Shakes
25d ago
Your prediction was the set of every possible outcome? Congratulations on your predictive powers
Shakes
25d ago
The US has a blockade on. Ships are not passing through without American power. Your alternative explanation that we have to disbelieve everything coming out of America and accept Iran’s explanations instead is totally unconvincing.
Shakes
25d ago
America killed Iran’s leadership and bombed their factories, which means Iran won. Because they control the straits of Hormuz, which allows them to cripple global trade, although that hasn’t happened because of the Chinese, who support Iran. It’s all very simple. The Americans lost so humiliatingly that they signed an embarrassing surrender deal, which proves they lost, even though they aren’t following it right now, which also proves they lost. It’s all very simple. The important point is that Donald Trump is evil, but he lost because he’s stupid, but he’s also too evil to care, but he’s also too stupid to know he lost, but he also refuses to accept that he lost because he’s so evil. It’s a very simple explanation. If the US starts to appear as though it’s winning, it’s actually a separate second war that bears no relation to the first war. Who can really say. Iran might not have a navy or Air Force or nukes, their leaders were all killed and now the IRGC is divided about how to proceed, they can’t control the straits and they are under tremendous economic strain, but when you think about it they refuse to surrender and isn’t that the same as winning?
The US accepted and signed very unflattering terms.
At the time I pointed out that America wouldn’t pay Iran any money unless they cooperated, and now what’s happened? Does it feel like Iran is in control? Does it look like Iran is in control?
Shakes
25d ago
The problem is that we don’t really know if this is true or not. The Admin has an interest in pretending that this is occurring, both to buffer the economy and sow confusion in Iran.
Yes we do. Independent trackers commercial AIS and satellite images show ships crossing the strait. It’s not as many as before the war and it’s not zero. These are not unfalsifiable claims, a lot of this stuff is verifiable and public.
Moreover, who would these lies be intended to confuse? The Iranians? If Iran cannot even tell when ships are crossing the straits, then they do not have control over the straits. So even if we accept your premise as true, it’s not looking good for Iranian power.
Shakes
25d ago
It will probably be very easy on a long-enough timescale to mostly eliminate driving. Your kids won’t want to learn. Governments will make licensure increasingly onerous. The economics will lead to many people selling their cars and giving up driving altogether. In certain places.
There will also be a geographical and class component here too. Self-driving cars that work well for urban commuters will not reliably serve rural folk with big trucks and cargo towed up on the back. Imagine the city folk who control all the laws trying to make it difficult for move your RV or boat between your house and your cabin. I expect there will be a lot of that.
Shakes
25d ago
Despite Iran’s pronouncements that the straits are closed, many ships are continuing to cross them. We know that during the last closure the US military escorted many ships through (while maintaining a blockade on Iran itself). Iran it turns out doesn’t have the capability to actually close the straits, just to threaten to do so. Increasingly hollow threats as sanctions, the blockade, war inflation, and US strikes erode their ability to project even a little force.
Now even according to the New York Times, Iranian officials are divided because the Supreme Leader remains absent. Iran is apparently deeply divided on whether to continue the war or not — far from the situation predicted by war critics that Trump’s strikes would simply ensure Iran was united around fighting America until the bitter end.
this distinctive category of forever conflicts
This isn’t forever war, this is just war. The Iran War has only for a few months, most of that under ceasefire — this is totally historically normal. The Ukrainian War has stalled out but 4 years is also not an exceptional length by the standards of war. The major forever wars of recent years were America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were totally different models. Trump doesn’t have NGOs on the ground teaching Iranian clerics to embrace hashtag Black Girl Magic.
Now I'm blackpilled, we might be lucky if we get out of this in less than 20 years.
Iran won’t last that long. Inflation and sanctions are already crippling their economy and their ability to stay fed.
Shakes
25d ago
I've said before that the MOU is a sign of the US accepting the failure of Epic Fury and military defeat and cutting losses (contra my initial expectations; tbh that was impressive, if anything – Russia also miscalculated, but can't even cut losses). But well, nothing (except self-respect and reason, perhaps) could prevent the US from retroactively revoking this acceptance and just relaunching the war.
