obsolete? Its main purpose was flying businessmen from New York to London/Paris so they could finish major transactions before the markets closed.

Tickets were also 20,000 dollars in 1985 money, so even if China makes a plane with a modern ticket price of 10,000-15,000… who exactly is the customer base for this?

China and Vietnam still has a VAT tax system based off of the Soviet system as well

Oh, I agree, and I wasn’t disputing that Google is a scummy IDF supporting company.

I was just saying that the research wasn’t Tel Aviv University’s. He was just a contributor to the project.

This research didn’t come from there. Arar is a traveling PhD student who contributed to the research team while studying in the United States, the research is entirely google’s.

Still leaves a bad taste in your my though.

Their source is Mike Benz… on the Tucker Carlson podcast?

Really pulling out the irrefutable sources I see.

True, but that’s not displayed as inherent to the Soviets or even unreasonable to a degree. The German brutality is talked about and displayed frequently, and the actions of the Soviets are displayed as a righteous anger in response to an invasion and suffering at the hands of an incredibly evil enemy. War is hell, and I feel that the game demonstrated the brutality of the conflict well. The US and Japan also shown engaging in that same brutality in the Pacific Campaign, so its not something unique to the Soviet missions.

Even then, moments like the one you talk about are rare, and preceded by a lot of context. For example, the scene where the group of SS soldiers attempt to surrender and you have the option to burn or shoot them, comes directly after an entire mission of that SS unit fighting savagely and repeatedly killing captured or surrendered Soviet troops, and then only surrendering because they attempted to escape into the metro system but were cut off and surrounded.

Or even the scene at the beginning of “Their land, their blood”, where Rheznov gives you the option of shooting the Germans bleeding out on the floor, comes after those same Germans beat you, a captured soldier, senseless, and were preparing to execute you. Which they were only prevented in doing because of the Red Army’s arrival.

To answer your question, Call of Duty 2 is alright. You’ll run into some tropes here or there, but nothing egregious. Mainly stuff along the lines of your officer giving you potatoes to use for throwing practice instead of training grenades. The game is a simple, fun, arcade shooter.

Call of Duty 1 is much much worse and I would stay away from it, mainly because its very unpolished and not fun.

The USSR did not actually kill retreating men in the field. Blocking detachments were mainly made up of the worst soldiers in a unit and were primarily used to round up malingerers and send them back to the front. There were also roughly 100-250 men in each blocking detachment, and each group was expected to enforce no-retreat orders on a regiment of roughly 40,000-50,000 men. The primary politcal goal of blocking detachments was to persuade officers from ordering panicked retreats in order to prevent the front line from collapsing. If individual units needed to fall back, they would be allowed to.

If a solider was suspected of serious desertion, they would be arrested and tried under court martial, not shot on the spot.

The only caveat to this is that Penal troops were followed by armed NKVD officers which would kill them on the spot for attempting to either surrender to the Germans, or escape from captivity.

Early in the war, Germany overran many Soviet divisions and their armament stockpiles leaving many troops without ammunition and oftentimes even rifles. This led to many Soviet divisions that survived the initial invasion being woefully under-equipped and significantly weaker then they appeared on paper; which in turn, led to further military disasters, notably around Minsk and Kiev.

However, by the start of the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, these logistical failures had been fixed for months and no longer plagued Soviet front line units. In fact, the Southern front had an overabundance of weapons and ammunition, and a severe lack of manpower due to the fighting around Leningrad and Moscow sucking up all available reserves.

What you are looking for is Call of Duty: World at War. You have two campaigns, one being American and focused on the Pacific, and the second being Soviet and focused on the Eastern Front.

From what I remember, there is very little, if any, historical revisionism or state department propaganda, so you won’t run into something along the lines of the Soviets randomly committing war crimes to show how “barbaric” they are or other garbage similar to that. The American campaign also doesn’t just hype America up to be this unstoppable war machine that was single-handedly responsible for winning WW2.

Every so often I’ll go back and replay the game due to how incredibly cathartic they make mowing down droves of Nazis. Storming the Reichstag is definitely my favorite part by far from both campaigns. Just watching the Nazi Eagle get hit with a rocket before tumbling down from the rafters and crushing the SS men taking cover behind Hitler’s podium is amazing. Not to mention the ending scene itself.

The automation is because it’s always been a felony not to register, same as it is in virtually every country with mandatory service, so to avoid the horrifically needless societal effects that come from giving someone a felony for a random crime, they simply automated it.

Basically what they did with social security years ago. Used to also be a crime to not sign up by a certain age, so they just started immediately registering all children at birth.

I really loved the Professor Layton series. They were technically very impressive for the limited hardware of the DS. Fully voiced and animated cutscenes, with a deep and immersive story, loaded to the brim with interesting mini games and side games so fleshed out they could be their own standalone titles.

I also loved Steel Diver, never been able to find anything like it!

It’s a predatory practice, but that feels like it’s more on the consumer at that point. If you blow your money on pointless stuff like that, or forget to cancel your subscriptions, then you are not responsible with your money.

Do people not check their bank statements at the end of the month?

What idiot is using all of those services simultaneously though? At that point you either pirate or choose one or two services to use for the month. You can’t watch them all at once anyway. If you’re buying all of them, then that’s on you at that point.

Eh, me too, but not for 100+ dollars.