Math seems wrong "The team found that the loop design would convert 75% of the gas entering the system into useful resources, producing carbon nanotubes and hydrogen in a 3:1 mass ratio. In other words, for every 4 kilograms of methane the system successfully converts into useful resources, it makes 3 kilograms of nanotubes and 1 kilogram of hydrogen."
The 75% and the 3:1 ratio are not related. Methane has the formula CH4, so for 12 grams of carbon you have 4 grams of hydrogen. If you successfully break down the molecule CH4 you get a carbon-hydrogen ratio of 3:1. Now, let's say you start with 5.33 kg of methane. Only 75% gets converted, so that's 4 kg. Of that, you get 3 kg of carbon and 1 kg of hydrogen.
Not op but, whenever I search for some term that maybe have more watchtime,you will see AI generated content. For example try searching for "li ion battery".
Still what she did was fraud. From the article - "Still, the judge criticized the bank, saying “they have a lot to blame themselves” for after failing to do adequate due diligence. He quickly added, though, that he was “punishing her conduct and not JPMorgan’s stupidity.” "
Not to justify it, but why isn't the founder of UPS (edit: Fedex) in prison? I don't think it was legal to go and literally spend their money at the casino.
If you turn a profit no one cares (unless you're Shkreli, don't think his investors lost money, but he pissed off some politicians because he said the quiet parts out loud about how the pharma industry works), if you lose it's fraud.
When all the winners are doing it, hard to compete otherwise... not that it makes it right.
why isn't the founder of UPS in prison? I don't think it was legal to go and literally spend their money at the casino
That was FedEx’s founder, Fred Smith. It wasn’t UPS
He only had $5,000 of funds remaining, which he gambled playing blackjack, so the potential loss to investors was small. He’d already lost almost all their investments through operating FeDex
At that point he had been stiffing his pilots on wages for weeks or months, and with many also paying fuel bills on their personal credit cards/checks, since many fuelers had canceled FedEx's accounts.
Yeah, $5K isn't a whole lot, but if I'm a pilot struggling to put food on my family's table, and the CEO takes company money to Vegas, I'm not thinking "Oh, but the investors" or "Sure, it's not that much money anyway".
I don't see why people (not saying you, in particular) see this as some heroic founder "risking it all". He wasn't. He was risking the company's "all", after asking the employees to suck up his mismanagement.
some heroic founder "risking it all". He wasn't. He was risking the company's "all", after asking the employees to suck up his mismanagement.
I agree. He was asking employees not to cash their paychecks sometimes. $5000 is inconsequential compared to that forced investment from employees and business partners
If you spend investor money at a literal casino while advertising a non-casino related business, and pay the investors back, probably people will view you as not committing a crime.
If you get investor money or get a loan on the basis of funding logistics investments, bet it on roulette red, and go bankrupt, I would expect you'd be looking at hard jail time for fraud.
So I'm thinking the crime would be nothing, because he was a winner, and the optics totally changed, and fraud relies on very subjective opinions of a jury.
There are lots of examples of people going to jail despite investors getting their money back, like SBF and Shkreli. Even Madoff investors got 94% of their investments back.
Shkreli is the only one of those 3 that fully paid back his investors, and it took him pissing off virtually every politician and a bunch of wealthy insurance executives/administrators to get enough resources mobilized to get a conviction (and being one of the most uncharismatic people on earth, which didn't help him at trial).
I think you are definitely in a much worse place for a fraud conviction if you lose money.
No, those repayment numbers are what their crypto was worth at time of bankruptcy and interest is nowhere close to what you could have made just doing index fund on top of any damage done since they didn't have the money.
If I stole 1000 bucks from you 3 years ago and repaid 1080 back now, sure, you got some interest, but you still be pretty unhappy with not having access to that money. For some, lack of access to that money could have been extremely damaging.
No because the assets ('money') deposited to SBF were crypto, and you just gamified it by doing a currency exchange to USD while disingenuously failing to note that in that time the USD value of the crypto went up.
If you want an accurate reflection, note how much of the crypto deposited went in, and then how much came back out after SBF lost it.
