I suspect that this is symptomatic of the same phenomenon; but it seems especially weird that they'd be trotting the CTO out to give a, from context, apparently intended to be exculpatory postmortem when the problems with a device you are intended to wear on your face, in public, are 'sensitive to external trigger shared across entire product line' and 'silently fails stupid if network conditions are suboptimal'.

You definitely wouldn't come up with a fresh 10,000 liters of the stuff just lying around somewhere; at least not without resorting to nuclear chemistry or natural gas processing on a pretty heroic scale; but if you purely needed to ship something, anything, to be able to say that the amount provided wasn't zero; the terrestrial supply isn't zero either. I think the US is good for high single thousands of liters on a typical year, from nuclear warhead maintenance; Russia at least theoretically in the same ballpark in terms of warheads that would need their tritium checked, though no assurances either that that is happening or that they'll sell, they had formally stopped doing so at least for a while over a decade back; not sure what the mixture of reasons was between domestic users and not wanting inferences about their weapon maintenance.

Such a sale would be basically ceremonial if it has to come from the existing supply which is already spoken for every year; and there would be no point in Interlune as an intermediary; but if some finance construct wiggles one way if the sales are zero and another way if the sales are merely small, it presumably might be worth someone's time for Interlune to be listed as the supplier to Bluefors, even if it's just them slapping their label over whoever Bluefors normally buys from and doesn't actually change the allocation to different purposes or the total size of the market.

It's adjusting the allocation that would be at least difficult(potentially viable if the VCs doing 'quantum' are paying better than the people doing ultra low temperature MRIs or academic physics, or if you can out-lobby the 'national security' neutron detector market that doesn't get anyone excited but zOMG Dirty Bombs the Homeland!; but probably not cheap); and actually changing the supply that would be hardest, but possibly of actual interest.

I'd be a trifle surprised if it's an outright lie; perhaps I'm not properly accustomed to contemporary standards of allowable market manipulation; but it seems to have been carefully worded to make a somewhat exotic but fairly barebones commodity futures arrangement, which could be entirely fulfilled by interlune doing some paper-shuffling resales of helium 3 from any source or simply selling zero liters during some or all years between now and 2038, sound like a tale of Bluefors actively paying to send rockets to the moon because it's obviously only freezer capacity, not any of the other issues, that is keeping 'quantum' from doing whatever it is supposed to do.

Not at all. I'm saying that the two situations, despite the parent poster's dishonest or confused equation of them, were totally different; with the fact that one involved direct state pressure on the media and the other didn't('liberals' not exactly even having control over the FCC in 2018; much less there being evidence of it being used for the purpose in the Barr case).

It's precisely the naked abuse of state power to try to force the media to toe the line on their repugnant little exercise in hagiography that makes this case deeply problematic; and that was simply not present in the Barr case. The fact that Kimmel was run off the air basically for not jumping to the conclusion that obviously Kirk must have been shot by some sort of trans antifa jihad sniper; rather than one of the numerous squabbling factions of hard right violence enthusiasts who have been feuding with one another for years, was icing on the shit sandwich; but the main story was the abuse of the FCC.

I'm sure that I'm not supposed to infer anything from how little the press release says about when the money actually changes hands and under what conditions.

Unless I'm missing something there's an annual quantity(of up to 10,000 liters; no stated minimum so presumably including zero) and a delivery period; but there's no actual statement of which years the annual quantity applies to(are they the same as the years of the delivery period? Do they start immediately?) and no statement of either when the product gets paid for or of what happens if it ends up not being delivered.

Depending on those fairly nontrivial details this could be anything from "refrigerator company spends 300 million dollars on lunar widget today with payoff potentially a decade or more out" to "if you happen to have some helium 3 in 2035 Bluefors will take your call; today we shake hands and make effusive statements in preparation for the bubble vacuum that the fall of 'genAI' will leave".

I'm fairly sure that there have been enough actual commodities deals(both actual sales and various options-related hedging) that if they wanted to talk boring details they would know exactly which ones to mention; which makes me suspect that it's less exciting than it is intended to appear.

It's surprising that the suicided whistleblower didn't leave an insurance file.

Or did he?

> Isn't capitalism great?

Capitalism doesn't let you buy laws, that's Corporatism, a subset of Fascism, which is in turn a subset of Socialism.

A proper Capitalist systems speaks to economics, not poltiics.

Reconstruction US, Post-Mao China, Post-Soviet Russia all embraced capitalist economics to lift the vast majority of their population out of abject poverty.

Societies which did the opposite mostly killed their middle class ans then half the population starved to death.

This one is rather significant.

I wonder which private repos were made public. This could be the main prize. Industrial espionage ops?

Having lived through the Dot-Bomb it's basically the same.

You're not going to get a valuation bubble without a hype bubble. And nobody is buying companies for that much who have zero infrastructure. And the stock price is what they use to buy the infrastructure.

These are inextricably linked, not separate phenomena.

This is what Austrian Economists call the 'malinvestment' part of the business cycle. It's caused by artificially cheap money (not set by a market) and will unavoidably be cleared.

Our Orwell is so strong the eggheads artificially setting the price of money call themselves "The Open Market Committee". Because an open market in lending rates is de facto prohibited.

Blaming the people is a very dangerous, and frankly extremely undemocratic approach to take. If you look around the western democracies I think the problem is that voters are getting increasingly fed up with politicians who are not addressing the increasing problems that they are facing: salaries rising slower than inflation, house prices going through the roof, immigration out of control etc. Mainstream politicians on both the left and the right seem either incapable or unwilling to address these problems.

This has opened the door for more extremist politicians on either the right or left who promise to fix things by whatever means necessary and people are increasingly voting for them because it looks like they are the only ones who may be capable of actually addressing their problems. It's not that people are broken, it's that when you are drowning in problems you'll reach out to whomever is offering to help, regardless of who they may be.

So it was worse than falling asleep at the wheel - they bent the knee to him. That is what has largely amazed me seeing this play out as a non-American. For all the bluster about how free and democratic the US is, the courts, politicians, press and companies all seem to have just largely capitulated and accepted Trump's rule by proclamation and speech-suppression by firing/intimidation tactics.

Ah yes, I definitely remember that time in 2018 when the FCC threatened ABC's broadcasting license in order to get rid of Barr; both sides, both sides!

Realistically, what will matter is what currently-clean-on-opset Pete will do to organizations(likely with Brendan Carr's slimy assistance). If they think that just doing journalist-level is going to work there's not much reason to just designate someone who can stay awake while holding a tape recorder to go collect the party line while everyone else skips the event. It's not like they are going to answer any but the most softball questions.

If anything, unless there's someone significantly smarter than Pete moderating the policy behind the scenes, this seems less likely to encourage compliance than the traditional measures; where you dole out little nibbles of exclusive and technically unauthorized 'access' to people you deem largely friendly precisely because the stuff at press conferences and releases is pure commodity(especially now that chatbots can, badly, munge it into other formats so there probably isn't even much future in rewriting or reading from the teleprompter those commodity releases).

How do you figure that? A human generally can't tell AI generated text from human generated text although I will admit that I'm getting a bit of an AI-vibe from your post.

How do you figure that? The fee is $100k _per year_ not just one off!