I heard it argued that Germany didn't have the raw resources and production capacity to go for quantity. Especially later in the war. So quality it was.
I suggest reading Len Deighton's Blitzkrieg (among other WW2 books by him) because it goes into unusual detail on the industrial design and resource allocation decisions that went into tank production leading up to WW2.
Except that the "quality" of their tanks was not exactly top notch, worse they used a lot of resources.
At that point it was just a desperate gamble: "if we can make an invincible tank, then it won't matter how few we have", we both know it did not pay off, not even close.
That's not true. They could have standardized on a few rugged platforms -- and in fact, some in Nazi Germany advocated for that -- but their industry and engineering were generally self-sabotaging and a mess.
They actually did standardize pretty quickly. Panzer III and Panzer IV were the workhorses in Russia, paired up with the StuG (which used the Pz III chassis). I think that it's arguable that no production strategy could have led to German success. Had they tried to produce T-34 or Sherman type tanks (and the Panther was kind of intended to be that tank), they still would have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of tanks built buy the Allies. The Soviets at their peak year produced over 29K tanks, with the US contributing around 21K. The Germans maxed out at around 8k.
IMHO, the Soviets alone could have eventually defeated Germany, thought at much greater cost (as if over 20m casualties wasn't already incredible).
Agreed that arguably no strategy could have helped them against the Soviet Union, it was a major blunder going to war with them.
But the Nazis self-sabotaged constantly. The Panzer IV and the Stug III (with the outdated Panzer III chassis) were arguably the closest standard for armor, but they were constantly diverting effort to alternative platforms that were too complex to mass produce and maintain. And the same for other weapons.
Not really, the tanks were both inefficient to operate and inefficient to build (lack of standardization, constantly changing plans, have to redesign every single part..)
When people say things like the GP, they are talking about German early war tanks, not the late ones.
The problem is that the early WWII arms race was so fast that I don't know how anybody can say with confidence that Germany lost to worse tanks than theirs. By the time the allies got any volume into battle, they also got better designs than their earlier ones.
Not necessarily worse, just different design philosophies. German design philosophies changed throughout the course of the war too.
And people don't really know much about the tanks the Germans were using in France and in Barbarossa. The Pz 2 was used extensively in Barbarossa and it was intended as a training tank! The Pz 3 was woefully underarmed compared to T-34 and god forbid come up against a KV1.
But at the end of the war, the Panther was one of the best tanks on the battlefield. Good crew ergonomics, a gun that was perfect, optics that allowed it to be used well. Comparing that to even a Firefly Sherman? Not a fair fight.
Depends what type of models you look at. There were many German designs that were much less prone to technical breakdowns due to pragmatic and mission focused design choices e.g. many of the Jagdpanzer ("tank destroyer") class like StuG II and Herzer were produced en masse and was very successful. Also, the Jagdpanther was a strong design.
You know that you don't have to do whatever Americans say, right? It will come with its own downsides, but it is a choice. Maybe it's the Dutch people who died for your freedom and independence who are rolling in their graves right now?
Normally I would understand our reluctance. But you know, old sentiment takes a long time to be overriden by new information.
The idea they have is "if we cooperate, we might not get hurt". But modern America will use you, empty you and then still turn their back on you.
So yes, I agree, better to cut ties now and start rebuilding without them. Now I just need to convince the people in power with all their investments in the USA.
Somerhing is finally happening. A consultant came talking about software choices. We asked for non US possibilities and he gave a few. While talking about ut, he mentioned the question came up a lot now, typically from governements and bigger corporations dealing with entities outside the EU. Discussion was done on management levels, not just on IT levels. It seems everyone is testing the waters.
Children of the people who fought for your freedom? Trump’s family coming from Germany, Rubio is of Cuban origin, … children of the people who fought in the war are in the “they took my job” boat.
When I was young 20-30 years ago older people were saying that the Internet would make us dumb. Why learn anything when information is always readily available one search request away? Videogames were supposed to make me a blood-thirsty maniac, and don't even get me started on readily available porn. "Kids these days are lazy and don't want to learn" is one of the oldest memes in human history, with documented use going almost as far back as writing itself.
The flipside of that take is that if you listened to technologists, then educational TV/CD-ROMs/laptops/the internet/tablets/educational games/digital blackboards/MOOCs/etc. were going to completely revolutionize education - but looking at the evidence, it doesn't seem like students have gained much at all from any of it.
I remember an educator ranting to me a long time ago that the only data-proven ways to meaningfully improve educational outcomes was to reduce classroom size and make sure kids got enough sleep + fed well enough, everything else was just a waste of time.
From all my years of schooling one of the biggest factors is the combination of level of interest from the student, with parent involvement following that, once you cross the basic threshold of stable home with regular sleep and food. Some kids don't care and even perfect parents won't matter, but disinterested parents also drag a bunch of kids down.
There has been a measurable and noticeable drop in attainment starting with smartphones entering the classroom, supercharged by COVID chaos, and finally with AI cheating being just the latest assault on learning.
Ask teachers that have been teaching for 10 years. Ask the professors how today's kids are different than the ones of yesteryear.
The move to de-tech the classroom will eventually help out I expect, but keeping kids (and adults!!!) from using cognitive shortcuts so they can develop their own sense of what's reasonable instead of taking information from a bought-and-paid-for oracle is going to remain a problem.
For some weird reason people like to simplify that war to "Napoleon vs. Russian winter", completely overlooking Kutuzov. Kutuzov was dealt a bad hand but he played his cards very well
Not good ones, and Scala devs are keenly aware they have been going in the wrong direction compared to Go/Rust, in part because of articles like this.
RedMonk shows Scala is comparable to Go and Rust [0] You can see in this chart which plots the number of projects on Github and tags on StackOverflow (ha ha.)
The upper right most cluster has the most popular languages (C++, Java, Python, JS, PHP, TypeScript) then the next cluster has Scala with Rust, Go, Kotlin, R, Swift, etc... That cluster is clearly separate from the next less popular one which has Haskell, Lua, Ocaml, Groovy, Erlang, Fortran, etc... and then you can see the long tail is a big cluster covering the entire lower left half of the chat with a clear gap between it and the upper right half.
I don't think it is a "very, very wrong" statement.
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