I am familiar with fuel manifolds and oxidizer manifolds, but where exactly is the budget manifold in a rocket?
It starts at the House Appropriations Committee offices, runs in a zigzag path to 330 E Street SW (NASA headquarters). From there it branches out to myriad contractors strategically scattered across a majority of Congressional districts.
It plays this way: if you care about three letter agencies reading what's on your phone, trade in your old A6 CPU iPhone (like the San Bernadino one) for a new one with an A7 processor because the A7 contains the new "secure enclave" crypto co-processor.
Of course we don't know whether the FBI can't get into an A7 based phone, but the whole point of that secure enclave is that it makes it much, much harder to crack a device, even if you have a team of electronics and system experts with a well-equipped lab.
Well, this is the iPhone 5c -- not the 5s. That means it has an A6 processor, not an A7. The A6 doesn't have the "secure enclave" cryptographic co-processor and storage. This enables a number of possible attacks, although none that a casual hacker could mount. For example the encryption key, which is stored in the secure enclave in the A7, could be read from flash or intercepted as it is transferred over the pins to the A6 processor. In the A7 all the magic happens inside the chip packaging. That kind of attack is not script-kiddy stuff, but it's not beyond what a specialist could do.
The "fix" the FBI was demanding in this case would work equally well on an A6 or A7, so one possible explanation for demanding that fix is that the methods used on this phone wouldn't work on an iPhone 5s or later.
Of course since we don't know how it was done we can't rule out the possibility the company the FBI used has an attack that works on A7 as well as A6 CPUs. There'd still be good reasons to want to have the security-weakened version of iOS. The weakened iOS would be quick and cheap enough to use routinely, even speculatively. What's more the legal precedent could be use against literally any device maker who sold stuff in the US.
Inferring motivations from actions, I'd guess that the FBI knew all along that it could get into this particular phone, but wanted the weakened iOS and legal precedent that came along with it.
Job titles often reflect tradition and custom more than responsibilities. In my city the people who control the speed of a subway train are called "drivers" or sometimes "operators", but people with the same job on the diesel-powered commuter trains are called "engineers". The subway inherited its terminology from the old streetcar system and the commuter rail from the 19th century regional railroads.
The rail system inherited the traditional roles of engineer and conductor, whereas the conductor responsibilities on the subway are split between the driver and the inspector. "Inspectors" (aka "starters") work in a station and are in charge of fixing problems that leave trains stranded in the station. They often handle the kind of minor repairs and adjustments GP is talking about. On the railroad side of things the career path to become an engineer probably would prepare you to deal with a variety of minor breakdowns and adjustments, since you essentially have to work your way up through a series of other positions on the train, but on the subway side inspectors are senior to drivers.
Clearly the job of operator on a subway line could be automated away, provided the track right of way is perfectly isolated from stray pedestrians and other traffic -- which is not always the case. There are subway lines that essentially become street trolleys in places for example. It's not out of the question even those could be automated, since we're approaching an era of autonomous road vehicles. The idea of having a fix-it man on every train would certainly improve train operations, but would probably be prohibitively expensive.
Your question is simplistic because it assumes equivalent amounts of "radiation" can be treated as the same thing. If we're talking about just exposure per se then I'm fine with occasional exposures totaling in the range 100 mSv/yr if it's relatively uniform over that year. Over the course of a day I'd be fine with 20 mSv or so, as long as it was a once-or-twice-a-year kind of thing.
If we're talking about inhalation/ingestion it's a whole different depends on the biochemistry of the source of radioactivity and the form it takes. Sr-90 and Cs-137 are similar in radiological half-life, so if we're talking about but very different in terms of biological half-life. Half of ingested Cs is excreted in 30 days. Estimates for time to excrete half of an Sr dose vary from three years to as long as 50. Clearly being exposed to similar levels of Cs-137 and Sr-90 are very different propositions in terms of lifetime risk. For the same reason I avoid working on restoring radium pigmented watches; radium's in the same column of the periodic table as strontium and calcium, and that means it's not something you want to make a habit of ingesting or breathing, even though Ra-226 is not particularly radioactive.
If you're asking for a blanket condemnation or endorsement of nuclear power, all I can say is, "it depends".
It depends on what specifically you're proposing to build, how you specifically plan to manage and monitor it, and how you specifically intend to decommission them when they're at the end of their usefulness.
