There are multiple types of sovereign wealth fund associated with taxes on resource extraction. The type you see in Norway is used to shelter the economic diversity, currency, and labor force from the steamrolling impact of the extractive industry. The type you see in Saudi Arabia, which has no such diversity and where basically all employment is tied to oil through few degrees of separation, is basically a slush fund for long-term infrastructure projects that would not otherwise be approved because of their size in relation to the secular economy, whether those are profit-generating enterprises like harbors or not-for-profit ones like roads.
Both aim to take today's windfall and spend it on something other than hookers and blow.
Norway still does have some totally unjustifiable passion projects, like the coastal highway it's building, but it's doing this from general funds to keep the wealth fund separately managed as a giant pile of investment money that just happens to belong to an investor called 'Norway', while in Saudi Arabia it is an instrument of policy.
You are inferring from our crude understanding of processes in general. Evidence is more specific.
Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets? This is amenable to natural experiments where one country bans it on a specific date and the neighbor does not.
Here's a decent one: 13% of the UK reports gluten intolerance symptoms, and only 7% of Germany does. The UK allows pre-harvest glyphosate desiccation, Germany doesn't. I would be happy to bet that the trend continues past my quick Google search.
> Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets?
That's a rather sneaky way to invert the issue. It's fishing for random luck when you ask for more and harder to obtain evidence given existing facts pointing to possible harm. A single study that doesn't show harm doesn't refute those that do.
You have to provide hard evidence that glyphosate (or another non-essential ingredient) does not cause adverse effects, and thoroughly explain the differences with the studies that show the opposite - until you do that, any in-vitro or other studies that show harmful effects count against the use of the product and you cannot ask for more evidence, you can only accept the remedies.
In this case, the appropriate remedies can be different: banning it altogether, limiting it to specific usage (e.g. no pre-harvest spraying), labeling using LARGE PRINT and scary language or some combination of the above.
You can't even get smoked fish accepted through precautionary-principle logic like that. This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
> You can't even get smoked fish accepted through precautionary-principle logic like that.
No, you really can't do that without breaking the Code of Federal Regulations. Smoked products must be labeled "smoked" in addition to many other requirements, and that despite the distinctive stink that self-labels these products. Even the font size is specified to be no smaller than the letters for the kind of meat on the label.
The real issue is why there's no such requirement for glyphosate, having it would be a good starting point.
> This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
I don't think all potato chips deserve, or have, such warnings but some might. Regardless, there might be specific regulations that are over the top and I don't mind admitting or discussing such cases but glyphosate isn't among them.
Smoked fish is a side, wheat is a staple. Degree matters.
If 90% of the raw food at the grocery were 'processed' in the same way that a smoked fish, or a french fry was, I think we'd have very valid reasons to be displeased with many of the myriad problems that come with that.
First, no it isn't, not in the cultures where it's believed to cause stomach cancer. Second: at the point where you're talking about distinguishing public policy based on whether something is a "side dish" or not, I think we've left the realm of plausibility and entered a wonderful new land I call "the voivodeship of special pleading".
There are actually vast swathes of territory with very little human population. There is an entire continent which is almost completely inhabited apart from a few bases. Same with most of the Sahara and other such deserts. Or much of the larger mountain ranges. The world's population is not evenly distributed, and is mostly coastal even today. Even Asia, the most heavily populated continent has thousands of square miles with barely anyone in it.
We've already had some "rewilding" in Scotland and it was called the Highland Clearances. It resulted in the almost wholesale destruction of Gaelic culture, and most of the region's people losing their homes. Now we have billionaires and aristocrats who want to finish that process.
I think it's a warranted attitude to take a failure to implement plaintext search as part of your text search algorithm as enemy action. Yesterday I ended up at Bing for some reason and typed in the unique name of the site I was looking for and it didn't even come up in the first page; All their competitors did, as well as a couple random SEO farms. This is enshittification to the point of unusability, for an application space that we solved in the mid 90's.
