Comments by "mpetersen6" (@mpetersen6) on "Whatifalthist" channel.

  1. The Foundry it s nowhere near as monolithic as some think. While there is a deep rooted sense of your worth is in your work. There are other factors at work. But one thing I notice is not every community ravaged by de-industrialization has taken the blow equally well. Some have wallowed in self pity. While at the same time others have decided to pursue new opportunities.
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  2. There's another factor in place here. From my experience talking to Germans in particular but Europeans in general they are much more willing to pay more for locally made consumer goods because they feel the quality is higher and because these countries are smaller in terms of area they are more appreciative of the fact that buying goods from China for example may put their neighbor out on the street. On top of this tax laws in some of these countries encourage companies to upgrade and modernize their facilities. In the US tax laws seemed to penalize re-investment.
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  3. One point on ethanol production in the US. The left over mash from producing the ethanol goes into livestock feed. So it is not as though the corn used in the process goes completely out of the food sector.
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  4. The African American communities of the Foundry, Rust Belt or whatever you choose to call it got hit really hard by the loss of industrial employment in the region. Not that other groups didn't get hit too. But I think they got hit the worse.
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  5.  @lyonelk3108  Yah, solar energy, in Canada, in the winter.
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  6. Well, I guess Arius was on his naughty list 🙄
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  7. That or boil religious philosophies down to their core value/s I don't know enough about other faiths but aside from the redemption part, Love they neighbor as you would love yourself. That's about as core as Christianity gets.
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  8. The actual word cowboy is a derogatory term imported from Britian
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  9. In our mind we imagine the Sahara to be a vast ocean of sand. It isn't. Parts are covered in dunes. Others are rock strewn plains looking similiar to images we have from rovers on Mars.
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  10. Kekistan, humbug. Elbonia shall rule them all
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  11. Two points. Mythology has its roots in two places. The first is in trying 5o make sense of the world around us. The second in the garbled retelling of actual historical events. This is the simplified version. The reality of the populating of the Earth is probably far more complex.
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  12. He's probably an Elf emancipation advocate to boot. 👍
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  13. The inability or unwillingness to listen to what the other side/s of an issue say is both stupid and arrogant. Arrogant because it implies that you are so sure of your beliefs and opinions that everyone that holds different views from your are beneath contempt. Stupid because like it or not what others say has value and the real kicker. They might be right and you are wrong.
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  14. Believe me. If they weren't triggered by an alt history video it would be something else. Probably something really disturbing like sunrise. Or that Monday follows Sunday.
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  15. Gilgamesh probably goes much farther back than that. Parts of Sumerian legends probably go back to the flooding of the Persian Gulf and the breaching of the Bosporus
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  16. Given the weight of Spanish influence in Catholic Europe I think it would be unlikely. Doesn't mean that he should have.
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  17. Mules are not a species of Equine. They're a mostly sterile hybrid of horses and donkeys. Usually a Male donkey matesd to a female horse. It is possible to use a Male horse and female donkey but the chance of offspring is lower. Donkeys and horses have to have separated from a common ancestor recently enough to allow them to interbreed but due to different chromosome counts they are rarely fertile. It is rare but there occasionally female mules able to breed. These are also other "mules" such as donkey/zebra. Additionally there are similiar cross between Zebra and other Equine species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vigor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebroid
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  18. In the past I've seen where it has been hypothesized that it was the adoption of agriculture that derailed the coming of the ice.