A few months ago war critics told me that America lost so badly it would accept whatever terms that the Iranians offered. Now that that hasn’t happened, they say that the US lost so badly it must have changed its mind about surrendering.
The rest of your post in fact makes a case I was arguing months ago: that the global supply chain was more resilient than critics supposed and that Iran’s leverage over the strait was not that great.
The much more plausible explanation, which I have not had to alter over the past few months, which looks better and better with age, is this: America decisively crippled Iran’s nuclear capabilities and Military Industrial Complex; Iran has been badly weakened, maybe fatally; Iran does not control the straits and cannot chase America out of the straits; America is in a dominant position. Iran will never toll the straits, they will never acquire nuclear weapons, their military strikes will become increasingly ineffective, their country will suffer from inflation and sanctions, they have no trump card to play, and the only question left is how badly they will surrender.
Shakes
27d ago
There's a big difference between post-ironic edgelord jokes about Kirkenator and lowkirkenuinely (which even the right enjoys) and leftists saying that they're glad Charlie died he deserved it. Conflating the two is part of the gaslighting.
Honestly Agartha Charlie Kirk is more entertaining and a better argument than anything else I could say here.
Shakes
27d ago
Do you not understand the difference between teenagers shitposting on casual discord chats and on tiktok vs professionals posting in work related chats?
There were lots of professionals posting under their real names that they were glad Charlie Kirk was killed. And Young Republicans signal group is not a work-related chat.
Shakes
27d ago
but the right wing reaction to his death was definitely a major catalyst
I think this is just cope -- the left would have taken any reaction from conservatives as justification to mock Kirk's death. There really isn't some noble pro-modesty faction that would have been nice and respectful, if only the reaction hadn't been so bad. Conservatives pounce! We can just admit that a lot of leftists are glad Charlie died, because they said so, that was what started this thing in the first place.
Your argument in fact falls down by simply noting that a lot of liberals were cheering Charlie's death or going even further and cheering for more deaths of more conservatives. Come on, we all remember it.
Shakes
27d ago
This contemptuous, at times nihilistic humor marks a dramatic shift from the period immediately following Kirk’s death in September, in which conservatives sought to suppress criticism of the late Maga luminary. Hundreds of people were fired or otherwise disciplined for denouncing him (which has since resulted in several settlements over alleged first amendment violations). The attempted censorship actually intensified the satirization of Kirk online, said Alex Turvy, a media sociologist and author of an upcoming book about internet culture, Memes in the Machine.
It's always grating to read inaccurate descriptions of things I remember quite well, made worse in this case by the author trying to fit in a "just desserts" narrative. Charlie was murdered in cold blood and this prompted a wave of liberals cheering his death as justified for his basically-normal conservative opinions.
But the right clearly pushed their chips in too far trying to martyrize the guy
This is leftwing gaslighting -- Charlie was martyred! The gaslighting here is the idea that joking about his death is blowback to conservative overreach, we didn't want to be so disrespectful, it was simply necessary because the conservative reaction was even worse than Charlie's death! Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself.
Even JD Vance isn't immune.
The claim in this article is extremely vague, all it seems to say is that Vance thought there might have been more to the murder than meets the eye, which is trivial really. I award bonus points for the laugh-out-loud tut-tutting when the New Republic scolds its readership with the line, "Vice Presidents should not have that much time on their hands".
Shakes
28d ago
A satellite that coordinates transmission scheduling is functionally a data center. It probably even runs SQL. We’re simply debating how far it will scale.
Shakes
28d ago
With Starlink or a similar system I imagine it would be easy to beam a lot more of it down.
You mean data-collecting satellites could outsource their data processing to specialized satellites that coordinate intense computing problems for them?
Shakes
28d ago
This is an interesting report but I want to highlight one section in particular:
At ABI Research, where I work as an aerospace analyst, we did a rough total-cost-of-ownership comparison between a data center on Earth and one in space. It showed that the cost to launch and run a GPU in space for a year is at least an order of magnitude higher than the same feat in a terrestrial data center. [...]
