Practically, anyone with access to the Baltic Sea, boats, scuba equipment, underwater explosives could do it, but they couldn't do it undetected. This area is under surveillance from Sweden and Denmark.
If you want to do it undetected you need to do it completely underwater, including ingress and egress, and that absolutely limits the potential actors.
You think that Sweden and Denmark surveil every single dinghy and fishing boat and yacht and ferry? That if a tugboat stops for 3 or 4 or 8 hours along the 2400km stretches of the Nord Stream pipelines, the coast guards will swoop in with helicopters and snipers. Yeah, no. No, that would not have happened.
No, but they definitely have the possibility after the event to replay recordings from their very nice naval radar systems to see if there was a surface vessel doing something in those locations.
Also, I understand the depth of the pipeline is 80-100 meters so you need divers experienced with hypoxic trimix (or an ROV) and you need to be able to carry a 50-100 kg payload in addition to all the diving kit. Just to qualify for the training courses to learn this type of diving you need to have logged many hundred dives with gradually increasing equipment complexity, it takes years and years of training.
I don't buy for a second that this is anything else than a nation-state actor with advanced equipment. The community of people in the world whou could dive to these depths and perform any kind of useful work is tiny and close-knit.
I'm one training short of hypoxic trimix (after a regular trimix course). I think you seriously over-estimate the complexity: open-water course is 3 days, advanced open-water is 2 days, nitrox is ... half a day?, basic tech diving (advanced nitrox + decompression procedures) is 7 days (50-100 dives minimum iirc), trimix is another 7 to 10 days.
Loads of people I know did all that without any difficulty and without leaving their day job. They weren't in the navy either.
The most advanced thing that I see here is how do you trigger the explosion underwater, plus of course getting the explosives somewhere.
Yeah, maybe I am over-estimating, I only have advanced open-water. But I thought you had to have logged like 50 dives at X depth between each step up the training ladder for trimix, so you need a minimum of like 200 dives total to reach hypoxic trimix? In my book that is multiple years of practice and not everyone will cut it.
So an organization either needs to make preparations for this many years in advance, or try to recruit someone who both has some form of extremist beliefs and a hobby that requires very specialized training. Neither of those things are very simple, but the first one is doable, yes.
You get a lower interest rate. Banks generally can't require you to have an account there to get a mortgage, however they can give 'discounts' to customers that also have their accounts at the bank. Close your account and you are no longer a customer and lose the discount.
Banks frame it as "it's one of the factors used by our opaque black box algorithm to determine your rate". To find out the exact weight of every factor beforehand, I would have to submit N applications, processing of which is on the order of a week or so.
When I was 'shopping' for a loan (in Sweden) I got an explicit price list. As in "our base rate is X%, if both of you move your main account here we'll offer you Y% and if also you move your home and car insurance to the insurance company we own then we'll offer you Z%"
Another issue with game dev for games that release on PC is that devs are usually on very high-end machines. NVMe RAIDs, 3080's, etc. Great for productivity, but there's very little dog fooding on low-spec machines.
That is true. The game I worked on was also on PS4 and Xbox One, which are both somewhat similar in architecture to a PC (at least in terms of CPU performance), just slower. If we could make the game perform well on the XB1, we knew it most likely would do well on PS4 and PC as well. But you're right, there could be PC-specific issues that would only show up on low-spec PCs.
In previous console generations things were harder back then as each platform's code was more different than now.
I have been deeply impressed with the unreal engine over the last few years. If a gaming studio picks it, chances are much higher it works well on mid- to low tier machines. It's incredible how well optimized it is. It probably takes the "looks per CPU/GPU cycle" crown if that is a thing. ;-)
Speaking of today's situation, that's straightforward. Fewer infections in the population in general, lower probability that an elder care worker in a given facility gets infected and goes to work contagious without their knowledge. Once that happens, game over.
This effect is evident just from different death rates per capita in countries that have similar demographic and housing situations, e.g. between the Scandinavian countries.
I'd expect that better working conditions would have been a much bigger help.
These workers would like to follow the general guidelines and stay home if they have any symptoms, but they generally work hours, not salary jobs, and can't miss too much work.
If they had the flexibility and leisure a lot of the swedish middle class experience at their office jobs, being able to call in sick, then more of the care workers could have obeyed the recommendation by the health authority.
But for now it's a low-wage, high pressure sector with less than ideal working conditions.
To add to that, the same patients meet very many different caregivers during a week due to the same working conditions, and this is also not good for preventing transmission.
I suspect that in the aftermath of this. There’s are the things that will have had the biggest impact on outcomes. The pre-conditions at the start. Not differences in response strategies.
But his point is that they are just experiencing these deaths now rather than in 2 or 6 months time, and that does seem likely given a vaccine is at least a year away.
I wonder if there's some social constraints that babies naturally seem to rebel against (or at least be less interested in). Cooks used to be mostly women, now they're mostly men. Accountants used to be mostly men, now they're mostly women. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/a-visual-history-of-g...
Programming is a good example here. It used to be women's work, mainly because it was relegated to women (men didn't want to do it, and it was seen as not that important). Now it's reversed; there's lots of money in it.
This is frequently repeated but rarely with supporting data. Programming work during the 70s and 80s, during which women's representation in programming reached its peak, was well paid. According to the BLS entry level salaries were $20k for the lowest level of "computer programmer" and $40k for the highest. Entry level "systems analyst" is listed with $28k salary [1]. The current BLS statistics for computer programmers does not break down by seniority, but lists an average annual income of $90k [2]. Adjusted for inflation, and the salaries are pretty similar. In Silicon Valley, entry level salaries above $100k are common but this is not replicated nation wide.
Perhaps your friends parents were over-careful because their kids kept breaking bones? Kids are different. Mine is very risk-averse and has essentially never hurt himself bad. I was the same way as a kid. His friends are daredevils who hurt themselves constantly.
Also, when it comes to "our parents in the past would let us do anything and I came out ok" sounds a bit like survival bias to me. In Sweden, far fewer kids die today than in the 70s, so perhaps there's some merit to bicycle helmets, safer playgrounds and not letting your kids eats whole grapes unattended before the age of five or so etc.
The actual scanning might be slower, but the queues are much shorter for self-scanning at the stores where I by groceries.
Also, where I live we have portable scanners. You pick up a scanner when you enter the store, you scan all your groceries and put them directly in the bag (or under the stroller) and when you reach the exit you leave the scanner and pay at a terminal and off you go.
Man I hate these with a passion. I always forget one thing or so, and then every now and then you're selected for a random check, and you feel like a common thief and have to do the walk of shame to the actual register for re-scanning and paying.
Also, the self scanners require you to weigh your fruits & vegetables at the f&v section. Although it seems they're adding scales to the self checkout boots lately, so hopefully I can start using the in-store scanning the way I use Anglo-Saxon self-checkout booths soon - just load up in the shop, scan everything yourself at the end.
Portable scanners FTW! Once you get competent with them it's ridiculous how much time you save. Add to that bringing your own bags and you are scanned and out in little more time than it took to do the actual shopping.
Every now and then you get audited, but I'll happily pay that price in order to have the scanner.
That's only true if Boeing was the only manufacturer that builds this category of planes (they are not).
Boeing has an issue in their planes that the A350 doesn't have. So if the price of 787's goes up because it needs to go from unsafe to safe, then airlines can buy A350s instead.
If you want to do it undetected you need to do it completely underwater, including ingress and egress, and that absolutely limits the potential actors.