yunyun333
8hr ago
The New Orleans shooter managed to cook up some homemade RDX, though he forgot that it requires a detonator. Bizarre display of semicompetence from an Army vet.
yunyun333
21hr ago
This guy was a caltech grad and he couldn't come up with a better plan than "run past a security checkpoint and hope there aren't more guards"? He didn't even get onto the floor of the ballroom itself. What happened to good old fashioned ANFO?
yunyun333
3d ago
Where does this end?
In the short term, robo-caretakers for the ballooning aging population. In the medium to long term, artificial wombs for mass production of wards of the state. Sexbots will help top off the bread and circuses. AGI will pay for all of this of course.
Or, continued mass migration from the wellsprings of fertility. One seems more realistic than the other.
yunyun333
5d ago
Hostile powers with nukes aimed at each other certainly pushes the world closer to nuclear use. One Soviet submarine officer prevented the Cuban missile crisis from going nuclear; another successfully nothing ever happens'd a false early warning. India and Pakistan is the most likely flashpoint for nuclear war; they are neighbors, have actually fired missiles at each other, and India even managed to accidentally fire a nuclear capable missile into Pakistan a few years ago. All it takes is one stupid misunderstanding and an overzealous trigger man. Iran and Israel have the mitigating factor of distance, but Iran's paucity of early warning systems will increase paranoia.
yunyun333
7d ago
Oh, I was just adding on to your point about the study. The healthcare system would implode if we tried to impose Medicare or Medicaid prices on providers.
yunyun333
7d ago
-A comment from a presumably intelligent healthcare professor on a recent healthcare podcast
yunyun333
7d ago
Redistricting is retarded. Look at Louisiana. First the legislature draws up a map with 5 non-black majorities and 1 black majority. This is challenged in court and found to violate the VRA so they go back and draw up a new map with 2 black majority districts (Louisiana is 1/3 black). Another group of 'non-African-American voters' challenges the new map for being racially gerrymandered and a federal panel agrees, so now they might have to change the map again pending SCOTUS decision.
Redistricting changes that would significantly shift the results (based on the most recent election) should just not be allowed. Why can every other country make this work?
yunyun333
8d ago
Yes, and people conflating this with historical antisemitism are pretty clearly off the mark. You can't explain it with reference to, idk, shylock or the dreyfus affair (do 5% of Americans know who alfred dreyfus was?)
To the antiracist left/liberal, Jews are white colonialists and Arabs are brown natives. There is very little that the oppressed can do against their oppressors that deserves full-throated condemnation.
yunyun333
11d ago
Vance apparently asked for a 20 year halt on enrichment (and handing over the remaining uranium). Now they're thinking about releasing $20b of frozen assets in exchange. It's hard to see how this isn't just the JCPOA but worse in most aspects.
yunyun333
11d ago
Per NYT, Israel told the US that they had intel about a meeting between Khameini and other IRGC leaders in a few days time and pitched it as the best time to strike. If the US had declined to get involved, Israel probably would not have gone ahead.
yunyun333
12d ago
The funny thing is that the economy was generally doing well pre-war. Dow was over 50k as someone pointed out, employment was good. Tariffs were paid for by Americans but weren't as big a drag as expected either, although core goods inflation would have been negative without them? He really could have done nothing, toned down ICE's retardation, and coasted.
yunyun333
12d ago
yunyun333
15d ago
South Korea is perfectly capable of annihilating Pyongyang even without nukes. The threat simply isn't credible. America could not have threatened the Soviets and Chinese with nukes to get them out of Vietnam, and Nixon's madman theory made him look pathetic instead.
yunyun333
15d ago
It was also sitting under the rubble of Isfahan since last June; no indication that they were even trying to dig it out. Because it was a bargaining chip (until now).
Nuclear blackmail also doesn't work the way the author thinks it does. Why doesn't North Korea say "Give us $100b and lift all sanctions or we nuke South Korea and Japan"?
yunyun333
15d ago
For better or for worse, human happiness seems to be tied only lightly to absolute material standards and heavily tied to relative status, position, and feelings of fairness, and the internet and social media are super-stimuli for the human sense of status calibrated towards the Dunbar number.
Relative deprivation/hedonic treadmill.
yunyun333
15d ago
Agreed, this is just impotent rage finding a lightning rod. You can't change society, but you can (attempt to) murder a CEO.
yunyun333
16d ago
They agreed to 3.67% enrichment and then the US ripped it up; thus, ask for more next time. If you look at a graph of SWUs (ie effort/time input) versus enrichment percentage, it's not that huge a leap; the first few percentage points of enrichment are the hardest.
yunyun333
16d ago
Wasn't that the point of the JCPOA? You can point out it was not indefinite, but given millennarian Shia expectations, it could plausibly be renewed without too much ideological handwringing.
yunyun333
16d ago
Which shows that they value having proxies over having nuclear weapons. Ultimately, trying to get nukes has been more trouble than it's worth for the Iranians; Israel can't invade them, the US pre-Trump wasn't interested, and it just led to a whole bunch of crippling sanctions. Khameini issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons which, presumably, meant something in a very fundamentalist society.
yunyun333
16d ago
If you believe the Omani negotiator, Iran was willing to give up their stockpile and enrichment in exchange for sanction relief; that was likely the point of building the stockpile in the first place. Once the US tried to regime change them, the calculations shifted.
yunyun333
16d ago
They had old moldy stockpiles of chemical weapons that were in disuse. None were actually used in the 2003 invasion and the only effect was that some US soldiers ended up poisoning themselves when disposing of them because they weren't properly labeled. The old canard was that Rumsfeld knew about Iraq's WMDs because he still had his receipts from Iran-Iraq.
All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.
In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.
Participants in the chemical weapons discoveries said the United States suppressed knowledge of finds for multiple reasons, including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong. “They needed something to say that after Sept. 11 Saddam used chemical rounds,” Mr. Lampier said. “And all of this was from the pre-1991 era.”
Others pointed to another embarrassment. In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.
yunyun333
16d ago
What does this mean? They still have thousands of missiles with launchers, they still have drones, they still have SHORAD, they still have hundreds of fast attack boats. If they had no military, the ceasefire would be unnecessary.
Well, it's more likely to work than charging Comey with writing "8647" in seashells, but there's really not much to say about this.
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