> With current diving at 150 to 200 meters, you can only get 10 minutes of work completed, followed by 6 hours of decompression. With our underwater habitats we’ll be able to do seven years’ worth of work in 30 days with shorter decompression time. More than 90 percent of the ocean’s biodiversity lives within 200 meters’ depth and at the shorelines, and we only know about 20 percent of it.
I believe the term is appropriate.
Not only would the books have mostly disappeared due to local conditions, they can indeed be, and often are, digitized.
Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy.
Millions of Indians escaped starvation thanks to this policy and an astounding body of knowledge survived and was consequently studied, helping elevate Indian culture in academic circles. But no matter, this created “knowledge gaps”.
The conclusion that this "created knowledge gaps" seems particularly inapt. If American universities had not purchased these particular books, they would have most likely been lost just like the rest of their respective print runs. The "knowledge gap" would have been even worse, as no one at all would have had access to those books.
Also mind you, this is coming from an academic. Yet there’s no proof being brought to the argument that this gap does exist and they’re not saying “may or might”, they’re making what appears to be a purely ideological statement.
There's certainly a hypothetical universe where American universities didn't buy these books, and they were instead acquired by Indian libraries which managed to preserve them. But that isn't our universe, and there's no clear means by which the US could brought it about.
>Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy.
I'm not talking about this particular case right now, although I may comment separately about it a little later, but the US did have a colonial past. See:
From that article, the 7th or so paragraph, highlighting is mine:
>Violent conflicts arose during the beginning of this period as indigenous peoples fought to preserve their territorial integrity from increasing European colonizers and from hostile indigenous neighbors who were equipped with Eurasian technology. Conflict between the various European empires and the indigenous peoples was a leading dynamic in the Americas into the 1800s, although some parts of the continent gained their independence from Europe by then, countries such as the United States continued to fight against Native Americans and practiced settler colonialism. The United States for example practiced a settler colonial policy of Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears.
The graphic after the first paragraph there (labelled "Graphic depicting the loss of Native American land to U.S. settlers in the 19th century"), is, well, graphic. See all that blue area disappearing?
We're perfectly aware of this, just as we're aware a large part of the starvation the US was saving Indians from was due to decades of the British forcing them to grow cash crops instead of food. An American collection of Indian works is no more a "colonial library" than an American collection of Irish works or of Canadian works.
I may reply more comprehensively later, but a few points for now:
>decades of the British forcing
JFC. A few centuries, is more like it. That's how long the Brits enslaved India(ns) for, which could happen at all, and then continue, due to multiple reasons on both sides, including, as one interesting reason, some Indian groups (think small "kingdoms") backstabbing others, and colluding with the British, which is why Alexander won over Porus, it is said in some history books.
Maybe check British colonial history and history of India, in obvious places such as Wikipedia and Britannica (ironically, for the latter).
Also read about Winston Churchill and the Bengal famine, in which millions died, but don't just limit yourself to Wikipedia:
which you too seem to display in your comment, at least going by:
>the starvation the US was saving Indians from
Sure, they may have saved them from it (I was a kid at the time, too young to look it up in depth, but I vaguely remember reading / hearing something about it, including some newspaper scandals about the quality of some of the food supplied by the US - milo is one term I somewhat recollect, but I don't know the details), but they did not necessarily do it (only) for noble or altruistic intentions.
I would not be surprised if there was some quid pro quo demanded or made a condition for the help, as often is the case when the World Bank
or the International Monetary Fund gave financial aid to developing countries in times of crisis.
In fact I just did a quick google or two, and this is one link I found:
Ghost of PL-480 Returns as India Avoids the Wheat Trap All Over Again:
And let's not forget that the wrecked state of many such countries was at least in "good" part one of the results of European colonialism. The United States itself was earlier one such colony, as you know. Heard of the Boston tea party?
I have been to Boston, BTW, and have eaten at Legal Seafoods and other places in downtown Boston. Nice town. I liked the architecture of some of the historical public buildings. I think one of them was the Public Library.
That is a long and very interesting article. It also has links to more detailed articles on many of the sub topics.
Apart from general background information, it has many paragraphs about the way the CIA interfered in the affairs of many countries, including some famous examples that many people outside the US are well aware of.
From their bio:
“My dissertation was a linguistic and cultural examination of disability as portrayed in Medieval Icelandic genre of the Sagas and Þættir of Icelanders.”
