Stavros

I do think it's a bit funny though that EVs are even better if you want to be totally self-sufficient. A solar panel or a windmill (common on farms already) and you've got infinite free electricity for your car. It's always struck me as a bit confusing that 'self-sufficiency' types are always reliant on gas or diesel. You know, that stuff that has to be industrially refined from raw resources imported from middle eastern royal families doesn't really seem that self-sufficient.

Very much looking forward to seeing you all at Fsimuk! Managed to snag an A340 on my return as well - might be the last chance to fly on one at this rate.

Here's a question - if all it takes is cheap labor and plans to improve manufacturing, why isn't India also on the verge of being Superpower? Or Mexico or Brazil? It seems pretty obvious that China is doing something beyond just encouraging manufacturing that is allowing what is otherwise still a developing country to lead the world in sectors like Robotics and Batteries and to achieve near-parity with the US on AI development. I mean, just as an example Brazil also has an extremely protectionist trade policy, a large population, abundant natural resources and yet they are nowhere near being a world-leading technological powerhouse. Is there maybe something we can learn from how China organizes and invests in technology, research, and education that would help us, with our far greater monetary and natural resources, to achieve similar results? Just to be clear, all of the things that China has done (protectionism, IP theft, tariffs, requiring JVs, etc) are things that are done by nearly all developing countries. Brazil and India are even more strict than China in this regard - yet they haven't achieved what China has. China does however foster a ruthlessly competitive business environment where starting and running a business is easy, there is a glut of educated workers in all sectors coming out of their university system, and as such in new technology areas there is a rat race to succeed and innovate or go bankrupt. This spray-and-pray approach to investment has created a darwinian system where the companies that emerge from this rat race must be efficient, highly innovative, and able to compete globally. If anything this system does exactly what our free market was supposed to do, but has failed to do for the last 50 years.

Living in university housing at a Chinese university is the same as living on a foreign military base? Interesting take. Are Chinese students not Chinese? Were you sharing a room with local civilians on those military bases? I didn't know that's how the military did things. What's your experience with China? You seem to be very confident in your own takes on the country given you spent 7 years of your life not living there.

I always love when the response to a factual analysis of China in terms of things the US could do better to compete is met with "if you love China so much why don't you move there?". No wonder we're falling behind when this is the prevailing opinion. I've spent a combined 2 years of my (relatively young, for now) life in China and speak the language. I've been to over a dozen cities and lived in university housing alongside regular Chinese students. Not sure why your experience in Italy has anything to do with China but I'm glad you learned a lot about Italy. As long as we keep pretending that the only reason China has gone from a borderline failed state to a superpower in a human lifetime is purely because labor is cheap and they steal tech from the west, they will continue to eat our lunch. Until we can have an honest conversation about the issues we face and ways to solve these issues that are actually supported by data we will continue to flounder throwing out these stupid soundbites from cable news.

Volvo is still available but their sister company Polestar is now banned as of the 2027 model year.

Yeah, those American cars you love so much are mostly made in Mexico these days where labor is actually cheaper than China. Yet the products are still more expensive and worse quality. I've rented enough Chevy Trailblazers from Avis to know that I'd rather drive literally anything else on the lot. Chinese manufacturing is not cheap because of labor costs and hasn't been for over a decade now. the Xiaomi Su7 is literally built in a dark factory that has essentially 0 workers. The reason China dominates manufacturing is because they have spent the last 50 years investing in the infrastructure and fostering an extremely competitive domestic manufacturing market where starting a new company is easy and established manufacturing companies are not protected against these startups. Just as an example, there 22 independent significant auto manufacturers in China, alongside another 50 or so smaller makers and startups. This doesn't include foreign joint ventures or marques owned by a single brand - that is 75 independent automakers all competing with each other, forcing innovation and pricing competition. The US has 3 heavily protected automakers alongside 2 startups - Tesla and Rivian - who have faced enormous hurdles in building their companies. (Tesla, by the way, only exists because of a major government loan in the 2010s. Quite a successful one at that! Maybe we should try that more?) But what do I know, I just have a degree in East Asian Studies and Chinese language and an International Business minor; alongside lived experience in China. I'd love to hear about the research you've been doing - have you visited factories in china? Analyzed labor costs? Attempted to source manufacturing contracts in America vs. China? Would love to hear the data backing up your claims!

I went car shopping with my father in law in Chongqing early last year and I have to say that it's made the offerings we have in the US look completely uncompetitive. And it's not just electric sedans - every single category of car from hatchbacks to wagons to SUVs and trucks felt like it was leaps and bounds better than anything we have available here. On top of that, the fit and finish of even cheaper cars in China feels on par with if not better than the luxury cars we have here. There are cars available for $30,000usd equivalent in China that are better than anything you can buy in the US for under $100,000. Some of them (Xiaomi, Li, and Nio especially) genuinely felt like nicer cars than you can buy for any price in the US. It's not surprising we've de-facto banned them here because their products put the slop US automakers put out to shame. You don't have to take my word for it either - the CEO of Ford is driving a Xiaomi Su7 as his personal car.

I would say that has been my experience with it so far

Not sure what Hawkers you're looking at the but the modern 800+ hawkers have curved windshields. Also, the top of the glareshield matches as well:

That is without a doubt a Hawker windshield

it's definitely not VRAM - usage for me on high texture resolution is consistently below 9gb, which is better than even some other addons. The primary cause of perf issues in this plane has been the screen drawing (aka the coherentGTUI thread) which is probably a good thing since in theory that should be something they can reduce given plenty of other addons (like the default Garmin G5000) have much more complex screens that don't use up nearly as much perf.

To be honest it would be difficult to even call MSFS a "simulator" if it didn't simulate something so basic as density altitude 😄 Thankfully it does simulate this quite well!

Anytime!