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"Many people forget that we invented the wheel. They simply changed the shape from square to circle, and changed the material from volcanic rock."
by noja 5y ago
"Many people forget that we invented the wheel. They simply changed the shape from square to circle, and changed the material from volcanic rock."
- jsnodlin 5y ago
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoIt’s funny today. But to put it in context, many Americans wouldn’t use German products after the war. My parents refused to buy German cars and other items for decades. Much like Russian products are abhorred in America right now. Caviar, LukOil, Kaspersky AntiVirus, etc…
- mirceal 5y agoto be fair: german products are high quality when russian ones are of questionable quality
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoSome are questionable, yes. But what about food, vodka, and gasoline, natural gas, and oil? I don’t think people avoided these products before the Ukraine invasion.
- bobthepanda 5y agoVery little vodka sold in the US is actually from Russia. Svedka is Swedish, Smirnoff is a British brand produced in the US and Tito’s is from Texas, to name a few.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoStolichnaya?
- bobthepanda 5y agoStoli sold in the US is Latvian (they recently renamed) https://www.foodandwine.com/news/stoli-vodka-stolichnaya-name-change-russia-ukraine https://www.foodandwine.com/news/stoli-vodka-stolichnaya-nam...
- beeforpork 5y ago> ... russian ... questionable quality Caviar is the best in the world! :-)
- denton-scratch 5y agoBut incredibly expensive. Really, it's just for showing off. Beluga sturgeons can't be farmed, so they are endangered. Farmed Italian sevruga caviar is good enough for a couple of blinis. I'd say it's still ridiculously expensive stuff, but it's a small fraction of the price of Russian beluga caviar.
- LeFantome 5y agoHave you tried Canadian? Something wrong with our sturgeon?
- daniel-cussen 5y agoDepends. Let's see. So when you're buying an antivirus you're buying paranoia. Russian paranoia is simply much more refined and unimpregnable than American paranoia, much worse persecution, much worse consequences. It's spinal. There's other stuff, like parachutes and ejection seats, they made much better parachutes for aerospace because they've seen uniquely fucked-up accidents like disgusting, and instead of slapping lasers and computers on everything they're more like old-school American inventors who actually used cheap cheap stuff, ideally stuff nobody wants, oh man there was tons of that in the Soviet Union! Factories producing too little of one thing, too much of the other, like the incentives didn't match up, but hey, if the inventor figures out a way to work with that, I mean of course he can't it was proven impossible BUT IF HE DOES ANYWAY, if he thinks the unthinkable, it may be the last time but it won't be the first. In addition there was some really high quality stuff the west just refused to talk about and carried out historical and media blackouts against. So just as the Soviet Union didn't talk about the American Lunar Landing, in the west they don't talk about the Soviet Lunar Landing, 1967 I think it was? First they got a rocket to do a hard landing, but all over the nearby solar system, hard landings everywhere, largely because they had bigger rockets, much better rocketry. Then after the hard landings, soft landings, take photos of Venus on the surface (the only ones humanity has), and put this little drone car on the Moon.
- WalterBright 5y agoWhich is kinda silly, as all modern jet turbines are descended from Ohain's axial flow engine which powered the Me-262 jet fighter. The Whittle engine was a radial flow design, which was bulkier and less efficient, and was abandoned after the war.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoI didn’t say it was rational. Emotional choices rarely are. But it made them feel better, and there is some value in that.
- wolverine876 5y agoWhat is funny about it? Boycotts do have economic effects, depending on participation. Also, what the Germans did in WWII was far, far beyond what Russia has done (not downplaying at all what Russia has done).
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoIt’s amusing if you don’t know the context in which it occurred.
- wolverine876 5y agoHmmm ... I still don't get it, but oh well.
- nobodyandproud 5y agoI wouldn't generalize. I already knew the context: I personally know people who to this day refuse to buy German goods because of WW2. I still find the quote amusing.
- kingcharles 5y agoJapanese stuff too.
- WalterBright 5y agoMy improvement on the square wheel was the triangular wheel. It had one less bump.
- freeopinion 5y agoOnce, while helping to assemble a brand-new bike, I was amazed when somebody came behind me and spun the wheel I had just attached. It didn't spin straight at all. They grabbed a spoke wrench and went to work. Tweak-tweak, spin. Tweak-tweak, spin. They patiently worked it into a perfect spin. I could not believe that something had come from the factory so crooked. That was when I realized that it pays to keep improving on the wheel.
- jacquesm 5y agoBikes bought from a typical store should be considered a kit, not a finished product.
- charcircuit 5y agoWhile it may have 1 less bump, the bump is bigger. What you want to do is minimize the size of the bumps. You can improve your design by instead of basing your wheels of triangles, base them off of a shape such as the Reuleaux triangle. This will essentially remove all of the bumps.
- jacquesm 5y agoYou completely missed the joke.
- webmaven 5y agoThe great thing about reinventing the wheel is that you get to make your version round.