While reading the Fundamentals of Data-Engineering I noticed that one of the most practically interesting parts, data extraction/acquisition, is essentially skipped. The author just noted its 'grayness'.
That is web scraping is the SaaS form of 'piracy'.
It's the Westphalian system which includes not only (protestant) capitalism, but also scientific positivism, liberal humanism and everything else. Which we now call (post-/meta-)modern.
There's nothing we can do about all that and for practical reasons we just accept the world as is and tend to forget/ignore the reasons it is so. But for retaining cognitive sovereignty if think it's good to remember that.
Lawrence J. Dickson anticipated this almost 2 decades ago in a research he did for DARPA in 2007[1]. Just look at the software development viscosity graph.
Looks like a last-ditch effort to salvage its crumbling technological sovereignty amid the EU's systemic crisis. Even if they invent something, production will happen in China or the US.
Germany wants to preserve Airbus and stay relevant in European space programs, but without cheap energy and raw materials this is a pipe dream. Quantum computing/hydrogen is theoretically promising, but they're already behind China and the US. Trying to catch up to Russia in drones and EW, but without energy independence or microelectronics it won't work.
Without Russian gas or nuclear power, high-tech manufacturing is unprofitable. Germany's best engineers are already in Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Russia/China/the US are sprinting ahead in hypersonics, AI, and 6G, while Germany is just forming a ministry.
Germany's move isn't a breakthrough, it's desperation. They're trying to save face, but they lack energy for advanced tech w/o Russia, have no military shield w/o the US, can’t manufacture at scale w/o China.
Britain was never rich in natural resources (coal was an exception, but its importance faded). Its strength always lay in:
* Naval and trade dominance (a legacy of Venetian methods, transferred through the Netherlands).
* Financial systems (London as the hub of insurance, lending, and later offshore banking).
* Intelligence networks and manipulation (from the East India Company to MI6).
* Colonial exploitation (enclosures, the Opium Wars, the Bengal famine of 1943, suppression of the Sepoy Rebellion, the exploitation of Ireland, etc.).
This wasn’t "honest" wealth but the result of systemic plunder and control over global flows. And the British elite has never prioritized the well-being of its people:
* Enclosures (16th–18th centuries) – Peasants driven off the land for landlord profits.
* The Irish Famine (1845–1849) – Grain was exported to England while millions starved.
* "Divide and rule" policies – From India to Northern Ireland, preventing unity among the oppressed.
* Austerity – Post-2008 budget cuts
Some may say this is in "distant path" but I think this is the root cause while the author focuses just on modern symptoms. The current crisis is the inevitable result of a model where wealth was built not on labor and innovation, but on exploitation and manipulation.
The Russia-Ukraine War makes it clear that
the electromagnetic signature emitted from the command posts of the past
20 years cannot survive against the pace and precision of an adversary
who possesses sensor-based technologies, electronic warfare, and unmanned
aerial systems or has access to satellite imagery; this includes nearly every
state or nonstate actor the United States might find itself fighting in the near
future. The Army must focus on developing command-and-control systems
and mobile command posts that enable continuous movement, allow distributed
collaboration, and synchronize across all warfighting functions to minimize
electronic signature. Ukrainian battalion command posts reportedly consist
of seven soldiers who dig in and jump twice daily; while that standard will
be hard for the US Army to achieve, it points in a very different direction than
the one we have been following for two decades of hardened command posts
Here's an excerpt from The The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters
Volume 53, Number 3 (2023) Autumn [1]
The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities
in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace
casualties. Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained
rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action
to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries.
With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will
require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained
about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same
number of casualties in two weeks.
