It's true that the US Navy isn't allowed to buy cheaper ships from eg Korea, but that's not because of the Jones Act, it's a separate rule.
There's just not much cargo shipped between 2 US ports. On the US mainland it's cheaper to use rail than to go thru US ports twice and sail around. The Jones Act does slightly affect prices in Hawaii, and if the Hawaiian gov wants to go after it they can, but for the US as a whole, going after repealing the Foreign Dredge Act would probably be an easier & smarter thing to do than going after repealing the Jones Act.
Well, even the old fabric sails act as airfoils, they're just not very good ones.
Another approach is to put an actual wind turbine on the ship; it's more competitive with sails than you might think.
I think most ships still don't do this, so I'm not sure if it's currently economical
From the papers I've seen, using sails on large cargo ships seems economically practical for up to 1/3 of their overall propulsion.
Sailboats have a lot of moving parts, and maintenance on so many of them would be a nightmare.
A sail would be a big rotating airfoil on a pole. Here's an example. What maintenance issues are you thinking of?
Could you clarify what you mean by "this" and how the Jones Act affects it?
Could you please share some information regarding why you think this is the case?
Well, this covers some of why I initially thought that might be the case. So then I looked into it and found some examples of it happening.
every country invests heavily in what people think is cool or prestigious
I think that's largely downstream of what makes money, rather than upstream.
In a small country, there might just not be enough of these lottery ticket companies to split
A small country like...China?
Do Korea and Japan produce ~100x more ships than the US?
Yes. That's by tonnage (thus my wording being "more ship") rather than dollar value or number of ships, but US Navy prices are inflated so it's hard to compare by value.
example source: https://www.ft.com/content/4e2d5bb7-e4d5-4b98-b1a8-895c0d493b07
3Obviously human trials of diseases are difficult to do in general, but studying transmission of colds is particularly difficult because "the common cold" isn't one virus genus, or even one virus family. Wikipedia notes:
Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses and enteroviruses being the most common.
Certainly, many types of virus responsible are basically only transmitted via surfaces, but obviously COVID can be transmitted by aerosols. There are almost certainly some kinds of "common cold" that can be transmitted by aerosols, too. But it's not feasible to do human studies of so many virus types - consider how hard it was for society just to realize that COVID was transmitted via aerosols!
I don't think I do, but maybe you can explain the math to me. You aren't just comparing per-mile transport costs of loaded ships vs trains, are you? That would be silly, of course.