As I have already pointed out, general audience, analysts, strategists & decision makers included holds unrealistic notions of how the global economy is organised. Now that is because they never see the back end of industrial civilisation
So let me show you some
There is a major delusion of seeing Europe as a sort of retired continent that "lags in tech" or even "doesn't produce anything". To some extent, it is just American hubris.
But there is more in there than just hubris. There is also some honest, sincere ignorance. The thing with most people is that they see only facade of industrial civilisation. They never ever had a chance to look behind the curtains
Whatever there is behind, is a total mystery
Now we come to the neat part. "Most people" includes almost the entire governing class of the West. Recruited from the service economy, it was never introduced to the back end. It has never been behind the curtains.
The governing class has no idea.
Seeing facade only means seeing only the final product. In this case the Angara rocket launch. We see it, we register it, we base our conclusions upon it. What we don't see, however, is the back end infrastructure supporting it all, hardware & software included.
Roscosmos is the Russian corporation responsible both for civilian space launches and for the ICBM production. In theory, civilian and military sectors are separated.
In reality, there is a certain overlap. Space rocket is not that different from an intercontinental missile.
The structure of Roscomos is typical for a Russian megacorporation. On the very lowest level, there are production facilities, manufacturing plants. They belong to the R&D facilities, Design Bureaus. So, these Design Bureaus form the vertically integrated companies of their own
One of these vertically integrated companies within the Roscosmos structure is Khrunichev Space Center. A smaller doll within Roscosmos, it has even smaller dolls (= manufacturing plants) inside. Again, visualising it all as a sort of of matryoshka can be very helpful.
Now let's go even further down the Roscosmos, structure. The manufacturing plant Polet. You can frame this production facility as the smallest doll within the gargantuan matryoshka. Producing the Angara space rockets, it also makes parts for other rockets & aircrafts.
Let's have a look at the Polet's 80th anniversary video. Published in 2021, it is very much available on youtube. Short as it is, it gives some glimpse into the back end infrastructure standing behind the space rocket production.
See a relevant fragment:
So, let's zoom in into some hardware & software we can register in this 3 minutes long video above.
Siemens 🇩🇪 CNC controller on what is very possibly a Dufleux 🇫🇷 milling machine.
(I believe MMS on the screen may refer to the Milling Mirror System)
We think of the UK as of a deindustrialised country. And there is certainly lots of truth in that. Still, it has some sophisticated, high end machinery production, for example of measuring equipment. We just don't see it, because it's all in the back end.
DMG Mori AG 🇩🇪 This seems to be an entire workshop equipped with DMG machines.
So what do wee see on this limited, 3 minutes long sample giving a glimpse to the Polet production facilities? We see German, Italian and French precision cutting machines. We see German CNC control systems. We even see the British metrological equipment.
Damn, it's all Europe.
What we see, is that the space rocket production relies on the computerised, software dependent machinery, 100% of our sample being recent European production.
Nothing Asian. Nothing American. And more interestingly, nothing old. All new stuff.
This is a very recent development. Until basically yesterday, the very same plant relied on manual, conventional methods. Extremely laborious, extremely difficult. Effectively semi artisanal. You do it all with your fingers, literally. Requires extreme eye to hand coordination.
Not that all people who could do that are dead (though most are). It's that these skills have never been passed to the younger generation. Younger workers do not know how to do precision machining by hand and not going to learn. They rely on modern, user friendly CAM & CNC.
Still, hardware makes for only part of the picture. Software is at least equally important. What you see here is instrumental for understanding the organisation of knowledge either on this specific plant, or in the aerospace industry in general.
See the red circle
How it used to work before? You draw the designs by hand. You make the calculations by hand. After many and many and many adjustments you send it to the workshop, only to make new adjustments after. It was the enormous investment of time and effort.
Much of this investment was inefficient. What one person did could be indecipherable to another (esp. the unfinished work). Much of the work done was lost or forgotten. So you would redo the same again, and again, while the 100% perfect design is lying in a dusty box somewhere.