Kind of a quaint concern in the era of ubiquitous surveillance cameras and facial recognition software. I've been saying for years now the civil liberties concern should be databases, not ID cards.
Well, possibly both. There can, for example, be lots of scientific studies that have the same methodological limitations. This happens when there's lots of researchers all subsisting off modest grants, and all trying to use those grants in similarly modest, cost effective ways (e.g. using students as experimental subjects).
I think you're correct, which is why in my neck of the woods you can't just roll up to a house, say, "this looks like it", and start tearing it down. You need to get a permit.
The permit application requires a photo of the house you intend to take down. You have to prove you know what you're doing, e.g., that you've had the utilities, especially gas turned off. You have to have a pest control company eradicate any rats nesting in the structure that might move onto adjacent properties. You've got to notify the police and fire department well in advance and if they determine there is a public risk or nuisance you've got to pay for a police and/or fire detail. Then you've got to notify all the abutters by certified ail and post a demolition notice on the actual structure to be demolished seven days in advance.
Yeah, it's a lot of rigamarole, and I'm sure people in much of the rest of the country can't imagine living under that much regulation. On the other hand, we can't imagine having our house demolished by mistake. And somehow developers still manage to make a living, so I don't think it's too much to ask..
Well, there's no shortage of plausible-seeming explanations. Which, if I know my mystery stories as well as I think I do, is an essential element in a good one.
Yes, I'm aware of the lead-crime hypothesis. It's an interesting one, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if lead is a contributor; but I haven't seen anything like proof.
It's actually something of a mystery, but crime rates have dropped in pretty much all first world countries despite their having wildly disparate crime policies.
As for the FBI budget, some no doubt is caused by the emergence of novel crime forms like cybercrime, but you have to count a lot of new money spent against terrorism. That may be justifiable, but not on a cost benefit basis. Even in a major terror year like 2001, terrorist victims are a small fraction of the murder total, much less of preventable deaths.
Living and working in the exclusion zones are two different matters altogether. Nobody can maintain the kinds of precautions you'd need 7x24.
As for workers in the immediate vicinity of the plant, those working on the New Safe Containment structure don't seem to be using masks or hazmat suits. Images from the years following the disaster show workers in the control room or turbine hall wearing clean room style jumpsuits with surgical caps and masks, but clearly not continually worn. This might indicate a more lax attitude toward worker safety than we would have, or that the contamination is not so bad in those specific places as we would assume, or most likely both. Obviously in parts of the plants they go with a full respirator.
What I've read is that outside the reactor the contamination is very spotty. That's probably because the places where there are higher levels of contamination have remained undisturbed by human activity.
I'd say this is yet another case of tech that was not quite good enough to have legs outside the early adopter segment. That's a pretty huge gulf. I once supported a team that went on a two and a half year research project in the Tanzanian bush. That happened to be just around the iPhone came out, so I'd equipped them with Compaq iPaqs. When they returned they were agog at how crude their gear seemed next to what ordinary folks were using.
There's good and bad things about the pebble. Mostly good, but not quite good enough. Most of all it's not very elegant, so it's not something an average person sees and immediately wants. On the other hand many early adopters like me won't buy another one because their devices developed irreparable LCD problems while just out of warranty.
People are bad at self monitoring. They really do believe as that they eat less than they actually do and exercise more. Which is a big part of why diet an exercise doesn't work for most people.
Which doesn't mean they don't work well enough for some people, particularly if all they want to do is maintain the status quo. But if you want to make improvements in your health and you want to control the process, there is no substitute for objective data, consistently collected and ruthlessly analyzed.
From personal experience I'd say that if you concentrate your willpower on measurement and mindfulness, improving your health and fitness becomes almost effortless -- above the very significant effort it takes to log every last calorie you ingest or burn. Eating with a timer so you don't go too fast and never multitasking that with anything else like reading or watching TV helps too.
It's not for everyone, but if you're the kind of person who can honestly and reliably measure everything then I'll work for you.
but are there any areas(outside of the interior and immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl sarcophagus) where the radiation exposure you would receive just by standing around is still intense enough to be an occupational safety issue?
