exchemist

This was all a load of overblown cobblers talked up by media hype and it was in the press in 2016, not last year. Many of the transactions "revealed" were perfectly legal, though certainly a number were due to tax evasion. As far as David Cameron's father was concerned, he was a stockbroker (not in itself anything remotely shady) who set up a company, offshore from the UK, for people wishing to invest in dollar denominated shares. That's all. It was perfectly legal and above board.

Here's the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55662-4 Sadly it is written in the usual, almost unreadable, style of so many papers these days, but the graph of the decay curve they obtained, from their measurement of samples, was interesting: Fig. 2: 10Be concentration vs. age measured in crust VA13/2-237KD. The bump is the anomaly. This graph suggests they can use ¹⁰Be for dating up to 14Myr or so (except obviously where the flat bit is, from ~8-10Myr).

Don't if you have seen this (or can read the poor copy) but there is a lot of this kind of thing circulating in the UK right now Oh there will be plenty of MAGA groups happy to make these threats, I've no doubt. And nobody will be able to pinpoint who, precisely, has suggested which politicians to threaten. The next step will be to threaten judges on the same basis.

Oooh, so it’s that ghastly Ayn Rand woman! Now why does that not surprise me?😉 She’s the one who advocated a philosophy of personal selfishness, thought millionaires were heroes and social welfare was an abomination…..and then spent her declining years living on, er, state social welfare benefits. So a thoroughly poisonous individual - and a hypocrite to boot. Oddly enough, I don’t feel motivated to read her effusions. But then, I was brought up with a Christian ethical system, of which Ayn Rand’s ideas are the absolute antithesis.

I see there are now reports that Hegseth has told the US Military Cyber Command to stop all work on the Russian target, and that analysts have been not to report, or follow up reports, of Russian threats. Can anyone corroborate this? If true, it can only be because Trump has received assurances from Putin that the USA is no longer going to be a target for Russian cyber activity. This would leave Russia free to focus on Europe. No doubt we in Europe can look forward to more undersea cable-cutting, placing of bombs in airfreight, mysterious fires at factories and cyber attacks on social services and power networks. While Trump and Vance laugh and cheer from the sidelines.

Who is the writer and what are his or her credentials on the subject?

I love it! That would be a masterstroke of very Chinese, face-saving, denial! 😁 Is "Silicon Shield" a thing, in Taiwanese politics? It's a neat image.

Yes you may be right there. But why do all these other guys like Vance also go along with the Putin love-in? There has to be some kind of ideology, surely?

Aha, thanks for the extra background. But this will mean Taiwan will be well aware of the value of what they have and won't part with it in a hurry, at least. Maybe, given the behaviour of the Trump administration TSMC would be wise to find reason to drag its feet over the Arizona plant. Because getting that operational for the top product lines could mean the end of Taiwan as an independent country. May even be worth having a major industrial "accident".

Agreed. One feels in particular that Musk and Trump must fall out before long. Musk's habit of giving peremptory, high-handed orders steals Trump's thunder. Also, there's a basic conflict between the populist far-right (Bannonists?) and the tech-oligarch, low tax fraternity (Muskies?), which must come to the fore when the DOGE cuts start to bite for ordinary people. So unless by then Trump feels he no longer has to worry about either elections or popular approval more generally, that must lead to friction. Back on the Foreign policy topic, I read a piece last week by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times that highlighted the implications of the Trump worldview as applied to the Pacific. If I were Taiwanese I would be very worried now. Trump sees the world as a carve-up into spheres of influence of 3 strongmen: himself, Putin and Xi. While China is seen as an economic adversary, it would be very Trumpy to propose a "deal" in which Trump agrees not to come to the aid of Taiwan, in exchange for some rebalancing of trade, access to processed lithium and/or rare earths, or something. The sole strategic interest Trump has in Taiwan is that it has, in TSMC, a unique semiconductor supplier, providing a lot of the high end chips advanced IT hardware requires. Rachman says the Taiwanese government is coming under pressure (tariff threats again) to sell a major stake in this business to a US manufacturer, allowing manufacture in the USA. Once this is achieved, Trump can cut Taiwan adrift and Xi can have it. Based on the disgusting exhibition we have been just been treated to over Ukraine, this has the ring of truth to me. If I were the Taiwanese government I would strongly resist pressure from Trump to let any US organisation anywhere near TSMC. It is the biggest "card" they can play for their own security. Given the tactics of this administration to flood the zone with shit, it's all too easy to fail to notice things that are not eye-catching but nevertheless significant. Does anyone know more about this pressuring of Taiwan on semiconductors?

