Well, if you have an expansionist apartheid state nearby, bent on seeking any pretense to sabotage or get your infrastructure air raided, higher enrichment factors would make much easier to safeguard fuel, given not high enough to easily cause a criticality incident.
Say you have 10 ton of 2.5% enriched uranium to safeguard. If you turn it to 60% HEU, now you have only ~400kg of fuel to safeguard against air raids. Density of uranium is ~19 ton/m³, so that would correspond to just 21 liters of HEU, one bucket worth, what would make it very easy to transport and hide. That would make it possible to split it and store in safe locations, for example, inside some deep boreholes, far apart to each other, making it impervious to attack, for the duration of hostilities. Once they pass, it can be recovered and diluted back to 2.5% with natural uranium, reconstituting your original 10-ton fuel amount.
how come immigrants from Haiti/other 3rd world countries come to the poorest rural towns in USA and make it work, while US citizens drown in drugs and crime?
The opportunity is there, its just USA was supposed to use the reserve currency status to invest domestically in its own people. Instead USA made a business out of education (private schools and elite colleges).
This creates a situation where only high value jobs are feasible in the USA, but the education to do these high value jobs is too expensive. Now you have to import foreign talent, as well as goods, and this leads to erosion of the country.
China on the other hand, invested in its own people and developed industries domestically, rather than importing talent
You realize our government built nuclear bombs, went to the moon, and in 4 years produced a nuclear powered submarine from scratch?
Not to mention the interstate system, drinkable water in almost every home, and the world financial order as we know it today, the internet itself was a government project too. GPS?
We have almost eradicated many extremely harmful illnesses as a result of government programs, including something that neutralizes but does not cure HIV.
> Government cannot allocate resources well however well intended.
That's because the half of the government that says this is ensuring it is true in order to justify deregulation and privatization to make their 10B benefactors happy. Most of the people who say what you say feel confident saying it, not realizing that it's not structurally true, but only true because they believe it.
Statements like this are just lazy justifications, born out of the desire to reinforce a certain world view, rather than genuine effort to understand.
Much has already been said about why Huawei is not simply a state apparatus, so I won't repeat that. The point I rather want to make is this: having a factually wrong image of the counterparty is dangerous, especially if you view the counterparty as an enemy (justified or not).
If you care about advancing your material interests, then you might want to emulate what you believe makes the counterparty successful (in this case, the belief that they're a state apparatus). But when you find out that the emulation yields bad results because your image of the counterparty was wrong in the first place, you will have wasted a bunch of time and resources. It's in your interest to get your world view right the first time aroubd.
> Strong anti fraud rules (even for massive banks) are a foundational part of a high functioning society.
Sometimes it seems we're missing most of the "foundational part[s] of a high functioning society" except the ones that serve elites (which then are so sacred *and must never be questioned).
Eventually people stop caring about the elite's protections, even if that breakdown is ultimately harmful. It's like the murder of that United Healthcare CEO. His company ground down the common man's benefits in a way that probably killed thousands (at least), but we're supposed to cry for him. Betray people long enough, and they're no longer interested in holding up their side of the bargain.
If they want a high functioning society, the elites need to work harder at holding up their end of the bargain.
I invite you to search HN for 'libor' and see how many of the American users of this website were affronted by the vast fines dished out by the US government to UK-headquartered banks for manipulating the LONDON Interbank Offered Rate from their offices in London, UK. If you can find a single one I'll eat my hat.
No different than ozy.com's story, and Carlos Watson got the pardon. It helped that he was basically Powell-Jobs's pet (one of the owners of the Democratic Party), then kissed Trump's ass on top. His entire deal was making connections with rich white people who wanted a black friend to tell them they were not only good people, but the best people. Excellent work if you can get it.
I don't think you can start this charm offensive after the crime, though. The only person I've ever seen manage that is Rob Blagojevich.
As has been said, the value of standing under a huge tree is more the shade, not the fruit. Your rich friends may never do anything for you, they might only value your friendship because you're one of the few who have never asked them for anything. But, consistent with that, if somebody attacks you they'll defend you as hard as they defend their other possessions. That kind of armor enables you to pluck fruit from other trees.
To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.
Shkreli's schtick was to buy out or control pharma companies that had a monopoly and jack the everliving fuck out of the prices. He had some programs for uninsured people, but he would milk the insurance companies absolutely dry, which gave him some wild profits.
This made a bunch of powerful people absolutely enraged, as he was basically publicly bragging about jacking the ever living fuck out of the prices. Pharma companies do this but Shkreli would publicly say it and tell the truth that basically the other companies were doing it while pretending to be good people, and he was only being honest about it. Poor people were pissed because they were told they couldn't get their drugs (I'm unaware if the program that allowed uninsured people to get them for cheap was real or not), and the rich insurance people pissed because he was basically he was bilking them.
