Does this apply to the 17 and 1800s too? Or was there an inflexion point when consumption plateaued and technology is about carving it up not increasing it? And how does it apply to other counties?

My hunch is that this is a recent half century thing for the US and other countries are still earlier in the curve with lots of room to grow still

Typically man-optional.

Best source on all this stuff is a classic proper OSINT blogger (who does awesome pics too): https://www.hisutton.com/

Russia has been mass producing its own copies or the drones - the Russian version is called Geran 2 - for several years now. They use a lot of western and sanctioned components and they assemble them in big factories eg Kupol plant in the Russian city of Izhevsk

But would it have got them to stop the war? Seems unlikely.

And regretful inventor of the null reference!

His “billion dollar mistake”:

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...