> Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?

Slowly, and then suddenly.

The cracks were obvious when digital records made record keeping more practical, and the first electronic payment systems appeared, but once everyone was doing everything online the damn just burst wide open.

> fighter jets can't operate on batteries

Gas turbines can run on a variety of fuels, natural, synthetic or a mixture of both. It’s actually one of the reasons that a turbine was chosen for the M1.

> someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau

Sometimes this is because of red tape and not because of software. I’ve run into many situations where you can log into the system and download a spreadsheet from the web interface, but the equivalent API hasn’t been configured (or has been deliberately disabled).

> Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.

Generally you get a much better ‘view’ of the artwork in a museum. It’s higher ‘resolution’ you can view it from multiple angles etc.

There are some exceptions. You’re probably going to get a better look at the Mona Lisa online than if you try and see it at the Louvre.

> One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.)

Sounds like a tautology. If you deliberately hoard knowledge of course it’s going to be hard to obtain.