Maarten88

> I just want to note that the president can give pardons for federal crimes, but not for state level crimes.

He can and he did, it just does not work.

But he can make the governor do it, which did work at least once.

Just this week the New York Times reported the case of a venezolan banker who received a pardon after hiring a former lawyer of the president. There probably will be litigation if they misreport it so this does not seem hearsay to me.

AI readily provided me a list of 8 other well documented cases of "pay for pardons" and offered detailed research on all of them.

Full presidential pardons go for just a couple of million, a rounding error on that fine. Invoking social media and complaining about a democrat judge or deep state conspiracy and forking over the money using the right attorneys is all it takes. Nobody with that kind of resources will go to jail.

You are thinking about a slow boat in displacement mode, or a wave-surf board with very small fins. But I can tell you that the wetted surface area of my wing-foil board is exactly zero after takeoff, and all wet surfaces of the foil are, for a significant percentage, in laminar flow. Same for a windsurf board planing: just the last 50cm of the board is touching the water and the fin is extremely significant for drag.

> Surfboards will have a Reynolds number of 10^7 which is entirely turbulent.

A fin, foil or daggerboard below the board/boat is operating well within the range of Reynolds' numbers where laminar flow is relevant.

Any competitive sailor or foil-racer knows that the underwater surface has the least friction and best laminar flow when sanded with fine-grid sandpaper, around 1000 to 1500 grid.

It always surprised me that this was not true in air and airplane wings were supposedly best when glossy. So now it turns out that this is indeed not true, and airfoils also benefit from micro-roughness for lowest friction.

Now the surprising question to me is how is it possible that something so simple was not known in this very well-researched and well-funded field. It probably was known, just not by the paper-publishing researchers.

> I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario.

What are the motives? Follow the money? Who profits most might give an indication of who is more likely wrong.

> people who believe that crashing the US, including the dollar, enables them to build a US like they want

Yes, it's strange how dumb some rich/succesful people are. As I understand it, no civilization ever has done such a thing. If a civilization and its institutions crash, it remains failed/dysfunctional for a very long time. The only way to improve society is in small steps.

I hope the people who finance this all will wake up to the reality that it may well cost them everything, too.

Titanium's advantage is imo not so much its weight, as aluminium is better still in that respect. Titanium is mostly better where corrosion and temperature resistance are important. Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.

> why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago

Maybe because at that time tropical hardwood was readily available at low cost?

I'm pretty sure healthcare costs in the US are also higher as a percentage of GDP compared to EU, so higher wages would not explain the difference. Also productivity should be higher?

I think pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance and legal companies take all the money.

> much more expensive and for no good reason

There is a good reason: profits and management pay. And greed is good, right?

> the problems are fixable

Fixable in theory. The US would first have to fix the underlying issue, which i.m.o. is government, media and even judicial capture by financial interests. Billionaires are now openly buying "shares" in those. I don't see any sign of it changing anytime soon. It only seems to get worse.

The investigating is great, the problem is who is doing it and for what reason.

If the misdeed is done by a non-public or poor company there is no money to be made so they would never even investigate it. And not accepting a payoff that returns more than the short position would be ignoring fiduciary responsibility, so some investigations could disappear.

It's very worrying that consumer protection against poisoning in the US comes from a for-profit company that makes money by short selling companies they found to have issues and then covering their back this way against lawsuits, which any less aggressive reviewer would face.