Sam Weiss

A WW2 Infographic Thread using Luftwaffe monthly locations and losses. For more info see here: scweiss.blogspot.com/2022/07/blog-p…

@YouJiacheng This is clearly a cheap knockoff of the original R package github.com/samcarlos/pRot… Clearly the WTO (world tariff organization) should provide an additional tariff to those who use this packages until we clear up the rights

1) WHAT

@BillAckman @ZelenskyyUa @Ukraine @realDonaldTrump no. the Russian agents in the white house are thr problem

I totally agree that Zelensky was the problem today after watching the whole session. Don’t rely on media excerpts if you want to get to the truth. @ZelenskyyUa mishandled this. And I say this as someone who has supported @Ukraine from the beginning of the war. @realDonaldTrump was appropriately angry, but kept his composure. In a negotiation, you should never overplay your hand, particularly if it is a bad one, and the lives of your people are at stake. In order to be a mediator, you can’t be viewed by either side as favoring the other. Trump is carefully and patiently playing this role. It is not helpful for Zelensky to be disrespectful. That said, I expect Trump to continue to be the honest broker between Russia and Ukraine, but he will now likely increase what he wants for the U.S. unless Zelensky quickly apologizes and offers something to Trump. A very unfortunate day for Ukraine.

@sentdefender why stop there? get protectionism to work for you today! github.com/samcarlos/pRot…

U.S. President Donald J. Trump says from the Oval Office, that he expects 25% Tariffs on all Products coming from both Canada and Mexico to come into effect on February 1st.

@mattyglesias People can still practice the Tariff Life through code! github.com/samcarlos/pRot…

@mattyglesias early voting is down by alot for democrats in PA. what do you make of it? cnn.com/2024/11/04/pol…

Harris makes a solid point @elonmusk … .. guess you don’t believe in free speech youtu.be/WYQxG4KEzvo?si…

@adam_tooze @nytimes you've really gone off the deep end

Bizarre! Jaw-dropping. Truly a testament to how of out touch the American political and media class are. The @nytimes has been nothing short of an embarrassment!

@AusSkeptic which analysis are you referring to?

A few WW2 aviation facts that remain not universally known. 1) The Hawker Typhoon was never envisaged as a ground attack aircraft, in fact it was supposed to completely replace both the Hurricane and Spitfire, both of which were expected by the Air Ministry to be technically outmoded by 1940. 2) German employment in aviation research in the 1930`s equalled that at the peak of WW1 - before the Nazis even came to power. 3) The Allies had superb intelligence about German synthetic aviation fuel plants because we had planned, built or insured many of the plants for the Germans in the 30`s. 4) The "miracle" delivery of 100 Octane fuel from the USA which arrived "just in time" to save us in 1940, had been jointly planned with the Americans since 1935. 5) Beatrice Shilling`s famous "orifice" fix for the infamous negative-g problem which emerged in the RAF in 1940 was actually only needed because the entirely new pressure carburettor (utterly immune to cut out) which she had already developed years before with other RAE engineers was ignored. 6) The Rolls-Royce Merlin began its life as a catastrophic disaster, which took years to resolve. The problems carried on so long that the RAF had to use some of the early Merlin`s, which were palmed off to be used in the Fairey Battle. 7) Far from the Defiant being an "oddity" or "experiment", it was actually at one stage a surprise that the fixed 8-gun fighter existed at all, many in the Air Ministry in the mid 30`s were adamant that the turret fighter would be the entire mainstay of the RAF. 8) The 2-stage supercharger which saved the RAF from the Fw190 in 1942 in the Spitfire IX, had in equivalent form been developed in Germany in the mid-1930`s, by Daimler-Benz, but seems to have been dropped from development for dubious reasons before the war broke out. 9) Most Allied fighter pilots ended the war without a single kill. Most of the victories were made by a tiny percentage of pilots, German pilots carried on virtually indefinite tours of duty, so their best pilots racked up absolutely astonishing scores, leading to the idea that pilots from different nations had radically differing fundamental abilities. 10) Secrecy on many topics was not what it was today, German scientists and engineers carried on publishing much of their wartime work in academic journals (available world-wide through embassies and other means) until about mid 1944.

@flattop100 @CalumDouglas1 Yea .. wonder if he misses abacuses

@CalumDouglas1 This is a little over wrought. There are still plenty of textbooks out there on drafting, and I'm pretty sure stores still sell t squares, compasses, and French curves.

All current Formula One engines use turbo compounding. This allows the thermal efficiency to reach 50%, an extraordinarily high level. Principally, this is achieved by recovering some of the huge waste exhaust heat into usable mechanical work, by, essentially - sticking a windmill into the exhaust gasses, the other which is connected to the engine crankshaft. This is a very old idea, which is generally accepted to originate in terms of applied knowledge, from the 1950`s, however, the idea itself is at least a decade older. Probably the first real application was in the American B-29 bomber, this extraordinarily capable (and mind-bendingly expensive) aircraft was eventually given Wright R-3350 engines which had waste-heat exhaust gas recovery turbines, geared to the crankshaft. This particular version of the B-29 did not operate during the Second World War, just missing it. In Britain the Napier Nomad applied similar technology, essentially a very high tech Napier Sabre, but on the diesel cycle, with a full compounding system where the power could be fed back into the crankshaft AND drive the compressor to supercharge the engine further. This ran in 1949. Earlier still BMW published their designs in 1940 for a compound engine with waste heat recovery turbines, probably a sub-type of the BMW 802 engine, which never saw any military service use. This showed the turbine mounted almost exactly as it was later to be done in the R-3350, but, later the Americans stole another trick from the Germans and applied a fluid drive coupling to act as an infinitely variable gearbox. As we move ever further from the times when designs like this could be made with just a pencil, it will increasingly be the case that public fascination with "old technology" will increase, as despite our modern advances, our perceptions as to how these kinds of inventions could be drawn, built and operated with nothing but the human hand will become ever more stretched. When the last drawing board designers retire (and there are still a few), these kinds of objects will take on the mantle of the pyramids, talismanic objects which will become as full of mystery and aura as the works of the ancients. This is rather a shame, as it distances us from the hands of our own ancestors, and draws magic into our lives as a vale to disguise ignorance of the reality which is even more exiting - you could do all this too, and once, you DID.

