Why the West is doomed. Engineer's opinion. Part 2

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Two years later, I decided to write a sequel to my first article "Why the West is Doomed." During this time, facts have appeared that indicate the loss of basic technologies by the United States.

Part 1

Now we are talking not only about the inability of the United States to advance scientific and technological progress in basic areas. The United States went further and, apparently, is now unable to even preserve what was accumulated by previous generations.

In my first article, I wrote that while working in the Moscow branch of the largest American aircraft building company, I often went on long business trips to the United States. And there I practically did not meet engineers who spoke without an accent, i.e. the overwhelming majority of the engineering staff are "come in large numbers". From which I concluded that the American education system today is incapable of producing engineers in an amount at least minimally satisfying the needs of not new, but long-existing industries. This is confirmed by the words of Steve Jobs, who, when asked why Apple does not transfer the production of the iPhone in the United States, answered by asking where he would get so many engineers. Moreover, they lack not only the junior engineering staff, like me, but also the heads of departments and managers. My current immediate boss on the American side is Algerian, and his manager is Indian. One of my colleagues in the Moscow office has a state manager who is also an Indian, who recruited exclusively fellow tribesmen into his department, moreover, of the religious movement to which he belongs. A colleague complained that six Russians in Moscow do all the work for twenty Indians who know little.

Of course, there is an opinion that the United States can do without its own engineers and buy brains in the right amount where they still remain. Yes, you can buy it, but not a whole industrial school. There is a concept - a scientific school. If it is lost, the purchases of individual scientists will no longer help restore the entire system. It's the same with production. For example, an airplane is made up of hundreds of thousands of parts that thousands of lower-level engineers fit together.

If I am engaged, for example, in laying any wires, then my task will be to design the corners on which these wires are held on a small section of the aircraft. I won't even have time to go into details of what and how these wires are powered. Other people are already doing this. My task is just the corners. You can bring together the leading experts, but again, each of them will be responsible for their own narrow part of the work, and they will not be able to design an airplane without these thousands of small performers tying everything together.

The Americans have long been forced to attract not only the leading brains, but also the bottom-line performers. Moreover, even ordinary Russian specialists can stand out there against the general background. So, about ten years ago, our most ordinary young employee left the Moscow department where I worked then for the United States. Now she is the head of some department of American retirees at NASA.

Apparently, the fact that the Americans cannot reproduce our RD-181 engine is just an example of the loss of a production school. Perhaps they can copy the form, but they cannot reproduce the content. Most likely, they cannot obtain the required superalloys. It looks like the US now has a Chinese disease. When our military aircraft engines were copied in China, their resource was enough for no more than a hundred hours of work. Roughly speaking, you cannot measure the alloy composition with a caliper. Here the copier is powerless. But, if the Chinese seem to be recovering, there in schools children are not allowed to relax, then in the United States this Chinese disease - "Form without content" - is only progressing. Hollywood is also just a form. The art of appearing, not being, has been perfected in the United States.

Why is Elon Musk so puzzled by the return of the first stages of rockets at any cost? He didn’t even look at the crazy payload reduction of the rocket. you have to lug around a ton of extra fuel to get the first stage back. Apparently, it has become very difficult and very expensive for the Americans to manufacture rocket engines.

Although, these attempts by Mask, it seems, are in vain. Judging by the photograph of one of the "successfully" returned steps, the central nozzle has even been displaced there. It is unlikely that the steps returned in this state will be reused. It's amazing how it even managed to sit down. As you can see, the Americans have already lost their advanced positions in space. I'm not going to talk about Martian photographs with rocks suspiciously reminiscent of the lemmings of the Devon Island of the Canadian Arctic.

In addition to space, it seems that the United States has also lost its military aircraft industry. According to the latest data, the F-35, on which all the bets were made, turned out to be so bad that they began to talk about a return to the F-22 program. Those. consider the possibility of horror-horror to return at least to horror. In order to continue to function in service, but have already exhausted their resource F-16, the US military bypassed all museums and aircraft cemeteries in search of spare parts. The production of the F-22 has been mothballed for four years. Will the Americans be able to restart the stopped production, where many ties have already been cut and specialists familiar with this program have been lost? If in the field of civil aviation (as in my case), they leave at the expense of fresh emigrants and outsourcing firms from Russia, China, Italy, Japan and other countries, then in the military field they do not have such an opportunity due to secrecy. This is where the homebrew generation of MTV came out. As a result, it is very difficult and very expensive for them to build new military aircraft. It seems that the same problem exists in the field of military shipbuilding, and indeed the entire American military-industrial complex.

Well, and the cherry on the cake is the crumbling area of nuclear power before our very eyes. Recently in the state of Ohio, without completion, the plant for centrifugal enrichment of uranium was closed. The gaseous diffusion enrichment method, popular in the USA, is many times more energy-consuming and expensive. This makes their fuel completely uncompetitive. Surprisingly, even Iran, under sanctions, was able to master centrifuges, and the States, in greenhouse conditions, pumping billions of dollars, attracting the help of Europeans, were never able to launch this plant in Ohio. By the way, there are Iranians in the variety of nationalities of engineers that I have observed in the United States. Where are their own engineers, with traditional Anglo-Saxon surnames like Smith or Johnson? Probably they could not master technical education.

