MicroB

Cue people complaining now about too much religion on their TVs, given the Pope has now died.

This is a statement by an idiot.

I think there must be a global conspiracy against Thai Buddhism. The BBC skipped over Songkran.

Why paranoid? You used, perhaps unintentionally, the paranoid fruit loop's favourite term "mainstream media" which is a bit of a red flag. These paranoid fruitloops, despite leading most of their (usually) 50-60 years on this Earth not giving a damn about the God Botherers, suddenly think there is some conspiracy to silence "Christianity". Usually, they reach that conclusion because they read someone telling them that was happening. Tosh. Its a normal Easter, except for the slightly unusual fact about Easter in 2025, which you probably aren't aware of. From the BBC, given your google-fu is limited;

Peak idiocy. The Communists of Wall Street.

In reference to 737 Max; http://www.boeingzhoushan.com/en/aboutUs/

Old people remember the good times, hardly the bad. It's a medical fact, related to how the brain retrieve positivie imagery as it ages.

Paranoid posting. Telly line up is pretty normal for an Easter Sunday. The Holy Joes have The 10 Commandments over of Film 4. The kids have a choice of Peter Rabbit, Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka, and Oliver! Had Easter Sunday Service followed by Messiah on the Beeb already. Normal Easter Sunday footie.

The plane is made in USA. The paint job and seats are added in China. I assume you have been in a coma for 30 years and just woken, so understandably you have no idea what the Comac C919 is.

Supporters like this, who thought long and hard at the ballot box?

Too Big Too Fail. But its not just Boeing. There is a huge supply chain. This supply chain impacts other industries. For instance, a well known US medtec manufacturer uses an aerospace parts supplier to also carry out assembly of some of its key products. If that company goes under, that Medtec company no longer has a CMO. And they can't just pick up the proverbial yellow pages and find another. They have to find someone else who does medtec, and has capacity. They need a lot of work transferring production. The FDA has to reapprove their product before it can even be sold.

Not brand new anymore. How complete are these aircraft? Do they have fitted out cabins, Contrary to the photo, the 3 planes that have come back were built for Xiamen Airways. From what I can gather, Zhoushan completes the livery and interiors. I assume most of the cabin wiring is done in the US, and in China they are bolting in seats, laying carpet, hooking up entertainment systems, all in Chinese. These were built with business and economy class cabins, so zero interest from Ryan Air unless a big discount, as they will likely need complete rework. Ryaqn Air, and other similar airlines don't do business class.

Maybe sliced his finger on one of those clockwork skeleton money boxes kids used to get in the 70s. As I recall, if you looked inside, they were made of recycled film canisters, mostly Fujifilm. Lethal adges on those tin toys.

Not necessarily good for the ROTW. CCP won't be replaced by Westenr liberalism. Its replaced by Chinese Imperial Nationalism. The Wumao army ("50 cent Army") are online trolls paid to spread CCP propaganda, but loyal to the party line, whatever direction that takes. But now there is Ziganwu. These are not CCP loyalists. They are rabidly anti-Western, and view us as corrupt and depraved. They attack issues such as feminism, human rights, multiculturalism, democracy. Of course, its possible the Ziganwu are playing a double game; they are employed to create an impression that there is political opposition to the CCP, but this opposition is frightening, expansionist, apocalyptic, so it becomes better the devil you know, because at least the CCP is predictable, rational. Taiwanese attitudes to Hong Kong, in my opinion, are complex. Yes, they don't like the Communists, but they put the British below the Communists.. When HK was returned to China, Taiwanese people were pretty happy that now Chinese people govern Chinese people. The Taiwanese I know despise Hong Kong Chinese, as they feel they have too many "white" values. When Chiang Kai Shek arrived in Taiwan, after the Japanese were ejected, he ordered all the graves containing Western POWs to be emptied. They didn't even allow a memorial to be erected until 1997. And yet, this is supposed to be the solidly pro-Western part of China.

