I think that pretty much makes Peppa a very bearable, sometimes downright funny, children's TV series.

"What is your house made of, daddy pig?" - "Bricks, so don't even think of it" is one of my favourites, as is the episode where there's a "glitter leak" in playgroup. Madame Gazelle getting a nervous tick when the children want glitter, and storing tiny glitter vials in a double-locked safe.

Thanks for clarifying, that didn't come across immediately for me.

Oh, you'll love Scott Hamilton's analyses of the state of Boeing commercial, then. Or even Richard Aboulafia's.

>How is airbus "dominating their US counterpart"?

Have you seen market shares recently, especially in the narrowbody sector? Have you seen sales figures and delays for the 777X? Have you seen how Boeing tried to lobby away the CSeries instead of innovating, scoring an impressive own goal in the process as it ended up giving Airbus the CSeries platform? Have you heard about the MAX debacle and the one year delivery stop for the 787 due to quality issues? Are you aware of the previous 787 screw-ups that led to a) Airbus selling more A330s after the 787 was offered than before (noting the A330 was the plane the 787 was supposed to kill) and b) the programme hardly ever being able to recover its R&D costs?

>Typical European, making this super awesome expensive thing, and then losing all that performance failing to do something that is comparatively easy and low tech. They have no mindset of iteratively improving, identifying bottlenecks and systematically improving those.

I'm not even disputing the assessment itself, but "typical European" is just unnecessary nonsense. A unit of Airbus builds and develops the Ariane 5 and 6, respectively, another unit of Airbus made a bit of a hash of the A400am military transport, while their commercial unit is currently absolutely dominating their US counterpart (which is also struggling in their military and space divisions) partly by doing exactly what you claim Europeans are unable of: iteratively improving, identifying bottlenecks and systematically improving those.

My point being - it's not about nationality/continent, it's about the capabilities of the organisation in question.

Beg your pardon? Before SpaceX came along, their cost was fairly competitive, and they had over 80 consecutive successful launches. It's not been quite as reliable as the Ariane 4, but still has a success rate of over 95% (93% if you discount partial successes), so it's not exactly a dud.

But yes, it's not as competitive as it used to be, and a successor is overdue. Funny to read Ariane 7 is being planned before 6 has even launched the first time.

Edit: Just to illustrate the reliability point: JWST was launched on Ariane, partly because it was such a proven, established platform with a good track record.

There is that aspect to it, but it should be kept in mind that Ariane for the most part is a commercial operation, carrying commercial payloads, so it does have to be fairly competitive.