This would be like me depositing USD, someone stealing some of it, then you bragging the value went up because I have a larger quantity as measured in Venezuelan Bolivars. What actually happened is their % they recouped was less than 100 until you artificially change to an entirely different currency.
It’s not super relevant. If you were responsible for managing a property for someone and instead sold it outside your agreed authority and dumped the money into nvidia shares in 2020, you’d still be in trouble with the owner of that property even if the nvidia shares did better in USD terms than the property would have
Ok, I deposit stock shares, you lose 50% of them under the couch, but the stock price goes up 110% so when the government seizes and liquidates your assets I have slightly more cash than the original value of what I deposited. Did you lose me money?
There's no knowledge as to whether he used company money, or personal cash/line of credit. In fact, there's no knowledge of the story is even true, apart from what one dead man wrote!
> (unless you're Shkreli, don't think his investors lost money, but he pissed off some politicians because he said the quiet parts out loud about how the pharma industry works)
What's the TL;DR? His wikipedia page doesn't make it obvious.
Shkreli's schtick was to buy out or control pharma companies that had a monopoly and jack the everliving fuck out of the prices. He had some programs for uninsured people, but he would milk the insurance companies absolutely dry, which gave him some wild profits.
This made a bunch of powerful people absolutely enraged, as he was basically publicly bragging about jacking the ever living fuck out of the prices. Pharma companies do this but Shkreli would publicly say it and tell the truth that basically the other companies were doing it while pretending to be good people, and he was only being honest about it. Poor people were pissed because they were told they couldn't get their drugs (I'm unaware if the program that allowed uninsured people to get them for cheap was real or not), and the rich insurance people pissed because he was basically he was bilking them.
So they went back and discovered one or some of his other early enterprises weren't profitable, but that he had used money he made off his later pharma enterprises to pay back his earlier investors.
In trial, his investors testified they were happy with the situation, lost no money, and would invest with him again. But they still convicted him for fraud, even despite the 'victims' themselves did not believe they were defrauded. It didn't help that Shkreli is probably one of the most profoundly unlikeable people you can possible listen to, unless you're not bothered to hear a hyper-capitalist be honest about how they do business.
He would paint himself as a working man's hero, "I'm making insurers pay more so you can get your drugs cheaper", always avoiding the awkward questions of where the insurer's money came from and why premiums kept rising (note that I'm also not siding with insurers here, especially those who have implemented PBMs to leech money into their pockets). He basically treated the public as useful idiots who thought that insurance was paying more for their drugs out of ... charity? Goodwill? The money fairy?
Then there was also the fact that at least once (and to a slightly lesser extent, twice), he went to the FDA to block the approval of a new drug, arguing it shouldn't be on the market. Why?
Not because it was less effective than the market options - it had better results.
Not because it had more/worse side effects, complications and interactions - it had better results there too.
Not because it was prohibitive, or patenting or anything stifling to the market.
No, it was because Shkreli had recently purchased a manufacturer of one of those existing drugs and their portfolio, and had been in the process of ramping up his price gouging on that drug, i.e. "The FDA should block approval of this better drug because it limits my ability to profit from my 'worse' drug."
Regardless on your take about his antics, it seems clear the fraud prosecution had a lot more to do with his pharma antics than the government actually caring that much about how he paid back investors at prior companies, especially since to my knowledge none of his investors were going to the government with complaints. No one gave a shit about the guy until his (seemingly legal) pharma 'gouging' practices pissed off a huge segment of influential people.
I do unfortunately agree with that. But to this day I still see people who see him as some unsung hero, and the prosecution of him for one of many horrible acts was one that only doubled down on that vision.
Sounds like basically the big boy version of how all the other psychiatrists who run plausibly deniable pill mills will screech about the one running a flagrant pill mill until they lose their license.
Victims not wanting prosecution doesn’t absolve the perpetrator as wife beaters learn all the time. I also think Skhreli’s biggest mistake was threatening Hillary Clinton.