You were not wrong🙄.

Oh yes, I’m sure they coordinated the Oval Orifice scene between them. But I still suspect Trump is being played by them, overall.

I’m not so sure. I think Vance and Musk are the ones with the ideology and sense of mission. Trump is just a self-obsessed old man with megalomania and a score of grudges. I think those two are the puppet masters and Trump their useful idiot. Vance in particular strikes me as having the ideological drive that is the missing element in Trump for a real c.21st Hitler. And Vance will take over when Trump conks out. He may be the real deal. That speech in Munich was not scripted by Trump.

This makes me want to retch. We will just have to take it on by ourselves in Europe. Europe has already provided more than half the funding for Ukraine. It's a shortage of manufacturing capacity that will be the problem, and that will take several years to rectify. Meanwhile I have no confidence that the US will even agree to sell armaments on commercial terms. I think Trump and Vance want the eastern EU to be overrun by Russia. It's fair to criticise the way Europe has not pulled its weight on defence but to pull the plug at zero notice has to be seen as a deliberately hostile act, given that it obviously leaves the countries of Europe exposed to invasion, overnight. I think we have to cease intelligence cooperation, too, now that there is yet another Russian stooge in charge of the US intelligence agencies. It's too risky. Ukraine's strategy and tactics could go straight to the Kremlin! And we no longer have any shared goals with the USA for the rest of the intelligence that is currently shared. Even on terrorism, the far right extremists may get tipped off by the USA. It really is over now. I doubt the USA will be able to get these people out of office - even if the people want to, which is far from clear. After all they did elect them. P.S. Seems my take on this fiasco is broadly shared by others with more information about what went on behind the scenes: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/jd-vance-volodymyr-zelenskyy This is disgusting.

This seems rather a waste of time and effort to me. For a start the human race is not going to be a multiplanetary species "soon", if ever. Secondly, even if we were, there is no reason to think a change to the system of units would be helpful. All units are arbitrary and the result of history. The metre, for instance was set up at the French Revolution as being one 10 millionth of the distance from the N Pole to the Equator. Does anyone today know or care about that? Of course not. We use the metre because it is a convenient size for human beings (actually very close to the yard), easy for us to visualise and able to express everyday objects and distances without a lot of decimal places or zeros. And then there is the process of changing units, which is very time-consuming and costly. So those are the reasons for not changing units. As far as I can see you have not explained what benefits you expect from a change (I have not read your long screed from ChatGPT since we all know Chat GPT produces any old crap to satisfy what the user has fed in. If there are benefits enumerated in that screed, you need to extract them and post a concise summary in your own words.)

You are choosing, bizarrely, to believe that the French authorities and all the major media organisations that have reported this nefarious activity are lying or misinformed. Obviously nobody on this forum is going to prove the truth of the allegations to your satisfaction by finding and posting examples of child pornography. If you can't see why that is, you are crazy. It is obvious there is at least a case to answer and it will now go to trial. The trial judge will see the evidence. So we'll see if the allegations are true.