So they went back and discovered one or some of his other early enterprises weren't profitable, but that he had used money he made off his later pharma enterprises to pay back his earlier investors.
In trial, his investors testified they were happy with the situation, lost no money, and would invest with him again. But they still convicted him for fraud, even despite the 'victims' themselves did not believe they were defrauded. It didn't help that Shkreli is probably one of the most profoundly unlikeable people you can possible listen to, unless you're not bothered to hear a hyper-capitalist be honest about how they do business.
Hasbara manufactured consent and weaponized crocodile cries of "antisemitism" are small potatoes when AIPAC foreign influence corruption runs DC but politicians don't want to be primaried, lose their bribes, or be called "spreading antisemitic tropes." It's an ethnonationalist regime propping up another enthonationalist regime plus controlled opposition of so-called Democrats who talk about fictional families and write strongly-worded letters.
"Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” - Carl Schmitt [0]
This is just revealing who is in charge. The state with some mix of banking and corporate interests. Certainly it is not the people, nor is the law as written sovereign.
Funny you say that, because not only do 'red' states have higher crime rates than 'blue' states[0], but 'red' cities within those red states, like Jacksonville or Oklahoma City, also have higher crime rates.[1]
This is only true if you believe that the purpose of punishment is rehabilitation. Depending on how severe the punishments it absolutely can affect crime rates. This is a very simple problem to solve. Remove the people from the streets. Punish drug dealers with severe, harsh penalties. Keep escalating until it stops. Do you think if we rounded up all the criminals and put them in jail, the crime wouldn't decline? Of course it would. It is only a matter of will and degree of punishment/enforcement.
We shouldn't have to live like this. We need a Lee Kuan Yew or Bukele type of leader to step up in these cities and say enough. This
passive acceptance of crime and disorder under some misguided sense of compassion or that putting criminals in jail is immoral is pathetic and will lead to ruin. This is not how civilization functions.
Select eggs/sperm and make embryos at fertility clinic.
Ship them all off to Genomic Prediction.
After you get their simplified test results, call and ask for the full report that is compatible with 23andme.
Search snpedia for keywords like intelligence, retardation, educational attainment and cross reference their existence/non-existence with the 23andme text file.
Have fertility doctor implant the embryo of your choosing.
If you have/are a female, the price is dramatically cheaper. Otherwise its about $200k (all post-tax). Embryo creation $45k, surrogacy agency fee $30k, surrogate $70k, baby delivery $25k, embryo testing $6k.
In the last 11 Olympics, men with Sub-Saharan African ancestry have earned 87 of 88 finalist berths in the 100m dash. Is this random chance or does race correlate with some genetic traits enabling differentiation in physical abilities?
>grouping people by skin color or many other arbitrary groupings
This isn't arbitrary, when common ancestry and origin impart real world observable differences in a repeatable predictable way.
>there are groupings of people by genetic traits and things like that do matter
A cop once told me "Criminals almost always get caught because of probability. The vast majority of criminals don't commit just one crime, so chances are, they will eventually get caught. To never get caught, they have to get lucky every time. I only need to get lucky once."
It's not possible: for most of these companies, their business model is built on burning VC, getting increasingly higher valuations, and then dumping on retail traders.
For instance, Stripe is valued at >$70b. They processed $1 trillion in payments in 2023, brought in $12 billion in revenue, which is 1.2% of payment volume. $100 million in profits.
Running as a modest private business just doesn't make sense when you've raised venture capital at 700x your annual profits. So, IPO it is.
The reason you see people planting rice seedlings in wet fields in movies and TV is that the rice being planted is already the second or third crop of the year. Someone somewhere sowed rice seed densely in a single plot, to use to replant several times as much acreage by transplanting.
They can also in some cases raise fish in the same terrace, and herbs or other crops on the walls between them.
Farmers of Forty Centuries is an out of copyright book from ~1903 that details the findings of a research group from IIRC England who wanted to understand how the Chinese have been farming the same fields for four millennia without exhausting them. They were doing three crops a year back 120 years ago. A lot of it is down to accumulating silt over time by irrigating with silty water, and dredging the irrigation canals every so often to start new fields with the take.
Unfortunately, I can write almost everything you wrote about Israel. The problems are very similar even thought the countries are very different, especially regarding their starting point and challenges.
Loss of control over vast areas by the government, property prices, rent rising rapidly. Teachers leaving schools due to out of control children.
I am thinking about leaving as well, as I've come to the same conclusions. If anyone is interested here are some of my reasons and impressions of Berlin.
