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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • D’Souza has observed that his friends are “the best little boys in the world. They all went to the fanciest universities and won all the prizes.”

    and wiped out several cities in the process

    My profile of Sackler, it turns out, was the first case to be brought before Objection’s tribunal, although the company told me there are now dozens in its virtual docket. “You’re Exhibit A,” D’Souza said, observing that the verdict on my work was part of the company’s soft launch: “Building software is hard.”

    did they try to turn their first target into unwilling and adversarial beta-tester?

    After we spoke, I awaited my verdict before the Objection tribunal in the Sackler case. None arrived. Eventually, the landing page was taken offline. I asked D’Souza about it. He explained that Objection would “hold off publishing any adjudications” until “a new major strategic partnership” was announced.

    so it seems

    (As a general matter, D’Souza questions the common journalistic practice of quoting “experts” as part of coverage.)

    it does fit a pattern




  • Not really, there are also polyesters and polyamides. These used here are hydrocarbons, and turns out there’s a tool for that. You see, in oil refining there’s a lot of stuff manufactured that it’s useless without further processing, as in, after distillation and vacuum distillation you might end up with half of weight of oil or more as asphalt or heavy oils that barely can be sold. So in order to make them useful, these products are broken down into smaller molecules, and then are separated again. What they’re doing is similar to process called hydrocracking that is commonly used to turn heavy vacuum distillates, think something like motor oil or other greases, to diesel
















  • to run drug tests you need six figure range machine (when new), maybe 5 euro worth of plastic (spe column, eppendorfs, pipette tips), couple ml of acetonitrile and maybe 5-7 min of machine time on average. it can run 24/7 and if you find anything you can do more detailed analysis. bro’s not earning shit, he’s paying down the machines (and maintenance)

    e: no way i’m nerd-sniped this easily. you can get hplc-ms for 90ish grand, add milliq water purification system, solvent recycling system, lots of fridges, a couple of laptops and company server and various other equipment and we’re probably in 200k range, excluding lab building itself. then you’ll need, say, $5 of consumables per sample ($2 per spe cartridge), so we’re talking about $40 revenue minus material costs. wages: you’ll need something about four people to run this thing at full tilt, two lab workers, one (?) clerk, half time driver and half time it guy, if you pay everyone 15k/mo then you need to go through 100ish samples just to pay wages not counting rent utilities and debts. but you can probably run 200 per day per machine, 300 if pushing it, so the main constraint will be logistics. because most of lab is in place then adding another hplc/ms will be only 90k. 300 samples per day print 9k per day, if you can get these samples. that’s probably why he’s expanding