My workplace does this to our customers too, where you get worse-than-plaintext-search effectiveness, and I guess it must be profitable enough conning the customer to waste our time as well, as we use the same interface for a lot of customer questions.
This is what killed search more than anything else - people actively working to get their results higher than they would have been under "normal" conditions.
A rise in meat (esp red & cured meats) consumption and a drop in vegetable consumption would also do it, particularly if it were disproportionately occurring in certain cohorts.
12% of Americans eat half the nation's supply of beef, and members of that group are disproportionately male and disproportionately middle-aged.
Nothing else explains the observed cultural confidence in putative harm than this "puritan streak", combined with sugar industry lobbying. It's gotten other sweeteners like cyclamate and saccharine banned (or voluntarily withdrawn pending a ban) over the years. The same comments are repeated about every new sweetener coming on the market.
Sharks are an ancient division of life, roughly 440 million years old, which has survived far warmer oceans.
There are ~500 living species of shark and likely tens of thousands extinct in their lineage.
We are perpetrating a mass extinction event that incorporates not just temperatures, but ocean acidification and trophic cascade for fisheries. In mass extinctions, enough things about the ecosystem change that specialists often go extinct. Great White Sharks are a specialist species in their extreme size; Most size specialists are in a precarious local maxima that disappears too quickly to adapt if conditions change drastically.
Ukraine dramatically reduced Russian fuel export revenue, and the sanctions did so even more.
It was really coming to the point of urgent existential threat to the Putin regime this spring, before Trump and Netanyahu bailed him out, first by doubling the global oil price and then by relaxing sanctions.
And Ukraine's drone / cruise missile portfolio includes things like the Flamingo, more than twice the payload and range of a Tomahawk.
If Ukraine had access to Tomahawks, Russian oil industry would not exist at this point. With drones after two and halve years of attacks with multiple hits at the same refineries Ukraine reduced Russian fuel production at best by 20%.
Flamingo is still mostly vaporware. For precise strikes against Russian factories Ukraine uses either Storm Shadow or domestic Neptun.
But that just shows again that drones are not particularly effective against most industrial targets and even against oil installations the damage is not lasting.
Or consider how US was able to destroy the bridge in Iran yet Crimea bridge and bridges in Rostov that are absolutely vital to Russian war logistics still stands.
Why do you think this bridge is vital when there is a land bridge (Kherson) with multiple rail links all in Russian controlled territory containing the entry and exit points of the bridge?
That bridge is A) incredibly expensive and something a postwar Ukraine would prefer to exist for economic reasons, B) extremely overbuilt in certain ways, and C) not strictly required if Russia can keep rail going on the landbridge.
It might be in play if the land bridge fell.
It would be almost trivial in terms of range to make it a target of any number of strike munitions. If you can hit the Baltic ports or factories in the Urals...
As for drones vs cruise missiles - at this point every missile strike is associated with drone accompaniment, it's part of the counter SHORAD proposition.
My crude understanding is that in the 90's, the US controlled basically all the world's large-scale financial clearing network, and after 9/11 declared a holy war against anything that didn't provide visibility to US intelligence (like the surviving medieval Middle Eastern 'Hawala' banking system) and the ability for the US to sanction it on a fine-grained basis.
Since that time, we have grabbed on tighter and tighter, and are finding that the world is starting to seek out a less politically volatile patron for a financial system.
It's pretty wild, I work in finance and hawala was specifically called out in my anti money laundering training. Really seems like cultural chauvanism and thinly veiled racism to eschew an entire traditional monetary support system.
Both aim to take today's windfall and spend it on something other than hookers and blow.
Norway still does have some totally unjustifiable passion projects, like the coastal highway it's building, but it's doing this from general funds to keep the wealth fund separately managed as a giant pile of investment money that just happens to belong to an investor called 'Norway', while in Saudi Arabia it is an instrument of policy.
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