Good post, but another aspect to consider about why this is becoming a buzzword now is the on-line communications world we live in now. The origin of the term seems closely linked to the well known proprietary technology Big Table developed by Google, cloned in open source by Hadoop. Google needed a new mass data storage/processing technology to be able to store and process the tens of billions of changing pages, and trillions of links, harvested from the web, and their chronological evolution (up to a point), and be able to maintain their index of them all in (ideally) something close to real time.
In data item counts (i.e. not total size), Internet advertising handles colossal volumes since a very large number of low value items are involved. A modest Internet advertising company might consider thousands of ads for each of a hundred million page presentations a day, displaying dozens of them for each page (i.e. present billions of ads a day, selecting them from up to a trillion ad feed choices). To find which ads bring in revenue (very few get clicked on) they must track them all, and make decisions on matching searches to ads in a fraction of a second. With dropping click through rates and maturing competition analytics to extract every possible bit of business intelligence as rapidly as possible becomes increasingly important. And due to the very average low value of each item they can't spend huge amounts on the technology to do it. No one is building traditional RDB data warehouses for this kind of stuff. And of course we are blessed/cursed with extremely cheap mass storage today enabling the collection and retention of this data.
Big Data as a professional skill means knowing the available technologies (which are developing rapidly) and being able to match them to the requirements of the equally rapidly evolving Internet business environment (we all live in Internet Time now). Major physics research centers may have been generators of vast data volumes for a long time, but the on-line communications world (including cell phone networks, etc., not just the Internet) really mainstreams these sorts of skills.
It has a lot to do with the discovery of supplies. If we could discover a Ghawar Oil Field whenever we needed, we would have no problem bringing enough oil production capacity on-line to keep production rising (thus never peaking and always meeting demand). But what has already happened is that oil field discoveries are neither large enough nor easy enough to extract to make up for declining production of existing fields.
We have already passed the point of peak oil, as originally defined and predicted. It happened 6 years ago. The reason why have not had a oil supply crisis yet (just gas near or above $4/gallon as a permanent situation now) is that we have been doing fuel substitution, e.g adding synthetic liquids to the supply, and thus changing the definition of "oil production".
This will of course continue on an increasing scale, with natural gas for example supplementing oil for transportation fuel either directly or after conversion to liquid forms. This is how we can, are, and must (for the present time) respond to passing peak oil, and it will prevent a sudden oil apocalypse, but peak oil is a proved fact.
Not a series. Like The Lord of the Rings a single novel published in three volumes. And it contains within it two short stories and a play, all of which are excellent.
Absolutely. You always need a math background at least a bit deeper than what you actually use in practice, so that you really understand what you are doing.
Discrete math and statistics are essential. I would never hire a software developer who did not have a good understanding of algorithm analysis (time complexity, etc.) and any kind of technical field calls for literacy in statistics if you are any good.
You will never solve a calculus problem on a software job, unless in a scientific field, but the discrete analog of calculus is called for not infrequently, and so you need to understand what it is you are writing the analog of.
Partly it is a matter of how broad a career you want, how many career options you would like to have, and how high you want to rise in technology (as opposed to management). I am at the top level of my profession as a software/enterprise architect/development lead and I could not have gotten there without a solid, broad math background.
Preventing childhood disease is a laudable goal, but that just brings more misery in the long run from overpopulation -- unless you also bring them up to First World standards in education, economy and infrastructure. And I don't think Bill has enough money to do that. There's probably not enough money on the planet to do that actually.
It is possible to bring birthrates under control simply by improving the relative socio-economic status of women, even in a country that remains poverty-stricken.
While well written, you are wrong in the comment below;
Secondly, the decline in number of children per woman is primarily tied to increasing Woman's Rights in a society. The closer women are treated like property (both culturally and legally), the higher the number of children borne, and the inverse when women and men are treated equally. Women's Rights is also closely correlated (and, likely a causative factor) in development of a significant middle class.
How is it we have an increase in Women's Rights (starting since 1893, first Suffrage laws in place), but still have a decline in the middle class. You can't say that increased Women's Rights produces a larger middle class, that is patently false. Our current economic climate is a prime example of this.
