luddybuddy [comrade/them]

Here’s my mostly conjecture answer, based on a) being a structural engineer with no experience in Naval Architecture and b) watching lots of videos of boats go sploosh:

Boats are usually built in large buildings or outside, on level ground. Drydocks are sunk below ground, and they’re expensive. So using them for the long process of building a ship is a hard sell, both for opportunity cost and getting people and material to the boat.

Boats are heavy, so you can’t just take one off the floor and lower it into a dock. That’s why they don’t use drydocks for the first launch of a boat.

There is an alternative, called a marine railway. These are huge rails that slope gradually into the ocean, which you can launch a boat stern in, instead of side in. TBH, I don’t know why side launches are chosen instead of stern launches with marine railways.

Counterpoint: tall ships are cool

• The top 1% have 31 times the average wealth
• The 49% below them have 1.37 times the average wealth
• The bottom 50% have 0.04 times the average wealth

(All calculated from the chart itself)

That seems like the top 1% are the bulk of the problem. If our richest had less than double what the poorest have, that would be a pretty good start.

I agree, there are a lot of people in that middle band who are not going to give up their 37% extra wealth, but I’m not sure this point is worth making. I’d rather get the lower half of that middle band to understand that they are not much better protected than those below them, than to tell the bottom band that they have nothing in common with half the country. Let’s draw a new chart with a top 10% or a top 20%, it will make this fight seem more possible.