And there's good reason for that. Someone with a clearance once explained to me that they're mainly worried about things that make you vulnerable to exploitation by foreign agents. If you're covering something up, that's something they can use to blackmail you.
But maybe if the thing you're revealing is "I myself was suspected to be a spy," that changes the calculus a bit.
Historically both directions are common, but in 2025 every month was revised down from the preliminary report except October. (They were revised down a lot in 2023 and 2024 as well fwiw.)
I actually don’t even think it’s a IaaS company. I mean it is, but Amazon seems to always excel at operations: whether it’s organizing a retail business, operating a logistics company, or managing a hyperscaler, it just seems like its real secret sauce is running ops.
(Which makes sense because all of their end user products suck)
One thing is for sure: if the seal builds and manages hundreds of billions of dollars worth of computer infrastructure across seven continents, it isn’t just a software company.
Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.
This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather it’s plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn’t really end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let’s not even get started on the African slave trade which was managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn’t based on any religious affiliation.
I’m a bit confused by your reply. Pretty sure the rulers of the Dahomey kingdom weren’t trading with people of the “Americas” but with Europeans, before and after its abolishment across Western Europe. In the book Fistful of Shells, historian Toby Green argues the scale of the trade was only made possible by European traders flooding West Africa with cheap currency (shells which had little value to them but that could be collected in the billions from Brazil and the Indo-Pacific).
1. slavery in Western Europe had been abolished long before the transatlantic slave trade - the Europeans were intermediaries, but there was little to no slavery in their home countries. There were many court rulings in England against slavery.
2. not enslaving Christians played a role in abolishing slavery in medieval Europe
3. serfdom was a far better condition that being a slave
4. Slave owners in the Americas opposed the conversion of slaves to Christianity. they also censored the version of the Bible available to slaves very heavily.
5. The claim about mass slavery within Europe is misleading on two counts: serfs are not just chattel slaves (they had rights), and Western Europe was very different from Eastern Europe.
With these executions Beijing is sending a message of deterrence to would-be scammers. But the business has now moved to Myanmar's border with Thailand, and to Cambodia and Laos, where China has much less influence.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to run online scams in Myanmar and elsewhere in South East Asia, according to estimates by the UN. Among them are thousands of Chinese people, and their victims who they swindle billions of dollars from are mainly Chinese too.
Frustrated by the Myanmar military's refusal to stop the scam business, from which it was almost certainly profiting, Beijing tacitly backed an offensive by an ethnic insurgent alliance in Shan State in late 2023. The alliance captured significant territory from the military and overran Laukkaing, a key border town.
China exercising profound influence over their near abroad.
Yeah this is the thing that i always think about when discussing buying American. Even the GSA (the Federal government’s “facilities manager”) buys Hyundai cars because they are all made in the states (I believe Alabama in Hyundai’s case).
The coverup is always worse than the original sin.
reply