[...] However, there are niche applications where the much higher costs of computing in space could be justified. Examples include preprocessing data from Earth-observation satellites, real-time detection and tracking of hypersonic missiles, and active collision avoidance in the increasingly crowded low Earth orbit.
We're not really debating if space compute is feasible, we're just debating if it will scale. Given that it's technically possible and useful in niche functions, small space datacenters are probably going to be made. Whether bigger ones will follow is an open question.
Shakes
28d ago
Also to your point, a lot of the monitoring of global warming happens because of satellites in the first place. We use satellite temperature data to measure how the earth is warming and where, and we use satellite imagery to assess when someone is cheating their emissions commitments.
Shakes
28d ago
Firstly, there's hardly any space data other than scientific probes by various space agencies, and communication satellites operated by both public and private entities.
This is not true and hasn't been true for over a decade. There are ~13,000 of satellites in space now. They are constantly collecting data and monitoring events. Even in the 2010s Planet Lab was able to scan every part of the Earth multiple times a day, and this was with a fleet of a few hundred satellites. Starlink now processes large amounts of internet traffic, set to increase enormously. Video sensors lidar sensors optical sensors infrared sensors synthetic aperture radar sensors particle detectors magnetometers gravitometers the works. All these systems are constantly collecting data. All these satellites are at risk of running into each other, or colliding with space debris, or have regular system checks that get reported back to Earth. And the number of satellites in orbit is going exponential as SpaceX and Rocket Lab make the costs to launch cheaper than ever before.
Even just the imagery needs are enormous. Planet Labs for example processes something like 30 Terabytes of imagery a day. I don't know how they do it, but it's not hard to imagine the constraints. Even the most basic Planet Labs Dove 1 and Dove 2 CubeSats from the early 2010s didn't report every image they took back to ground antenna networks. The stress on bandwidth would be enormous. What would happen even then is that each CubeSat would take a multitude of images and algorithmically select the best with which to phone home. Now consider that as a satellite moves across space, images of the same location on Earth are taken from different satellites. Deciding which images to send (which videos, which reports, which temperature data, etc.) can become a giant coordination problem. And there's no special reason why that wouldn't be done in space: it's simply a question of convenience.
A datacenter is just a warehouse of computers. There's nothing special about it. Datacenters process and manage data storage and dissemination for other computer. This is already happening in space. In a trivial sense we already have datacenters in space. We just don't call them that, because the ones in space are not as large and generalized as the ones we have on Earth. But there's not really any serious debate that datacenters in space are going to grow. The question is, at what scale? Will orbit-bound datacenters grow into a significant computer industry, or will they stay at this trivial level? Will they ever be efficient for processing data that originates from earth, or will they only be useful for data that originated in space? These are open questions.
or you'd have to be constantly passing the data around to different space datacenters to keep latency somewhat consistent, but this data transfer would likely kill any gain you got from the latency reduction and then some).
This is basically how Starlink already works. When you connect to Starlink it switches which satellite you're connected to every few minutes.
Shakes
28d ago
Space datacenters face similar economic disadvantages, and none of the proponents seem to be saying anything about the financial math here. I personally find the discussion of stuff like "How are you going to cool it?" irrelevant and a distraction, except inasmuch as they affect the cost. Cooling the datacenters is absolutely feasible, but it definitely complicates the engineering (and drastically increases the amount of material that has to be launched) far above and beyond what would be needed for a nomal terrestrial datacenter or some of the other exotic options I mentioned.
Space datacenters don't have to be cheaper than ground datacenters, they just have to be cheaper for processing space data than ground datacenters. The latency and bandwidth of space-to-grond will make space datacenters naturally attractive as space scales.
That's maybe a trivial compared to the actual core question, which is whether space datacenters can make sense for processing ground data. I think that's an open question. But the economics will become known as space datacenters are built to process space data.
Shakes
28d ago
If we're being conspiratorial though why leak this stuff after the primary, but before the deadline for changing the ballot line.