Well, "enough to be an occupational safety issue" is not very much. You don't have to get enough radiation to get acutely sick for it to be an "issue". Still it's reasonably safe to work in the exclusion zone as long as you take precautions and monitor your exposure. In fact people do continue work there, even at the plant itself. It's a little-known fact that the three other Chernobyl reactors were operated 14 years after the 1986 catastrophe in Number 4, but in part this reflects a much more cavalier attitude towards worker safety than would be acceptable in the West. It's also little-known that the 1986 catastrophe was neither the first nor the last serious mishap at the plant. And then of course when you shut down a nuclear reactor you can't just walk away from it even in the best of circumstances. As of today people are still working in the exclusion zone to maintain the site and build the New Safe Confinement structure.
I have mixed feelings about the idea of using Chernobyl as a nuclear waste site. On one hand it makes sense to concentrate your nuclear hazard operations where you're forced to do it anyway. On the other hand it'd be a bad thing to simply abandon the area, because it's not really that contaminated -- not so contaminated that people can't work there at least. And people will have to continue working there. For how long? Possibly for as along as our species continues to exist, because whenever the decision comes up whether to stabilize the site permanently or build another confinement structure that'll last for a few more decades, it'll always be more cost effective to go with the temporary fix. So it's a very good thing that people will be able to move into the exclusion zone in 500 years -- if we don't mess up in the meantime.
What you really need is a crystal ball that can show you the future. If you see a well-managed operation then this is a site which is solving problems for the rest of the world. If you see a half-assed operation then this may become site where the problems are so concentrated you can't work on them there. Everything boils down to how much you trust people to do the right thing even when it's expensive and difficult and doing the wrong thing won't cause any problems unless you're unlucky.
For years I had a company whose clients were public health agencies. One time one of my customers said this to me, "You guys can do all kinds of great stuff, but the problem with you is that you want money for everything."
I was nonplussed. I just couldn't get my brain around the fact that he saw the fact that we charged for our services as somehow venal; after all this wasn't a field I went into to get rich, because that sure would have been a bust. The reason we could do things that people had only dreamed about doing as that we did something that nobody in the public sector could: hired a team of talented and qualified engineers to work on these problems. The downside of that was that those engineers don't come cheap; any time money wasn't coming in we'd be bleeding it at eye-popping rates. So we did indeed bring in a lot of money, but it all went straight out to feed the payroll dragon.
I'm glad I did my little bit for humanity, I think everyone should at some point in their career. But I probably wouldn't do it again.
Well, I suppose that the poster is envisioning something like an encrypted filesystem, where your machine, which you trust, encrypts filesystem blocks and stores them out on the cloud, which it doesn't trust.
This solves the trust problem, but not necessarily the infrastructure problems they have. If they had oodles of server bandwidth to spare in their own data centers but not enough storage, that'd be the way to go. But if they can't process the data in their own data centers, it doesn't help.
Building on the work of others is what open source is about. Heck, it's what proprietary code is about too.
I think what we're looking at here are community rules of which are too permissive of unsharing without cause. It's one thing to unshare for legal reasons but the extent of unsharing should be strictly limited to the affected modules. The deal should be that if you encourage people to depend on your car work you don't get to take it away without good reason.
Well, some people can't tell the difference between "skepticism" and "wishful thinking". A true skeptic tends to doubt everything on an even-handed basis. A wishful thinker doubts things that would be unpleasant if they were true.
One thing an accomplished skeptic understands is that evidence for complicated real-world questions is always contradictory. This makes his job hard because he's got to judge which side of a question has the preponderance of evidence in its favor. On the other hand it makes the job of a wishful thinker easier, because there will always be evidence to support whatever he wishes to believe. All he has to do is cherry-pick.
One of the best exercises for a true skeptic is to spend a few hours with Google Scholar and tracing the shift in consensus from the 1950s, when most scientists thought the planet was entering a cooling phase, until the 2000s when the consensus was strongly in the other direction. This will dispel any notion that the consensus just changed overnight for no reason (or because of some kind of conspiracy). There was a thorough and vigorous debate with both sides represented.
I don't think anyone actually believes in any kind of ethical calculus where having a nice research facility makes it OK to have tortured people. I think what's up for PR grabs is whether it's OK to still have a base there. So what the pitch here is that it'll be a like concealer makeup on a black eye.
Welcome to the world of diplomacy, where a lie isn't a lie because everyone knows it's a lie.
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I am familiar with fuel manifolds and oxidizer manifolds, but where exactly is the budget manifold in a rocket?
