Comment by Retric
4 days ago
Mundane != commonplace, in 1969 when the very first 747 entered service there was exactly 1 of them in service. It took a long time to build up an actual fleet of them.
Aircraft are a durable good, 20 year old aircraft are in regular service even today.
> quick and mundane which the Space Shuttle accomplished in spades.
Again perception not reality, from 1981 to 2011 each shuttle averaged roughly 1 flight per year. The program was paused twice for multiple years after each failure.
It was very much still an experimental program where they where they constantly tweaked things not a mundane just do everything the same every time kind of thing. “Shuttle main engines 104 percent” because the RS 25 went through a series of upgrades. FMOF, Phase I, Phase II (RS-25A), Block I (RS-25B), Block IA (RS-25B), Block IIA (RS-25C), Block II (RS-25D): First flown on STS-104.
> Russia was never considered Western
So rather than falling, that suggests an overall trend of political ascendancy of the west through at least the fall of the USSR in 1991.
> perceived as bad) economy
Perception has become wildly devoid of reality. The US economy handled COVID amazingly well, but we’ve become so used to success we don’t even understand what it means to suffer minimal issues. We’ve had such long term success we’ve forgotten what failure looks like, that’s about the opposite of failure.
>in 1969 when the very first 747 entered service there was exactly 1 of them in service.
Yeah, and also in 1969 air travel was already mundane.
>that suggests an overall trend of political ascendancy of the west through at least the fall of the USSR in 1991.
I did argue the peak of the West was in the mid to late 20th century.
>We’ve had such long term success we’ve forgotten what failure looks like.
The 2008 Great Recession was the latest significant failure, though even that was actually pretty mild as failures go.
Nonetheless the economy today is bad, because Main Street says it's bad. Complaints of inflation, stagnant wages, rising costs of living, among others are all real.
I suppose if there's any consolation, at least a head of cabbage doesn't cost around $7 dollars here (yet?) unlike in Japan.[1]
[1]: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15582870
> 2008 Great Recession
Recessions are benchmarked relative to the years around it not overall economy by historic standards. At the peak of 2008’s recession things were still doing quite well. 10.0% unemployment and 5.1% drop in GDP from the peak is tiny.
It doesn’t even qualify in the top 10 US recessions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...