Crypto is useful. It can get around international currency transfer limits, facilitate transactions into and out of sanctioned countries and ay for things that normally can't be legally traded. Essentially its use is to facilitate some sort of illegal transaction unable to be completed through the normal banking system. For this to be useful it simply has to have some value and be stable enough too not hugely change value while those transfer occur.

My theory on why China has had a significant crypto mining industry, even though it is officially banned, is it gets around Chinese foreign currency transfer limits. Miners costs are in local Yuan, so they will take Yuan as a payment for any crypto produced, but what they trade is a crypto currency that can be turned into USD or similar somewhere else in the world. The crypto only has to retain value in a hard currency for those series of transactions to occur to be useful.

So many times I've gone to B&Q having looked online for an item promising me multiple of an item in stock in the store, to find nothing there at all. It is seriously poor compared to competitors, and so the opinion of Kingfisher about ERP systems should be summarily dismissed because of it.

This was surplus equipment. Stuff they were upgrading and replacing.

Case IH is using their more lenience on right to repair as a feature to attract customers. https://www.caseih.com/en-us/unitedstates/service-support/self-repair There are competent alternatives to JD.

I think the problem is that large industrial farms sign big service contracts with JD and their dealer network. That comes with all the perks of rapid response and everything being handled by JD. But for that to be cost effective you have to have a lot of JD gear (so a large industrial farm).

So it's the farmer with 1 or 2 JD bits of hardware, tractor and harvester for instance that loses out. Those smaller farmers will switch to an alternative at some point, but now have a large expensive asset they are struggling to keep running. The other brutal truth is that those types of farmers are getting less and less.

Here is a concrete example of how someone from the "paparazzi"/gutter press could be motivated to try and use covert collection of DNA and genetic testing for a scoop,

There has long been speculation and rumors about Prince Harry not being Prince Charles's biological son. James Hewitt is the speculated "real" father, and was known to have had an affair with Diana Princess of Wales starting in 1986 (2 years after Harry was born so obviously doesn't work out unless the affair actually started earlier than either Diana or James have admitted to).

Getting a viable clean DNA sample of Prince Harry, Prince Charle's or James Hewitts DNA and proving that either Charles isn't Harry's biological father, or James was by genetic testing would be quite a big scoop in the tabloid press.

From what I can see online. The plane was stationed in Antonov airport, which was taken by Russia early on but because there was no air superiority established Russia were unable to hold it and Ukraine forces took it back. Seems Ukraine decided the airstrip was more of a military liability than a military asset and destroyed it. The plane Itself was too big and too much of a target to actually be useful to ukraine. If the airspace gets clear again there will be plenty of cargo planes able to fly in relief to other airports.

Interesting thing I've read is the use of drones by Ukraine to prevent air superiority. We've only really seen drones used to arms length attack targets even though air superiority has been established. But here Ukraine is using small Turkish made drones with 4 air to surface missiles, that can be packed up easily and transported around the countryside by truck and launched from anywhere. Easy to get behind enemy lines, launch and take out supply lines without there being time to be intercepted by an enemy fighter. It's undermining the air superiority doctrine protecting troops and armoured columns that has been established ever since germany started it in WW2.

This shows the political problem with Cryptomining in stark detail. Faced with a choice between the population being cold and in the dark versus allowing cryptomining, the government of Kosovo decided to crack down on cryptomining. Not a hard choice.

The recent crackdowns on cryptomining in China preceeded the current energy crisis (where china is central to that crisis), and it would seem to have been to mitigate some of the energy crisis they knew was about to happen.

Faced with a struggle to keep the lights on vs allowing cryptomining, governments will always choose to crack down on energy intensive crypto mining.

He has effectively quit the project in spectacular style. The upshot will hopefully will be to force the commercial companies that rely on it to fork the project and pay for its development now. They just won't be paying him.

The fact that there is this option open to companies and individuals that rely on the software is what is good about open source licenses. In the closed source world the equivalent is when the company behind it goes belly up or they just decide to cut support. Then there are no options open to maintain the software going forward, and much pain ensues.