I know. It costs about $6m per year more to flag a US vessel. A container ship will typically have to pay $3-4m per US port call. There are 200 US flagged container ships, of which 30 are US made. Vancouver Port and Manzanillo are going to do really well out of this. Los Angeles and Long Beach account for 40% of trade into the US by sea. I forsee the effective end of the US flagged merchant fleet. The two main west coast ports have a combined revenue of $1.5bn. The two ports handle 4000 vessals a year. Call it $400k per ship. Fees are now increasing 10x. Canadian and Mexican stevedores and drivers are going to earn a lot of overtime. Increase truck traffic at the border will ironically result in increased illegal migration, and further increases in the cost of border patrols. It will be like the mess after Brexit, x100, when the UK had 30 miles of stuck trucks at the border because of insufficient numbers of inspectors. And that will impact traffic both ways. Containers going in have to go out, loaded. Ports in Europe are now congested with Chinese shipping transferring cargoes. With a $3m charge, it might become worthwhile to transfer the cargo to some crappy clapped out American made ship to avoid the charges. Make sure that American made ship sails in with a red flag on the stern.

The 47th President's office has released a series of images mocking Senator Christopher Van Hollen for meeting Abrego-Garcia, and crudely altering a New York Times headline., along with a photo of the President holding an unverified photo of a tatooed hand allegedly of Abrego-Garcia, with an exaggerated scowl. Commentators have compared this posed photo to the well known meme, known as "Compo Face", commonly employed by British tabloids concerning parochial matters. Commentators have accused the President of trying to trivialise the court decision and gang violence.

All my life people have said it was better in the good old days. With the 70s, there was National Front, Gary Glitter on Top of the Pops and Jim Fixed It. The memories are illusory. Cicero apparently said "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book". Only he didn't. The Chaldean King, Naram Sin, in 5000BC said "We have fallen upon evil times, the world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book." But againm he probably didn't. But someone thought this in 1908 when these quotes first appeared in print. People have always complained life was better in the past. Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe etc) coined "the Gold Old Days", referring to trade. Research shows as we age, our memory becomes increasingly selective. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2003/06/aging-memory Basically as we age, we become more preoccupied with the end. A physiological reaction is to recall more positive memories. I'm not sure if its part of a defensive reaction by the brain (I don't know, changing dopamine, serotonin levels etc) as we gradually lose our faculties. Its a casual observation that those who beat the odds and make it to extreme old age, tend to be very optimistic people. They are very optimistic about the present (life is wonderful and all that). My father passed away a couple of years ago. He had Alzheimers. We were lucky that he didn't forget us. Sometimes he would have momentary struggle to recognise me, but that quickly passed. My grandfather though completely forgot he had a son, and he was very frightened as a result. Towards the end, my father's anecdotes were increasingly when he was a young child in WW2. For him, these were happy memories of going to sleep in the garden air raid shelter, and how all the adults saved their egg ration for him. Its a bit curious, because objectively, he had a sad childhood. His father said goodbye to him in 1940, ended up captured at Singapore, and everyone in the family thought he was dead until 1944. I suspect his mum struggled. His dad got back by 1946. By 1950, he had a new baby brother. In 1951, his mum was dead from TB, and his brother went off with her family, and basically not seen again until they were adults. But all my dad remembered was the happy time. Of course, he hadn't forgotten his mum died when he was 11, but it didn't seem to register with him emotionally. And did e really remember being in an air raid shelter. I barely remember when I was 4 or 5; its more a series of fleeting impressions. So perhaps the memories were constructed based on what people talked about afterwards. Yeah, for me the past was better because I was closer to the start. The present is less good because I'm nearer to the end. In the future I am doomed. And my father's end fills me with dread. But maybe I'm not my father.

