> So what’s happened here? Well, whoever collected these emails first converted from CRLF (i.e., “Windows” line ending coding) to “NL” (i.e., “Unix” line ending coding). This is pretty normal if you want to deal with email. But you then have one byte fewer:
I think there is a second possible conclusion, which is that the transformation happened historically. Everyone assumes these emails are an exact dump from Gmail, but isn't it possible that Epstein was syncing emails from Gmail to a third party mail server?
Since the Stackoverflow post details the exact situation in 2011, I think we should be open to the idea that we're seeing data collected from a secondary mail server, not Gmail directly.
Do we have anything to discount this?
(If I'm not mistaken, I think you can also see the "=" issue simply by applying the Quoted-Printable encoding twice, not just by mishandling the line-endings, which also makes me think two mail servers. It also explains why the "=" symbol is retained.)
In one of the email PDFs I saw an XML plist with some metadata that looked like it was from Apple's Mail.app, so these might be extracted from whatever internal format that uses.
When they process these emails, it's fairly common to import everything into a MS Outlook PST file (using whatever buggy tool). That's probably why these look like Outlook printouts even though its Yahoo mail or etc.
Yeah, I wouldn't bet on this being a single bad Gmail export; it smells much more like the accumulated scars of multiple mail systems doing "helpful" things to the same messages over time
What happened here is what always happens with all printed and digital material that goes through some evidentiary process.
The shot-callers demand the material, which is a task fobbed off onto some nobody intern who doesn't matter (deliberately, because the lawyers and career LEOs don't want any "officer of the court" or other "party" to put eyes on things they might need to deny knowing about later.) They use only the most primitive, mechanical method possible, with little to no discretion. The collected mass of mangled junk is then shipped to whoever, either in boxes or on CD-ROM/DVD (yes, still) or something. Then, the reverse process is done, equally badly, again by low-level staff, also with zero discretion and little to no technical knowledge or ability, for exactly the same reasons, to get the material into some form suitable for filing or whatever.
Through all of this, the subtle details of data formats and encodings are utterly lost, and the legal archive fills with mangled garbage like raw quoted-printable emails. The parties involved have other priorities, such as minimizing the number of people involved in the process, and tight control over the number of copies created. Their instinct is not to bring in a bunch of clever folk that might make the work product come out better, because "better" for them is different than "better" for Twitter or Facebook. Also, these disclosures are inevitably and invariably challenged by time: the obligation to provide one thing or another is fought to the last possible minute, and when the word does finally go out there is next to no time to piddle around with details.
In the Epstein case, the disclosures were done years ago, the original source material (computers, accounts, file systems, etc.) have all long since been (deliberately) destroyed, and what the feds have is the shrapnel we see today.
No it's not, that's what happens when people can spend someone else's money without consequences, potentially by asking a friend what they need. That happens everywhere, all the time, but let's not pretend this is economically efficient or acceptable.
If the request for proposal had been done fairly, that page would have cost a few tens of thousands.
Clearly the site is intended for a few mega-employers to push out as "training". How many employees do you think need to take the training to recoup £4.1 million in GDP? Not many.
It later transpired the real reason the Police wanted to ban the group:
"West Midlands Police did have "high confidence intelligence" that members of the local community in Birmingham were planning to arm themselves to attack Maccabi supporters."
But surely it's not an apple to apples comparison?
Wind farms can only generate electricity when it's windy. While you might be able to get cheaper energy from wind when it's windy, but unlike other technologies such as gas or nuclear with wind you still need to build out and maintain infrastructure for base power load when it's not windy.
Surely you need to factor that double build cost in with wind and solar since it's not required if you were to build out say nuclear power plants with similar output?
It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity. And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt. Most of the cost is drilling wells, liquifying gas, shipping it, unloading it, etc. All those other costs are much lower because the generators only run a small fraction of the time.
If you go to https://winderful.uk and set the date range to a year, you can get a sense of how many long dips there are.
> It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity.
The expected load factor for offshore wind power is around 50%. Much better than onshore wind (~35%) but still far from perfect. You can compensate some part of it by installing more power than what you need, but then you must pay for the unused capacity (£1.5B paid last year).
> And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
A day maybe, but in winter night last up to 16 hours. And wind droughts can last more than two weeks.
> But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt
But they have limited flexibility: you can't turn it on and off easily and there's limited power modulation you can do. That's why France keeps its gas output relatively constant in winter and do the modulation with nuclear despite its marginal cost being lower than gas on paper.
Renewable are an important leverage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they are also really challenging to work with, far from the simplistic view people can have on the internet.
> But they have limited flexibility: you can't turn it on and off easily and there's limited power modulation you can do. That's why France keeps its gas output relatively constant in winter and do the modulation with nuclear despite its marginal cost being lower than gas on paper.
Gas peaker plants are extremely flexible and fast to turn on and off. That's the style that will fill the gap until batteries (or whatever else) takes over the last ~10%.
My understanding is that base load tends to refer to a source that produces constantly to cover base usage levels round the clock. That’s what nuclear is good for, and then you have other technologies that service the peaks it can’t quickly scale to.