The original poster is much closer to being correct. The Middle Class came into existence in the U.S. since the late 1800s, when women started moving into more professions, acquiring greater rights, and the long term steady decline in the fertility rate set in (this has been a steady trend since at least 1880, with the one 25-year anomaly of the Depression birth rate crash followed by the Baby Boom surge) . The emergence of woman's rights, and increase in female employment is not something that just happened in the 1960-1970s despite all the attention it attracted at the time but has been a persistent trend for 130 (or more) years.
We see the emergence of woman's rights, and the growth of a Middle Class in industrializing countries, like India today, and even in dirt poor Bangladesh.
The recent decline of the Middle Class in the U.S. is due to specific policies adopted by business and politicians here, it is not general world-wide.
If by "remaining stable for most of human history" they mean "for most of the time modern humans have existed" then they are on reasonably firm ground - between 40,000 BCE and 4000 BCE there was little population growth - except for colonization of new areas. If they mean the period thought of as "the historic period" when we have written records, then no, they are no correct.
Most charts using a linear population scale only show the exponential blow up that appears at the end of the curve of every exponential process, no matter when you pick that end, but offers little or no insight into what was happening in previous epochs.
What the Discover graph shows is that population was pretty stable until the development of civilization around 4000 BCE, a steady upward trend then set in for the next 3500 years, then around 500 BCE the development of high ancient civilization in the Mediterranean and East Asia led to a growth spurt which hit a plateau around 100 BCE after which there was only slight growth for the remainder of the ancient civilization period (until around 500 CE), the so-called Medieval "Dark Age" period led to accelerated, but erratic growth, and then we entered the two recent acceleration periods - the early modern period (age of exploration), and then the industrial revolution.
Horseshit. The hazard is significant for a few hundred years at most. People are not going to dig the stuff up and eat it by the ton.
Yup. Within 500 years the waste is less radioactive than the ore from which it was mined. Marking every waste site makes no more sense than marking every vein of naturally occurring uranium ore.
...
The specific claim you seem to be making - that a kilogram of spent fuel is less radioactive that a kilogram of natural uranium ore after 500 years of decay - is most definitely not even remotely true.
It is very easy to see that this cannot possibly be correct when you consider that natural uranium ore is typically 0.1% uranium, and its total radioactivity is about 14 times that of the uranium itself (due to the build-up of radioactive daughter products), thus being roughly equivalent to 1.4% U-238; whereas the spent fuel itself is 85% uranium (being made out pure uranium oxide), and contains ~1% Pu-239 that is ~200,000 times as radioactive as U-238. Even 25,000 years later (one half-life of Pu-239) the fuel is still ~100,000 times as hot as typical uranium ore, and being roughly 1000 times as concentrated as typical natural ore it will never cool to being less than about 1000 times more radioactive - even after ten billion years.
You are repeating - in garbled form - an argument based in some way on the the total amount of radioactivity, considering intensity (very high by geologic standards) and its mass/volume (very small by geologic standards). But the radioactivity of those containers won't be safe for someone cracking them open until the most of the plutonium has decayed, after a couple of hundred thousand years. Should we care? Perhaps not, but don't pretend there is no hazard if they are dug up.
China has not had a history of projecting its occupation forces well beyond its borders. Sure, China has invaded Tibet and is threatening to do the same with Taiwan and some puny islands near the Philippines. But unlike the US and the old European empires, China has not sent its armed forces across continents to conquer people of vastly different cultures....
Sure, if you leave out the recent conquest of an entire nation (Tibet), and the invasion of India (1962), and the invasion of Vietnam (1979); and discount much longer ago conquests of the non-Chinese inhabitants of Central Asia, then sure, they are the friendliest most peaceable neighbors imaginable.
The US is for all useful measures older than China. China as we know it today started under Mao. Regardless of their own claims to the contrary the Chinese state is just pup compared to us.
And Russia is only as old as Putin (given that he completely re-created governance in Russian)? I didn't know the clock was reset on the age of a nation every time there was a regime change.
We should declare rare earths a strategic resource and use defense dept budgets for funding and to protect against market dumping then convert those resources to commercial uses. In the meantime, continue research into other technologies that do not require rare earths.
During the Cold War the U.S. did exactly this. But after its ends, those strategic reserve stockpiles (except for oil) were all sold off. The U.S. government should become a guaranteed buyer of Mountain Pass mine production, enough volume at a sufficient price to keep them in business, and encourage U.S. companies that use rare earths to secure part of their supply through long-term contracts from this mine (and others, if any open).
