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Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

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Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#141

Post by hervature »

CommitSyn wrote: post #104
sublinear wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 out of 5 pharmacy-filled prescriptions is not 4 out of 5 prescriptions, let alone 4 out of 5 patients, nor does that statistic say anything about unfilled pharmacy prescriptions or the rate at which people did not develop an addiction. Also you would expect the proportion of pharmacy-filled prescriptions for opioids to go up if the more common prescription for pain is not opiods from a pharmacy.

> 4 out of 5 pharmacy-filled prescriptions is not 4 out of 5 prescriptions As opposed to the non-pharmacy filled prescriptions people pick up? Your argument is that the statistic only works because so many people don't pick up meds their doctor calls in for them? I'm not a statistician so maybe I'm not understanding correctly, but that seems like a very weak argument.

While 4/5 is shocking any way you look at it, the stronger argument for why this stat is misleading is because it does not take into account how long the prescription lasts. Anecdotally, I was given basically a week's worth after all 3 of my surgeries. Tough to find stats on these things but I could see opiod prescriptions being 2x the number of prescriptions because the number of "doses" are half what other non-addictive substances are. Still, that would make opiods 2/3 of pharmacy-filled "doses".

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#142

Post by saiya-jin »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #113
sublinear wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable That is quite a non sequitur. Who is being forced to take drugs or listen to extremist propaganda? Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that. The instability of American culture is currently seen as an intrinsic virtue. China is not causing any change. They're just app…

> Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that. Not only this is counterproductive, it would be definitely something those hypothetical Chinese agents would say! This sentiment is what you call "the dumbest part of America" - one of personal responsibility when facing dangers that are by design above most people's threshold of self-control. If there is on…

You call it 2 extremes, from European point of view there are just mild variations of the same right wing approach, and result differences are even milder (ie democrats starting/expanding wars, conservatives allowing recreational cannabis etc).

Not criticizing or anything, but actual extremes look significantly different, wake me up when a proper anarchist sits in White house for example

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#143

Post by Dah00n »

jraby3 wrote: post #90
sublinear wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable That is quite a non sequitur. Who is being forced to take drugs or listen to extremist propaganda? Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that. The instability of American culture is currently seen as an intrinsic virtue. China is not causing any change. They're just app…

There’s a pretty strong connection to them supplying fentanyl to the US through Vancouver. https://www.jordanharbinger.com/sam-cooper-how-the-west-was-...

Anyone being unbiased who claim to know enough about PRC to point at the state being behind it doesn't use the wrong and derogatory term for the Communist Party of China ("CCP", it's CPC). That's like 60 minutes making a documentary about the Federal Investigation Bureau or the Party Republican.

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#144

Post by baybal2 »

nwallin wrote: post #42

Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one…

> I just feel like there's probably an interesting story there, but we never hear it, just the tidbit that can fit in the headline.

They say that the trade was done under cover, but they don't tell why the Soviet Union was doing that trading at all.

USSR was absolutely existentially dependent on its foreign exchange streams, and what little they were able to sell to the West, was sold it prodigious quantities, no questions asked. The Soviets have probably tried to upsell them again, and again. USSR needed USD like water to maintain the supply of Western luxuries for CPSU higher ups, but what was even more important than that was USSR's near complete reliance of the Western high tech goods up until late eighties.

That's why selling things like titanium was taking a precedence for them over making their own jet fighters out of said titanium in the first place. Luxuries, and technologies were taking far higher precedence in CPSU's minds over that.

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#145

Post by goodcanadian »

akira2501 wrote: post #28

The US "intelligence" apparatus created a particular cover story. There's no actual information as to what the USSR actually believed at the time. If they weren't particularly interesting in competing in aerial surveillance then it may have been seen as worth the money they got in return. They were already in the business of exporting it, it's not as if we got them to create a special market based on this cockamamie…

They were already in the business of exporting it, it's not as if we got them to create a special market based on this cockamamie story.

Yes, I really don't think there is much more to the story. The US used shell corporations to buy titanium so that the Soviets didn't know that the final customer was actually the US Air Force.

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#146

Post by pigeonhole123 »

bigger_inside wrote: post #133
eloisius wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that. Tell that to historians, especially Chinese historians, regarding Britain’s opium trade.

I was about to comment on the obvious projection inherent in the "the Chinese are forcing drugs on the US" narrative. But it's a classic. If you want to know the nefarious things the US is doing, just look at what the claim their adversaries are doing.

I think GP's point is the opposite. Most people agree that Britain's opium trade in China was exploitative.

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#147

Post by hardware2win »

oneshtein wrote: post #111
chii wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not like the west can complain after what we did in the opium wars? the west isn't one entity. Plus two wrongs don't make a right. Just because in the past, there has been atrocities committed, doesn't mean there's justification to do so now.

Transportation is much faster now, thus peoples are much closer to each other, so they are united at much larger scale. Few hundreds years ago, two town with few thousands were separate countries. Today European Union acts almost like single 0.5B country. In few hundred years, whole Globe will be united. In transition to Global State, whole continents, or hemispheres will be united first by geographic location, race,…

>Today European Union acts almost like single 0.5B country.

What makes you think so

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#148

Post by JDEW »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #57

Was this AI generated? The amount of repeat text is concerning if from a hunan

I was thinking the same.

> ...they fraudulently possibly told their comrades...

> ...by flying to the heavens.

These sentences, among others, strike me as odd/unnatural, but I'm not a native speaker.

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#149

Post by chaostheory »

sublinear wrote: post #87
anoy8888 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what China is doing to US now . Decades from now , Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable.

> they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable That is quite a non sequitur. Who is being forced to take drugs or listen to extremist propaganda? Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that. The instability of American culture is currently seen as an intrinsic virtue. China is not causing any change. They're just app…

> They're just apparently exploiting what was already the dumbest part of America. China is not causing any change.

So just like what the British empire did to China during the century of humiliation with opium? Mainlander hypocrisy is comical

Re: Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

#150

Post by chaostheory »

camillomiller wrote: post #123
anoy8888 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what China is doing to US now . Decades from now , Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable.

oh, so the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma are Chinese? The more you know…

1. Oxycontin much weaker than fentanyl

2. China is still actively doing it

https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/chinas-role-in-the-fen...

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