The median income in the UK is currently sitting at £2,627 / week or £31,524 / year [1]. This is advertising more than double that at £64,189, not quite graduate wages!
There's good evidence that it was expressly approved in the form of social media posts advertising the consignment on their social media pages. Difficult for them to argue either ignorance or that the arrangement wasn't authorised, both of which aren't really relevant to the demonstrated facts of the dispute.
If he's truly a "senior" CIA official, he probably actually was a reservist for much of his career, and continued to claim leave for reserve duties after he was discharged. And payroll eventually did pick up on this, which sparked an HR investigation of his credentials, which turned out to be inflated, and only then did they start to look at what this guy was doing with all the money he was taking home. Payroll is probably the only entity in this story that was actually doing their damn job.
All of the comments in this thread assume he was being investigated for his acquisition of comically large amounts of cash and commodities that he presumably left the building with in big bags with a dollar sign on them. They ignore the open secret that the CIA is cartoonishly out of control has been little more than a massive organised crime syndicate that happens to be on the government payroll for 20 years.
In all likelihood, his taking more than forty million dollars wasn't the suspicious behaviour that set him to being investigated. It's right there in the charge sheet. He was being investigated because payroll noticed he was fraudulently claiming leave that he wasn't entitled to. There's no routine oversight on who they're bribing with actual gold. There's still routine oversight on their payroll and HR practices. That led to them actually checking his resume properly, and when that was shown to be bullshit, only then did they actually look at what this guy was doing.
Deliberately testing its survivability with that failure mode over different parts of the vehicle has been one of the major foci throughout the entire test campaign, and it has proven remarkably resilient. That generalisation pretty much does not hold for starship.
That's right. SpaceX is likely a great business on its fundamentals, and starlink is probably even better. The meme-stock part of this is that they've swept all these different business up together. I would've loved the opportunity to invest in SpaceX and starlink, but I'm not convinced the AI and other parts of the business are anything other than a landfill fire. The orbital datacentre concept is just plain nutty and in a different way than most of Elon's major undertakings. Sweeping them all in together like this just creates a serious risk that the best space company in the world will go under when the AI bubble bursts.
9000 satellites that last less than five years, and no path from EBITDA to a GAAP profit. Never mind the crazy space data centers, even the supposedly profitable part won't be.
You still need a round trip to space and back - which with a Starlink-like orbit means a distance of at least 400km. At that point it makes significantly more sense to place your "edge computing AI engine" at a 5G base station a few dozen km away.
military/industrial customers want this for tactical operations
fully discreet low latency compute that integrates with there existing space hardware
so the ability to run drones, and meatbots from space, with low hardware requirements on the ground, but with lets say 1000~2000 users max, power users, but not that many.
so batteries, heat sinks,he refrigeration radiators, on a sattelite fleet.
they have been trialing this for years and are pitching putting ALL of the military compute in space, no more dirty civilian hands on there toys
Sure, in the same way that there is unlimited solar power on earth.
There are orbits with 24/7 or near-24/7 sunlight - but those are very undesirable if you want a low-latency data link back to Earth. Just like you can get 24/7 sunlight on the North / South Pole - but they are still pretty bad locations for a data center.
LEO orbits like those used by Starlink have far better connectivity, but about the same sunlight exposure as the surface as the planet will be between you and the sun about half the time.
Also, power is the easy part. Cooling is far harder.
Absolutely none of that would happen. It's in Iran's interests to keep the oil flowing at a fee that everyone can stomach and that doesn't offend the sensibilities. $1 a barrel for a year of unprovoked war crimes costing them hundreds of billions of dollars, with the cost effectively shared by all, fits this description. Nor has Iran responded with the kind of zero-sum, suicidal, totalitarian foreign policy that is always attributed to them by their enemies. Serious commentators have all remarked at how restrained they've been during this war. It's almost as though sane people who intend to come to a realistic agreement that everyone can live with are running their foreign and defence policies.
As you say, the shadow fleet exists because of sanctions. In other words, because the biggest bully on the block is committing de facto piracy with their navy. Pretty much the definition of blocking freedom of navigation. Their insurance paperwork not being in order justifies their seizure?
That's a half truth at best. The sanctions in question are hardly unilateral, particularly in the case of Russia. The shadow fleet exists due to a combination of factors; dodging the sanctions is only one of them.
As I understand it (but I'm certainly no expert) the insurance paperwork isn't in order and the fleet not properly registered as a result of the general state of the vessels involved. The US is hardly alone in this - the UK has also recently taken to seizing such vessels that pass too close to them. But generally yes, if due to the risks no country wants to officially register a vessel and no insurance provider want to cover it then it seems entirely justified to seize it in order to protect the commons. These aren't pleasure boats we're talking about here, they're ridiculously large merchant vessels. There's approximately zero legitimate excuses for them to be flying a fraudulent flag.
Ponder for a moment why it might be that the countries involved don't want these vessels flying their own flags and don't want to extend them insurance policies themselves.
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