philipallstar

Yes. If you think SpaceX is some sort of terrible also-ran that can only get contracts through political links, then honestly I don't think I can help you there. I don't think anyone can.

It seems obviously dustortionary to highlight the niche, optional part of the process they did spend time on, that would be utterly worthless without the difficult bit being done elsewhere. Please be less specific.

I can't imagine Swindon being a better town to know than Reading, though.

Awarded that for doing work, though, not to clone someone else's work and release it for less money.

> This is spying with extra steps couched in corporate speak.

Calling something names doesn't invalidate it. It only invalidates what point you're trying to make.

> Science historian Alistair Sponsel of the Science History Institute and crystallographer Brian Sutton of KCL argue Franklin knew the earlier photo had revealed a helix—the epiphany Watson claimed for himself—and that is precisely why she made a second, more refined version, photograph 51.

It was Watson and Crick who discovered the double helix, even if Franklin did write something down about a single helix from a previous photo that they didn't read.

Who is dismissing it?

That's why Chat Control has vanished for good, and isn't going to be brought up over and over again until it eventually passes.

Inequality is not a problem in a world where people can choose to work really hard or chill their whole lives and have the hard workers pay for their food stamps.

The main thing is choice, and that will always result in different outcomes. A violinist will probably end up with less money in her life than a stockbroker ends up in his, but money is not the only measure of a life.

On that measure however, with the massive scale that certain companies can achieve, some people will have far more net worth than others. But that won't be because the others had anything taken from them. It'll be because massive value was supplied to some customers, or some value was supplied to millions of customers.

Yes. You're just having slightly less money stolen by the government.

What debt are we incurring? If I stop working and don't pay tax, I didn't rob you. Me paying less tax doesn't rob you. Stupid spending of your taxes on things you don't need or want robs you.

Most people don't pick up the bill. Anyone net tax-negative does not pick up the bill. Facebook definitely pays more tax than me, both as a corporation and from all the employees they employ.

No one is siphoning money from taxpayers. Paying less tax legally is not taking any money from you.

> Canada specifically requested Pakistan to not use the Plutonium it derives from the CANDU research reactor, but it declined

This is the most Canada and Pakistan thing in history.

You mean they can give away ownership of companies in exchange for things? I suppose so, but can you give me a for instance? Elon Musk swaps half of his SpaceX stake for something?

> However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!). [1]

That is indeed alarmist, at least. If you define wealth in a really stupid way you can get to that statement, but it has to be a really stupid way.

Extra-national laws are a real minefield, though. Ireland is in a great position without having too do very much of its own to have got there other than sign the right agreements.

> In some cases, like the notorious Ireland Apple tax shelter, they may not want to enforce the rules because they feel they are benefiting from the evasion.

I thought it turned out the EU had no business in national tax affairs.

It's not a race to the bottom any more than competition lowering consumer prices is a race to the bottom. It's one of the few checks on governments just demanding more and more tax money for little return.

After this victory by USPIS, I hope Maury went postal and brought in muffins for everyone.

> Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.

There are plenty of things to not like about immigration implementation, and trying to steer everything towards your pet peeve seems mad.

> we cannot demand that people are surveilled every minute of their lives whilst at the same time complaining that it's a bad thing to happen to us.

Well, those in power should be held to a higher standard in various ways, and it is tricky. Someone who works on a pharma regulatory board who then the next year gets a gloriously-salaried job at Pfizer should probably not have been able to do that, even though for most people a job at Pfizer would be fine.

> They just took ideas from abroad - industrialization, capitalism, mass literacy, adult male suffrage, (some) democracy (pre-WW2) - and adopted them.

Japan is more modern because it already had a very advanced, well-organised society. Japan is more like the UK in that it's a source of civilisation rather than a recipient. However it hugely calcified around religion, where the Emperor is basically god, and the utter decimation of that belief upon two nukes landing on Japanese soil meant that Japan had a huge reset, and took on - extremely well - the latest and greatest at the time, which was UK and US-based lower-case liberal capitalism.

> Japan is more modern than India because it wasn't colonized

This is backwards. Japan was organised, modern and hard-working enough to not be colonised throughout history.

> > Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent

> And India isn't?

I think you need to bear in mind the conversation being had, rather than goldfishing through statements forgetting where they came from. This was: "The US has more slaves in it than anywhere else in Western Europe". Answer: "It's much larger than anywhere else in Western Europe." Nothing to do with India.

> You said India is backward today compared to ancient Greece

No, I didn't mean that. I said if Ancient Greece is your yardstick, India would be more than 1000 years behind today without external influence. Ancient Greece was 2000 years ago, not 1000.

> The US has the most people in modern slavery in the Western hemisphere: https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie....

Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent, so of course it's got more than most of Western Europe. If Luxembourg had a million modern slaves there'd be nowhere to hide them. And it has much, much more sensitive systems for detecting this sort of thing than India does, so you can imagine that number is not lowballed.

In a way its distant nominative descendent, TikTok, is also a solitaire game.

> I'm not aware of widespread slavery in India

Goodness, there was a huge amount of slavery, back into prehistory, then lots African slaves from the 6th century, then when Islamic conquest hit almost 1000 years ago many Indians were enslaved. Just as slavery was everywhere, it was in India. The big event was in 1843 when Britain did the moral thinking and emphasis to abolish it throughout their empire and also just in general, with British ships going to war against slaver ships and the British Empire buying slaves' freedom. The two big things about India and abolition were 1) the East India Company was definitely not as morally clear as the people in England, and 2) there was a worry that ending slavery in India would be too disruptive to the local culture, it was so embedded. So it was only abolished 10 years after the rest of the Empire.

Today, with 70 years of independence and self-rule, India has the most modern slaves in the world[0].

> Women are allowed to vote there.

Yes, as of 1950 when democracy was copied and pasted from other civilisations - some, like ancient Greece, almost 2000 years prior - who did all the discovery and moral thinking for this. It's not hard to copy something, particularly when declaring it to be so is what's measured, and not how well it's implemented.

[0] https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...

1000 years ago is not mud huts. Although in terms of civics and rights I would say India seems quite a lot further back than 1000 years, if you take the ancient Greeks as your yardstick.

You'll see a load of people on benefits being tax-negative, though. If paying taxes is your measure, then an honest assessment of who pays taxes wouldn't land you at the ultra-rich.

Wirecard was pretty good though. That made the headlines.

Funding is highly related to those things. It's not related to intellect, but a place that is extremely high risk to invest in just won't be the place where investment ends up.