> With current diving at 150 to 200 meters, you can only get 10 minutes of work completed, followed by 6 hours of decompression. With our underwater habitats we’ll be able to do seven years’ worth of work in 30 days with shorter decompression time. More than 90 percent of the ocean’s biodiversity lives within 200 meters’ depth and at the shorelines, and we only know about 20 percent of it.
Also mind you, this is coming from an academic. Yet there’s no proof being brought to the argument that this gap does exist and they’re not saying “may or might”, they’re making what appears to be a purely ideological statement.
I believe the term is appropriate.
Not only would the books have mostly disappeared due to local conditions, they can indeed be, and often are, digitized.
Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy.
Millions of Indians escaped starvation thanks to this policy and an astounding body of knowledge survived and was consequently studied, helping elevate Indian culture in academic circles. But no matter, this created “knowledge gaps”.
From their bio:
“My dissertation was a linguistic and cultural examination of disability as portrayed in Medieval Icelandic genre of the Sagas and Þættir of Icelanders.”
If they weren’t a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you’d think this was straight out of Portlandia.
The article gives some details we can go off of.
5 suitcases with $500k each, is $2.5M.
Alfassi charged 10% so $250k.
Out of that you have to manage all the logistics (as they said his fee covered it).
- Pickup of the cash
- Counting
- Hiring and managing mules (which means paying for Clarke’s salary and expenses who lives between Dubai and London, with, I assume, lots of flying and housing for her and her family required)
- Getting mules to your location
- Paying for things like Covid tests, a few expenses (I assume some food, and other little things)
- Driving them to the airport
- Flying them in business class to Dubai
- Paying for a local resort while they stayed put a few days
- Flying them back to the UK
Now they flew two people at a time, so all of the above is doubled for each trip.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this added up to around $50k per trip, which is 20% of the $250k fee for just transportation of the cash (does not include the actual laundering being done locally).
Margins are likely still “respectable” in the end, but you can’t have mules taking 10% of the suitcase’s content if you’re to run a profit.
I don’t think this is about how technically complex that would be. That’s clearly not where the moat is.
The moat is in the commercial operations powering the cash machine that Google has built across its numerous properties.
You can build this engine but it won’t give you the richness of the data Google collects through Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Analytics etc… on its users.
You could argue that Apple could try, through its own properties, but it would go against the privacy stance (essential to their image now).
Not saying they aren’t capable of dancing around this problem either, but then you start eroding your brand (which sells lots of iPhones).
That’s when you start seeing that it’s just simpler to externalize this cost to a third party that you can then openly criticize and use as scarecrow to reinforce your market position, all the while collecting tens of billions in profits from them.
Yes profits, they don’t pay anything to operate Google Search. Given that Google gives them a third of revenue on Safari, that means Apple would need a product that does multiple times what they get for it today. That also requires a sales force they don’t fully have (although that’s been increasing for their own properties like AppStore and News).
Anyway, looking at it from this angle, it’s kind of genius not to change the status quo.