You are thinking about a slow boat in displacement mode, or a wave-surf board with very small fins.
But I can tell you that the wetted surface area of my wing-foil board is exactly zero after takeoff, and all wet surfaces of the foil are, for a significant percentage, in laminar flow. Same for a windsurf board planing: just the last 50cm of the board is touching the water and the fin is extremely significant for drag.
Any competitive sailor or foil-racer knows that the underwater surface has the least friction and best laminar flow when sanded with fine-grid sandpaper, around 1000 to 1500 grid.
It always surprised me that this was not true in air and airplane wings were supposedly best when glossy. So now it turns out that this is indeed not true, and airfoils also benefit from micro-roughness for lowest friction.
Now the surprising question to me is how is it possible that something so simple was not known in this very well-researched and well-funded field. It probably was known, just not by the paper-publishing researchers.
You know the carbon footprint concept was literally created by BP marketing, to place the blame for climate change on society, and distract from all the evil stuff they did to promote more fossil fuel consumption and sabotage climate science.
> people who believe that crashing the US, including the dollar, enables them to build a US like they want
Yes, it's strange how dumb some rich/succesful people are. As I understand it, no civilization ever has done such a thing. If a civilization and its institutions crash, it remains failed/dysfunctional for a very long time. The only way to improve society is in small steps.
I hope the people who finance this all will wake up to the reality that it may well cost them everything, too.
Titanium's advantage is imo not so much its weight, as aluminium is better still in that respect. Titanium is mostly better where corrosion and temperature resistance are important. Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.
I'm pretty sure healthcare costs in the US are also higher as a percentage of GDP compared to EU, so higher wages would not explain the difference. Also productivity should be higher?
I think pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance and legal companies take all the money.
There is a good reason: profits and management pay. And greed is good, right?
> the problems are fixable
Fixable in theory. The US would first have to fix the underlying issue, which i.m.o. is government, media and even judicial capture by financial interests. Billionaires are now openly buying "shares" in those. I don't see any sign of it changing anytime soon. It only seems to get worse.
The investigating is great, the problem is who is doing it and for what reason.
If the misdeed is done by a non-public or poor company there is no money to be made so they would never even investigate it. And not accepting a payoff that returns more than the short position would be ignoring fiduciary responsibility, so some investigations could disappear.
It's very worrying that consumer protection against poisoning in the US comes from a for-profit company that makes money by short selling companies they found to have issues and then covering their back this way against lawsuits, which any less aggressive reviewer would face.
With all the anger over illegal immigrants taking US jobs, as a European it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers.
If I want to hire someone (local or remote) as an employer here, I better make sure the worker has a valid working permit. Fines for non-compliance towards the employer are huge, even for a single day of work. All paperwork has to be complete before any work is done. Even when hiring through intermediary companies who guarantee it's all legal, liability and fines remain in place for the ultimate employer if it turns out to be not so.
Disruption at work. Ford can't make money on selling EV's, their overall margin suffers with every EV they sell. They have large existing investments in factories, processes and people that produce combustion engines. They can't lower prices and sell enough of them for economies of scale to start working.
Tesla is the new Ford. Ford (and most other car manufacturers) will have a difficult time, most manufacturers are probably doomed. After the current hesitation phase, when the economics are there (very soon), customers will almost all go electric.
> the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities
You can change that by giving them their own lane so they don't get stuck in traffic with the cars, let them go where cars may not go, give priority at traffic lights etc. That is what they do where I live.
It's hard to educate the next generation when everyone of all ages is exposed to relentless propaganda (also known as marketing, in all forms including the fully legalized corruption of US politics) at the same time.
Oil and car companies' futures depend on continued public support for free parking, more lanes and housing far away from destinations. It's in their interest to manipulate people into opinions that are beneficial to their bottom line, and they will continue to do so.
> Tax haul for 10 houses are better than a 10 unit complex.
I thought is is pretty well established that in US cities, poorer and denser neighborhoods are subsidizing the richer suburbs, tax-wise.
Because 10 houses need 10 of everything, paid for by taxes: street pavement, sewer, water, electricity, internet, etc. A 10 unit complex needs only one. It all needs maintenance too, starting some 25 years after being built. Most US suburbs can't pay for their own maintenance from taxes.
I'm generally okay with Ads, that is fair.
But I'm not okay with tracking, consolidating data about me from different sources, analyzing it and selling that. It is too hard to understand how that may impact me and others.
In sailing, boats are required to render help to a boat that is in problems, before continuing their race. Boats that render help are compensated for the loss in position/time in the race afterwards, by a jury.