Doesn't that depend on when they acquired the gold and at what price? It has roughly tripled in just 10 years, and increased tenfold since the early 2000s.
Gold is gold. There is no such thing as suspect gold. It can always be subject to a purity test. Those who buy much gold, e.g. Apmex, always do it. The fact that France was able to sell the gold validates that it was gold.
Do you have a reference for this? There's been a lot of talk from ministers about reviewing contracts when break clauses allow, but I haven't seen anything definitive and this still seems to be a matter for individual departments.
Not before handing over an enormous cache of NHS patient data to them during the pandemic. If memory serves, this was not kept on NHS hardware or even NHS controlled compute.
If memory serves, this was not kept on NHS hardware or even NHS controlled compute.
Does anyone have a verifiable source for that? It would be extremely controversial if true and even among the big civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups in the UK I have never seen anyone make that claim.
The defence to using Palantir by British government departments and public services has typically been that Palantir only provides the technology and the data itself is still held and processed in the UK under the native organisation's control. Even this is still controversial because of issues like the CLOUD Act and the general reputation of Palantir.
But that is a long way from allowing the mass export of sensitive personal data to a US firm without the data subjects' knowledge or consent. That looks just plain illegal under our existing data protection legislation. Green lighting it - even in the panic phase during COVID - would probably be controversial enough to end a few political careers at least. It might even leave enough of a cloud over the party in government at the time to affect a future election.
Are you referring to the same UK that only a week ago gave Palantir access to the entire data lake of the FCA, the financial regulator and crime watchdog?
I wonder if there's a critical failure mode / safety feature of our species for some percentage of the population to always dislike whatever some other large percentage of the population likes.
As if it's to prevent the species from over-indexing on a particular set of behaviors.
Like how divisive films such as "Signs", "Cloud Atlas", and even "The Last Jedi" are loved by some and utterly reviled by others.
While that's kind of a silly case, maybe it's not just some random statistical fluke, but actually a function of the species at a population level to keep us from over-indexing and suboptimizing in some local minima or exploring some dangerous slope, etc.
Either they are alcoholics who can't control themselves or simply just think they are still under control of their ability to drive despite being impaired. Many people just don't know what 0.08 BAC feels like. In college, I got the opportunity to blow on a breathalyzer (not because I was arrested) and found that despite not feeling drunk, I was over the 0.08 limit.
The 0.08 BAC limit also has no basis in reality for what impairment is. It's a political reality, not a scientific one. MADD and other organizations lobbied to make this a legal limit across the US and many other jurisdictions around the world followed suit.
That's not to say that anyone should drive after drinking, but the basic reality is that impairment is often individual, and cannot be directly measured by blood alcohol content. Many people are impaired with a lower BAC than 0.08, and in many states you can now be charged and convicted of DUI even if your BAC is not beyond the legal threshold on the basis of purely circumstantial evidence.
There's no good answer here, because we need cut and dried evidence in our legal system to prevent abuses, but there's not really good ways to do that. Separately, the leading cause of accidents is no longer drunk driving in most parts of the West, it's inattentive driving due to cellphone/electronics usage while operating a vehicle. Younger generations don't drink as much as older generations, to the point that zero-percent alcohol spirits and NA beer are now becoming broad markets and it's dramatically affecting bar/pub culture, but younger generations nearly as a rule are addicted to their smartphones.
That's the BAC of a healthy male an hour after drinking 2 light beers. That is an absurd limit to set in stone, however there is plenty of evidence to show that /some/ people are impaired at 0.05 BAC.
Ultimately it really amounts to a battle between people who want to operate off fuzzy logic and reasonableness and a people who want to use totalitarian enforcement. There is definitely a significant government-funded (and activist pushed) take where /any/ amount of alcohol /any/ time prior to driving is dangerous, which is obviously stupid and incorrect.
People should not drink and drive, they should not drive while impaired in any capacity, whether its from their prescription medication, a drink, a joint, or simply a lack of sleep. There is also absolutely nothing wrong for a normal healthy person to have a single glass of wine over a steak dinner and to drive home, which will not in any way physiologically impair you.
> There is definitely a significant government-funded (and activist pushed) take where /any/ amount of alcohol /any/ time prior to driving is dangerous, which is obviously stupid and incorrect.
Driving itself is dangerous. Acknowledging this is obviously smart and correct.
And while I'm sure that you can drive safely at 100 miles an hour, or after five beers, some objective standard has to be drawn somewhere. If the line were drawn at 0.16, someone would no doubt chime in to explain about how they've got it fully together at 0.17.
Sure, but that's a strawman of my position. I'm not saying we should not draw a line, I'm saying that drawing a line is required due to how our systems work (in my earlier comment), and then in my reply to /reducing that line which was already nebulous/ I'm pointing out how ridiculous that reduction is. There are people who are impaired at 0.05 BAC. A normal healthy adult male is not. Like many things you can think of them as statistical distributions with outliers. If you slide the BAC level you consider legally impaired (regardless of actual function) you shift how many people will fall in the distribution above the line but without meaningful impairment.
I'm not making some radical point here, I'm speaking basic reality.
Your assertion this was an American pressure group which didn't form for over a decade after the rest of the western world introduced explicit restrictions is just the brainwashing of American exceptionalism.
Every single one of the 50 states had to individually sign laws because there is no national law about drunk driving, and MADD was instrumental in the 0.08 legal limit becoming law in the United States. That's a well-founded assertion.
Addiction, mental illness, a defacto requirement to drive to get around low-density towns where walking is often extremely dangerous due to lack of sidewalks and fast roads.
Alcohol abuse has been around about as long as we've been human. We've just constructed a society where Alcohol abuse is far more likely to pick up collateral damage.
We've also become a lot better at distilling high-proof alcohol, and at making it cheap enough that most people have the budget to get absolutely wasted on the regular.
Most people don't do that, but the option is there for anyone looking to make their life and the lives of people around them significantly worse.
The French sold theirs and bought new stock on the European market.
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