I have no problem believing Bill is a scoundrel, however, much of what you reference here is from an “unsent draft” email most likely just made up by Epstein (without a precedent email). At least I'm not aware of any corroborating evidence.
Also you do not want them to benefit from your smart design choices. You want them to suffer from their bad choices and not learn from your success. (Yes, of course you could have bad design choices that you don’t realize someone else has solved more intelligently.)
Off topic but how were pirate radios able to operate while people with sets would have vans going around and fining people for not having a TV license?
In the US sometimes you’d have pirate radio off the coast so as to avoid “jurisdiction” though I’m not sure how effective that was.
A lot of the infrastructure of pirates in the UK is intimately linked to the urban environment of high-rise residential tower blocks, which housed the studios (often in abandoned flats), with the height of the building providing excellent coverage for transmitter aerials which would be mounted on the roof.
The pirates got very advanced over the years, and one of the most important tactics was to separate the studio and the transmitter, using separate tower blocks for each connected via microwave linkup. It got to the point where they would have multiple transmitters available so that if the DTI (UK government body responsible for finding and prosectuing illegal radio transmissions) found the transmitter currently in use, they could then switch quickly to a different one and carry on broadcasting. There would be people monitoring the frequency to check that it hadn't been taken down, and once mobile phones were more common it made it quite easy to quickly abandon a transmitter or studio if necessary. The tactics of the DTI are actually quite fascinating in themselves, involving triangulation and all sorts of interesting gizmos.
If you're interested in learning more, the YouTube channel Ringway Manchester[1] has been documenting the techniques used over the years, and is an excellent channel for info on radio in general, especially with regards to the UK, including some brilliant interviews with the people involved in running the pirates, with stories of the crazy things they got up to in those days. There are also a couple of excellent documentaries from the 90s on the topic, one of which, specifically about Kool FM, is featured on this channel about Jungle & Drum n Bass Documentaries[2] (First Sight Pirate Radio).
I’m not sure if you’re joking or not but TV license detection vans are a joke, a scare tactic, a meme, they don’t exist. TV license “inspectors” just showed up at houses and asked if they were watching broadcast TV.
Pirate radio would broadcast from the top of buildings and did often get caught.
It’s not a place for most visitors to go off-piste, unless you’re like MacAffee or that British lad Mike who does a hitch-hikers YT travel channel. They both were/are quite a-tuned to where they are think on their feet and are adept at escaping tough situations. Most people ate not like them.
Moreover, the "content" isn't always information. It can be informative and it can be news you need to know about. But it's often garbage, disinformation and the information analogue of empty calories in food.
The increased demand in coal was, uhum, fueled primarily by data center energy demands. Along with coal, there was also an uptick in solar installations to meet DC energy needs. Given solar is cheaper, it stands to reason more solar will be built to meet DC energy demand.
Coal (and gas) has "owners" and so that means more wealthy people to give Trump gold trinkets and praise. Trump can turn $1M of tax into $500k wealth for a Coal mine owner, that owner can give Trump $100k "donation" and praise The Donald as the greatest President in history. No downside. Well, not for Donald.
I think the US is going to find itself with a bunch of stranded fossil fuel infrastructure (expensive but now worthless) and hyperinflation. Countries that ten years ago would see the US as an old ally which has fallen on hard times will instead see a traitor getting what was coming and turn a blind eye.
Ironically, if it's true that the jobs are being off-shored, rather than on-shored and filled by locals, this would be beneficial for the countries who currently find themselves in a brain-drain spiral (be it India, Ukraine, etc.). It would result in a more tech and economically balanced world rather than having two lobes (USA and China). People would say that it's a detriment to the US's future --but those are often the most critical of US hegemony.
The Indian offshore firms are scrambling because of the opposite happening. If all this work was just flooding to India then the panic that’s happening there over the industry imploding wouldn’t be occurring.
The sort of work traditionally handled by cheap offshore labor is now the sort of work most ripe for replacement by AI. So it’s burning the candle from both ends. The low value stuff is getting replaced by AI and not sent there and the high value stuff struggles to get delivered by cheap labor because the play was always cost of and not the quality of the talent.
US has shipped all manufacturing jobs to Asia, including China and got the Rust Belt in exchange (and huge corporate profits). and China is now a manufacturing powerhouse.
Partly that push was created by the labor unions, who pushed the cost of doing manufacturing business far above what was profitable and feasible.
When the environment becomes hostile to conducting business, then jobs will leave and local industries atrophy.
How was the environment that enabled businesses to lower their cost by admitting China in WTO hostile to conducting business?
BTW - with or without unions manufacturing was profitable in the US before NAFTA and China entering WTO. So your narrative that manufacturing was dying because of labor unions does not hold much water.
the offshoring of manufacturing started in the 50s and 60s and accelerated in the 80s. the reason is that US wanted to do specialized high value manufacturing, and was offshoring everything low value and low margin, because of increasing cost of environment and labor regulations and unions.
My fear is that if US becomes hostile to foreign tech workers, they will simply create alternatives to US Big Tech in other countries and US economy will suffer.
Current US domination of global tech is partly because of foreign tech talent.
"the offshoring of manufacturing started in the 50s and 60s and accelerated in the 80s. " - not true.
Manufacturing offshoring started in late 90s in small part due to NAFTA and then accelerated when China entered WTO in early 2000s (thank you President Clinton for this one).
Speaking as an Irish person who grew up in the 80's, this isn't true as there were loads of US companies manufacturing in Ireland back then. There were even clothes manufacturers until the mid 90s.
So I'd probably agree more with the OP here, perhaps the Asian outsourcing happened in the 90s (but even then, loads of my toys as a kid were made in Taiwan), but this has been happening for a while.
It's potentially related to the relaxation of capital controls that happened in the 70s.
That reminds me of the San Fco "network administrator" who would not provide the passwords to anyone in city gov't and brought things down to a standstill. Eventually he capitulated and provided the governor the passwords to their networks. Some people!
The other thing is that its coverage estimation was off by at least an order of magnitude. It is a transition zone species. So they cover trees that are at the perimeter of forests or stands along highways. Back in the 70s aerial estimations were not as good as today’s. Their visual extrapolations were thus way, way off. It’s still a pest but it’s not “swallowing the South”.
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