And now there is also a surprise from Rosatom. Our concern intends to supply not only enriched uranium, but also the fuel assemblies themselves to the United States. Despite the fact that the Americans cannot in any way adapt their rods for Ukrainian stations, ours have already mastered assemblies for American reactors. It turns out that it is very difficult and very expensive for the Americans to produce their own fuel. They may object to me that nuclear energy is dangerous and, in general, the last century. Renewable wind and solar energy are trending today. To which I can argue that this chimera, dependent on the whims of nature, will never break even without a revolution in the field of batteries. I want to note that the same silicon for solar panels is melted using traditional energy sources. At the same time, it is in Russia that they are on the verge of introducing real renewable energy, and not fake - wind-solar. At the moment, neither the sun nor the wind can provide that stable, dense and cheap flow of energy that the atom produces. Now, when launching fast neutron reactors capable of converting radioactive waste into new fuel, we can get a closed cycle. The fuel becomes endless.

With such technologies, Rosatom plans to implement a system that can be called Energy Windows all over the world. This is when the buyer, who ordered the construction of the station on its territory, may no longer think about how it will work under certain circumstances. All problems associated with the construction, operation and decommissioning of the nuclear power plant are undertaken by Rosatom. Our concern may even become a shareholder of a nuclear power plant and share responsibility and profit with the customer. Thus, our nuclear power plants, regardless of where they are located, become a constant source of income for Rosatom and the Russian budget. No matter how pretentious it may sound, it is precisely such technologies, and not only oil and gas, that can lead Russia to its stated goal - to become an energy superpower.

What trump card remains with the United States? On the surface, the answer is financial strength. But, somehow at the end of February 2016, as far as I remember, on Thursday, I saw the ruble fall below 83 rubles per dollar. On that day, in the fall, the ruble had already greatly overtaken the falling oil, i.e. in his dive, he even got rid of oil, which fell below $ 25 a barrel. I thought, that's all, we could not resist. Our economy has received a knockout blow. But then I took a closer look at the Dow Jones index. He also fell by several percent in the moment. But this index is probably even more important for the American economy than the ruble is for ours. Roughly speaking, pension funds, loans, pledges, debts and, in general, everything are tied to stock indices in the United States.

I also decided that if on Friday everyone does not play sharply, then we will fly to hell in good company, together with America. However, a "miracle" happened on Friday. Oil suddenly, for no reason, jumped seven percent in the moment. This, of course, reversed the downward trend in both the ruble and the Dow Jones. A little later, experts announced that the oil strike in Kuwait was to blame for the rise in oil. Although, even the day before, any strikes, coups and even military actions were completely ignored. On this day, it was as if the information switch was switched from the campaign to reduce oil prices - to their growth. Suddenly it was discovered that oil reserves, it turns out, are erroneously overestimated. Some strange armed attacks began on the terminals of Western oil companies in Nigeria. Where are the armed guards of these multinational companies looking? Why did the information switch switch happen?

In my opinion, in order to tear the Russian economy to shreds, an artificial reduction in oil prices was launched with the help of Saudi Arabia and the talking heads of experts in the world media. But the deep and prolonged decline in the planet's main energy carrier has triggered an additional deflationary wave around the world, which has pinned stock indices to the floor. The Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929 were precisely deflationary. And now it has become impossible to keep stock prices high in the face of such deflationary pressures. We can say that the United States has lost the only weapon capable of harming the Russian economy. A very low oil price will explode the American stock market bubble. In general, it is no longer possible to introduce any new sanctions that could cause Russia more harm than their initiators. If a boycott of our energy carriers is announced, Europe will freeze and gas prices on the spot will soar. If SWIFT is turned off, Russia will be forced to completely switch to its system and, possibly, even start selling energy resources only for rubles. The effect can be even more interesting than that of import substitution. The only thing that the West could do painlessly for themselves is to chop off our sport.

So, summing up the intermediate result, we can say that advanced technologies in space (the crafts of the adventurer Musk do not count) in the field of the military-industrial complex and nuclear energy are disappearing in the United States. Even their financial weapons are losing their power. But these are the main pillars on which the state, which is a superpower, should stand.

How did they come to this life? It's simple. For humane reasons (if you put all conspiracy theories aside), they stopped forcing children to learn. If in the second grade, instead of mathematics, a child has reports about hedgehogs, like some of my friends who emigrated to Germany, then soon there will be no one to create something new, but even to serve the existing one. By the way, the mother of this child works as an engineer in a German construction company. In her small department, the last native Germans have retired, and half of the engineers are Russian-speaking. My German friends, of course, expect their son to have more serious workloads in high school. But, if the child does not have the habit of overcoming difficulties in elementary school, then it will not appear in the future.

In the comments to my first article, one of the emigrants said that his son had very heavy workloads at a Western university. For example, laboratory work takes him forty minutes, and the subsequent filling out of all kinds of forms and forms - up to six hours. I see this passion for filling out all sorts of forms in my work. To simply replace the length of a bolt in the documentation that did not fit during assembly at the factory, you need to go through two obligatory meetings with American colleagues and managers, fill out many electronic forms duplicating each other and get a bunch of signatures and confirmations. The whole process takes up to several months. At the same time, people work very hard to go through all these circles of hellish bureaucracy.

So, what does modern Western education provide?

1. Teaches how to prepare beautiful presentations and reports (starting with hedgehogs). In later life, this becomes necessary in the preparation of inflated financial and production reports. It is also useful when squeezing money out of investors for dummy startups.

2. Western education develops the stamina necessary to fill out many redundant forms and forms.

And at the very end I would like to say to all fans of the United States: if you do not have the strength not to bow before the West, then extol the generation of baby boomers, when the MTV generation did not yet exist and the Americans could do something themselves, and Khrushchev strove to catch up and overtake America …