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The Emergence Of Ghost Cities In USA and Canada
  • In California, Oregon, and Washington the state governments stripped cities of most of their powers related to zoning in regards to blocking conversions to mixed use residential. As long as there isn't heavy industry right next door (aren't crazy, no one wants Houston), mixed use residential zoning is hard for cities to deny.

    Los Angeles has the problem (benzene, hydrocarbons, heavy metals) of all the oil wells, pipelines, refineries, crude oil storage, and other oil field infrastructure hidden behind facades all throughout the city. The city and county are an active oil field, something that should never have been approved when there is residential or light commercial literally 25ft away from camouflaged wells, pipelines, and crude oil storage tanks. Then again people over a century ago probably shouldn't have looked at the natural tar pits and thought to themselves "this is a great place to build a city".

    https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/09/oil-wells-in-la-nearby-residents-grapple-with-health-problems.html

    New residential arguably is unethical in this situation, especially if it's lower income housing. Btw, this is the reason building new public schools has been almost impossible in Los Angeles and existing schools all have soil that if there were alternatives would mean shutting them down. Los Angeles and Houston are more alike than anyone likes to admit. Can't do the type of super fund site remediation (clean up) at the scale actually needed because it would mean tearing the city down to the bedrock to replace all the soil.

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    China’s new cancer drug is approved in the US but will cost 30 times more: US$280 in China, US$8,892 in the US
  • Who is pocketing the price difference:

    Junshi partnered with California-based Coherus BioSciences to bring the drug to the US, and it is expected to become available within the first quarter of next year.

    Gotta love how the US regulatory regime is structured so middle men always get their taste. It's like how the US doesn't produce much in the way of active ingredients, instead US companies import them from China, India, and Poland then package them under their own brand name into pill, capsule, or injectable formulation. During this process the price somehow increases 1,000% to 10,000% over what they paid for the active ingredient.

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    California mayors hail China's High-Speed Railway in the week-long visit to China
  • I've personally enjoyed watching all the admin meetings for the project on their YouTube Channel because it really gives an understanding of the insane inefficiency of the US system of private property rights and public-private contracting.

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    Airstrikes hit largest US occupation base in Syria
  • As long as no one hits one of the two US carriers on station in the area there should be no worry about the US resorting to nukes. It's something like an aircraft carrier getting sunk that would cause the kind of psychic damage required for US leadership to have an irrational knee jerk response involving nuclear weapons.

    on a side note: does anyone else hate how because the people of the US are uniquely fkd in the head and have enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth lifeless, the rest of the world has to keep in mind what kinds of events might cause the US to have a complete collective freak out? In recent years I keep thinking about how throughout all of human history hegemonic empires would rise and fall but never before has the decline of an empire come with the very real danger that as they destabilize it could result in them killing everyone on earth rather than just themselves and their neighbors. It feels like being locked in a room with another individual who is experiencing deteriorating mental health and is in possession of a hand grenade no one can take away from them without risking setting it off.

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    China vows to play 'constructive role' for peace between Ukraine, Russia - Chinese VP Han at UNGA
  • Yeah. Gonna have to be China and/or Brazil mediating any talks because literally every other global power has been dumping weapons into the war. Aren't really any other at least somewhat neutral parties that also have geopolitical clout.

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    Life comes at you fast
  • Let's not kid ourselves by calling it gimmicks or overly complicated. It is the same hardware and methods for the Russian military. It also isn't security through obscurity. Everyone switched to software defined radios for their communication and radar for a reason.

    There are methods to combat such jamming but Ukrainian forces don't have the training or capability. NATO can't just magicially make the Ukrainian military into one with the capabilities of military super powers like the US, China, or Russia. The US and Russia both have the capacity, infact the Russian military is extremely capable when it comes to the electronic warfare and countering electronic warfare because their military has to be on par capability wise with the US military.

    Instead we have sad stories like what's left of the Ukrainian air force powering down all the electronics in their aircraft as they approach the front line because they have no way to detect and counter Russian electronic capabilities.

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    Life comes at you fast
  • The worst part is all the NATO countries are stripping the Active Protection System hardware out of Challenger, Lepord, and Abrams battle tanks before they are delivered to Ukraine. Everyone is paranoid about Russian electronic warfare learning how to jam the radar systems those NATO nations have installed in their tanks. Russian tanks currently on the front line have modern APS hardware while Ukraine is getting battle tanks that are intentionally crippled by NATO.

    Another funny and fkd up thing is what will happen with the F16 fighters Ukraine is about to have. The US has stripped out the counter measure hardware that makes an old airframe like the F16 more survivable in an environment with modern anti air missiles being fired at it. Those F16s are going to get turned by Russia into wreckage just as fast as they did with all these NATO battle tanks.

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    First F16 delivered!
  • It's too funny because the F16 doesn't stand a chance against Russian air defenses. The US and NATO are giving Ukraine F16 fighters undoubtedly stripped down to the feature set reserved for buyers like Pakistan. They will lack any modern advanced electronics equipment to keep them from getting easily shot down. It's an old fighter at this point and without the latest upgrade packages is going to be cannon fodder for Russian mobile anti air, which is actually quite advanced.

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    New book reveals Tiananmen square massacre, others fabricated by US
  • Even that is giving too much credit to the US government narrative.

    There literally are all the US mainstream news outlets like CBS News who actually had reporters there at the time: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/

    Also from classified US communications with assets on the ground: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html

    Funniest thing is that "tank man" photo idiots spam on Reddit all the time. Most people in the west don't realize there is video of it, that the guy didn't get run over. Furthermore they assume he was blocking tanks heading towards the square, infact those tanks were at the time headed away from the square to avoid engaging with armed agitators (people with guns and grenades that had killed police) in a crowded environment. Dude was trying to make them go back.

    The deaths that day were people who got gunned down by the "protestors" or the police who were killed when the "protestors" threw grenades (military ordnance) into police vehicles. People that were armed by the CIA as part of a color revolution operation, one that failed because it didn't actually have any support and more importantly because the PLA commander on the scene ordered his units to leave the area rather than responding in kind. The only actual protestors that day were communists having labor protests happening nearby and not the dancing libertine youth acting as the face of the US color revolution operation involving armed groups trying unsuccessfully to provoke the PLA soliders into responding to deadly attacks with deadly force in a crowded urban environment.

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