If they are, I suspect its for testing purposes, and in relatively small quantities. DPRK and iran aren't able to cover up deliveries; shipping and rail records ensure that. Large sclae transfer of Chinese weapons systems, which are now increasinglydifferent to the Soviet era would certainly require the movement of Russian military personnel into China for training. We know that, because that's exactly what Ukraine had to do in the West. Even equipment which is nominally of Soviet design. So far what Zelensky has said is that China has been providing engineers to Russian factories and possibly gunpowder. That's not quite the same as providing weapins systems. Its more about improving production yields. There is talk about Chinese company making weapons in Russia; that's somewhat curious. Is it Chinese companies making Chinese weapons in Russia, or a Chinese company has taken over a Russian company and is doing busonss Bild first came out in 2023 with claims about Chinese weapons on the battlefield, but they have been quiet about it since. There is evidence that China is analysing the battle space, and no doubt learning a lot about about. There might be some Chinese materiel invlvement, but nothng that is making any strategic difference. The fact that evidence hasn't yet been release; its been promised for next week, makes me think its not convincing or is ambiguous (ie. is Ukraine certain that Chinese munitions have come directly from China, rather than Russia obtaining the same munitions via a third party who just happens to buy from China. Iran is a major customer of China, for instance. Chinese arms exports footprint: 85% of Chinese Arms exports are to APAC, and 60% of that is to Pakistan. Possibly Myanmar is a source. Myanmar has been supplying Russia with mortar rounds https://militarnyi.com/en/news/russia-received-ammunition-manufactured-by-myanmar/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/russia-reimports-arms-parts-from-myanmar-and-india-aiming-at-improving-weapons-for-use-in-ukraine-customs-data-analysis-shows/ There is mutual benefit; Myanmar needs new ground attack aircraft in its civil war, and frankly, the RuAF has been pretty absent over Ukraine, so they have spares, maybe even spare pilots. Ukraine might present evidence of exploded munitions, analysing for parts of Chinese origin. From this, you can estimate, fairly accurately how much is entering Russian stockpiles. If it is the case (China is now a supplier), its further evidence, whatever happens, Putin's Russia is finished, and Russia is now a vassal of China. And China wants China back.

If elections don't gom the way Russia wants them to go, then Russia's demands are not met, and they continue to rape women, murder small children and massacre men. As for your other comments, 100% Tankie Bilge. I assume English is not your native language considering the strange way you address former Colonel MacGregor. Are you Chinese? The Chinese get first and last names mixed up.

And the problem with those PPP rankings, China can really only go up. The US can go down. Plus all thse foreigners living in Thailand suggests living standards might not be hunky dorey back home for many.

Its the Black Knight theory Is it the "Tis But a Scratch" or "Its just a flesh wound" stage?

The sensible response is to do what the West does best; innovate. The old Henry Ford approach to mass production is dead. Let China invest resource into building massive complexes to build lots of the same thing. One innovative approach is microfactories, coupled with additive manufacturing (for example, 3D-printing) and AI. The West has spent 200+ years building infrastruture. We have a lot of under used real estate, as legacy industries have faded, eg Detroit. Covid has left a surplus of commercial property. Microfactories are factories which are low volume, but high variety. You make things that people want. A factory in California isn't making things what people in New York want. A factory in New York does that. If the factory is down the road from me, I am not waiting on a 3 week lead time for the factory in California to build what I need, then find a shipping slot in an very complex logistics chain, nor do I need the local distributor having to maintain a ruinously expensive inventory where the numbers are based on a bet. In the medical world, we now have personalised medicine. At one point, that meant, if you had cancer, undergoing various tests, called companion diagnostics, to work out which medicine works best for you. Now it means extracting your cells, and synthesizing a treatment just for you. Its happening now. We have personalised products already; you can order a coffee mug with a holiday snap on it etc. With additive manufacture, the whole concept of tooling goes out of the window. We fully monetize our innovation. Currently, we design a car. We arrange for that car to be made in another country. A factory is built, tooling and presses purchased. Before you know it, knock-off Range Rover Evoques and fake i-phones appear. The fakery might be even coming from your own factory, from the other half your JV partner never lets you see. With additive manufacture, the tooling is code. You don't want that factory making 3-d printed phones, delete the code, remotely lock the machines. If you have anyone in that factory, they will have no clue how to get the thing going again. They are left with a lot of scrap that is quickly written down. Its not a model that can be easily replicated by someone else. China will find it very difficult to make something that exactly fits that New Yorker's requirements, because they are in China. They could do it if they choose to fit out a microfactory in New York; all very fair competition.. In China, their massive factories, with employee towns become obsolte. To implement the microfactory model, they need a diverse consumer market. We have that. They don't. Oh they have a consumer market, but they want lots of the same thing. We all want different things. I want a pair of trousers that actually fit without a belt to hold things up. I want a car that I can park in my city, not park in some other city on the other side of the world. I don't want a fridge, where I have to leaf through 50 different languages before I find the English bit. And speaking of food, I want to do my bit supporting the local farmers, and apologies, not subsidising the Aussie ranch owner, but I don't want to do that in a way thats turning the clock back 100 years and poking around at slabs of fly encrusted meat at the local market, where its "cash only mate". Anyway there could be other approaches. We need to play to our strengths, and being imitators isn't one of them

Offset the charges by reducing costs of flags of convenience.