If a wife says at trial she wasn't beat, it's extremely likely you're getting a conviction. I'm aware of a recent high profile case (Mike Glover) where the partner even had signs of broken bones and a beaten down door and the partner just later changed her story to those being due to a recreational accident outdoors and that pretty much terminated the case between that and her not providing a favorable testimony. But that's aside the point.
In this case the wife never called the cops, and then when the cops showed up she claimed she wasn't beat, and not only that she has no visible marks or bruises or anything.
And none of this is justifying any of it. Just showing how far outside of what we commonly see in fraud cases that actually get convicted.
There is truth to this. She was exposed because JP Morgan ran a marketing campaign that converted extremely poorly. Better purchased data might've prevented significant forensics. The poor due diligence had already been signed off.
While she committed fraud, I feel sorry for her because of her naivety. It must've been a sick moment when they asked to examine the data during due diligence. If she'd known that would be used for marketing integration so quickly, maybe she would have backed out of the deal.
From the complaint:
> In particular, CC-1 and JAVICE asked Engineer-1 to supplement a list of Frank’s website visitors with additional data fields containing synthetic data.
> Engineer-1 was uncomfortable with the request and stated, in sum and substance, “I don’t want to do anything illegal.” JAVICE and CC-1 claimed to Engineer-1 that it was legal. JAVICE stated to Engineer-1, in sum and substance, “We don’t want to end up in orange jumpsuits.” Engineer-1 declined the request from JAVICE and CC-1.
She's not naive. She was told this was illegal and then did it still. She knew this was fraud.
Yes, read the same. Naive in thinking she could get past that and they wouldn’t do anything particularly revealing with the data. A smarter fraudster would’ve backed out earlier with less damage.
She's so naive, she just hung around until someone found out the fraud.
It made me wonder what she was thinking when her $30M share landed in her bank account. "Whee, I got away with it", "it's their problem now"?
I don't think I would commit fraud, but if I did it for that amount, I would be on a flight to Malaysia or some other place with no extradition with the US!
Can someone explain how did climate issue became a political issue in USA? It seems rest of world does not have this problem( but it's becoming a problem for rest of the world who follows US politics.)
Part of it that the commenters so far missed is that to do anything about climate change will affect profits for the oil industry and cause corporations aplenty to have to come up with new manufacturing materials and processes. It also means consuming less. The solutions are seen as a threat to owners of capital who will fight until the earth is in flames to do anything about it. Our politicians and many media sources are owned by these people.
Basically, it started with Reagan[0] and the Republicans equating environmentalism with leftist (read - Communist, and therefore evil) agitation (through its links with feminism and the hippie/antiwar movement) in order to court business interests who favor deregulation and lax environmental standards.
It became a 'wedge issue'. A common tactic in 2-party politics is for a campaign to push their candidate to become indistinguishable from their opponent, and then pick one issue that divides the voter base, hopefully in their favor. It has to be something that your party can rally around and their party can't compromise on. Conservatives are generally pro business and anti government regulation, while liberals are usually pro environment and regulation, hence the battle of climate change.
The US has two political parties of roughly equal size.
One of those parties has gone completely off the rails into authoritarianism and science denial. Oligarchy is at the root of it: the barons can't sell "clean coal" and "drill, baby, drill" if climate change is seen to be tearing the world apart. Money über alles.
You'd think most people would be repulsed by such a party, but turns out that humans have a neat little exploit! Due to the fact that the parties are completely entrenched and about equally as popular, people intrinsically assume that their policies also have equal merit.
Only if you ignore reality and redefine science with an absurdly narrow definition (mostly focused on trans folks) and ignore everything else. One side claims absolutely ironclad proven wrong things like "ectopic pregnancies can just be moved and saved", "vaccines cause autism", but because they have a narrow interpretation of sex and gender, they think that allows them to claim "SCIENCE, BITCH". No, just no.
Corona conclusively proved that Democrats are every bit as capable of scientism as Republicans.
People - even leading scientists - who questioned natural origin, mandatory lockdowns, school closures, vaccine effectiveness, or any of a dozen other narratives were demonized and attacked in the name of science. "Do your own research" became a phrase of mockery, while "trust 'the' science" was used as a thought terminating cliché.