Berlin is lost, the decline of the rest has begun. The problems are systemic. The social fabric is beginning to crumble.
Organized crime, especially many criminal clans from the islamic\arab-world ("Clankriminalität"), have been a plague since the 80s. It seems they spread and get more brazen. Law enforcement and the judicial system is a joke in that space. Many known violent repeat offenders are walking free after a short time, if caught. They have also started to subvert public offices by bribes and other methods, such as the immigration office, police, job centres. To summarize a quote from an Austrian police journal related to the Austrian Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs [1]: Clankriminalität has long since become an everyday phenomenon in Germany. One can't expect the elimination of Clankriminalität through the measures and strategies deployed, the goal should rather be to curb the dangers and reduce the especially negative manifestations.
As an aside, the Mafia has also been growing here (in Germany) [4], concealed, underestimated, insidiously subverting Germany [5]. The weaknesses of the law have been known for decades but no politician or party in power has been willing to do anything.
Massive fraud, often by the same ethnic groups, is made laughably easy by the government. For example, an estimated 1 to 1.5 billion Euros of taxpayer's money was paid out to fraudulent test centres: basically every shisha bar, tiny late-night corner shop, barber shop, etc., became a Covid test-centre overnight, reporting ridiculous numbers of tests, while in reality mostly being empty. They only had to provide their bank details and a kindergarten sketch of their 'facilities' in an online form to open one. The officials did not even bother with criminal background checks. Then they would send in a handwritten tally sheet and receive massive amounts of money. There were over a thousand test centres in Berlin alone. It was obvious what was going on, yet nothing effective was done about it. Another well-known example is social-security fraud, where they would arrive with their new Mercedes-Benz to collect basic welfare. Also: certain groups produce many children, collect child benefits for each one, as well as other benefits and just live on that.
Violence of immigrants, such as mass brawls, happens quite often here. The police has to come regularly to public swimming pools. Here are two examples that happened in the last two months in a public swimming pool: [2], [3]. The first one shows the start of mass brawl. The second one is a brawl between two groups of 12 people, one group got kicked out, but came back with impact weapons, sprayed irritant gas and wanted to attack the security personnel. The police found three of the suspects later and let them go after taking their data (they might get charged). They take over public spaces. This also illustrates the feeling of helplessness ordinary people might have, even if there's just one or two of them, because you know they have friends. You know they are easily offended and prone to extreme violence. You know the police/law/government won't do much to help you or to punish them or remove them from society. So you do the only thing you can, you stop going, you avoid places where they are, you flee when they come, you possibly start voting hard right.
Islamic terrorism\attacks now also happens in the neighbourhood, for example in '21 an Afghan refugee (Abdul Malik A.) stabbed a woman in the neck/throat, the reason he gave was: 'women shall not work'. She survived but is badly crippled. Now the taxpayer pays for her life-long care and his comfortable accommodation in a psychiatric hospital.
Let's not forget the rapes and group/gang rapes, 902 rapes (Vergewaltigung § 177 Abs. 6, 7, 8 StGB) were reported in Berlin in '21 [7]. If you search a bit, you'll find plenty of pretty bad real cases. Here [6] is a case where an Iraqi got 13.5 years for raping four victims (for multiple hours), assault and other serious offences, the youngest victim was 14 years old.
The number of shady looking people has grown over time, where I live. I rarely go out without a knife and I live in the better parts of Berlin.
Primary schools: An acquaintance, a retired teacher from Berlin, gave the general career advice to not become a teacher in Berlin because the children's behaviour has deteriorated so much. I know of a public primary school where violence (kicking, hitting, throwing things), insults and occasionally threats against classmates happens bi-weekly starting from the first grade, but nothing of consequence happens. Some also disrupt the class very massively. The measures taken, such as talking to the parents, a letter of reprimand, a school-yard ban or a couple of days off, do not seem to do anything. Some victims have expressed their unhappiness about this and the often bad/loud learning environment but the teachers/school don't have the legal means to do anything. There are schools in Berlin where much worse stuff happens, there are better ones as well. The alternative are private schools, with the problem that the classmates tend to be from rich families, leading the child to expect or wish for expensive vacations and things.
Public Transportation: It's mediocre. You mostly get where you want to go, but it's expensive, and sometimes it's filled with obnoxious people: drunks, people talking extremely loud, beggars, gypsies. Many station entrances frequently smell of piss. I know a guy that said he only has a car because he wants to avoid the scum in the trains. About half the people don't wear the mandatory mask in the trains (not just Berlin, also regional trains). Thanks to them, I probably got Covid. It's not enforced at all, even the train personnel just ignore it. I think many are afraid to say anything, because they might get shot in the head, beaten up, threatened with a knife or insulted, which has all happened.