It starts at the House Appropriations Committee offices, runs in a zigzag path to 330 E Street SW (NASA headquarters). From there it branches out to myriad contractors strategically scattered across a majority of Congressional districts.
It plays this way: if you care about three letter agencies reading what's on your phone, trade in your old A6 CPU iPhone (like the San Bernadino one) for a new one with an A7 processor because the A7 contains the new "secure enclave" crypto co-processor.
Of course we don't know whether the FBI can't get into an A7 based phone, but the whole point of that secure enclave is that it makes it much, much harder to crack a device, even if you have a team of electronics and system experts with a well-equipped lab.
Well, this is the iPhone 5c -- not the 5s. That means it has an A6 processor, not an A7. The A6 doesn't have the "secure enclave" cryptographic co-processor and storage. This enables a number of possible attacks, although none that a casual hacker could mount. For example the encryption key, which is stored in the secure enclave in the A7, could be read from flash or intercepted as it is transferred over the pins to the A6 processor. In the A7 all the magic happens inside the chip packaging. That kind of attack is not script-kiddy stuff, but it's not beyond what a specialist could do.
The "fix" the FBI was demanding in this case would work equally well on an A6 or A7, so one possible explanation for demanding that fix is that the methods used on this phone wouldn't work on an iPhone 5s or later.
Of course since we don't know how it was done we can't rule out the possibility the company the FBI used has an attack that works on A7 as well as A6 CPUs. There'd still be good reasons to want to have the security-weakened version of iOS. The weakened iOS would be quick and cheap enough to use routinely, even speculatively. What's more the legal precedent could be use against literally any device maker who sold stuff in the US.
Inferring motivations from actions, I'd guess that the FBI knew all along that it could get into this particular phone, but wanted the weakened iOS and legal precedent that came along with it.
Job titles often reflect tradition and custom more than responsibilities. In my city the people who control the speed of a subway train are called "drivers" or sometimes "operators", but people with the same job on the diesel-powered commuter trains are called "engineers". The subway inherited its terminology from the old streetcar system and the commuter rail from the 19th century regional railroads.
The rail system inherited the traditional roles of engineer and conductor, whereas the conductor responsibilities on the subway are split between the driver and the inspector. "Inspectors" (aka "starters") work in a station and are in charge of fixing problems that leave trains stranded in the station. They often handle the kind of minor repairs and adjustments GP is talking about. On the railroad side of things the career path to become an engineer probably would prepare you to deal with a variety of minor breakdowns and adjustments, since you essentially have to work your way up through a series of other positions on the train, but on the subway side inspectors are senior to drivers.
Clearly the job of operator on a subway line could be automated away, provided the track right of way is perfectly isolated from stray pedestrians and other traffic -- which is not always the case. There are subway lines that essentially become street trolleys in places for example. It's not out of the question even those could be automated, since we're approaching an era of autonomous road vehicles. The idea of having a fix-it man on every train would certainly improve train operations, but would probably be prohibitively expensive.
Your question is simplistic because it assumes equivalent amounts of "radiation" can be treated as the same thing. If we're talking about just exposure per se then I'm fine with occasional exposures totaling in the range 100 mSv/yr if it's relatively uniform over that year. Over the course of a day I'd be fine with 20 mSv or so, as long as it was a once-or-twice-a-year kind of thing.
If we're talking about inhalation/ingestion it's a whole different depends on the biochemistry of the source of radioactivity and the form it takes. Sr-90 and Cs-137 are similar in radiological half-life, so if we're talking about but very different in terms of biological half-life. Half of ingested Cs is excreted in 30 days. Estimates for time to excrete half of an Sr dose vary from three years to as long as 50. Clearly being exposed to similar levels of Cs-137 and Sr-90 are very different propositions in terms of lifetime risk. For the same reason I avoid working on restoring radium pigmented watches; radium's in the same column of the periodic table as strontium and calcium, and that means it's not something you want to make a habit of ingesting or breathing, even though Ra-226 is not particularly radioactive.
If you're asking for a blanket condemnation or endorsement of nuclear power, all I can say is, "it depends".
It depends on what specifically you're proposing to build, how you specifically plan to manage and monitor it, and how you specifically intend to decommission them when they're at the end of their usefulness.
Kind of a quaint concern in the era of ubiquitous surveillance cameras and facial recognition software. I've been saying for years now the civil liberties concern should be databases, not ID cards.
