Inherited a Hilti Hammer drill from my dad that was used for basically everything in construction and demolition he ever did since before I was born - around 4 decades ago. It was and is the tool he and now me always go to when cheaper drills can’t deal with the problem. Be it hammering through super massive concrete walls or enduring hours-long destruction sessions, it just does the job.

Nowadays it looks like a utter piece of junk that got tumble dried with rocks, but it’s as reliable as on day one.

But it’s not really true. Switzerland has no naval branch of its armed forces.

It has a dozen or so of 10t patrol boats armed with a single 50cal MG for its lakes, and those are organized in a single motor boat company, which is staffed and manned by the military engineers branch.

Their duties are supporting the border guard (police) on the lakes against trespass/ smugglers and assisting (civilian) search& rescue.

People tend to vastly overestimate the impact of radiation and fallout. Even the by a very large margin worst nuclear disasters, Fukushima and Chernobyl, have not killed more than 100.000 people. And especially Chernobyl, with the reactor core being openly burning while melting down, generated immense amount of highly radioactive ash and dust that was deposited in the area.

Nuclear weapons, especially thermonuclear devices which have been the mainstay since the 1950s, excel at using almost the entire nuclear fuel provided to generate raw energy. There simply remains extremely little radioactive material that isn’t fissioned or fused into stable compounds in very short amounts of time during and immediately after the explosion. There’s always gonna be some grams of material with longer half lives, but as others correctly pointed out: the longer the half life, the less radiation per minute it generates. And even this remaining radiation can easily be contained when the weapon is detonated underground, which was the norm after the 1963 partial test ban treaty.

Most of the classic big financial tech mainframes actually run on COBOL, at least in Europe. Though even those are very slowly being replaced, mostly by Java. Still, freelancers with COBOL specialty do rake in huge sums. It’s not only about the rare tech skills ( COBOL isn’t worse or harder than other languages, it’s just old and thus simple), it’s about having those skills combined with a sufficiently high security clearance.

It’s more of a political statement, same as the Soviet missiles on Cuba and Pershings in Germany during the Cold war. As such they carry great strategic value.

Everyone wants cheap cars, but that’s not what this is about. This is about fair and competitive markets and products.

China heavily subsidizes their car industry. Actually everyone had been doing that, but currently China is doing it more.

Subsidies become a problem when they don’t serve to make necessities affordable in-country, but are used to boost sales in foreign countries, while hurting their local industry.

Now you might conclude that “why don’t we just subsidize or own manufacturers more as well so cars get as cheap as China’s?”

Well, where do you think the money for subsidies comes from? Taxes. So in the end, it’s just another scheme to make the general public pay for things that only part of the population needs, and it reduces pressure on manufacturers to innovate, leading to stale products. Which is a big reason why Western car companies are not competitive: the West has done exactly what China is doing now. We have subsidized the car industry massively in order to push or products into the global market. Those subsidies were considered worth it, because it created a trade surplus, effectively meaning wealth is transferred from the global market to mostly the car industry leaders, and a bit of it trickling down to workers as well.

After a while, the subsidies lead to corruption, inefficiency and lack of innovation, and the bubble bursts. That’s how you get histories like Detroit. Equivalents exist in almost any Western country.

A means to protect against subsidized products ruining the local markets is to impose tarrifs. The US has many of those, not only against China, but also against EU companies, especially in the car market. See chicken tax. American car manufacturers were so far behind after decades of heavy subsidies they couldn’t even compete with European cars ( and apparently still can’t, given that the chicken tax and similar tariffs still exist). In the end, tariffs run the same risk as subsidies: over time, a protected market means the industry can get lazy and keep selling the same, because competition is forced out of the market. Tariffs and subsidies are never a viable long term solution. Both can only serve strategic purposes: either providing actual essentials to ones population or nurture change ( eg subsidized regenerative energy build up) that only exist for a limited time. Tarrifs can be used to protect strategically important industry: e.g. military or technological cutting edge tech where you don’t mind paying extra for the privilege of maintaining in-country know how and manufacturing abilities.