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  19.  @wolfpack4128  Where I live we used to have a large number of industrial facilities. All of them with unions. All of them are gone now. Out of business, moved South, consolidated in other locations etc. But the community has moved on to a large degree. Granted there are still those who long for the old days. It's understandable. You could buy a home, raise a family etc. But as you stated. They never understood economics or market forces. There is another factor in the decline of manufacturing in the Rust Belt that often gets overlooked though. A lot of industrial facilities dated from the 1920s or earlier. They were often inefficient to run and did not lend themselves to modernization. Also when they were built there location was often at the edges of the community they were built in. Eventually the the communities grew around them. Their primary mode of transport for materials coming in and goods going out was rail. As railroads began to shut down branch lines that were losing money these companies had to begin relying on trucks. With their location inside of cities often surrounded by residential neighborhoods this was not an ideal solution. I retired out of an automotive facility in 2005. We built engines. There were plans being looked at to expand and begin building transmissions. It closed two or three years later. One reason was the downturn in the economy. The second is the company (Chrysler) simply built too many different engines. At one time we built two different V-6s along with the 4.0 liter inline 6 and 2.5 liter four used in Jeeps. Model redesign and government regulations killed off the 4.0 and 2.5. The V-6s were dropped in favor of the newer Pentastar. The third reason was the plant was basically in the center of the city. Truck access in and out to the Interstate was more of a pain. Also a major portion of the facility went back to the 20s. Newer facilities with more efficient operationing conditions built in and being closer to vehicle assembly plants won out. Other companies in other industries often suffered the same problems. A wire rope company merged with another company. The other company had more modern facilities. That labor rates aside simply took less manpower to run. Another is a company that produces high quality hand tools. They decided to move all of their manufacturing to facilities they already owned and just keep the corporate HQ. All of these companies and others were unionized. In some cases it was the union that was the last straw. In some cases it was simply economics.
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  20.  @valcan321  Before I finally retired I worked for a company that builds and services industrial centrifuges. Primarily the waste water (ie sewage treatment plants) and other users to dewater the end product so the water can go through the final treatment. One of the users is the ethanol industry. Extremely hard on the machines due to high heat and humidity. When I was working I did far more for the environment than 99.9% of all the "activists". We here about how ethanol is a net energy loser. What a bbn out petroleum with all the heating and processing they have to do to seperate out all the different petroleum products.
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  21. Why do you think so many younger people have latched onto the religion of Woke. If you doubt it is a religion consider. It has a "theology" and "theologians", It has its "saints" and "martyrs". And it has people who they consider "saviors".
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  22. Don't forget that Imperial Japan basically fought three wars at once. A land war in China with sideshows in SE Asia. A naval war with the US. And an internal war between the IJN and the IJA.
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  23. One needs to remember that these islands and areas of exposed continental shelf would take a period of time before they can be really habitable
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  24. According to Wikipedia (yah I know but they have links to source material) there are indications that grasses date to at least the Early Cretaceous. Fossils found in corpolites from India and China from this time period indicate the existence of primitive grasses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwx145 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMID_(identifier) https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1482
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  25. The trigger for the next major war IMO will be water resources. Potential hotspots include Turkey vs Iraq, Ethiopia vs Egypt and China vs India/Southern Asia. Also the possibility of a Civil war in the US if the Federal government attempts to divert water from the Mississippi River Basin or the Great Lakes to the Southwest and California.
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  26. As Count Dakula would say. A true Mad Lad
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  27.  @davidkelly4210  I think it depends a lot on just how we define a "civilization". Was the culture that erected, carved and buried Golbecki Tepe a civilization? I'd say so. It may or may not of had agriculture as we define it. But they certainly had some sort of social cohesion. The National Geographic Society commissioned Robert Ballard and his group to do a survey of the wrecks of Allied warships lost around the Dardanelles during the Galipoli campaign in WWI. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://licensing.screenocean.com/record/215989&ved=2ahUKEwjOoJWn86PwAhXbQc0KHRSPCUUQFjAnegQIKxAC&usg=AOvVaw1OSX9LOKOL4kGud0JDVlcE Finding the wrecks was no problem. It was known pretty much where the were. In addition his team also found a number of circular stone structures with a taller stone structure in their center. One immediate conclusion was that they were religious structures of some sort. That seems, at least to a layman like me, to be one of the go to conclusions about ancient discoveries. To me they might have had a different purpose. Could they have been some form of communal dwelling for an extended family. They were up to about 30 meters in diameter and the central pillar could well have been used to support roof beams that extended from the outer circle to the center. Doing any extended od more thorough investigation would require an underwater survey but the whole problem is that the wrecks in the area are war graves which complicates the situation. The kicker here is the area was last above sea level at least 8,000 years ago. I suspect that there are a lot of archeological sites in areas that were dry land during the last glacial maximum. I'm not saying lost cities* I'm simply saying archeological sites. In terms of the earliest civilizations. As I said above it depends on just how we define it. I'd say if you have a common culture, social organization and way of making your living a society is most of the way there. *there may be some urban sites off of India's western coast southwest of Mumbai. If so just when did they go under the waves. Plus how long was the time frame from the first dwellings made of organic materials to the first mud brick structures to working with stone. There is a lot we do not know yet.