Nobody's really attempted to make it harder to obtain guns; all of the fighting really is about security theater measures.
Well, possibly both. There can, for example, be lots of scientific studies that have the same methodological limitations. This happens when there's lots of researchers all subsisting off modest grants, and all trying to use those grants in similarly modest, cost effective ways (e.g. using students as experimental subjects).
Some jokes never get old.
Other ones...
I think you're correct, which is why in my neck of the woods you can't just roll up to a house, say, "this looks like it", and start tearing it down. You need to get a permit.
The permit application requires a photo of the house you intend to take down. You have to prove you know what you're doing, e.g., that you've had the utilities, especially gas turned off. You have to have a pest control company eradicate any rats nesting in the structure that might move onto adjacent properties. You've got to notify the police and fire department well in advance and if they determine there is a public risk or nuisance you've got to pay for a police and/or fire detail. Then you've got to notify all the abutters by certified ail and post a demolition notice on the actual structure to be demolished seven days in advance.
Yeah, it's a lot of rigamarole, and I'm sure people in much of the rest of the country can't imagine living under that much regulation. On the other hand, we can't imagine having our house demolished by mistake. And somehow developers still manage to make a living, so I don't think it's too much to ask..
Well, there's no shortage of plausible-seeming explanations. Which, if I know my mystery stories as well as I think I do, is an essential element in a good one.
Yes, I'm aware of the lead-crime hypothesis. It's an interesting one, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if lead is a contributor; but I haven't seen anything like proof.
It's actually something of a mystery, but crime rates have dropped in pretty much all first world countries despite their having wildly disparate crime policies.
As for the FBI budget, some no doubt is caused by the emergence of novel crime forms like cybercrime, but you have to count a lot of new money spent against terrorism. That may be justifiable, but not on a cost benefit basis. Even in a major terror year like 2001, terrorist victims are a small fraction of the murder total, much less of preventable deaths.
Living and working in the exclusion zones are two different matters altogether. Nobody can maintain the kinds of precautions you'd need 7x24.
As for workers in the immediate vicinity of the plant, those working on the New Safe Containment structure don't seem to be using masks or hazmat suits. Images from the years following the disaster show workers in the control room or turbine hall wearing clean room style jumpsuits with surgical caps and masks, but clearly not continually worn. This might indicate a more lax attitude toward worker safety than we would have, or that the contamination is not so bad in those specific places as we would assume, or most likely both. Obviously in parts of the plants they go with a full respirator.
What I've read is that outside the reactor the contamination is very spotty. That's probably because the places where there are higher levels of contamination have remained undisturbed by human activity.
I'd say this is yet another case of tech that was not quite good enough to have legs outside the early adopter segment. That's a pretty huge gulf. I once supported a team that went on a two and a half year research project in the Tanzanian bush. That happened to be just around the iPhone came out, so I'd equipped them with Compaq iPaqs. When they returned they were agog at how crude their gear seemed next to what ordinary folks were using.
There's good and bad things about the pebble. Mostly good, but not quite good enough. Most of all it's not very elegant, so it's not something an average person sees and immediately wants. On the other hand many early adopters like me won't buy another one because their devices developed irreparable LCD problems while just out of warranty.
People are bad at self monitoring. They really do believe as that they eat less than they actually do and exercise more. Which is a big part of why diet an exercise doesn't work for most people.
Which doesn't mean they don't work well enough for some people, particularly if all they want to do is maintain the status quo. But if you want to make improvements in your health and you want to control the process, there is no substitute for objective data, consistently collected and ruthlessly analyzed.
From personal experience I'd say that if you concentrate your willpower on measurement and mindfulness, improving your health and fitness becomes almost effortless -- above the very significant effort it takes to log every last calorie you ingest or burn. Eating with a timer so you don't go too fast and never multitasking that with anything else like reading or watching TV helps too.
It's not for everyone, but if you're the kind of person who can honestly and reliably measure everything then I'll work for you.
but are there any areas(outside of the interior and immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl sarcophagus) where the radiation exposure you would receive just by standing around is still intense enough to be an occupational safety issue?
