Falcon 9 did not launch first in 2018; its first launch was in early 2010.

The mistake you seem to be making is your assumption that Falcon 9-lookaline development would begin tomorrow and be bulk launching payloads to orbit just a couple years later. Development takes far longer than that. From conception to first launch may only be a few years, but from there to actually being reliable, cheap, and rapidly reusable takes many, many years. Anyway, here's the playing field:

Tianlong-3: Started in 2022. Almost a direct 1:1 copy. Failed launch this spring; they're redesigning.
Zhuque-3: Started in 2023. Stainless steel and methalox, and a bit wider than Falcon 9, but otherwise a very Falcon 9-like design. First orbital launch and booster landing in August of this year.
Terran R: Started in 2021, pivot in 2023. Larger diameter, 13 engine cluster. Integration/testing phase, no launch attempts yet.
Pallas-1: Started in 2018-2019. Sort of a mini-F9. Flew to orbit for the first time in September of this year.
Nebula-1: Started in 2019-2020. Another mini-F9. Doing small hop tests, of mixed results.

(Amur-SPG isn't worth taking seriously ;) )

There IS work on Starship clones/competitors - Long March 9, Cosmoleap, Xingzhou-1 , Astronstone, Project Jarvis , Nova - but they're varying degrees of long timelines, less ambitious, paper-concept-for-now, etc. Long March 9 is the most likely to be fully realized, since it's run by the state-owned CALT, but they're not even expecting to start their first test launches until the early 2030s. And we've seen how hard test launches can be on a Starship-style vehicle (though at least others can make use of lessons-learned). But who knows, some of the startups may succeed with accelerated timelines.

And here comes Node.js....

The split was massively beneficial for GE. Post-split, GE Aerospace went from ~135-160B to ~300B. GE Vernova went from ~35B to ~240B. And GE HealthCare went from ~25B to ~30-40B. The aggregate return of the split was ~300-400%. The new companies have a total market cap of approximately the same value GE had at its absolute peak during the Dotcom boom, dramatically reversing decades of decline. Their value is ~40% more than before GE's Dotcom surge; double that of GE's pre-collapse level (~2016); and ~800% of what it was post-collapse.

It's not just GE. Siemens. Johnson & Johnson. United Technologies. DowDuPont. 3M. Kellogg. Daimler. It's just been the trend to unbundle. Musk's empire is going in precisely the opposite direction. He sustains it with a cult of personality.

What even is the point of Europe?

It took you 2 1/2 centuries to get as centralized as you are. We're still in our "Articles of Confederation" phase, and being just as crippled in crises by it as you were under your Articles of Confederation.

That doesn't mean "give up and die"; it means "work to try to get the extremely high level of agreement needed to unite better (nations, like the early US states, are loathe to give up any sovereignty), while simultaneously doing the best we can with the system that we have".

That's what's so absurd about it all. In general, the market has trended toward splitting up conglomerates. If you're GE and you make both jet engines and electrical equipment, the people who want to invest in jet engines would rather a pure jet engine play, and the people who want to invest in electrical equipment would rather a pure electrical equipment play.

This is all about one person's wants and needs, and that person is Elon Musk.

Because SpaceX acquiring Tesla would count as "a change in control", and in a change of control, the operational goals of Musk's stock compensation package (which he just passed, knowing that the acquisition was possible) - things like 20 million vehicles, 1 million Optimus robots, or 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation - get dropped. Only the $TSLA market cap requirement - just over $500/share - is required for him to get his first tranche. And he can basically force whatever offer he wants to be made for $TSLA to ensure he gets it.

You seem confused. Abliteration is the process of removing harmful behavior to a model, not adding it. And in general, the process of adding harmful behavior is skin-deep, as it's part of posttraining, not pretraining.

And why would Trump/America care?

When America lost 3000 people on 9/11 and called for aid, Europe stood up. Denmark lost more people per capita, fighting in an overseas war that was not their own, than America did, all to support their ally. And now that Europe is under threat, in the largest war on the continent since WWII, with a good chunk of a million people dead and city after city laid to waste? You not only don't help, you not only cut off things that cost you literally nothing, you outright threaten to invade Denmark, you fucking traitrous assholes. They were having to rush explosives and bags of blood to Greenland to prepare for fights against you.

Maybe if the Europeans don't want to be overrun by Russia. They should stop supporting it with all that cash from trading with them.

Russia was one of Europe's largest trading partners in 2021. Today it's in 19th place. Trade with Russia has collapsed, but it is not nonexistent The biggest problem we face is that Europe is not a dictatorship; every country has a veto over collective action. And there have been a couple pro-Russian leaders - until recently led by Orban, but still with Fico and now Babic - who basically screamed until they were blue in the face any time there was a threat of cutting off the Russian fuel that they had bet their energy systems on, and won carveouts in order to get other Ukraine legislation passed. A couple other countries fought on LNG and won a reprieve until early 2026 to cut off short-term contracts and late 2026 for a full LNG cutoff. There are a couple other holes of relevant but financially-small magnitude.