It's because Platner was dropping in the polls. The consensus among Democrats in the press was that the accusations against Platner were baseless up until the exact week he stopped polling ahead of Susan Collins.
Shakes
28d ago
Who knows how it will all turn out but I can confidently predict the following: Platner's replacement will be proclaimed by Democrats as a brilliant new discovery, the perfect candidate, the candidate they wanted all along, not just a candidate making the best of a bad situation but really the best possible candidate. An extraordinary candidate. "Maine-ia". Donations will pour in. The media will write encomiums about how brilliant the candidate is. Late-night hosts will joke about the candidate becoming an unlikely sex symbol overnight. Presidential ambitions will be discussed.
And if the candidate procedes to lose anyways, everyone will act as though none of it ever happened. You are actually a little weird if you think it did.
Shakes
28d ago
he just needed to be convinced of his own non-guiltiness (or shameless enough) like Trump to keep saying the same thing "the establishment is pulling all the tricks in the book to stop me"/"these are all lies by the same people already lying to you"/etc.
Platner didn't stick it to the establishment because he's not actually anti-establishment. He's just the next-generation model of Democratic cipher candidate managed by Democratic consultants to whisper to Democratic focus groups. His oyster farm is all pretend and his appeal to blue collar voters is imaginary -- Platner's appeal is to white college-educated Dems who want to believe they appeal to blue collar voters. The fantasy isn't really about beating the establishment. The fantasy is winning. The fantasy is that Platner can speak to this class of voters Democrats don't know how to reach but know they need to reach to win. Platner's appeal wasn't that he could stick it to Janet Mills, Platner's appeal was that he could stick it to Susan Collins. As that fantasy evaporated, the Dems dumped him.
Trump was genuinely an anti-establishment candidate and they genuinely pulled all the tricks in the book to stop him. Republican officials refused to endorse Trump, withheld donor networks and infrastructure and cash, denounced him on TV and refused to cooperate with his campaign. Even after he got into office Republican officials undermined Trump in every possible way -- cooperating with investigations against Trump, McCain's Obamacare betrayal, leaks, moles in his staff and inner circle, denunciations from sitting Republican senators, the whole nine yards. If rumors are to believed lots of them wanted to impeach Trump but were scared of what the voters would do to them if they did. And Trump, clearly, believed his own pitch because he felt that his campaign against the establishment was more important than his reputation after accusations were made against him.
Shakes
29d ago
Profit is an extremely powerful motivation but not the only one. There are Olympic athlete whose feats are rewarded with multimillion dollar bran deals, and there are priests.
Shakes
29d ago
Court-packing would spell the end of SCOTUS, but not the end of the US. Probably, in fact, just the end of Marbury v Madison.
SCOTUS ceases to exist as an independent Constitutional authority if it can be packed by the partisans at will. But there are still lots of constraints at play. Court-packing requires the President and Senate be of the same party, which is not a given at all. It also only erodes the Court's credibility on highly contentious political questions. There remain lots of boring technical matters that fall outside the purview of party politics, even if everything today is a political issue. That work will remain even if the Court's ability to declare laws Constitutional and Unconstitutional is practically ceded to the other two branches. This is probably more in line with how the Founders envisioned the court in the first place. SCOTUS reduced to a rubber stamp on Constitutional matters effectively loses the power it gained in Marbury v Madison. But it would still be the Supreme Court and the highest court of appeal on all sorts of other matters.
So otherwise we're back to electoral constraints. And short of actual civil war destroying one party or the other, Democrats and Republicans will both maintain enough power in enough places that new power-limiting arrangements will probably emerge.
Shakes
30d ago
Yeah this is a plausible scenario to me. Or like how Ford declined from its dominant position because it didn't fully accept the logic of the business model pioneered by GM. Ford created the production lines and the factories and then let GM extract all the value from customers.
But for now it's SpaceX's game to lose and it will probably take a generation for its dominance to be contested.
“You mad, bro? You mad bro?” Too bad I was kind of looking forward to arguing again. Until next time!
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