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  28. What does on expect when decision makers are taught from early on about how the US is a "post industrial economy". Well a PIE is soon to be a PFWE. Post a First World Economy.
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  29. Things are never this simple. There may well have been some one worse.
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  30. The way some portions of Western and especially the US societies mistreat Christianity is really bothersome to anyone who really takes the teaching in the Gospels seriously. Far too often in my opinion "christians" in the west will cherry pick certain parts of the bible to support their contradictory views or beliefs. The biblical justification for slavery is but one example. Another is the treatment of certain version of the bible being treated as though they were handed down from the literal throne. I'm looking at the KJV version here. Yet by and large talking about about some of these things is taboo in American (1) society. Yes atheism (2) will criticize religion in general. But to me it seems not get to specific in terms actual points. Then we have the whole arena of Wokism. Wokism in my opinion and others is the newest religion on the block. It certainly has some of the trappings of religion. Certain core values and beliefs that are not open for debate. And if you do dare to disagree you can face being shunned or banished. Also known as cancelled. But by far the worst thing in Western societies today is there far too little civil discourse (3). The public conversation is dominated by the fringes with the majority in the center feeling their voice can not be heard simply because any rational debate is not allowed. And both sides are quilty. 1) Yes their are other countries in the Americas. And their citizens could lay claim to being called Americans. Tough luck. The US got there first. Live with it. After all it's not the most important thing in anyone's universe. 2) Can atheism be considered a "religion"? I think so. Any philosophy with a core number of beliefs can be as far as I'm concerned. 3) In some ways the media us to blame for this. As long as there has been media be it the town crier to todays broadcast and internet there has been bias in the media. In the era of print media some newspapers were literal organs of political parties. To the point the papers were literally called blank Democrat or Republican. But there were papers with a more centrist leaning. With today's media I see nothing in the center. And very little anything moderate from both sides. No wonder we hear discussion about a possible civil war.
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  31. One lead to the expansion of the West. Being on the tail end of the spice trade Portugal sought to bypass the middle men. Be they the Islamic World or Venice. A world in which Europe never rose to dominance would likely be a far poorer and brutal one with technology maybe at the level of the early 17th century. The Americas would eventually be (re)discovered most likely by Basque or English fishing fleets. In fact either may well have known about New Foundland or Nova Scotia prior to Columbus. But kept the knowledge secret to prevent others from accessing fishing grounds. The most important weapons for the Spanish were their germs and allies
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  32. The Chinese did form a colonial empire. It just wasn't formed by the state and was very loosely organized. It is the network of merchants and craftsmen all over SouthEast Asia
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  33. Never assume that the difference would be better. The world could wind up with someone just as evil and much more competent.
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  34. Totalitarian are never as smart as the think they. The truth is no one is as smart as they think they are in all areas of intellectual endeavor. I know I'm not. But a successful totalitarian only needs to smarter than his opposition. But this a condition that never lasts.