@CalumDouglas1 Agreed! I found that Luftwaffe Aerial claims drop dramatically after these attacks took effect (and not so much before) scweiss.blogspot.com/2023/08/blood-…

No you would not have embarked on a campaign to annihilate German cities with a mosquito force, you would have made an all-out concentrated attack on about 12 of the most important Hydrogenation plants in Germany and taken six months off the war. See my essay making the case for this > calum-douglas.com/the-strategic-…

@PHuenermund its a communist plot youtube.com/watch?v=iAHJCP…

@adam_tooze Used USAAF and Luftwaffe claims data to show it was the oil campaign that really defeated the Luftwaffe scweiss.blogspot.com/2023/08/blood-…

@yudapearl what have the romans ever done for us? youtube.com/watch?v=kCXoUZ…

Thank you for posting this moving video. Whenever I visit Rome, I'd not miss a visit to Titus Arch. Last time I couldn't contain my chuckle: What an irony! A monument for a final end of a nation has turned out a reminder of its glorious past and a symbol of its re-birth. I still can't hold my chuckle.

interesting that Starlink has the occupied coast but not the east

@yudapearl by taking ownership and controlling its own crazies Isreal showed the world that it was serious about governing. something Palestinians would not do. concerningly recent riots by israeli settlers on Palestinians cast doubt on this. israel needs a new altalena moment

75 years ago, June 22, 1948, marks a memorable event in the history of Israel: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altalena_…, a violent confrontation between the newly-formed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Irgun, reached its climax -- the ship was shelled and set ablaze, and the Irgun members aboard the Altalena raised a white flag. Some say it was Ben-Gurion wisest decision, and some see it as the root cause of a rift that never healed.

@CalumDouglas1 @housingehp Yea P-51 had majority of claims in Europe for USAAF after 1944 reddit.com/r/ww2/comments…

Data says no. By the time the P-51 formed just 15% of the escort force, it made nearly HALF the total kills. Obviously the P-47 played an important role, but the argument that the P-47 killed all the German aces in 1943 before the P-51 arrived and stole the glory has no basis in any of the statistical data. If that was so to some degree, it was only by virtue of being in service earlier on escort duty. Both it and the P-38 were rapidly phased out once it became obvious to everyone that the P-51 was utterly superlative in combat around the bomber streams.

If you think WW2 was bad for the Allies in terms of losses in 1944, consider the following sobering facts and breathe a sigh of relief. 1) Due to the attacks on the German synthetic oil plants (totally unbeknownst to us) German production of Nitrogen and Ammonia was almost stopped. This had such a catastrophic impact on the production of explosives and propellants, that by late 1944, German shell casings were packed with nearly 70% rock salt (i.e. filler). 2) In July 1944, Germany was fighting on three fronts, (four if you include the airspace above Germany as a "front"). Only 20% of the production of fighters was allocated to Luftflotte Reich in mid 1944. This is ONE explanation for the failure to obliterate the Allied bomber offensive. 3) Germany, had by 1943 almost totally lost the scientific arms race in the field of electronics & radar (having enjoyed superiority early on), as a result their AAA shells (unlike Allied products) had no proximity fuse, but were set to a predetermined altitude before firing (by hand). 4) USAAF auditors concluded after extensive investigation of Albert Speer`s production records, that around 8000 new fighter aircraft did not exist, and had likely never done so. They concluded that to keep favour with the High Command, Speer had secretly ordered that repaired aircraft and even those undergoing minor refits at the factory, be allocated to the "new aircraft" data lists shown to Hitler. Since Hitler was of course never going to request to read thousands of airframe numbers, the deception was effective.

Nice paper that evaluates tradeoffs similar to mr_uplift scweiss.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-mr… However seems a bit more complicated. Instead of optimizing for constraint why not vary the tradeoffs necessary to obtain the constraint? arxiv.org/pdf/2306.11979…

@mattyglesias They have licenses plates in the back though right? Are front license plates that important? Wouldn’t all states have that law if it was?

There is no way for me to tell if any given person out of compliance with the license plate laws is lazy, “just” trying to get away with driving recklessly and endangering children, stealing cars, or trying to get away with serious violent crimes. We shouldn’t tolerate it.

Two of my most controversial takes: — There should be police officers who enforce the laws — That includes laws about license plates

@mattyglesias one argument against front license plates is that they ruin the design of a car. but considering the design of the g80 m3 a front license plate can only help

It’s weird to me how many conservatives turn into total anarchists when it comes to license plates. “Cars should have license plates” is not like some radical new idea.

Another hard luck case as the owner of this BMW M3 apparently couldn’t afford to affix his license plate to the front of the vehicle as required by law.