Terminated, an emotive phrase, sounds more dramatic than what it actually is.

Those complaining about "biolabs" don't actually know what a "biolab" is. I worked most of my career in so-called biolabs. Nearly every university has several biolabs. Every hospital has at least 1 biolab. I know some of the Ukrainians doing work in these labs. You know one of the things they were working on? It sounds utterly amazing, but the application is rather dull. In the Noughties, they worked on death rays. Or rather, how they could direct plasma to disinfect a room, as an alternative to a formaldehyde bomb (which is still the gold standard). The idea didn't really work, but it illustrated a particularly Soviet approach to science. I knew the lab head. He couldn't speak English, wouldn't speak English. He'd go to a conference to present findings. He'd get a young lackey from the lab to translate to the conference. He would stand up, speak in Russian for a bit, show off some half arsed overhead acetates, when everyone else was using Powerpoint, and he'll get his lackey off to one side. The research was interesting, but the how show was embarassing. Nevertheless, the presentstions would be met with stoney silence. No one wanted to spend half an hour trying to get a question understood, while the break coffee was getting cold. On e of the many reasons for the support for Biolabs is related to why Ukraine had to get rid of their nuclear arsenal. The Soviet Union collapsed overnight. It was extremely chaotic. Hollywood was full of plotlines involving evil renegade Soviet generals. We had rumours of backpack nukes being lost (largely a myth). Scientists getting recruited by rogue regimes. Cults like AUm Shinryoku were doing their level best to recruit scientists of the very highest ability, to support their apocalyptic paranoia. Ukraine was uttely brassic. It was left with an expensive toxic mess called Chernobyl. While it was largely the engineering brains of the USSR, it was now cut off from its main market; there was no Soviet government to buy its Sukhoi aircraft etc. It was left with scientists and engineers on the breadline. And a heap load of nukes, plus freezers full of god knows what. If Russia is accusing te US of running secret seapons labs, its because they are projecting. The entire Soviet BW programme was corrupt; go read Ken Alibek's account of it. He was an Uzbek in the Soviet military, and a military doctor. He was recruited to research Yersinia pestis, a bacterium endemic in Centra Asia, and carried by small mammals. What it causes we know as the Plague. Doctors in the Soviet Union were like others; they got into medicine to help people, and swore an oath. How dom you get a MD to research biological weapons. You don't. You tell the doctor we need research into developing better antibiotics. You tell the doctor to make it easier, we need to study the plague bacterium, and generate an attenuated version, so we are not forever working in a biohazard environment. In this way, Y, pestis became the Soviet Union's lab rat. In the West, we have Escerichia coli ("E. coli"), which for the most part, is a fairly benign bacterium (excepting food poisoning). All our knowledge of genetics is built around this bug. The same in the SU for Y. pestic. Then they want these doctors to understand how antibiotic resistance evolves, so they deliberately generate resistant strains. Then the research mysteriously stops. Soviet research is very different to Western research. In the West, we develop our scientists to have thinking skills, to develop initiative. University research groups tend to be quite small, and collaborative. Its a team effort. In the Soviet Union, they had some very good scientists. But the research groups were huge, but they weren't teams. Perm is a city populated by scientists. Everyone works for the institute. Someone decides on the objective; new killer biological weapon. Then splits the project into programs of work, all occurring concurrently. The silo'd groups, in each program have no idea of the ultimate objective, only their objective. There is no contact with other groups. Its a recipe for chaos; for scientific red herrings, blind alleyway, errors. Russian scientists, when you give them a task, are very good. But when you export them to the West, well, they are a bit crap outside of their comfort zone, and consequently, most spend their entire Western careers as little more than lab techs. I'm fairly typical of a Western Postdoc. My PhD was in Marine Microbiology, after a first degree that basically covered brewing. My research was into the role of bacteria is regulating the marine climate. I had a little postdoc role in the US, which was more like geochemistry. Got a few papers out. I segwayed into waste water microbial ecology, understanding how bacteria impact the functioning of aeration pumps in waste treatment. That lead to roles in government looking at infectious disease detection. All the while I'm extending my skill set, adapting. 