Poul-Henning Kamp

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• Commented on Announcement time!
  »the idea that a building is sovereign territory of some other country is very recent, historically speaking.« It was gradual, it started with reliable mail delivery and a "consul" who was subject to the host nations laws, but treated as...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  »COVID19 dropped life expectancy in the developed world by more than 24 months.« I can recommend this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01450-3 The arrow-plot on pdf page 3 makes it very obvious that the really important factor is the health-care system. A well...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  »About 30-35 years ago I went all in on X-10 remote controls for lights and such in a house.« We built a new house 8 years ago, being in the IT/Security field nothing "smart" was allowed near it. The heatpump...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  »IBM doesn't seem to have suffered any reputational damage from renting out the machines that ran the camps…« … because they also rented out the machines used to keep track of all the japanese citizens USA put in concentration camps,...
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  »Nation-states don't have immunity« I didn't say "immunity", I said "impunity"....
• Commented on Announcement time!
  »There's a difference between complying with legal requirements -- if necessary going to court to clarify their lawfulness -- and bending over backwards to help an oppressive regime.« Yes. And that difference is, and always have been, »what makes the...
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  »But you need to recognize that if Apple bends over for the US government or the EU, then they've got no easy excuse for not bending over for China or India or J. Random Kleptocracy to demand spyware and backdoors...
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  There was an obscure danish band called "Strange Party Orchestra", given your list, you might like them....
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  »I'm fairly sure that Shakespeare failing on his own works is an old Asimov short story. « "The Imortal Bard"...
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  »I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that bleed air from the turbine compressor is a great way to aerosolize a high vapour pressure oily liquid« No, you need far higher pressure and, easier to fix, much lower...
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  »its stall speed is something like 7 knots« One of my friends grew up on an airbase, got his certificate as a teenager. One sunday he took one of the trainers up in a good wind, throttled way down and...
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  »Javier was working to a brief handed to him« Ohh, I'm not blaming him at all, he clearly gets The Laundry, it was precisely the US production-oids I was commenting on. The only "real" movie-person I know once lamented, that...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  »So it's probably a good thing it never got made.« Talk about dumbing down......
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »More fun from the Dali: for one, Maersk has a policy that NO ONE is to tell the authorities of problems.« First: All shipping companies have that policy, because all harbors are /very/ corrupt, so revealing anything which could give...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »Um, nope. NO HAZMATS in tunnels.« That's not nearly as universal as you seem to think. I can easily imagine why older tunnels may have that restriction, but modern tunnels seldom do....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »The Captain is fucked.« The specific blame-allocation will not be nearly as interesting as what the NTSB concludes about bridges and ships big enough to demolish them. Tunneling under rivers may become a thing again....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »Did the people who closed the bridge know there was a work crew there? Did they know how to contact them?« They probably knew exactly what it would take to contact them: Somebody driving out on the bridge with a...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »what is behind Da'esh's attack in Moscow? « Russian mercenaries in the middle east ?...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »FSVO "extremists" that also includes the "defense" industries and Halliburton etc, to the tune of a few trillion dollars in extra sales over two decades.« And to complicate things: If they had not, USA would probably be hip-deep in economic...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »The US would freak right out …« And they still do, about all the wrong things... Both 9/11 and in particular "Havanna Syndrome" and most recently "The Chinese Spy Baloon" all made me think of Poul Anderson's "Sam Hall" and...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »I also knew that Hussein was not suicidal« There is an interesting wrinkle to this entire story. It is, and was, a proven fact that Iraq had a clandestine nuclear weapons program. They got told, in various convincing ways, to...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »you have my full attention now« I bet we dont :-) The canonical fate for people discovering Girl Genius is to disappear from orbit for days if not weeks... As they ought, given it's brilliance....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »then there's 'red mercury' craziness« Originally that was a precisely designed canary, deliberately planted in the uranium mine to be heard from only if clandestine nuclear programmes discovered it. Various "leaks" had mentions that this (classified, obviously!) substance was "crucial"...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »The report below is coming out tomorrow and is likely to list most of the variables that define a typical EU country.« The one thing which I have never been able to explain to USAnians, is how much shitty healthcare,...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »I just don't think Putin is willing to invest that much in DT.« Saudi Arabia might, and they rutinely spent as much on other forms of entertainment......
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »I kinda want to hear what an "ordinary EU country" is and what their policies might be, to be honest. :-)« From the top of my head: No Death penalty (because even courts make mistakes) No elected judges (because that...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »Liberal, educated Americans, the kind who'd want to cross into Canada, don't have that poor mental model of the world. We know exactly what's wrong with our country, and with both major political parties, and what's right about the rest...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »And what does it mean / portend if he gets the bond from the Saudi's or Russia?« I still expect him to sell the golf course in Scotland for half a billion dollar to a triple-sandwiched private equity fund, which...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »It's like they couldn't understand that the labels "left" and "right" meant different things in different countries.« Actually it's more fundamental: They literally have no idea what "different countries" mean and entail, having never been abroad, and never seen any...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  »mapping out routes via secondary roads to reach Canada...« Some years back, a friend who happens to know a lot about China, explained to me why "China doesn't do something about North Korea" and it really blew my mind that...