New pyramid leans very heavily on meat and dairy which goes contrary to most long term dietary studies. Those are industries that lobby heavily.

Try learning German or French

yeah seriously

[flagged]

Problem solved, but what about the white monster energy drinks?

https://thegoodshirts.com/products/hello-i-am-fleeing-the-am...

You mean Like the Whitehouse press room today?

I'd suggest looking into the story of Naomi Wu, who many here would know for her videos on the Chinese maker and electronics scene.

They absolutely enforce ideological positions in opposition to science, and very aggressively so.

There is no waffle room on this.

They have suppressed reporting of the deaths and missing from Kyirong Valley and Gyirong Port landslide. Surviving relatives living outside the area would appreciate information but the Chinese Government would prefer that everyone just move along.

US has/had the best schools in the world. US provides/provided remarkable academic independence (tenure, etc). US provides/provided the best expected economic return to foreign scientists.

As we dismantle those components via xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, funding cuts, and so on, trends will change. Already I see a substantial uptick in my PhD/Academic friends moving to Europe as we cede our historic advantages.

If, in say 15 years, China provides better schools, or better economic returns, or (perhaps unlikely) better independence, or all 3, then scientists will go there.

The reason is money. The US has the world reserve currency which basically means infinite money. This will soon end and China will have the world reserve currency.

This doesn’t actually represent an American decline in space exploration, though.

The NASA/ESA Mars sample return was poorly designed, they basically attached a half baked idea to the Perseverance mission in the hopes that having the mission “underway” would make it easier to fund the rest of the mission. That meant Perseverance was just putting things in tubes and leaving them sealed on the ground at random places around Mars. So that meant they would need to devise another system to go collect them, another system to store and launch them, and another system to return them to Earth. That’s a ridiculous process. The costs exploded, the gambit failed.

China’s was much better planned, having the rover and launch vehicle land together, fully funded from the beginning. However, it’s also much simpler, there’s no picking and choosing what to sample from a wide area, it’s just whatever is available to the lander wherever it happens to land.

And this would not have been the only future mission to deep space. The US is going to land a fleet of drones on Mars. They’re launching a nuclear powered drone to Titan.

The US has led the world in reusable rocket development, satellite constellations, and crewed LEO operations.

The big picture is clear. This one mission doesn’t really say much about the space program in general.

Peofle often complain that Trump is a "Russian asset" when he's done far more to boost China's success than Russia's.

The US is still significantly ahead of everyone else in space. It’s just that NASA has become a shadow of its past self.

Maybe it’s better this way. There is a tendency of every organization, private or public, to rot and stagnate over time. But in the private sectors they die more quickly and give way to new entrants, which would help space exploration long term.

> It's hard to imagine, since the moonlandings, if America kept its pace in space exploration ...

The collapse of the USSR was the worst thing to happen to NASA.

I would suggest a watch of "We Stopped Dreaming" https://youtu.be/CbIZU8cQWXc

A less angry version (video and transcript of Neil DeGrasse Tyson testifying before the Senate's Science Committee on 7 March 2012) https://ifsa.my/articles/we-stopped-dreaming-by-neil-degrass...

    Let’s be honest with one anther.  We went to the Moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. To think otherwise is delusion, leading some to suppose the only reason we’re not on Mars already is the absence of visionary leaders, or of political will, or of money. No. When you perceive your security to be at risk, money flows like rivers to protect us.

    But there exists another driver of great ambitions, almost as potent as war. That’s the promise of wealth. Fully funded missions to Mars and beyond, commanded by astronauts who, today, are in middle school, would reboot America’s capacity to innovate as no other force in society can. What matters here are not spin-offs (although I could list a few: Accurate affordable Lasik surgery, Scratch resistant lenses, Cordless power tools, Tempurfoam, Cochlear implants, the drive to miniaturize of electronics…) but cultural shifts in how the electorate views the role of science and technology in our daily lives.

    As the 1970s drew to a close, we stopped advancing a space frontier. The “tomorrow” articles faded. And we spent the next several decades coasting on the innovations conceived by earlier dreamers. They knew that seemingly impossible things were possible—the older among them had enabled, and the younger among them had witnessed the Apollo voyages to the Moon—the greatest adventure there ever was. If all you do is coast, eventually you slow down, while others catch up and pass you by.

> but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.

So things like curing AIDS don't count?

>What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.?

What view do you have of what programs have been cut from Chinese government budgets? Can you link to some of the HN discussions around them so I can also see people commenting on the internal policy decisions that the Chinese government has made available for people to openly comment on?

As someone from the former USSR, I find that hard to imagine. Downright denial that the moon landings even happened, sure, but seeing them as a bad event? Not really likely.

The Soviets launched the first satellite, put the first animal into space, launched the first lunar probe, got the first photographs of the dark side of the moon, put the first human in space, put the first woman in space, put the first craft with more than one crew member into space, did the first spacewalk, sent the first probe to Venus, got the first pictures of another planet, and launched the first space station.

The moon landing was fine and all, a moment of global historic import (and propaganda value, with the US putting their flag on it like they owned the damned thing) but that's still just one victory in a race that was otherwise entirely dominated by the Soviets, and on balance what the Soviets did was of greater scientific merit than anything the US would achieve for years. Americans didn't even care about space until Russia flew Sputnik over their heads.

Taxpayer money being used for race-based and gender-based "research".

"fostering gender equity" is not even science, trying to equate these grants with something like researching fundamental physics or chemistry is disingenuous.

Well, at the very least they can pump the brakes on the stupid by giving power back to congress.

Stop rubber stamping stupidity like RFK, pass a war powers resolution, and reign in the vengeance based tariffs.

It isn't like the VP hasn't done impeachable offenses.

They could get warmed up for it by first impeaching Pete Hegseth and RFK.

Also they’re no where near each other. These Chinese rover cannot get there.

Also also, if China were to create a new mission to collect them, they would see their costs balloon to unsustainable levels as well, as the issue is how the mission is designed. The samples are all over the place and would need a rover specifically designed to collect them and return them to a launcher.

The US Mars sample return project was always half baked in the hopes that doing something would garner funding for the rest of the mission.

> China stole design information regarding advanced thermonuclear weapons

Sounds like they blew it. What a shame.