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  35. Santa went to work for Amazon years ago. For some humor go to The Mighty Jingles channel for his Christmas greeting
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  36. A 12th historical misconception. The Woodrow Wilson is responsible for every evil in the world today. Even that's a little much for the devil incarnate
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  37. The Years of Rice and Salt immediately came to mind. Plus on AlternateHistory.com this gets you a Vlad Tepes Award
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  38. One template for space colonization could well be what happens on the Moon. To prevent squabbling over potential resources we may well see the lunar surface partitioned off into "Zones of Influence". Even then minor countries who have no potential to expand into space operations will attempt to short circuit any attempts to benefit from resource extraction thru the UN Treaty on Space.
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  39. If we do it will be our own hand likely.
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  40. The Greeks certainly had some very sophisticated workshop techniques in the period a couple of hundred years either way of the founding of Christianity (I refuse to get into the "did Christ really exist" arguement). The Antikythera Mechanism proves that aside from what else it may have been. Those corroded lumps of bronze didnt just spring from the inventors imagination with no background in terms of geared mechanisms. The question here in my mind is were those craftsman free craftsman or highly trained slaves. There in lies the rub. For the Greeks, or Roman's or any other ancient culture that depended economically on slavery their simply isn't the societal push to develop industrial technology.
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  41. The wild cards in any prediction of the future is emerging technologies. Be they energy, digital or biological. Unless we see a global collapse of civilization the technologies of 2600 will likely be almost unrecognizable to us today. Our descendants could be subsistence farmers or living in a true Post Scarcity Economy.
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  42. Even more effective than the fire raids was the strangulation of Japan by US submarines.
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  43. Time stamp 4:42. I see you lifted the map from "The Nina Nations of North America". Their is one thing that the Great Lake states have in their favor that will pay off in the end. Access to cheap water. And if the South and West think they can get their hands on it good luck.
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  44. Arizona goat ropers. I love it
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  45. The Chattering Classes. I much prefer The Nattering Nabobs of Negativity The decline of reality in the face of insane beliefs. Beliefs that probably strike the overwhelmingly majority of humanity as insane. A good example is some of the insane things that supposedly intelligent people have been saying about gender over the last few years. The latest is that men can become pregnant and have abortions. Sorry. An individual can take all the hormones they want. Have as many surgeries as they want. Can believe with all of their will. But if you are born with two X chromosomes. Have female genitals. Experience menstrual cycles. You are biologically female. The same applies to individuals born with XY chromosomes. Male genitals etc. You can never become a biological woman. The whole transgender issue has probably started to begin a cultural pushback that may not end well.
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  46. It wasn't just that the Japanese planned to fight to death of the last Japanese. There were also an additional 3.5 million Japanese still under arms in China, what is now Indonesia, Formosa, Malaya, Singapore, Indochina and Burma. Transportating all of these men home following the war had to have been a logistical nightmare. The Japanese certainly didn't have the required shipping anymore. There were still Japanese garrisons on islands in the Pacific that had been cut off for two or more years whose only means of supply had been submarines. Wake Island, which fell, in December 1941 was still under Japanese control at the end of the war.
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  47. Well I wasn't expecting to see the Danes.
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  48. As the climate cooled the great tropical rain forests would shrink greatly speeding the millennium long Bantu migration from westrn into southern Africa
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  49. One of the ironies of Germany and their junior partners invading the USSR for living space, racial obsessions and oil is Italy was sitting on an ocean of it in Lybia and didnt have a clue
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  50.  DarkEternal6  Workers that belong to industrial or construction unions has been on the decline ever since the 60s. Even without moving production off shore the move by industry to states that actively discourage unions would have only continued. Every company that is unionized in the US that has problems its is always the union the gets the brunt of the blame. Yes they share in the blame but most of the blame should be laid at the feet of the management of these companies. In the end quality of the product is not only a function of the factory floor and workforce. It is also a function of management making decisions about just what the level of quality is needed. This can be as simple as the allowable tolerances in a product to the overall build quality that management sets. In the 1980s the build quality of US automobiles was terrible compared to the Japanese when looking at the fits of body panels etc. What most people do not understand is almost all cars left the factory with the fit of the various body parts (doors, hoods, trunks etc) inrelationship to the body as whole in tolerance. The Japanese simply set a tighter tolerance. As to the quality of interior pieces a lot of that can be placed on the cost cutting attitude that if the part is really good when it costs a dollar and crappy at 98 cents we will use the 98 cent part. In the 1980s Ford contracted AMC to manufacture final drive gears for certain vehicles. The finished Ford parts made to Ford specifications howled like a banshee. The ones AMC made for themselves ran at least 10 decibels or more quieter. Remember the decibel scale is a log scale. Every ten points is a factor of ten. Its these types of decisions made by management that greatly effect quality. And in terms of industrial workers represented by unions Japan and Germany far outstrip the US. The vast majority of union membership in the US is in the public sector today.