You are right that enormous new deposits have opened up in recent decades (Australia, Siberia), and although the new producers are not part of the DeBeers cartel, they know which side their bread is buttered on and informally collude with it to keep the prices fixed, rather than underselling for volume. (This is a good example how unregulated, or ineffectively regulated, markets tend naturally toward price fixing cartels, not competition.)
I would disagree. The new mines are smaller then all of Debeers. So if they try to under sell DeBeers, DeBeers can flood the market and drive the new mines out of business. Then DeBeers can walk in and buy those now in trouble mines. If those new mines were on the same scale as all of DeBeers you might have a point.
Half of all the world's diamonds are mined outside of Africa, and DeBeers only recently (2007) opened its first mine not on that continent (Canada). Even if DeBeers controlled every diamond on the African continent (they don't, the Angolan mines are outside of their control, and then there are the blood diamond fields) then they would be only half of the world's supply.
Naturally occurring diamonds are rare. But the overall scarcity of diamonds is a man-made affair. It's easier, and cheaper, to produce diamonds artificially. Not only that, but lab produced diamonds can be made even more purely than what is normally found in nature. De Beers however, has managed to severely limit the production of artificial diamonds. Nearly a decade ago, De Beers even paid a paltry fine for colluding with GE to fix prices on industrial diamonds. Interestingly enough, diamonds have been discovered around the world in areas outside of De Beers control. So their decades long monopoly has eroded.
The concept of "rarity" is a relative, not an absolute one. They are not nearly as rare as DeBeers, and the world diamond market, would believe. Since every woman who wants some can buy as many as she likes, and the price has remained stable in constant dollars for more than a century, it is clearly plenty of diamonds to meet all demand.
You are right that enormous new deposits have opened up in recent decades (Australia, Siberia), and although the new producers are not part of the DeBeers cartel, they know which side their bread is buttered on and informally collude with it to keep the prices fixed, rather than underselling for volume. (This is a good example how unregulated, or ineffectively regulated, markets tend naturally toward price fixing cartels, not competition.)
China, however, is not even close to being in the same situation when it comes to rare earths. Rare earths is relatively plentiful. Mining has stopped in the US moreso because of environmental regulation and cost than because of scarcity.
Why did rare earth mining stop worldwide, outside of China? You can't appeal to U.S. environmental regulation to explain the absence of any competition today. It is because of dumping extremely cheap Chinese rare earths on the market. As soon as competition was gone - surprise, surprise - prices for non-Chinese buyers shot through the roof, if China was even willing to let you buy any at all.
It was an act of deliberate and illegal (under treaties China has signed) economic warfare, and should be dealt with accordingly.
China is gambling that it will be too difficult and costly for Western nations to reopen or start up new mines and that they'll eventually cave.
Or they aren't gambling at all, merely planning to pull the same trick twice, three times, as often as they like. If they don't have to pay a costly price that is.
There was no protection of private property in those countries during the Second World War. You owned property only at the whim of the government. It looks like capitalism, but it's not.
Nonsense. Neither Germany nor Japan appropriated the property of its own citizens without providing for due compensation (just as did and does the U.S.). Being the losers in the war, the compensation may often have taken the form of script that turned out to be worthless after the war ended, but the notion that either government went around stealing its own nationals property is baseless.
In both Germany and Japan the great industrial capitalist corporations made fortunes, at least until the bombs started wiping out their assets.
Slashdot Mirror
Good post, but another aspect to consider about why this is becoming a buzzword now is the on-line communications world we live in now. The origin of the term seems closely linked to the well known proprietary technology Big Table developed by Google, cloned in open source by Hadoop. Google needed a new mass data storage/processing technology to be able to store and process the tens of billions of changing pages, and trillions of links, harvested from the web, and their chronological evolution (up to a point), and be able to maintain their index of them all in (ideally) something close to real time.