Really you're going with that ignorant statement? Salinity in what is supposed to be fresh water and in the soil is a serious pollution issue around the world since ancient times. In fact "salting the earth" became a symbolic act over a conquered enemy in ancient times to show you had conquered their territory and wanted to stop them from growing back, effectively a symbolic pollution poisoning based on the ancient understanding of the effect of salt on arable land.

They only need to confirm 1 transaction that identifies the person and connects them to the wallet, and that is it. This is fairly trivial in most cases. Remember all the transactions ever are there for all to see including who the crypto came from, and who it went to. Very hard to actually use the crypto in real life without giving yourself away if you actually want to use the cryptocurrency to buy something or transfer it into fiat.

As a good example in the youtube link below there is coffeezilla figuring out what Post Malone's crypto wallet is, and how much MoonPay paid to have themselves featured in one of his music video, from some simple tracing of 1 NFT purchase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DZ_V92SJ5g&t=11s

Most of the examples are a case of diminishing returns. Take shipping, getting bigger and bigger improves the efficiency of the vessel, in terms of tons carried per dollar of cost in fuel and crew. But it doesn't linearly scale, at some point the efficiency gain from going bigger isn't that big and you have penalties like restrictions on use of canals, restrictions on ports that can take the ship and a therefore a limited number of destinations that make sense.

Same for the A380, the 747 was the biggest plane that most international airports could handle. Going bigger did increase efficiency per passenger slightly, but required changes to airports to handle it and markets big enough to justify regular flights that could fill the A380. It was a very inflexible aircraft with a niche market in the end.

Every generation launch has supply limitations. As there is always pent-up demand for the next-gen console that is difficult to satisfy at launch, without putting huge costs on the launch company in terms of held inventory or over speccing production capacity for the long term.

In the current environment this is even more difficult to ramp production, but the production volumes would have been planned well ahead of time with supply contracts going back probably before the pandemic, so it isn't really about lack of supply of chips that weren't planned in ahead of the ramp up in sales (unlike say the car industry).

The delay in the production of new games though was not predicted, and it could hurt the platforms in the next 12 months, as the compelling reason to get a next gen console for the cohort of more casual gamers that represent the majority of console customers are lots of new shiny games they can't play on their current console, unlike the hardcore gamers paying over the odds for a console now just to get in first even if there is only 1 or 2 titles that actually warrant the new system.

Dollars are backed by the ability of the US governments ability to levy taxes, and the ability to enforce the payment of fines and debts in the form of US dollars.

It's a subtle one, but effectively any disagreement or damage occurring between two parties in any transaction can be fought out in the courts and a decision reached, the compensation to the wronged party will be required to be paid in USD.

In the crypto world, say someone defrauds someone else out of their bitcoin and it goes to civil court in an attempt to recover some of the bitcoin, the restitution will most likely not be in bitcoin but in an amount of USD determined by the value of the bitcoin at the time.

There are known common oncogene mutations that occur a lot in some cancers. Part of personalised medicines aim is to actually characterise the mutations in a cancer, and then chose drugs that can most effectively target those mutations. What happens though is the drugs are effective but often the cancer can mutate around it.

One I've been looking into is BCR-ABL1, which is a fusion of 2 genes that creates a unregulated kinase found in some leukemias. This has an effective drugs against it, but selective pressure means that some mutations occur that get around that drug and there are now second line drugs that are effective against the common mutations. And there are even new drugs coming out that can work synergistically with the current drugs that will hopefully make it even harder to mutate around.

So I think it's actually going to be standard small molecule drugs that have gone through standard approval, but the sequencing of the cancer informs which drug cocktail to use.

Phase 1 they inject it into a small number (10s) of healthy volunteers and see if it behaves as expected. Ie doesn't have obvious bad side effects, produces antibodies as expected.

Phase 2 gets a bit bigger with 100s to 1000s volunteers involved, at this stage they are fine-tuning the administration stategy. So dosage and how many doses. This will be done by looking at the immune response in the volunteers and ensuring it is as expected.

At phase 3 trial, they will innoculate ~ 40K or more people in high HIV prevalence areas. Probably Sub Saharan africa. Then follow those people for long enough to show a statistical significant difference in HIV infections. Unlike the Covid studies this will probably take a significant amount of time due to the slower rate of HIV infection.