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  51.  @andysamet4554  St one time it was one of the most corrupt cities in the US. Then the Socialists got elected and and it went to being one of the best run and corruption free cities in the US. It's been on a downhill slide since the mid 70s.
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  52. As much as l dread a nuclear war even a limited one the thing that really scares me is the use of EMPs. Just how hardened is our power grid. Our communications systems. Very few cities in the United States would have running water much less functioning potable water. And then there is the waste treatment plants. All of which require electricity to power the pumps needed. Plus the electronics that control everything would likely be fried. And then there is the transportation networks. How many cars, trucks or trains would be functional. The lucky ones would be the dead. Even without EMPs consider a "limited" nuclear war between the US and Russia. Seattle and Charleston are toast. Sub bases for boomers. How many other military bases are close to fair sized military bases. How many vital Air Force Reserve units are based at major or secondary airports. Even non combat units such as transport or refueling units are targets. Honolulu is screwed with Pearl and Hickham right next door. San Diego. The Chesapeake Bay region. That's just what i can think of for the US of the top of my head. And now for the bad news. How many nations could or will have nuclear weapons in the next ten or twenty years? IMO Iran will. Anyone who thinks they won't is delusional. The coulds. Japan. If push comes to shove they could probably have functional weapons in a year from the time they make the decision. Tiawan. They have the industrial base. They have the capability. Just making the decision could force China's hand though. Brazil. Again the industrial base. The desire. That's another matter. The EU. Even though France has nucs would the EU pursue them. They certainly have the technology base. A lot depends on if the EU holds together. Saudi Arabia. If (when imo) Iran has an arsenal its on the table. Indonesia. That I'm not sure. I'm sure there are others. The point is even in the face of sanctions and agreements North Korea got the bomb.
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  53. This world would be so different from our own its impossible to speculate on just what that world would look like
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  54. He's as real as we make him
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  55. I think one wild card that could upset any number of apple carts is the potential for a breakthrough in fusion. The joke is fusion is always 20 years away. I think we are in the last 20 years.
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  56. 40 years on and this still has a lot of relevance.
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  57. #4 brings to mind the Medieval America and its reboots on Alternatehistory.com.
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  58.  @forestofsecrets7273  Well it depends on where in Canada doesn't it. I'm south of Milwaukee and theres parts of Ontario farther south than I am.
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  59. Best book of the 20th Century? I doubt it. I really, really seriously doubt it. But to each his own i suppose.
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  60. A political note. As we face an extremely bad potential food shortage worldwide we have certain segments of society attempting to drastically reduce or eliminate certain fertilizers etc. Often with good environmental reasons due to over application and usage.
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  61. I be Iron Jack Bonny and your pirate accent is terrible. Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh!
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  62.  @Slapnuts9627  I remember my brother in law telling us about stopping for gas in Nebraska and the guy inside (pre pay at the pump) telling him "I guess the Badgers didn't do so good this year. He replied, "at least they can all read"
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  63.  @kordellswoffer1520  maybe not a civil war. But insurrection and sabotage of the facilities required to transfer any meaningful amount of water from the Great Lakes or the Mississippi Basin is highly likely.
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