If they weren’t a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you’d think this was straight out of Portlandia.
Studying how a specific ancient culture potrayed and felt about disability seems like a reasonable thing to study.
Sure, maybe its not as immediately useful as say science, but if you are going to study ancient cultures, analyzing the writings they left behind is one of the main ways to do it.
It's not that it's unprofitable. It's that it's un-interesting.
It's not interesting now, and will never be interesting. It was selected as a topic because it hit the right buzzwords, and nobody will ever read it out of genuine interest. Nobody will re-think their worldview from the conclusions.
We live in a massive universe, in the most exciting time in human history. There are a thousand times more topics to research than there will ever be people or time to do so. To pick a pointless dissertation topic in this open, vast universe of potential is a profound waste of human potential. It's sad.
> It's not interesting now, and will never be interesting
You’re writing off Icelandic culture as having nothing useful to suggest to modern civilisation. Given their parliament is the oldest continuously-operating one in the world, I’d say you’re dead wrong. What’s sad is that you’re dismissing books you haven’t read. Which is ironically pertinent to this article—it’s what India has been doing.
> Nobody will re-think their worldview from the conclusions.
Did you read their dissertation? How do you know?
> It was selected as a topic because it hit the right buzzwords, and nobody will ever read it out of genuine interest
I don't think that is true. How societies balance group needs versus individual needs, especially for individuals with unique needs or who may not be able to contribute in the same way as most is a pretty perenial question.
Certainly in the greek context people have talked and argued about sparta's alleged harsh attitude towards disabled people since forever. Like its a pretty pernial source of debate, and has echoes in more modern movements such as eugenics in the 1900s thousands of years later.
All that is to say. This isn't a particularly buzzwordy topic. Most computer science disertations are more buzwordy than this.
I consider history to be useful right now. The past influences the present and guides the future. I meant immediate as in like instructions on how to build a car.
The article gives some details we can go off of.
5 suitcases with $500k each, is $2.5M.
Alfassi charged 10% so $250k.
Out of that you have to manage all the logistics (as they said his fee covered it).
- Pickup of the cash
- Counting
- Hiring and managing mules (which means paying for Clarke’s salary and expenses who lives between Dubai and London, with, I assume, lots of flying and housing for her and her family required)
- Getting mules to your location
- Paying for things like Covid tests, a few expenses (I assume some food, and other little things)
- Driving them to the airport
- Flying them in business class to Dubai
- Paying for a local resort while they stayed put a few days
- Flying them back to the UK
Now they flew two people at a time, so all of the above is doubled for each trip.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this added up to around $50k per trip, which is 20% of the $250k fee for just transportation of the cash (does not include the actual laundering being done locally).
Margins are likely still “respectable” in the end, but you can’t have mules taking 10% of the suitcase’s content if you’re to run a profit.
I don’t think this is about how technically complex that would be. That’s clearly not where the moat is.
The moat is in the commercial operations powering the cash machine that Google has built across its numerous properties.
You can build this engine but it won’t give you the richness of the data Google collects through Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Analytics etc… on its users.
You could argue that Apple could try, through its own properties, but it would go against the privacy stance (essential to their image now).
Not saying they aren’t capable of dancing around this problem either, but then you start eroding your brand (which sells lots of iPhones).
That’s when you start seeing that it’s just simpler to externalize this cost to a third party that you can then openly criticize and use as scarecrow to reinforce your market position, all the while collecting tens of billions in profits from them.
Yes profits, they don’t pay anything to operate Google Search. Given that Google gives them a third of revenue on Safari, that means Apple would need a product that does multiple times what they get for it today. That also requires a sales force they don’t fully have (although that’s been increasing for their own properties like AppStore and News).
Anyway, looking at it from this angle, it’s kind of genius not to change the status quo.
Well this is actually still very common in Paris!
A number of subway stations have adopted them for long corridors connecting platforms of different lines within the same station.
They move people at 4km/h on average, but the one in Montparnasse station goes up to 9km/h (used to be 11!).
They’re mighty useful to hurried Parisian commuters.
Peak human population is expected to reach 10.4B in 2084 and slowly decrease from there.
This is according to the UN[1] but other estimates envision a much earlier peak by the 2040s at 8.5B followed by a sharp drop to 6B by the end of the century[2].