Perhaps, no single factor has revolutionised the aerospace industry (aircraft & rockets included) as much as the implementation of fully integrated solutions by Siemens. You can see Teamcenter as an operating system, not of a plant, but of an entire production chain, top-down.
By this point, the Siemens integration turned into the key for the normal functioning of a modern aerospace plant. Being non-alternative, it is the foundation everything else is built upon. Any other CAD, CAE, ERP whatever else is tested for compatibility, and must be compatible
I will cover in more detail later. For now you need to believe
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What I am saying is that "capitalist reforms" are a buzzword devoid of any actual meaning, and a buzzword that obfuscated rather than explains. Specifically, it is fusing radically different policies taken under the radically different circumstances (and timing!) into one - purely for ideological purposes
It can be argued, for example, that starting from the 1980s, China has undertaken massive socialist reforms, specifically in infrastructure, and in basic (mother) industries, such as steel, petrochemical and chemical and, of course, power
The primary weakness of this argument is that being true, historically speaking, it is just false in the context of American politics where the “communism” label has been so over-used (and misapplied) that it lost all of its former power:
“We want X”
“No, that is communism”
“We want communism”
Basically, when you use a label like “communism” as a deus ex machina winning you every argument, you simultaneously re-define its meaning. And when you use it to beat off every popular socio economic demand (e.g. universal healthcare), you re-define communism as a synthesis of all the popular socio economic demands
Historical communism = forced industrial development in a poor, predominantly agrarian country, funded through expropriation of the peasantry
(With the most disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences)
Many are trying to explain his success with some accidental factors such as his “personal charisma”, Cuomo's weakness etc
Still, I think there may be some fundamental factors here. A longue durée shift, and a very profound one
1. Public outrage does not work anymore
If you look at Zohran, he is calm, constructive, and rarely raises his voice. I think one thing that Mamdani - but almost no one else in the American political space is getting - is that the public is getting tired of the outrage
Outrage, anger, righteous indignation have all been the primary drivers of American politics for quite a while
For a while, this tactics worked
Indeed, when everyone around is polite, and soft (and insincere), freaking out was a smart thing to do. It could help you get noticed
People don’t really understand causal links. We pretend we do (“X results in Y”). But we actually don’t. Most explanations (= descriptions of causal structures) are fake.
There may be no connection between X and Y at all. The cause is just misattributed.
Or, perhaps, X does indeed result in Y. but only under a certain (and unknown!) set of conditions that remains totally and utterly opaque to us. So, X->Y is only a part of the equation
And so on
I like to think of a hypothetical Stone Age farmer who started farming, and it worked amazingly, and his entire community adopted his lifestyle, and many generations followed it and prospered and multiplied, until all suddenly wiped out in a new ice age
1. Normative Islamophobia that used to define the public discourse being the most acceptable form of racial & ethnic bigotry in the West, is receding. It is not so much dying as rather - failing to replicate. It is not that the old people change their views as that the young do not absorb their prejudice any longer.
In fact, I incline to think it has been failing to replicate for a while, it is just that we have not been paying attention
Again, the change of vibe does not happen at once. The Muslim scare may still find (some) audience among the more rigid elderly, who are not going to change their views. But for the youth, it is starting to sound as archaic as the Catholic scare of know nothings
Out of date
2. What is particularly interesting regarding Mamdani's victory, is his support base. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that its core is comprised of the young (and predominantly white) middle classes, with a nearly equal representation of men and women
What does Musk vs Trump affair teach us about the general patterns of human history? Well, first of all it shows that the ancient historians were right. They grasped something about nature of politics that our contemporaries simply can’t.
Let me give you an example. The Arab conquest of Spain
According to a popular medieval/early modern interpretation, its primary cause was the lust of Visigoth king Roderic. Aroused by the beautiful daughter of his vassal and ally, count Julian, he took advantage of her
Disgruntled, humiliated Julian allied himself with the Arabs and opens them the gates of Spain.
Entire kingdom lost, all because the head of state caused a personal injury to someone important.