And neither party are really taking climate science seriously, it's just that one pays lip service a bit more.
You aren't engaging with any of my points, just repeating the dogma - which helps proves my point.
> School closures worked well for preventing spread.
Show me the data.
And, at what cost? Was the juice worth the squeeze? ... How many teachers have you talked to lately? Because the universal consensus is that closures did serious damage, still being felt to this day.
And it's an undeniable fact, that conversation (among many others) was heavily suppressed. Researchers who raised it were shadow-banned from Twitter, Facebook etc. That's not science, it's authoritarian dogma from an unaccountable political class.
There were superior alternatives - putting air purifiers in classrooms would have been a big one. But we weren't permitted to even have that conversation.
> Vaccines actually solved the covid issue.
Or, basically everyone already got corona and now there's a level of herd immunity; like with every global pandemic ever. Did you see any data on this? Or are you 'trusting the science' which you haven't actually seen.
> Lockdowns did worked, actually.
Oh? So, you can point to countries where there were no lockdowns and they got torn apart, can you? ... Because researchers who have looked at that question say it isn't actually that clear [0].
The purpose of lockdowns was to slow the spread so that chronically underfunded and privatized healthcare systems wouldn't utterly collapse. Fair enough - but it wasn't presented that way, and investment in public health hasn't been improved since. Instead, most systems in the West seem stretched more than ever, while we have plenty of money for sending Israel bombs and weapons, or building concentration camps, or deporting people at ludicrous expense, etc.
... But that wasn't even what I was talking about - I was talking about how even questioning mandatory lockdowns was enough to make people lose their jobs, and get censored from mainstream and social media. It's not very scientific to censor scientists.
> there is no "both sides" on climate change. Republicans are actively trying to make it happen.
And Democrats pay lip service to stopping them, but don't seem very effective. And when something like Deepwater Horizon happens, or the DAPL protests, or support for fracking is an issue, where is the Dem leadership? Quietly backing the fossil fuel companies, every single time.
What's needed is radical change, immediately. That's the view of basically every scientist. Democrats pretend not to understand that. It's nowhere near good enough, and I see no reason to expect change; not the slightest glimmer of hope for what's necessary.
From your own link: "He also points to a 2021 study that attempted to quantify the effect of specific government interventions on the spread of Covid-19, using data from 41 countries. It reveals that certain aspects of national lockdowns might have been more impactful than others. The researchers found, for example, that banning gatherings of more than 10 people or closing schools and universities was especially effective, reducing transmission by more than 35% on average. Shutting restaurants and bars seemed to make slightly less difference to transmission, however.
What's more, the researchers suggest that adding a strict stay-at-home order on top of such measures "only had a small additional effect" in terms of slowing down Covid-19 – estimated at below 17.5% on average."
> You aren't engaging with any of my points, just repeating the dogma - which helps proves my point.
Frankly, I think we're all very tired of engaging with anti-Covid response points which have been debunked to hell and back, and then back to hell again.
Scientific evidence is not "dogma" just because you, intuitively, disagree with it. That's fine. The real world does not follow very simple logical frameworks. It's complex, it's messy.
Was our, or anyone's, Covid response perfect? Of course not. But this was a novel disease, one and in which our understanding of it changed day by day. Read that a few times over and you'll begin to understand why we did what we did.
> And, at what cost? Was the juice worth the squeeze? ... How many teachers have you talked to lately?
Basically, blue states that had more of them had results getting almost as bad as red states without them have it. Lives were saved at some acceptable lowering of test scores.
> And it's an undeniable fact, that conversation (among many others) was heavily suppressed.
Nonsense. The points of your side were repeated and laundered and repeated and defended and then again. Other people telling you that you are wrong is not supression.
And also, bullshit with researchers being censored. Especially hypocritical from someone conservative or republican.
> basically everyone already got corona and now there's a level of herd immunity
Not true. Vaccines came, covid went away. Babies cried about vaccines.
> Basically, blue states that had more of them had results getting almost as bad as red states without them have it. Lives were saved at some acceptable lowering of test scores.