In data item counts (i.e. not total size), Internet advertising handles colossal volumes since a very large number of low value items are involved. A modest Internet advertising company might consider thousands of ads for each of a hundred million page presentations a day, displaying dozens of them for each page (i.e. present billions of ads a day, selecting them from up to a trillion ad feed choices). To find which ads bring in revenue (very few get clicked on) they must track them all, and make decisions on matching searches to ads in a fraction of a second. With dropping click through rates and maturing competition analytics to extract every possible bit of business intelligence as rapidly as possible becomes increasingly important. And due to the very average low value of each item they can't spend huge amounts on the technology to do it. No one is building traditional RDB data warehouses for this kind of stuff. And of course we are blessed/cursed with extremely cheap mass storage today enabling the collection and retention of this data.
Big Data as a professional skill means knowing the available technologies (which are developing rapidly) and being able to match them to the requirements of the equally rapidly evolving Internet business environment (we all live in Internet Time now). Major physics research centers may have been generators of vast data volumes for a long time, but the on-line communications world (including cell phone networks, etc., not just the Internet) really mainstreams these sorts of skills.
Modulo whatever you mean by "directly".
It has a lot to do with the discovery of supplies. If we could discover a Ghawar Oil Field whenever we needed, we would have no problem bringing enough oil production capacity on-line to keep production rising (thus never peaking and always meeting demand). But what has already happened is that oil field discoveries are neither large enough nor easy enough to extract to make up for declining production of existing fields.
We have already passed the point of peak oil, as originally defined and predicted. It happened 6 years ago. The reason why have not had a oil supply crisis yet (just gas near or above $4/gallon as a permanent situation now) is that we have been doing fuel substitution, e.g adding synthetic liquids to the supply, and thus changing the definition of "oil production".
This will of course continue on an increasing scale, with natural gas for example supplementing oil for transportation fuel either directly or after conversion to liquid forms. This is how we can, are, and must (for the present time) respond to passing peak oil, and it will prevent a sudden oil apocalypse, but peak oil is a proved fact.
It needs to have its own law named. "Communism!" (or "Socialism!", often no distinction is made) is the Godwin's Law of the right.
Not a series. Like The Lord of the Rings a single novel published in three volumes. And it contains within it two short stories and a play, all of which are excellent.
Excellent point.
The discrete analog of calculus is not uncommon, and you need to understand what it represents to use it correctly.
Absolutely. You always need a math background at least a bit deeper than what you actually use in practice, so that you really understand what you are doing.
Discrete math and statistics are essential. I would never hire a software developer who did not have a good understanding of algorithm analysis (time complexity, etc.) and any kind of technical field calls for literacy in statistics if you are any good.
You will never solve a calculus problem on a software job, unless in a scientific field, but the discrete analog of calculus is called for not infrequently, and so you need to understand what it is you are writing the analog of.
Partly it is a matter of how broad a career you want, how many career options you would like to have, and how high you want to rise in technology (as opposed to management). I am at the top level of my profession as a software/enterprise architect/development lead and I could not have gotten there without a solid, broad math background.
Indeed. Ayn Rand was a very, very. very, very, very, very, very, very. very, very, very, very poor writer.
(Think I belabored the point uselessly and annoyingly with all the redundant "verys"? Then you should get my point.)
Wonderful! I hadn't encountered that quote before. Thanks!
You left out the third achievement upon which the world's greatest minds are now focused: getting you to click on ads.
Preventing childhood disease is a laudable goal, but that just brings more misery in the long run from overpopulation -- unless you also bring them up to First World standards in education, economy and infrastructure. And I don't think Bill has enough money to do that. There's probably not enough money on the planet to do that actually.
...
A common belief, but one that is disproved by the example of Bangladesh, where the fertility rate has plunged to below the replacement level recently without requiring economic advance to First World standards: http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&idim=country:BGD&dl=en&hl=en&q=bangladesh+fertility+rates
It is possible to bring birthrates under control simply by improving the relative socio-economic status of women, even in a country that remains poverty-stricken.
While well written, you are wrong in the comment below;
Secondly, the decline in number of children per woman is primarily tied to increasing Woman's Rights in a society. The closer women are treated like property (both culturally and legally), the higher the number of children borne, and the inverse when women and men are treated equally. Women's Rights is also closely correlated (and, likely a causative factor) in development of a significant middle class.
How is it we have an increase in Women's Rights (starting since 1893, first Suffrage laws in place), but still have a decline in the middle class. You can't say that increased Women's Rights produces a larger middle class, that is patently false. Our current economic climate is a prime example of this.