The supporters of these policies (prominently led by Scholz, until his replacement by Merz) argued that we can't support Ukraine if we shoot our economies in the foot, that it's better to not phase out trade with Russia too quickly if it will hurt our economies enough that we can't support Ukraine. And my view is, frankly, that's bullshit. Russia is an economic pygmy compared to Europe. Even if something hurts us several times more than it hurts Russia, proportionally, it hurts Russia far more. I want to see a complete shutdown of all trade with Russia, and strict, adaptive third-party sanctions on any country or entity that tries to launder trade through them (down to the level of isotopic and chemical fingerprinting of hydrocarbons). And frankly I've been furious that we followed Merkel's "Wandel durch Handel" policy after 2014 when Russia had already shown its colours, with a whole "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU, EVERYTHING WILL WORK OUT FINE!" polyannaism. But you can't roll back to 2014, and we can't substitute a reality in which Europe is united under a single system (like the US is) is for the actual reality where every single country has a veto in the EU. In the Spring 2026 Eurobarometer poll, 76% of Europeans agreed that the EU should keep supporting Ukraine until "a just and lasting peace", and 76% also viewed Russia's invasion as a direct threat to EU security. If we were a single united country, there would be no ambiguity.

In the meantime, Europe nearly alone is bankrolling Ukraine's defense.

To elaborate more:

When part of your body undergoes necrosis (tissue death), such as from loss of bloodflow from tissue damage, the body tries to wall off the dead tissue. Where live tissue meets dead, there's an intense inflammatory response, creating a sharp line between the living and dead tissue. White blood cells release enzymes to break down the necrotic tissue. This includes skin, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, etc. Bone does not have to rot away (and even that high explosives can readily shatter and separate bones). With joint capsules and tendons broken down, there no longer is a connection to hold even intact bones together. The weight of the limb alone can pull it off.

Frostbite and trench foot, untreated, will sometimes lead to autoamputation (most commonly individual digits, but sometimes whole extremities). Ergotism outbreaks (ergotism causes peripheral vasoconstriction) commonly caused autoamputation ("A great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot, so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death" - Annales Xantenses, 857). Autoamputation is *famously* an (indirect) side effect of leprosy (no, all those stories of lepers having extremities fall off were not fiction). In "normal" conditions, it's most common in diabetics

Okay Jan. Whatever you think. You know best.

Russian troops knew his location and attempted to persuade him to surrender, even dropping a speaker broadcasting messages promising evacuation. Vlasenko refused. Subsequent Russian drone attacks severely injured both his legs. His left foot eventually detached following tissue necrosis, while he amputated his right foot himself using a knife.

A Ukrainian soldier who lost both feet during combat is pictured recovering in a hospital following his evacuation. (Source: Bairak Oleh via Facebook)
A Ukrainian soldier who lost both feet during combat is pictured recovering in a hospital following his evacuation. (Source: Bairak Oleh via Facebook)
"Tears were streaming. I had to cut. And I cut it off," Vlasenko recalled. He later joked to his commander that he no longer had flat feet or needed size-44 shoes. Throughout his isolation, thoughts of his wife and daughter Khrystyna helped him endure. His wife also sent him Stephen King's novel "The Outsider," which he read while remaining in the position.

In another account of his ordeal, Vlasenko described crawling back to where his severed feet had been left and finding orange-and-black butterflies flying nearby. "I thought, God, even butterflies have emerged from my legs," he recalled.

The term you're looking for is autoamputation. Autoamptuation is not "fiction".

Ukraine has been making heavy lift drones since the start of the war. I hope that answers your question about whether they can "build something that works". Now actually read my post.

Honestly, European defense is pretty screwed if Ukraine falls. We'd be losing a million-man veteran force with the experience in the most modern warfare on the planet, and instead Russia gaining their entire defense industry, as well as seizing their land, economy, and propagandizing to their kids and preparing to draft them into its own military - to turn all of that against other states in eastern Europe.

You do realize the difference between a controlled demo of a drone that can go a max 10 meters for a max 6 minutes in pristine conditions, and getting to a guy who's been trapped in a concrete drainage pipe for 491 days well behind enemy lines, all rescue attempts failed, his comrades dead, constantly being shelled, one foot rotted off and fallen off, the other cut off by him, relying on random drone airdrops of supplies to stay alive, and getting out to him - again, under fire - hoisting him and his rotted legs up, and escaping under fire, maneuvering low around obstacles for cover, without him or the drone being jammed or shot down or him being shot?

You understand the difference, right? The challenge was not "make an object that can lift a weight".

Airgaps are not flawless defenses. Ask, say, the Iranians about Stuxnet.

Even at the bare minimum, *information* is flowing through said airgap (otherwise, what's the point?), and the output information could be deliberately tainted.

There are legitimate concerns with the use of an AI model from a hostile state, esp. given how much today is agentic.

That said, there's no reason for a complete ban; surely having a standard set of post-training data and requiring that Chinese models first be posttrained should be sufficient? Unless someone finds a trick to embed harmful behavior so deeply that resists removal by post-training (and also resists detection in a way that can be abliterated)...