oce 🐆

The diplomatic speech use is pretty funny.

“Faced with this apparent misunderstanding of the basic expectations of the office of ambassador, who has the honour of representing his country, the minister [Jean‑Noël Barrot] has requested that he no longer have direct access to members of the French government,” the ministry added. “It remains, of course, possible for Ambassador Charles Kushner to carry out his duties and to present himself at the Quai d’Orsay so that we may hold the diplomatic exchanges necessary to smooth over the irritations that, inevitably, can arise in a friendship two hundred and fifty years old,” it nevertheless specified.

LLM translated from https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2026/02/23/mort-de-quentin-deranque-charles-kushner-ambassadeur-americain-a-paris-ne-s-est-pas-presente-a-une-convocation-du-quai-d-orsay_6667987_3210.html

The tobacco industry is a good historical example of all the shit world dominating companies do. The most sneaky thing I can remember is that they finance perfectly good research on a lot of causes of cancer, except for tobacco, so researchers were too busy and happy to get some money to work on something, to investigate tobacco. They also have been buying companies that used to finance legitimate research so researchers that depended on them are now forced into a conflict of interest. https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q1153

Personal anecdote, a young female data scientists left my current department to join Philip Morris, it blows my mind that young educated people would join this industry willingly, I guess it was for the money.

Some people put so much time and energy in this kind of stuff. Imagine we could harvest this level of motivation from everyone and put it at the service of the sustainable transition, we would have stopped global warming at the +1.5⁰C mark.