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An Anonymous Coward writes:
Found this interesting bit of history at the NY Times
George H. W. Bush: Hello, Mikhail.
Mikhail S. Gorbachev: George, my dear friend. It is good to hear your voice.
G.B.: I greet you on this momentous day, this historic day. I appreciate your calling me.
M.G.: Let me begin by saying something pleasant to you: Merry Christmas to you, Barbara and your family. I had been thinking about when to make my statement, Tuesday or today. I finally decided to do it today, at the end of the day. So let me say first Merry Christmas and very best wishes.
Well, let me say that in about two hours I will speak on Moscow TV and will make a short statement about my decision. I have sent a letter to you, George. I hope you will receive it shortly. I said in the letter a most important thing. And I would like to reaffirm to you that I greatly value what we did working together with you, first as vice president and then as president of the United States. I hope that all leaders of the commonwealth and, above all, Russia understand what kind of assets we have accrued between the leaders of our two countries. I hope they understand their responsibility to preserve and expand this important source of capital.
Gorbachev goes on to say that he is handing off control of the USSR's nukes to Russia in an organized fashion. Bush thanks him for that and then recalls the fun they had tossing horseshoes at Camp David.
With all the talk of Trump and Putin being business buddies, it looks like there is at least some precedent of the two cold war country leaders carrying on a civil conversation.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday January 03 2017, @10:09PM
I know it's off-topic, but I'd really like to hear your views on container ships. Would you please share?
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 03 2017, @10:28PM
Well, it goes like this. My original view was that pacific container ships were wasteful horrible things, running on nasty hugely inefficient(in terms of BTUs/tons of carbon). The stuff is even worse than diesel in that regard and just called "fuel oil" in the petrochemical industry, though it's pretty similar to kerosene. It also blackens the sky because international waters don't have any sort of general air protection laws.
Then I read about refinement and how those inefficient fuels are a necessary byproduct of the same refinement process we use to turn crude into jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, and plastics. So having learned that, and realizing that the alternative to using it would likely be dumping it, I had to reconsider my views on using it to fuel the big ships(though i continued to suspect they could do something about the massive pollution, a la power plants and high quality catalytic converters)
But then I raised that point in an argument on the subject with an actual chem-e. And they corrected me. The way crude separates depends heavily on which catalysts you cut the crude with in the separator tanks(and other more complex processes my primitive source didn't cover) and that it was likely the case that if two steps on the supply chain(the refinery and the container ships) were willing to spend an almost trivial amount more on cleaner fuels, the carbon:energy ratio would be way better. That the more nuanced reality I'd discovered before was really just a picture of what was cheapest, not necessarily what was best, and my attitude is now that we(the United States) need import tariffs to reflect the carbon costs of shipping in some way.