If Zelensky has no, or few, cards to play that is solely because Trump has chosen to betray him and side with the aggressor in this war. So it is pretty rich for Trump to tell Zelensky he has no cards, when it is Trump who has taken them away! I actually think this dust-up in the Oval Orifice was a manufactured publicity stunt by Vance and Trump to try to weaken Zelensky personally, in the hope he will stand aside and allow a more Russia-friendly leader to replace him. That has always been Putin's desire. Putin wants Ukraine to hold an election (preposterously, in the middle of a war with parts of the country under enemy occupation) which he can interfere with and cast doubt on. This can provide a pretext for a further invasion later on if the new leader is insufficiently subservient to Russia. The row was televised and no doubt carefully selected clips will now be circulated to depict Zelensky as ungrateful and unreasonable, when he has been fighting for the life of his country for the last three years, against a massively powerful foe. Trump has furthermore overturned the entire military posture of the USA since WW2 in the European theatre. He has wrecked the deterrent value of NATO, which has been the centrepiece of military strategy ever since WW2. This leaves Europe exposed to military conquest by Putin's revanchist Russia. It is absolutely plain now that Trump and Vance are Russian stooges, wanting to carve the world up into spheres of influence without regard to borders or law. It is also plain that they hate the EU deeply and want it to fail. What better way of achieving that than to neuter NATO and thereby encourage Russia to nibble off bits its eastern frontier, sapping its energy and resources? Meanwhile Vance and Musk try to destabilise it on the political front by encouraging far-right authoritarian movements. The USA is now, suddenly, the adversary of Europe, not its ally. "The West" is now dead. What we have now is the free democracies vs. the rest. Those comprise the EU, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and a few others. The USA is not a member of this group.

Quite. Anyone who has visited Charlemagne’s octagonal chapel at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), built in 800AD, will find “Dark Ages” a suspect term.

Aha. So the resolution of the seeming paradox is actually quite subtle. To be honest, the ladder paradox almost does my head in. I'm not surprised @M S La Moreaux hadn't thought of it that way.

This isn't my field at all, but I wonder if the conceptual difficulty is that, while the electrons are in motion relative to the observer, the wire in which they travel (i.e. the array of atoms of which it is made) is not. So it seems to me the external dimensions of the wire are unchanged to the observer, even though the contents, i.e. the moving electrons, are foreshortened in the direction of travel as you have explained. I'm not sure myself how I should picture this. In terms of your analogy, the balls inside the plexiglas tube are in motion, but the tube itself is not.

On the contrary, @TheVat and I have been addressing the OP, which was asking about points of law concerning interception of correspondence by the state.

Firstly this is not the constitution and secondly there are two references in the section on Article 432 concerning the case of public officials acting “hors les cases prevus par le loi”. This implies there are other laws that may override this one in particular cases, most likely concerning public safety and security. I see little point in you trying to relitigate a case in a jurisdiction you know nothing about.

I don't see anything in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic about secrecy of correspondence: https://www.elysee.fr/en/french-presidency/constitution-of-4-october-1958 What are you referring to? As for the UK, there is, famously, no written constitution at all. In fact there are specific laws allowing the authorities to access correspondence, under certain circumstances. I don't know about other western countries but these examples indicate you are mistaken.

I made a post about, that a while back on this thread. But the idea of bonds, and thus the meaning of the diagrams @studiot showed you, should not be too hard for you to understand, I hope. Water is H-O-H. Carbon dioxide is O=C=O (double lines in the latter case denoting what are called “double” bonds. Note that in this case carbon still forms 4 bonds, even though here it is joined to only 2 other atoms.) So you can see O, oxygen, forms 2 bonds, C, carbon 4 and H, hydrogen 1.

By observing the proportions in which substances reacted. Once you have the atomic weights, if you carefully weigh the reactants and the products, you can deduce that one carbon atom reacts with 4 hydrogen atoms, or else to produce substances with the ratio nC atoms: 2n+2 H atoms. In other words, CH4, C2H6, C3H8………..etc. These are all hydrocarbons. Probably easiest to do it by burning some of a hydrocarbon and measuring the amount of water and carbon dioxide produced and looking at their ratios. And then it dawns on you that C is joining to 4 other atoms, either 4 Hydrogen or else to one or more C atoms and H for the remainder, but H is only joining to one other atom. The lines between that atoms signify that C can join to 4 atoms but H can only join to 1 . This led to the idea that the number of “bonds” an atom can form is characteristic of the element. And that is a very powerful principle in chemistry.