Are you seriously asserting that school closures are the difference between red state and blue state mortality rates??
> Nonsense. The points of your side were repeated and laundered and repeated and defended and then again. ... bullshit with researchers being censored
The censorship was vast and is well documented, ie, [0], [1], [2], etc. Facebook alone admitted to removing over 20 million posts, and suppressing at least 190 million.
> Not true. Vaccines came, covid went away. Babies cried about vaccines.
Did covid 'go away' in the global south, where they didn't have vaccines? Hmmmmm......
> Are you seriously asserting that school closures are the difference between red state and blue state mortality rates??
What's your explanation for the difference?
> The censorship was vast and is well documented, ie, [0], [1], [2], etc. Facebook alone admitted to removing over 20 million posts, and suppressing at least 190 million.
I don't know about you, but I don't use Facebook for science research.
Was there censorship on, idk, arxiv regarding Covid?
I think you're the one who mentioned it up the comment chain, but I agree with the view that the messaging coming from (well, everywhere) is divisive and dogmatic.
> Facebook alone admitted to removing over 20 million posts, and suppressing at least 190 million.
Facebook also pushes false narratives. Facebook and other large companies drive engagement above all else, and engagement is found on the fringes.
I really like the parent comments you made. They didn't come off as "one-sided" (in any direction), but more so "let's step back and think about it." Kind of like a blameless post-mortem, blameless in the way of saying it wasn't _our_ faults, the general public, because who are we to really fight against these companies who have so successfully weaponized our basic emotions and values against ourselves? And what can we do to "wake up" (not in a "red-pill" or "sheeple" way) and collectively see that all of these narratives that we are fed are for no common person's best interests, and that we've been had, and how can we work together next time (if we even can work together on the same platforms which pull us apart)?
I know that the realization that I came to after reflecting on everything that happened over the past (5, 10, 15) years is that the only thing that _I_ can do is focus my energy towards my community - my friends, my neighbors, those people who I can in someway touch without relying on corporations with ulterior motives to stand between us.
And, like you alluded to, to also accept that most things are out of my control. Nothing I do will ever sway climate change, for instance. An example that sticks out to me is Greta Thornberg. She had what seemed to be very pure intentions about making a stand for a better future (whether that is or isn't the case isn't the focus here), but, no matter what side of the issue a person falls on, the main story surrounding her turned into questioning her - her motivations, her knowledge, her parents; the narrative given to 'conservative'-leaning people were all of her flaws, and the narrative given to 'liberal'-leaning people was the manufactured outrage about what the 'conservatives' were saying - and then, Boom: now nobody is actually talking about the issue, and the divide grows wider, and the focus is taken off of the companies who indisputably take advantage of the world (can anyone actually make an argument that the waste poured into rivers, for example, is _good_ for the inhabitants of the earth?).
Climate change, wars for profit, mass censorship and surveillance, etc, aren't blameless issues - there are people doing these things, people like you and I (only wealthier). Fossil fuel companies knew for a fact that they were causing climate change, and responded by poisoning the global conversation while suppressing alternatives.
What's between us and a better world is class awareness. So, for example, when you say things like "Facebook and other large companies drive engagement above all else", you're missing a major piece of the puzzle.
The daily atrocities in Gaza could drive tremendous engagement on Facebook, were they not heavily censored and suppressed.
Same goes for mainstream media. Look how unanimous the opinion of the media and political class was against Luigi. Look how they chorused in unison with smears against Jill Stein, or against Assange, Snowden etc. Again, all people who had their stories suppressed on social media as well.
This also explains how with Greta "the main story surrounding her turned into questioning her" - there's an agenda that unites the tiny number of billionaires who own basically all media in the West. The element of class even explains neatly why the media stopped covering Greta - because she started connecting the world's issues to capitalism and inequality. (You know, like MLK did, right before he was assassinated.)
So please don't think I have a message of blamelessness for the world's issues. There's more than enough blame to go around, and the problems won't be fixed if we keep ignoring the problems stemming from massive wealth inequality.