The original poster is much closer to being correct. The Middle Class came into existence in the U.S. since the late 1800s, when women started moving into more professions, acquiring greater rights, and the long term steady decline in the fertility rate set in (this has been a steady trend since at least 1880, with the one 25-year anomaly of the Depression birth rate crash followed by the Baby Boom surge) . The emergence of woman's rights, and increase in female employment is not something that just happened in the 1960-1970s despite all the attention it attracted at the time but has been a persistent trend for 130 (or more) years.
We see the emergence of woman's rights, and the growth of a Middle Class in industrializing countries, like India today, and even in dirt poor Bangladesh.
The recent decline of the Middle Class in the U.S. is due to specific policies adopted by business and politicians here, it is not general world-wide.
If by "remaining stable for most of human history" they mean "for most of the time modern humans have existed" then they are on reasonably firm ground - between 40,000 BCE and 4000 BCE there was little population growth - except for colonization of new areas. If they mean the period thought of as "the historic period" when we have written records, then no, they are no correct.
A good graph that reveals population growth trend patterns since pre-historic times is this one: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/the-axial-age-world-population/
Most charts using a linear population scale only show the exponential blow up that appears at the end of the curve of every exponential process, no matter when you pick that end, but offers little or no insight into what was happening in previous epochs.
What the Discover graph shows is that population was pretty stable until the development of civilization around 4000 BCE, a steady upward trend then set in for the next 3500 years, then around 500 BCE the development of high ancient civilization in the Mediterranean and East Asia led to a growth spurt which hit a plateau around 100 BCE after which there was only slight growth for the remainder of the ancient civilization period (until around 500 CE), the so-called Medieval "Dark Age" period led to accelerated, but erratic growth, and then we entered the two recent acceleration periods - the early modern period (age of exploration), and then the industrial revolution.
Horseshit. The hazard is significant for a few hundred years at most. People are not going to dig the stuff up and eat it by the ton.
Yup. Within 500 years the waste is less radioactive than the ore from which it was mined. Marking every waste site makes no more sense than marking every vein of naturally occurring uranium ore.
...
The specific claim you seem to be making - that a kilogram of spent fuel is less radioactive that a kilogram of natural uranium ore after 500 years of decay - is most definitely not even remotely true.
It is very easy to see that this cannot possibly be correct when you consider that natural uranium ore is typically 0.1% uranium, and its total radioactivity is about 14 times that of the uranium itself (due to the build-up of radioactive daughter products), thus being roughly equivalent to 1.4% U-238; whereas the spent fuel itself is 85% uranium (being made out pure uranium oxide), and contains ~1% Pu-239 that is ~200,000 times as radioactive as U-238. Even 25,000 years later (one half-life of Pu-239) the fuel is still ~100,000 times as hot as typical uranium ore, and being roughly 1000 times as concentrated as typical natural ore it will never cool to being less than about 1000 times more radioactive - even after ten billion years.
You are repeating - in garbled form - an argument based in some way on the the total amount of radioactivity, considering intensity (very high by geologic standards) and its mass/volume (very small by geologic standards). But the radioactivity of those containers won't be safe for someone cracking them open until the most of the plutonium has decayed, after a couple of hundred thousand years. Should we care? Perhaps not, but don't pretend there is no hazard if they are dug up.
Oops. Left out the invasion of Korea with more than one million troops during the Korean War; and the border fighting with Russia during the 1970s.
Say, which of their neighbors have the Chinese NOT shot at in the last 60 years?
China has not had a history of projecting its occupation forces well beyond its borders. Sure, China has invaded Tibet and is threatening to do the same with Taiwan and some puny islands near the Philippines. But unlike the US and the old European empires, China has not sent its armed forces across continents to conquer people of vastly different cultures. ...
Sure, if you leave out the recent conquest of an entire nation (Tibet), and the invasion of India (1962), and the invasion of Vietnam (1979); and discount much longer ago conquests of the non-Chinese inhabitants of Central Asia, then sure, they are the friendliest most peaceable neighbors imaginable.
The US is for all useful measures older than China. China as we know it today started under Mao. Regardless of their own claims to the contrary the Chinese state is just pup compared to us.
And Russia is only as old as Putin (given that he completely re-created governance in Russian)? I didn't know the clock was reset on the age of a nation every time there was a regime change.