Well, "enough to be an occupational safety issue" is not very much. You don't have to get enough radiation to get acutely sick for it to be an "issue". Still it's reasonably safe to work in the exclusion zone as long as you take precautions and monitor your exposure. In fact people do continue work there, even at the plant itself. It's a little-known fact that the three other Chernobyl reactors were operated 14 years after the 1986 catastrophe in Number 4, but in part this reflects a much more cavalier attitude towards worker safety than would be acceptable in the West. It's also little-known that the 1986 catastrophe was neither the first nor the last serious mishap at the plant. And then of course when you shut down a nuclear reactor you can't just walk away from it even in the best of circumstances. As of today people are still working in the exclusion zone to maintain the site and build the New Safe Confinement structure.
I have mixed feelings about the idea of using Chernobyl as a nuclear waste site. On one hand it makes sense to concentrate your nuclear hazard operations where you're forced to do it anyway. On the other hand it'd be a bad thing to simply abandon the area, because it's not really that contaminated -- not so contaminated that people can't work there at least. And people will have to continue working there. For how long? Possibly for as along as our species continues to exist, because whenever the decision comes up whether to stabilize the site permanently or build another confinement structure that'll last for a few more decades, it'll always be more cost effective to go with the temporary fix. So it's a very good thing that people will be able to move into the exclusion zone in 500 years -- if we don't mess up in the meantime.
What you really need is a crystal ball that can show you the future. If you see a well-managed operation then this is a site which is solving problems for the rest of the world. If you see a half-assed operation then this may become site where the problems are so concentrated you can't work on them there. Everything boils down to how much you trust people to do the right thing even when it's expensive and difficult and doing the wrong thing won't cause any problems unless you're unlucky.
Men who call women or girls "females" are ones I suspect have little direct experience with that half of the human race.
For years I had a company whose clients were public health agencies. One time one of my customers said this to me, "You guys can do all kinds of great stuff, but the problem with you is that you want money for everything."
I was nonplussed. I just couldn't get my brain around the fact that he saw the fact that we charged for our services as somehow venal; after all this wasn't a field I went into to get rich, because that sure would have been a bust. The reason we could do things that people had only dreamed about doing as that we did something that nobody in the public sector could: hired a team of talented and qualified engineers to work on these problems. The downside of that was that those engineers don't come cheap; any time money wasn't coming in we'd be bleeding it at eye-popping rates. So we did indeed bring in a lot of money, but it all went straight out to feed the payroll dragon.
I'm glad I did my little bit for humanity, I think everyone should at some point in their career. But I probably wouldn't do it again.
Well, I suppose that the poster is envisioning something like an encrypted filesystem, where your machine, which you trust, encrypts filesystem blocks and stores them out on the cloud, which it doesn't trust.
This solves the trust problem, but not necessarily the infrastructure problems they have. If they had oodles of server bandwidth to spare in their own data centers but not enough storage, that'd be the way to go. But if they can't process the data in their own data centers, it doesn't help.
Building on the work of others is what open source is about. Heck, it's what proprietary code is about too.
I think what we're looking at here are community rules of which are too permissive of unsharing without cause. It's one thing to unshare for legal reasons but the extent of unsharing should be strictly limited to the affected modules. The deal should be that if you encourage people to depend on your car work you don't get to take it away without good reason.
Well, some people can't tell the difference between "skepticism" and "wishful thinking". A true skeptic tends to doubt everything on an even-handed basis. A wishful thinker doubts things that would be unpleasant if they were true.
One thing an accomplished skeptic understands is that evidence for complicated real-world questions is always contradictory. This makes his job hard because he's got to judge which side of a question has the preponderance of evidence in its favor. On the other hand it makes the job of a wishful thinker easier, because there will always be evidence to support whatever he wishes to believe. All he has to do is cherry-pick.
One of the best exercises for a true skeptic is to spend a few hours with Google Scholar and tracing the shift in consensus from the 1950s, when most scientists thought the planet was entering a cooling phase, until the 2000s when the consensus was strongly in the other direction. This will dispel any notion that the consensus just changed overnight for no reason (or because of some kind of conspiracy). There was a thorough and vigorous debate with both sides represented.
Florida is a swing state.
I don't think anyone actually believes in any kind of ethical calculus where having a nice research facility makes it OK to have tortured people. I think what's up for PR grabs is whether it's OK to still have a base there. So what the pitch here is that it'll be a like concealer makeup on a black eye.
Welcome to the world of diplomacy, where a lie isn't a lie because everyone knows it's a lie.