30m years on, I am decoding the entire US medtec supply chain to understand tariff impacts, modeling 88,000 surgery codes for 40 countries and so forth. I see Postdocs in my company from former SU countries in my career who have completely ossified, unable to adapt their outlooks. When the SU collapsed, Alibek found himself to be an Uzbek colonel in a Russian Army, and consequently he was no longer trusted, and he made the decision to flee to the US, and spilled the beans on how Russia had been breaking the Biological Weapons Convention for years. Anthrax outbreak in the USSR in the early 80s? The Soviets blamed infected beef. The real reason was scientists driving their Lada from one lab to another, with a paint tin of the stuff, and forced at a checkpoint to open it, Hollywood style. First Soviet BW attack? About 1943, Francisella tularnesis used against German tank crews. Quite effective until the wind changed, causing outbreaks in Soviet troops. He revealed a Soviet BW programme in a terrible state, no one getting paid, broken safety equipment. I can back that up from experiences in visits to Perm; my Russian colleagues woild ask me to bring paper for the printers, some Western branded buffers etc. Any translators I needed, I had to pay with booze. Rubles were worthless, and hard currency attracted too much officialdom. Booze could be traded. So the nukes in Ukraine had to go. Ukraine knew they had to go. The country was full of skint engineers and scientists, surrounded by interesting looking kit. The kit had to be secured in place, and skint scientists given non-jobs, like plasma death rays, until they came up for retirement, and could live out their vodka-sozzled days at a country dacha. And also to ensure their skillset and knowledge, with the passage of time, became worth less and less. And speaking of safety, obviously there were and are huge differences in attitudes to health and safety. I know of two needle stick injuries involving the US and the SU, working with the Ebola virus. In the US, it was a female lab tech. She received the very best of medical care and recovered; its not that hard an infection to treat in the grand scheme of things. In Russia, the poor sod was locked in a chamber, with a diary, and asked to record his final moments, so that he would become a Hero of the Motherland. He didn't make it. What Nuland was referring to was probably the thousands of decrepti freezers containing material going back decades that the US didnt fully understand. The US assumption is that the Russians better understand what legacy material is there than they do, and maybe better than what the Ukrainians do, if records had become chaotic over a 30 year period. As for weaponsation of BWs, Its a bloody hard thing to do. Amerithrax was so-called weaponised Anthrax spores that essentially contaminated most of the US postal service, through the actions of some individual likely only known unto God. 2 people died. Aum Shinryko (might have misspelt that); Japanese Christian-Buddhist death cult who tried to cause WW3 and thereby arise from the ashes, got caught out when their home made Sarin contaminated the Tokyo underground, killing a relatively small number of people, including the heroic platform guard who kicked the offending milk carton into touch (school boy error). The trial revealed how they had driving around the Imperial Palace in Kyoto with a van pumping out botulinum toxin, hoping to kill the Emperor. Inconveniently no one noticed. They followed that up by using a agricultural crop sprayer to spray from the roof of an apartment block Anthrax that they were cooking up in the basement. Locals complained about the smell and their dogs being sick (they had ordered the wrong strain from the ATCC). This was a billion dollar cult, which used computer shops as fronts to generate funding, and which had recruited many of Japan's leading scientists. The concern from Nuland was that there might be some reference strains in that Ukrainian collection useful to the Russians. eg.. Marburg virus; one of those eyeball bleeding horrendous African viruses. Called Marburg, after the German city where 4 scientists died after obtaining material from Africa. The Soviets actually sent someone to dig up one of the bodies, to get a bit of tissue, so they could propagate the virus. The assumption is that there might be unique strains there of value to Russia, but of no value to the US. Preferably, there should have been supervised disposal of the material, but that can be quite complex, with respect to designing efficient disinfection processes. No doubt some will respond, take issue with me. I don't care. I have turned all notifications off; I will not have a scoobie do if you did respond. In that way, I am fully in control how I use the forum, not like some pavlovian dog responding the the bell, the like. I respond when I want to, Which might be never.