That’s not really a relevant model any more with renewables, what you need is in-fill for times the main power source isn’t producing well. As a complementary power source you want something agile and switchable. Usually this is gas generators which are easy to spin up/down more or less instantly. Obviously gas is not ideal as it’s still a fossil source, so some countries are looking at batteries etc to service those loads.
That is correct. Which is managed by the day ahead market. If you can produce electricity when the grid is strained you will be paid a lot.
The problem with for example new built nuclear power is that it is essentially only fixed costs. Therefore it does not complement renewables at all.
Why should someone buy expensive grid based nuclear power when renewables deliver?
We've seen people starting to muse on the "unraveling of the grid monopoly" now when renewables allow consumers to vote with their wallets rather than accepting whatever is provided.
You need to have the right levels of energy available at all times. But that doesn't mean baseload any more. Hasn't for ages. It means having a variety of different sources that tend to be available at different times, backstopped with something like gas turbines.
The gas and other base load infrastructure are largely built, it just needs maintenance which is a lower cost than building something new. The CfD is a competitive process, so the price (should) fully incorporate the cost to build the infrastructure, maintain it, operate it and make a profit.
Correct, this is the problem that the Tories failed to identify when they started to reduce fossil fuel usage. It was a political decision taken to shore up support with people who ended up moving to the Lib Dems anyway (and everything unravelled anyway with Brexit for Cameron, who was probably the biggest proponent of this...Lib Dems incidentally also played a key role in blocking nuclear).
Comparing the prices of these two things does not tell you what the eventual cost is going to be.
To explain the context: the UK had to cap electricity prices because costs have risen so much, government is paying huge subsidies to providers, minister made bombastic claims in the last election that he could fix everything, nothing has worked out, he has now set up a range of quangos to employ his friends (reducing quangos was one of the promises in the election) who are now briefing the press aggressively with other lobbyists that costs are going to drop...despite the government having no political ability to do anything that will reduce costs (the latest briefing is that new gas plants are too expensive, an obviously misleading comparison on many levels).
UK electricity prices are extraordinarily high, the political context is that you have to say this will reduce them. This is obviously not going to lead prices to fall but the context has to be the same.
The other question is why we are doing this if this isn't going to actually cause prices to fall? As with many similar problems in the UK: too many people making too much money. Government is now subsidizing retail electricity prices to pay for private sector investment in high-cost technology that guarantees a high ROI. Most of the people quoted in the government's presser are lobbyists, as I said above a cottage industry of quangos has now sprung up surrounding Miliband. There is no way back.
In terms of macro, it is definitely quite interesting because the last few years of this have essentially made it impossible for the UK to operate as a modern industrial economy. How do you maintain employment with essentially no industrial function? Energy prices are so high commercially that some services businesses are actually struggling too. It is incredible employment and wages are so high in the UK (although the level of economic support the government is providing, particularly in services, is huge).
It's kind of mentioned in the article, but I'm more comfortable cooking with lard than either tallow or oil based on the current evidence. Avoiding UPF is probably the most important factor though.
Pretty much all, if not all, cooking oils/fats when heated past the smoke point create this problem.
Avocado oil has a smoke point of 500F, which is what I use for high heat cooking. By contrast lard is only 370F, which means it supplies less flexibility than avocado oil.
sadly one of the most frustrating things is that everyone groups saturated fats in one big group. there is lots of evidence that only specific types of saturated fats actually cause CVD, in particular some specific configurations of palmitic acid. the other saturated fats are not nearly as problem causing.
Lard is a different mix of the oils from the others. Much less saturated fat than tallow (but still a lot). You can look up the proportions if you want to.
UPF as in ultra-processed food? UPF designations are farcical; they're a modern formally-ratified instance of the naturalist fallacy. There are attributes of ultra-processed foods that are bad, but it's not the ultra-processing that makes it so; it's a very "correlation is causation" situation.
The fundamental problem with UPF isn't the nutritional qualities of the food. It's the _process_ itself. UPF is basically derived from A/B testing food continuously to making it (a) highly consumable and (b) low cost. Repeat that process over decades and thousands of times and you get overconsumption of shit food.
I think you mean highly palatable. Hyperpalatability is a real problem. But that's not intrinsic to "ultra-processing"; there are lots of reasons to "ultra-process" foods that aren't about maximizing caloric input.
I mean, that's not as far as I know an actual commonly-used metric but it's closely enough aligned with hyperpalatability that I think the distinction doesn't matter.
Those atoms were made in supernova, but the molecules themselves probably didn’t. It’s like saying "my car was made in a supernova" because it’s made of atoms. Sure…
I think there is a second possible conclusion, which is that the transformation happened historically. Everyone assumes these emails are an exact dump from Gmail, but isn't it possible that Epstein was syncing emails from Gmail to a third party mail server?
Since the Stackoverflow post details the exact situation in 2011, I think we should be open to the idea that we're seeing data collected from a secondary mail server, not Gmail directly.
Do we have anything to discount this?
(If I'm not mistaken, I think you can also see the "=" issue simply by applying the Quoted-Printable encoding twice, not just by mishandling the line-endings, which also makes me think two mail servers. It also explains why the "=" symbol is retained.)
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