Won't know until all the documents are released. The blackmail is undeniable. But what's more interesting is who else was involved. Who purchased his services? That's what they are trying to hide.
Guns are incredibly available in the USA unlike in places like Europe, Australia, Japan, China, etc… you don’t have ~20 million guns being produced per year for civilian use without them getting basically everywhere. Gun control is very ineffective if you don’t do something about supply as well.
I can produce a 1911, Glock, or an AR-15 in all of these places in under a day and no law can really prevent that. The tech isn't going anywhere, it's a century old.
You are underestimating the quality and scale of American gun production. You can make your own gun, sure, or get an old one, maybe it won’t even blow your hand off. This is the one manufacturing area that the Americans have a clear advantage over the Chinese in.
I use Chinese contract CNC providers for non-firearm parts all the time: you're sorely mistaken if you think any random Chinese millshop can't produce a 100-year-old design just as well as any American one.
They can't produce those designs or even gun parts without risking the death penalty, so no private business will go near them, and they definitely won't specialize in it.
> any random Chinese millshop can't produce a 100-year-old design just as well as any American one.
Once. They do it once, then there is a huge death penalty trial that is rehashed on CCTV for weeks. You definitely won't get any scale out of it, no one will invest in something that will get them executed, so definitely nothing near to what the Americans can produce as the world's most economical gun producers.
These days, it feels like America basically sucks at making anything besides guns. For guns, no one else really compares, and if it weren't for the Darien Gap the whole of the Americas would be overflowing with guns from the USA (also, Brazil also makes lots of guns, meaning the production is roughly divided between the USA in the north and Brazil in the south).
The PAP (People's Armed Police) and the PLA have guns produced from closely regulated SOEs (not private enterprises allowed). The normal People's Police do not have guns, which makes sense since neither do the criminals (because guns are so unavailable in China they are almost impossible to get ahold of).
If we all resorted to snarky replies on HN then the conversation would be in a sad state despite the posting in the guidelines saying not to. Of course the posting of the guidelines is not the source of their enforcement, it's just a notice of what will be corrected by the mods via means other than written notice or group encouragement towards the environment the guidelines create.
While that doesn't drive comments against the guidelines to 0, I think it does a better job than if we all took to being as a defense to snark instead.
I think what he's saying is you can boost efficiency if you compress a cooler gas. So if you could capture the "cold" that you get from discharging the device, and use it to pre-cool the air for the next cycle (or use it for the data centers cooling system) , it would be much more efficient.
Cooling is rarely done in any other way than compressing a gas, allowing the heat to dissipate and then allowing it to decompress again. You don't want to compress a gas to cool another gas about to be compressed. What reasonably advanced compressed gas storage systems do is capture and store the heat that gets created during compression and feed it back during decompression. This gives the same efficiency difference as compressing some magically pre-cooled gas would do, only on the discharge side.
So far so good, just the old thermodynamics. It gets interesting when you have a cooling use case anyways: then you can skip on some of the decompression recovery and use the "cold" from decompression directly, to cool down something that needs cooling, without going the extra way of converting back to electricity and then sending the electricity recovered into a compressor setup for "creating cold". Bonus points if you also have a use case for the heat you did not use in reconversion to electricity, but chances are between losses during storage and heating some the gas back some amount beyond neutral you won't have much spare heat anyways.
I am guessing someone who works at the station shared some internal documents.
I remember in the mid 90s watching Nickelodeon before school and they played an entire 30m block of commercials instead of a program. They probably lost the tape or something.
There are definitely outside organizations whose sole responsibility is to monitor TV/radio broadcasts and nowadays even podcast sponsor breaks to ensure that ad copy is inserted as agreed. (Source: I was contracted to do some of that work for a time.)
> Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
Yes, it is.
It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't.
What the cryptocurrency people get wrong is that replacing one shared delusion with another isn't a useful path to go down.
Unless you do substinence farming, you would not last a month without "shared delusions" in place to make sure farmers supply you with food, getting nothing in return except a promise that they can go somewhere to pick up something someone else than you made in the future.
Money isn't "only bits" it is also an encoding of social contracts
You use the word delusion like it also includes a) things everyone fully agree only exists in people's mind as intersubjective reality (no deceit going on really) and b) things you depend on for your survival.
You talk like getting rid of "delusions", as you call them, is a goal in itself. Why? It is part of human technology. (Just like math, which also only exist in people's minds.) Humans have had contracts since we were hunter gatherers in groups...
I would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
> would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
Already read it. Counter: read "Debt, the first 5000 years" by Graeber for, finally, a non- "Chicago school of economics" take on the history of trade amongst humans.
Just to be clear, I agree the money abstraction is not working particularly well. And that in the age of computers something that is more directly linked to the underlying economy could have worked better. But what needs to replace it is a better and improved "delusion", not a lack of it.
But, why? Regarding your farmer example, there are examples throughout history of farming that fed many without the involvement of currency or the paying off of debt. Take a look into syndicalized Spain if you ever get a chance (~1936-1939). Farms were collectivized and worked on by volunteers, distributions done by need with some bookkeeping to track how many people were in certain regions. Worked pretty well until the communists decided it needed to be centrally controlled and kicked out the anarchists!
Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.
Currency (or IOU's, handshakes, pieces of green paper, bits on a disc, etc) is just an abstraction allows one to have choice.
The political systems that get built on top of that are just a downstream effect of the incentives that arise. Communisim thinking it would be good to centralize the control, capitalism thinking it would be good allow the incentives to rule, marxism thinking the labor rules, etc.
What I do for work is SO far away from any sort of tangible production, it makes sense to have a way to just straight from Work -> Food, rather than 50-100 trades so I can eat everyday. Again, the choice to to have to trade at all, or to trade exactly what I want, when I want, is enable by currency.
You can make the argument things shouldn't be so easy, that I shouldn't be able to choose to go to play pinball and drink a vanilla milkshake at 11am, but if that's possible, currency (in whatever form you want) has to exist.
So your claim is that someone is not a victim unless they are physically restrained or imprisoned? Can you give some examples of clear, definitive "legitimate victims" for contrast? Or are you insinuating that victim hood cannot be claimed unless they both come from the same income strata? Because otherwise the victims incentive to make money outweighs the possibility that the claim is true, that a wealthy person could in fact be a rapist?
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