The FTC is the weak link here. The FTC and Department of Justice divvy up their prosecution of monopolies. Firms prosecuted by the FTC always get off scot free.
Yes! I have struggled with this concern for a while now.
I think that humans are the ultimate arbiters of quality for humans.
Nothing that is non-human can make that determination because anything that is not human (an LLM) is at best just a really good model. Since all models are necessarily wrong by definition, they can never get it right all the time. When determining what’s good for humans, it is only us that can figure that out.
I also came back to ZAMM when wrestling this question. There must be something there if we have all independently coming to similar conclusions.
This is not new. None of the Arab countries have ever fully aligned with the US. They routinely host Russia and China and buy their hardware. They will continue to host the US and buy its hardware as well.
A fundamental misunderstanding of the West is that these countries will, with time, align philosophically against the West's enemies. They are concerned with preservation of their regimes and their ways of life. They recognize that they have no foundational shared story with the West (religious or otherwise), and that without such shared origins and culture, Western people will not fight to save Arabs when resources get tight. So what do they do? Hedge their alliances so that they always have someone to turn to.
J85s are old technology. They're a turobjet, not a turbofan, nor do they have any electronics on board. This makes them highly inefficient engines. They're cheap, there are plenty lying around from old 4th gen fighters, and plenty of old guys who know how to work on them.
I suspect they used these just to get the XB-1 airborne, making progress while they find a better engine.
Yes, this is what every supersonic intake does. The leading edge of the intake for supersonic flows is meant to create an oblique shockwave that reflects off the other parts of the intake to progressively slow the flow to subsonic speeds before reaching the front of the engine. Fixed intakes, like the one on the XB-1, are optimized for a certain speed.
The gap between the intake and the fuselage diverts the dirty boundary layer air so that the intake is more efficient.