WayeeCool [comrade/them]

In California, Oregon, and Washington the state governments stripped cities of most of their powers related to zoning in regards to blocking conversions to mixed use residential. As long as there isn’t heavy industry right next door (aren’t crazy, no one wants Houston), mixed use residential zoning is hard for cities to deny.

Los Angeles has the problem (benzene, hydrocarbons, heavy metals) of all the oil wells, pipelines, refineries, crude oil storage, and other oil field infrastructure hidden behind facades all throughout the city. The city and county are an active oil field, something that should never have been approved when there is residential or light commercial literally 25ft away from camouflaged wells, pipelines, and crude oil storage tanks. Then again people over a century ago probably shouldn’t have looked at the natural tar pits and thought to themselves “this is a great place to build a city”.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/09/oil-wells-in-la-nearby-residents-grapple-with-health-problems.html

New residential arguably is unethical in this situation, especially if it’s lower income housing. Btw, this is the reason building new public schools has been almost impossible in Los Angeles and existing schools all have soil that if there were alternatives would mean shutting them down. Los Angeles and Houston are more alike than anyone likes to admit. Can’t do the type of super fund site remediation (clean up) at the scale actually needed because it would mean tearing the city down to the bedrock to replace all the soil.

Uhhhhmm… I think the prefer to be called “tech bros” or “founders”.

One senior Chinese finance official who speaks fluent English and is a regular fixture on the international conference circuit told POLITICO by email that he could no longer attend an upcoming event outside China and was unable to speak on the phone.

He joins dozens of senior finance officials who have been removed in recent months, often after being accused of corruption.

Hollyshit. This is quite literally the same response you get from any affluent person who is under investigation, regardless of nation. In the US it’s a trope at this point for people under active investigation when reached out to by media to respond that they cannot talk about it, especially over the phone and to journalists who are guaranteed to be keeping a record of the conversation. Media are filled with jackels and anyone with any sense of self preservation will refuse to talk with them, especially directly and not through legal counsel.

that he could no longer attend an upcoming event outside China

Yeah! No shit?! It’s called being flagged as a “flight risk” due to having the financial means and connections to leave the country where you have been accused of commiting a serious crime. It’s exactly the same in most countries, including the US. Hell, in the US they restrict your movement even within the national borders (can’t leave specific state) until your name has either been cleared or you are convicted.

Who is pocketing the price difference:

Junshi partnered with California-based Coherus BioSciences to bring the drug to the US, and it is expected to become available within the first quarter of next year.

Gotta love how the US regulatory regime is structured so middle men always get their taste. It’s like how the US doesn’t produce much in the way of active ingredients, instead US companies import them from China, India, and Poland then package them under their own brand name into pill, capsule, or injectable formulation. During this process the price somehow increases 1,000% to 10,000% over what they paid for the active ingredient.

I’ve personally enjoyed watching all the admin meetings for the project on their YouTube Channel because it really gives an understanding of the insane inefficiency of the US system of private property rights and public-private contracting.

Best printers out there. I’ve had the same b/w brother laser printer for well over a decade and it is still going strong. None of the bullshit associated with other brands of laser printers or inkjets. It can sit unused for over a year and will immediately print something no problem. Also gives me 7000 pages between ink toner replacements and only have to replace the drum every 3 or 4 tone replacement cycles.

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Lmao. Chinese officials proving to be experts at not taking the “denounce” bait.

As long as no one hits one of the two US carriers on station in the area there should be no worry about the US resorting to nukes. It’s something like an aircraft carrier getting sunk that would cause the kind of psychic damage required for US leadership to have an irrational knee jerk response involving nuclear weapons.

on a side note: does anyone else hate how because the people of the US are uniquely fkd in the head and have enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth lifeless, the rest of the world has to keep in mind what kinds of events might cause the US to have a complete collective freak out? In recent years I keep thinking about how throughout all of human history hegemonic empires would rise and fall but never before has the decline of an empire come with the very real danger that as they destabilize it could result in them killing everyone on earth rather than just themselves and their neighbors. It feels like being locked in a room with another individual who is experiencing deteriorating mental health and is in possession of a hand grenade no one can take away from them without risking setting it off.

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For real. The majority of the price difference isn’t materials or workplace safety but privatized vs state enterprise. A sizeable chunk of the $5000 price difference is the cut that goes to the shareholders of General Dynamics. It’s the same reason the Chinese J20 costs so much less than the F35 and had dramatically less production issues.

Russia only had a privatized defense industry from the early 1990s until in 2007 they decided privatization of certain industries was a mistake. They undid the privatization of their aerospace, defense, high tech manufacturing, and key heavy industries. It’s taken almost a decade to repair the damage of privatization and rebuild capacity but we are now seeing the fruits of those efforts.

In Russia their 155mm artillery shells are currently manufactured by KBP Instrument Design Bureau, a wholey owned subsidiary of the Russia state owned Rostec holding corporation.

In the US all their 155mm artillery shells are manufactured at the US government owned Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, which is operated by the private sector defense contractor General Dynamics. That same facility used to be able to produce over a million 155mm field artillery shells per month back in the 1940s before modern factory automation and even today claims to have the ability to ramp back to that capacity (at a cost) with only a couple months notice. As part of the US propaganda blitz, BusinessInsider recently did a PR and tour video of the plant.

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Let’s not kid ourselves by calling it gimmicks or overly complicated. It is the same hardware and methods for the Russian military. It also isn’t security through obscurity. Everyone switched to software defined radios for their communication and radar for a reason.

There are methods to combat such jamming but Ukrainian forces don’t have the training or capability. NATO can’t just magicially make the Ukrainian military into one with the capabilities of military super powers like the US, China, or Russia. The US and Russia both have the capacity, infact the Russian military is extremely capable when it comes to the electronic warfare and countering electronic warfare because their military has to be on par capability wise with the US military.

Instead we have sad stories like what’s left of the Ukrainian air force powering down all the electronics in their aircraft as they approach the front line because they have no way to detect and counter Russian electronic capabilities.

The worst part is all the NATO countries are stripping the Active Protection System hardware out of Challenger, Lepord, and Abrams battle tanks before they are delivered to Ukraine. Everyone is paranoid about Russian electronic warfare learning how to jam the radar systems those NATO nations have installed in their tanks. Russian tanks currently on the front line have modern APS hardware while Ukraine is getting battle tanks that are intentionally crippled by NATO.

Another funny and fkd up thing is what will happen with the F16 fighters Ukraine is about to have. The US has stripped out the counter measure hardware that makes an old airframe like the F16 more survivable in an environment with modern anti air missiles being fired at it. Those F16s are going to get turned by Russia into wreckage just as fast as they did with all these NATO battle tanks.

blood for the blood god!

It’s too funny because the F16 doesn’t stand a chance against Russian air defenses. The US and NATO are giving Ukraine F16 fighters undoubtedly stripped down to the feature set reserved for buyers like Pakistan. They will lack any modern advanced electronics equipment to keep them from getting easily shot down. It’s an old fighter at this point and without the latest upgrade packages is going to be cannon fodder for Russian mobile anti air, which is actually quite advanced.