My wife had a terrible fear of loosing me in this station, afraid she would loose me and never find me back :-) .
It felt like the biggest station we knew before, multiplied by 10 and then molded and warped like a ball of dough.
IIRC there is a multi-level bus terminal at this station too that we had to use to get to Narita airport, which we had never seen before for a bus terminal.
Would love to go to Japan again, but when the kids are a bit older and we don't have to fear loosing them in this station.
> I may have picked a bad example, but the principle stands.
I know electric aircraft are not quite feasible on the same scale as airlines.
On the other hand, China has an extensive high-speed rail network for inland travel. OI have no idea how often the Chine fly inside the country vs how often they use aircraft, but this is the sort of different technology for the same purpose I mean.
I'd expect the competition for these companies to come in not from someone using the same technology, but a different technology that serves the same purpose. Eg. what happened to Kodak and Nokia.
For jet engines, the only thing that comes to mind is electric aircraft. No single-crystal turbine blades needed at all.
I may have picked a bad example, but the principle stands.
EDIT: China has an extensive high-speed rail network. While those don't quite cover intercontinental flight, it is the sort of paradigm shift I mean.
Besides direct control, what could a dividend on the profits do what a well-proportioned corporate tax on profits cannot do? The state would only get dividends assuming it would not sell shares.
And the state can exert control much more fairly (ie. to all competitors as well) with regulation and laws.
Regulations and taxes are seen as 'un-american' I suppose, while giving stock to the government is not somehow?
I'm using DeepSeek v4 Flash through OpenCode and OpenRouter, and works just fine. It's not the bottleneck, I am, for what I'm building. That involves understanding the problem I'm solving, checking correctness
Meanwhile, it's such a cheap model that I've spent not even $25 over 3 weeks.
According to Kimi, I'm a Dutch robotics engineer. Got that part actually right! Not so much for the rest, about First Lego League. But I did RoboCup, so close enough I guess.
The other models think I'm Dutch (I guess the 'van' gives that away?) and am a soccer/football player. I don't know anything about soccer though
It will be a spectacular crash if/when it crashes. But there is this old adage of 'the market can remain irrational much longer than you can stay solvent'.
The US is the IT-supplier of the world. I don't know how large a % of that comes for outside the US. But with all the 'shenanigans' of the Trump regime and the trust the US has lost due to that, that should lead to losing IT business from the rest of the world.
In other words, If Europe would disavow using US IT, as would be the wise choice I think, then Europe might close the gap.
I just hope this is not just wishful thinking though.
Made a multi-player Battlefield game for my scout group: up to 6 players set up ships like in the classic Battefield game. But you can try to hit any of the other up to 5 enemies and each team can see who hit them.
And instead of turn-based, you have to hike to/visit a physical location, fill in a code you found there to get bombs for the game. Or do a quiz and get the answers right.
All laudable efforts, but I'd love for my Dutch govt to actually use these broadly. With the support behind it to file down those rough edges for the benefit of all.
All great, but I would love EU and (national, local, ...) governments in the EU simply use the open source stuff already available.
Often there is an 'you must open source, unless you explain why not' and then there is some faff about why they really need to be buying more stuff from Microsoft (which is more and more cloud stuff and thus under the CLOUD act etc.)
It felt like the biggest station we knew before, multiplied by 10 and then molded and warped like a ball of dough.
IIRC there is a multi-level bus terminal at this station too that we had to use to get to Narita airport, which we had never seen before for a bus terminal.
Would love to go to Japan again, but when the kids are a bit older and we don't have to fear loosing them in this station.