We should declare rare earths a strategic resource and use defense dept budgets for funding and to protect against market dumping then convert those resources to commercial uses. In the meantime, continue research into other technologies that do not require rare earths.
During the Cold War the U.S. did exactly this. But after its ends, those strategic reserve stockpiles (except for oil) were all sold off. The U.S. government should become a guaranteed buyer of Mountain Pass mine production, enough volume at a sufficient price to keep them in business, and encourage U.S. companies that use rare earths to secure part of their supply through long-term contracts from this mine (and others, if any open).
You are right that enormous new deposits have opened up in recent decades (Australia, Siberia), and although the new producers are not part of the DeBeers cartel, they know which side their bread is buttered on and informally collude with it to keep the prices fixed, rather than underselling for volume. (This is a good example how unregulated, or ineffectively regulated, markets tend naturally toward price fixing cartels, not competition.)
I would disagree. The new mines are smaller then all of Debeers. So if they try to under sell DeBeers, DeBeers can flood the market and drive the new mines out of business. Then DeBeers can walk in and buy those now in trouble mines. If those new mines were on the same scale as all of DeBeers you might have a point.
Half of all the world's diamonds are mined outside of Africa, and DeBeers only recently (2007) opened its first mine not on that continent (Canada). Even if DeBeers controlled every diamond on the African continent (they don't, the Angolan mines are outside of their control, and then there are the blood diamond fields) then they would be only half of the world's supply.
So yes, I do have a point.
They are not nearly as rare as DeBeers, and the world diamond market, would have you believe.
Naturally occurring diamonds are rare. But the overall scarcity of diamonds is a man-made affair. It's easier, and cheaper, to produce diamonds artificially. Not only that, but lab produced diamonds can be made even more purely than what is normally found in nature. De Beers however, has managed to severely limit the production of artificial diamonds. Nearly a decade ago, De Beers even paid a paltry fine for colluding with GE to fix prices on industrial diamonds. Interestingly enough, diamonds have been discovered around the world in areas outside of De Beers control. So their decades long monopoly has eroded.
The concept of "rarity" is a relative, not an absolute one. They are not nearly as rare as DeBeers, and the world diamond market, would believe. Since every woman who wants some can buy as many as she likes, and the price has remained stable in constant dollars for more than a century, it is clearly plenty of diamonds to meet all demand.
You are right that enormous new deposits have opened up in recent decades (Australia, Siberia), and although the new producers are not part of the DeBeers cartel, they know which side their bread is buttered on and informally collude with it to keep the prices fixed, rather than underselling for volume. (This is a good example how unregulated, or ineffectively regulated, markets tend naturally toward price fixing cartels, not competition.)
China, however, is not even close to being in the same situation when it comes to rare earths. Rare earths is relatively plentiful. Mining has stopped in the US moreso because of environmental regulation and cost than because of scarcity.
Why did rare earth mining stop worldwide, outside of China? You can't appeal to U.S. environmental regulation to explain the absence of any competition today. It is because of dumping extremely cheap Chinese rare earths on the market. As soon as competition was gone - surprise, surprise - prices for non-Chinese buyers shot through the roof, if China was even willing to let you buy any at all.
It was an act of deliberate and illegal (under treaties China has signed) economic warfare, and should be dealt with accordingly.
China is gambling that it will be too difficult and costly for Western nations to reopen or start up new mines and that they'll eventually cave.
Or they aren't gambling at all, merely planning to pull the same trick twice, three times, as often as they like. If they don't have to pay a costly price that is.
(Generally agree with the rest.)
If they were based in the US, they'd get slapped so hard with an antitrust suit they'd be called DeDrunks.
In fact DeBeers executives are warned not to visit the U.S. since they would be vulnerable to arrest for anti-trust violations.
Could you dig up the link please? (No, Googling myself is not the answer since only you know if it is the article YOU are thinking of.)
...
There was no protection of private property in those countries during the Second World War. You owned property only at the whim of the government. It looks like capitalism, but it's not.
Nonsense. Neither Germany nor Japan appropriated the property of its own citizens without providing for due compensation (just as did and does the U.S.). Being the losers in the war, the compensation may often have taken the form of script that turned out to be worthless after the war ended, but the notion that either government went around stealing its own nationals property is baseless.
In both Germany and Japan the great industrial capitalist corporations made fortunes, at least until the bombs started wiping out their assets.