Re: China resumes export of Nexperia chips, with some restrictions

Heroin addiction has been around for a very long time.

Susceptible people got hooked long before there was an international drug trade.

Some people are susceptible. As the US attempt at Prohibition demonstrated, trying to stop susceptible people getting access to addictive drugs simply doesn't work.

What does work is harm minimisation. You give them enough of what they crave to keep them from buying more from crooks on the street.

It isn't good for them, but they last a lot longer on higher quality drugs of known strength, and some have been known to outgrow the addiction.

IIRC, I had it this summer when they removed my colon cancer. It simply became dark and 2 hours later the lights went ON again. No sensations, no feeling good but no pain or headache.

And since we all are old farts here: Do your regular check-ups! Next year it could have turned much worse.

Gerhard

"Harm reduction" is a medical specialty. It gets its drug perfectly legally from the medical supply chain.

By providing a competitive source of higher quality addictive drugs it out-competes the drug-traffickers. It doesn't seem to drive them out of business, but it restricts the bulk of their business to occasional thrill-seekers, so their turnover is a lot smaller, and they kill a much smaller proportion of their customers.

The religious right thinks that "harm reduction" is immoral, but it's hard to see the virtue in sustaining a system that kills a lot more addicts than harm reduction would.

I don't think the US ever grew many opium poppies. Did the UK or Germany or Australia?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The US had their drug lords in Afghanistan who were best friends as long as they helped against the Russians. And the Golden triangle in SE asia before that in the Vietnam war time frame.

The UK forced China to accept opium as currency with the opium wars.

What goes around comes around.

Gerhard

Opium poppies are a crop in Tasmania. One of my wife's school friends grew up on a sheep farm that had been in her family since 1826. She and her husband (who grew up in the Tasmania town where I was born and went to primary school) had to diversify. They tried opium poppies - there's a well-regulated medical market - but it didn't work too well. Pinot noir grapes did much better, and they found a wine maker who was able turn them into Gala Estate pinot which pretty much became our house wine.

Opium poppies are a crop in Tasmania. One of my wife's school friends grew up on a sheep farm that had been in her family since 1826. She and her husband (who grew up in the Tasmania town where I was born and went to primary school) had to diversify. They tried opium poppies - there's a well-regulated medical market - but it didn't work too well. Pinot noir grapes did much better, and they found a wine maker who was able turn them into Gala Estate pinot which pretty much became our house wine.

I had a hernia surgery. They used something that I forget. I told the guy that I didn't feel anything yet. He said "you will." He started morphine and the lights went out.

It was cool that a couple hours later I could walk out and go home.

Imagine surgery and dentistry before anesthetics.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Some bad things happened hundreds of years ago.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

But they do have low level contaminants and isotope distributions, so you can tell where they came from.

It is going to take a while to ramp up rare earth extraction and processing, and that is going to cost money for quite a while before you can start shipping rare-earth ores, and and even longer before you can start shipping refined rare earths as chunks of metal.

China is going to use its financial power to make sure that these operations aren't going to be profitable for some years, and will offer to buy out potential competitors to improve their monopoly position - they have been doing that for decades now, and nobody did anything about it. Trump hasn't got a great attention span.

You don't like him, and are obsessed with him, because he has common sense, and he's on our side, and is winning.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Sounds fine: don't pay them back.

FGM isn't a Jewish practice.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Do they pay your air traffic controllers yet?

Jeroen Belleman

Is Jaguar still alive?

Is Estonia part of Russia yet?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I certainly don't like Donald Trump. I'm equally certainly not obsessed with him, but he has power, and he is using it to disrupt international trade, and to reduce US investment in science.

His idea that human-induced global warming is some kind of hoax is totally demented - even if it i a delusion you share.

Despite your gullible delusions, he doesn't have any common sense at all. He's certainly not on your side - he's on an ego trip, and is exploiting his position as President of the United States of America to make money for himself and his family, and to feed his self-esteem - his obsession with getting a Nobel Peace Prize is a little too obvious for comfort.

One has to wonder what you think he is winning (apart from the money he's collecting for himself and his family). The US economy is being slowed down by the tariffs he's now collecting at the borders, which are essentially a tax on imports paid by the US population on the goods they import.

His health secretary - RFK - denies being anti-vaccination, but US vaccination rates are going down and diseases which were well-controlled by vaccination are now on the rise in the US.

If you think that this is "winning", you have a very strange idea of success, but you do have a lot of very strange ideas.

You get a lot of your consumer goods from China. You have to rebuild your manufacturing sector before you start upsetting China. It might be a good idea to build up a rare earth mining and extraction industry at the same time.

Russia still hasn't managed to occupy much of the Ukraine yet. Estonia may be on their to-do list, but getting a more civilised regime into power in Russia may be on some other people's to-do list.

George Soros might take it on.

Am 04.11.25 um 18:01 schrieb Jan Panteltje:

Don't make me laugh so hard. My belly hurts, and that's not caused by the surgery.

The civilian employees here in Ramstein Airbase, Sprangdahlem... are lucky insofar as the German government guarantees their income even if their money is owed by the US :-(

Sorry, local news in German:

Gerhard