Housing: rent has been going up for some years. Good districts have become unaffordable if you are not well off. People stopped moving “Umzugsstreik” because new rent has become so expensive. (The law limits raises somewhat.) You see classifieds-notes posted on street lamps offering 2000€-4000€ reward for help to find a flat 2-3 room flat with a rent of up to x, often with phrases like: “we are desperate”. I have given up.
The design of the general pension system and public health insurance are fundamentally broken for the coming times. I do not know one person under 45 that expects to receive anything worthwhile from the pension system. The insurance premiums are going to rise even more and the payouts for yourself will have been inflated away. Wait times for an appointment with specialist doctors can be multiple months.
It's not just Berlin. It's spreading.
Politics ignores the problem, as they have for years. They don’t go for the root causes. People not directly affected ignore it or don't perceive it until they are affected. The people I know are growing more and more dissatisfied and angry.
Obvious, simple solutions, are ignored because they are not politically correct. For now. As things deteriorate further, add a hard recession/depression and this might change, fast. Winter is coming.
That is one of the most grotesque whitewashes of Zionist terrorism I have ever read. You are trying to rewrite a story of Zionist terrorism and colonial succession into a heartwarming family drama.
The idea that Zionists were just a colony "looking to Britain for guidance" is an understatement. They were a de facto rival colonial project that used terror to expel the British, the Zionists even ironically described the British as occupiers of Palestine.[0] The Zionists weren't looking for "guidance," they were busy planting bombs[1].
Your claim that it was "never personal" and there was "no hate" is a disgusting lie. Tell that to the families of the British sergeants the Irgun hanged and booby-trapped. Tell that to the scores of British officials murdered in the King David Hotel bombing. It was a vicious Zionist terror campaign, and pretending otherwise is obscene.
Finally, your "convenient proxy" explanation sanitizes the ugly truth. The West didn't ally with Israel despite its history of terrorism, but they allied with it because of it. Israel's violent founding proved it could be a ruthless and effective enforcer for Western imperial interests. That is the real foundation of your "special relationship."
This is why literacy improved: "The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research.1 This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked “whole language” method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound." The fact that the debunked "whole language" method is being used seems intentionally destructive
It's quite possible that this whole digital ID thing is a red herring, to distract from recent revelations about Morgan McSweeney - who illegally took money from the Israel lobby, to fund a fake "antisemitism crisis" in Labour, with the goal of replacing Corbyn with Israel-aligned Starmer.
Some of the digital ID proposal documents published by UK gov even bear the "Labour Together" stamp - Labour Together being the Israel-aligned "think tank" that McSweeney used for the illegal funds!
You say "the Jews" but you're leaving out that there are Arab Jews and European ones. Arab Jews have lived in Palestine for hundreds of years alongside other Arabs peacefully in coexistence.
The arrival of Zionist European Jews was a phenomonen of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Zionist Jews that came from Europe brought with them a supremecist ideology that, in their eyes, justified all forms of violence committed against the Muslim, Christian, and yes, Jewish Palestians that opposed their colonization.
I don't know what you're making or misrepresenting in your statememt about Jordan and Jerusalem, but Jews have always lived in Jerusalem since the Muslims first took control of it 1400 years ago when Umar ibn El-Khattab brought back in Jews who had been expelled by the Christian rulers prior to that.
Jews have always prospered under actual religious Muslim rule, whether in Palestine, Spain, Morocco, Iran, or otherwise. Zionism is what drove a rift between Muslims and Jews in past two centuries, as prior to this there never was one.
So you think the Jews imported by the One Million Plan and the tens of others like it were "displaced"? There's a reason that the multiplicity of Jews in Israel today are American and European immigrants with no connection to the land whatsoever.
It wasn't started by the Palestinians. Israelis conduced ethnic cleansing operations against civilians to displace them, including biowarfare and well poisoning. It continues today, in Gaza and in the West Bank.
Kicked out? Is that what you call the One Million Plan and all the other plans like it? They were imported there because that's been the MO of the state of Israel since the Irgun and Haganah first envisioned it.
Say you have 10 ton of 2.5% enriched uranium to safeguard. If you turn it to 60% HEU, now you have only ~400kg of fuel to safeguard against air raids. Density of uranium is ~19 ton/m³, so that would correspond to just 21 liters of HEU, one bucket worth, what would make it very easy to transport and hide. That would make it possible to split it and store in safe locations, for example, inside some deep boreholes, far apart to each other, making it impervious to attack, for the duration of hostilities. Once they pass, it can be recovered and diluted back to 2.5% with natural uranium, reconstituting your original 10-ton fuel amount.