Text of the article:

*Raytheon Technology Corp. (RTX) has been assessed a $200 million fine for violating export laws involving exchanging information on U.S. combat aircraft with prohibited countries. The laws are associated with the International Traffic in Arm Regulations. According to the U.S. State Department, RTX is guilty of improperly classifying and controlling exports of defense articles, including classified material.

Sensitive information on the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Lightning II, and B-2 Spirit bomber was mistakenly made available to Russia, China, and Iran.

According to a Reuters report, RTX voluntarily disclosed its errors. At a July 25 earnings call with investors, the company said it had earmarked $1 billion to resolve three separate legal issues that it said were primarily identified during the integration of firms Rockwell Collins and Raytheon/United Technologies into RTX in April 2020.

According to a U.S. State Department document released last week, one of the transgressions involved providing Chinese nationals in Shanghai with information that was more sensitive than RTX employees realized on “an aluminum display housing component of the F-22 Raptor Fighter Aircraft.”

On the earnings call, RTX told investors, "As part of the resolution of each of these three matters, we will be required to retain independent compliance monitors over the three-year term of the agreements." Half of the fine will be spent to fund a remedial compliance program.*

Own take:

First of all, hahahahaha!! This is what you get for being such a free market fundamentalist shithole that you leave war production in the hands of the private sector! Also China wins again by doing absolutely nothing lol

I think this punishment is extremely lenient considering this could be viewed as treason. It's barely .012% of their market cap, so it's like a speeding ticket for a normal person. Also it mentions they are having three other violations at the same time, so this is apparently a regular occurrence. In my opinion, this just goes to show how deep the US government is in the pocket of these companies.

Costa Rica is a tropical country and has only two seasons; a dry season from January to March and a wet season during the rest of the year. It is geographically impossible for there to be a Four Seasons hotel in this country. If anyone has sold you a stay at such a resort, you have been scammed! Contrary to what is advertised, you will not experience autumn, winter, or spring in the way temperate latitudes do, nor do these hotels undertake any actions to emulate such an experience.

As the abstraction of the act of streaming from its individual particularities, NPC streaming presents the distillation of the streaming profession, resulting in maximal efficiency in revenue generation. A quantitative increase in this kind of stream will eventually result in a qualitative transformation of the industry where it will be sublated by an entirely novel mode of production, namely the streamer-capitalist who relies entirely on the viewer for both the production and the consumption of their product, and who will eventually become a node in a never-ending tree of subcontractors.

Comrades, today I had the pleasure of participating in our city's First of May demonstration, and to purchase two books from the local chapter of the MLPD (Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany). One of them is pretty well-known, it is the Dialectics of Nature by Friedrich Engels; the other was an obscure philosophy tract written by one Mr Oscar Creydt where he attempts to reframe the entire history of the universe from a ML point of view, which is why I went in there with high expectations, namely that it would use recent discoveries from natural science to develop new ML philosophy.

Unfortunately for me however, whilst the book started promising and ambitious and it does demonstrate a good grasp of the historical developments of quantum mechanics, by page 60 of 220 it occurs to the author that he wants to deny Einstein's theory of general relativity, arguably the most well-tested and internally consistent theory in all of physics. But this was only the hors-d'oeuvre of the work, he goes on to try and reduce every single phenomenon in the universe to the vibration inherent to photons (which he calls "radions"), he spouts metaphysical nonsense about why the speed of light is constant, he declares the cosmic microwave background radiation to be the "primitive stage" of this vibration because Big Bang cosmology isn't real either, and he makes no attempt to explain cosmological redshift, gravitational lensing, or the perihelion precession of Mercury with his mental construction.

Now bear in mind that I don't necessarily want to accuse the author of being bad at science. The foreword of the book explicitly remarks that due to the anticommunist Stroessner regime in Paraguay, he couldn't rely on qualified people to empirically test or mathematically proofread his work, it is possible that the libraries he frequented just didn't have reliable books on the topics, and even the best scientists might publish utter drivel after having to work in isolation for decades. However, it is obvious that the mistake with this approach is that you cannot start with your own interpretation of dialectical materialism, and then change science to fit into it. This is a misconception of ML philosophy which many theoretically-minded comrades have already exposed, including on this very website. The refutation to it is that rather than relying on some rigid dogma formulated by humans, nature begets the shape of her own dialectics via her own interactions with herself; which is why we must study nature to arrive at natural philosophy and not vice versa.

The last thing I want to remark is that, if instead it had been let's say a Christian fanfic of science, one would immediately have noticed from the lack of footnotes and historical background knowledge, the presence of biblical and other nonscientific references, the use of odd figures and diagrams derived from gnosticism, or the extensive use of all-capital letter words. Here, there were no such signs. Marxist-Leninist scientific malpractice is especially worrisome because you might not even notice it until several pages into the book and even then the errors are of a much more subtle nature and require background knowledge.

btw China has quadrupled its green energy production since 2008