To create artificial scarcity on a free market, it should be either a direct monopoly, or a giant cartel that includes every single developer and has mechanisms of punishing the outliers.
Yes, it is a downward spiral. How do you propose to stop it, assuming both parties want another one to disappear from reality, and see any compromise as weakness?
I hope this helps to return some sense into the architectural bureaus that live in their ivory towers of "trendy" architectural styles of modernism or brutalism. Too smug to ask what people actually prefer, too detached from reality to realize how their sterile monstrosities would look in real life.
Leaving the price formation nuances of some US peace-time military artifacts aside, my point is that manpower a.k.a. human soldiers become more and more obsolete and should not be treated as a main criteria perhaps already in the current Russian-Ukraine conflict.
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4 days is exactly the time frame to understand that initial calculations have gone wrong and it is time for damage control (try to pull out, initiate peace negotiations, etc).
1. Manpower does not matter anymore. Drones and (soon) robots do.
2. I remember media sphere prior/at the time of invasion rather well. The general consensus was that Ukraine would fall in less than two weeks. The invasion itself started on the Fatherhood Defender's Day and I believe was supposed to be completed before the International Women's Day to make a good picture of Russian soldiers gifting flowers to Ukrainian women.
The majority of Russian population genuinely believes that if the country "becomes weaker", some evil Western soldiers would come and either (belief A) physically exterminate every last of them or (belief B) enslave for eternity.
From that lens, loosing a few millions in a "pre-emptive strike" to save the bulk of population looks reasonable. Don't ask me how they ended up with this picture of reality.
But Microsoft is a small business which just cannot afford to have two versions of interfaces for clearly distinct modes of interaction: touch and mouse-based. They had no other choice except trying to merge things together.
Journals receive papers for free, peer review is free, the only expenses are hosting a .pdf and maintaining an automated peer review system. I would've understood $14.50 but where does the two orders of magnitude higher number come from?