We've been planning interventions in Iran for 40 years and they constantly get revised or updated. Iran is literally one of few countries known for drones, which they based on stolen drone tech from western countries. It's not realistic that we entered this conflict unaware that Iran could harass the strait cheaply.
The problem is that Israel bombed their entire leadership structure and there's seemingly nobody to deal with now. It's fragmented between people who want to make deals, people who can even facilitate any kinds of agreement and the radicals who simply want the world to burn and will throw any human in the way to die for that end.
We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.
At the same time, showing the vulnerabilities in getting oil from that region means China is now buying more oil in USD and even directly from the US via the Pacific which helps further deter World War 3. In the case that something did still happen as part of a global strategy by China, Iran no longer exists as a lever that can be pulled to expand the chaos of a war with the aim of further diffusing the US military away from the Pacific.
If we wanted to fully end this mess, we would probably have to send the military in on the ground, which nobody wants except Iran. They are extremists in general and willing to die over this nuclear issue.
Barring that, we've largely neutered their capacity to make war and reorganized oil trade further in favor of the US. We will have to wait to see if Iran's leadership structure sorts itself out and they come to the table. Until then, if Iran wants to prevent their neighbors from benefiting from international shipping, Iran can be denied that too. Countries are developing workarounds to rely less on the strait, so the longer Iran sticks with this strategy the weaker it will get over the years.
It's popular to say the US lost this or the US lost that and it's a ridiculous country, but it's usually some kind of political gymnastics or financial judgement as it pertains to cost vs benefit. We always lose fewer soldiers and generally come out of it better than if we hadn't done anything at all. We almost always go into something for many more reasons than are publicly stated. A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now.
Sometimes doing the right thing is unpopular, but you should still do it.
> We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.
It's the US and Israel that are the "terrorists" and yet both have nuclear weapons. You literally say yourself that we can "continue destroying their capacity to do things", and like your definition of terrorists, the US/Israel are using us (US citizens) as human shields.
Iran has been terrorizing the entire region, exporting radicalism and funding terrorism. Many of the wars that have occurred in the middle east were caused by Iran. If you look at the history of Israeli attacks, they have essentially been reactions to Iran-backed terrorist attacks against Israel.
Why did Saudi Arabia attack Yemen? For fun? No, they were reacting to Iran-backed terrorist groups. Why did Iraq attack Iran, for fun? No, even back then they were reacting to Iran exporting their terrorism to Iraq.
Their strategy has been to try to look innocent by avoiding direct attacks from Iran and have diplomats that pretend Iran is a nice actor on the international stage, while using their country as a stable foundation for exporting terrorism. This isn't exclusively a strategy for achieving state power, it is a religious imperative to achieve a radical vision of global Islam.
The US has worked with the Middle East for many years to settle on some kind of peace after thousands of years of conflict (which was also the case for Europe). There can never be peace as long as Iran manufactures conflict regularly.
When the US does things, there is usually a strong and valuable logic behind it, even if it is not expressed publicly. For Iran, the reasons tend to be religious. Their goals and behaviors are not the same as you would expect from a rational state actor.
You can’t just label all of Israel’s enemies “terrorists”. The history of the Zionist colony is well know at this point. I’m a US citizen and fully aligned with Iran against Israel and the US presence in the Middle East.
I never said that. Only terrorists are terrorists. It has a real definition and it just happens that many of the people opposed to Israel use a terrorist form of attack against Israel. The Iranian government has been officially designated as a terrorist regime by many countries, because they have been actively promoting terrorist strategies all over the region. Most of the people in Iran are not terrorists. There are a lot of great Iranian people in the US.
People will think all kinds of things and there are many people with different ideas. Not everyone can be right all the time. It often comes down to how you were taught, what kind of media you consume, whether you seek the truth and logic or prefer emotion, and what your emotions lean toward. All I can say is from a purely logical perspective, Iran is not on the right side of this, even if it is fair to say that Israel has been extreme in its own way in reacting to aggression.
This isn't only about Israel. Iran has rubbed all of its neighbors wrong for 40+ years. If this was only about Israel and no other country, then there would be more to dig into there, but it is more than that.
At least we are free to express our ideas in the US and Israel. In Iran, they do not have free speech. The government can and will punish you for speaking against the government. They can make anything seem true just by imprisoning anyone who says otherwise.
Attacking Israel is never terrorism. They are invaders on stolen land. It's always legitimate resistance.
> At least we are free to express our ideas in the US and Israel. In Iran, they do not have free speech. The government can and will punish you for speaking against the government. They can make anything seem true just by imprisoning anyone who says otherwise.
Whether this is true or not, is none of my concern. What is my concern is a US backed invasion of other people's territory and Israel's influence on my government. Including Zionist attacks on free speech.
Terrorism is never justified, it's even against international law during war itself. And has terrorism against Israel been a successful strategy? Clearly not. It doesn't work and it's bad.
Israel doesn't control the US any more than the UK controls the US. We're all allies and countries that have shared interests can all influence each other in various ways.
There are some influential Jewish people in US culture and in politics and of course our countries share intelligence, but we have a shared interest in stabilizing the Middle East. Iran is the biggest destabilizer in the region, not Israel.
> and like your definition of terrorists, the US/Israel are using us (US citizens) as human shields.
No they don't, that is ridiculous. In what way could US citizens take collateral damage in this war? They aren't in harms way at all. You could argue they use Israeli and Arab civilians as human shields since they are the ones taking the attacks, but not American ones. And even for the Arabs that has US bases there are no girl schools inside those US bases like Iran puts in theirs. (the girl school was inside the walls of an irgc base, probably an old repurposed house)
> A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now
I, umm, disagree fairly wholeheartedly.
Maybe there's some long term <something> that has changed direction slightly as a result, but right now literally everything immediate is worse than it was beforehand.
The US is not xenophobic. That is ridiculous. Any time you say stuff like that, you discredit the things you say that actually make sense. I'm with you on the privacy aspect, but there are multiple dimensions of that which you're ignoring. I'd much prefer taking my chances in the US than in the EU, where they are constantly trying to push companies to weaken privacy.
Europe has way stronger data protection laws than the US. EU has GDPR, strict requirements, large fines. US only has a couple states protecting personal data, with HIPAA for health data, and that's it. We require you to unlock all your devices within 100 miles of a border (inland) so we can look at all your data. Of course our intelligence service also hoovers up the metadata of US citizens in contact with anyone overseas, which is borderline illegal. All our states are now passing "age verification" which is mass surveillance under a different name.
And US absolutely has been xenophobic for years, by official federal policy. I'm really surprised you're not aware of it, but here's a small selection of examples:
- Both our elected and appointed leaders are white nationalists. Our president called all Mexicans murderers and rapists, said African migrants were eating random pets in a rural US town (they weren't, obviously, but it was intended to exacerbate xenophobia)
- Our federal government has a mandate using ICE to try to eject anyone with a Hispanic name from the country (has already deported US citizens based on being hispanic/latino). We even boot people seeing asylum, often exporting them to foreign prisons even if they've never had a criminal record. We have concentration camps now, filled entirely with foreigners, and people who have lived here for decades but were foreigners.
- We stopped accepting new visas from 75 countries. We may even expel you for social media posts we don't like, or for attending a protest that our citizens can attend. We increased travel bans for people from majority Muslim countries. H1-B visas have been rolled back to only the highest paying jobs, and you may need to pay a $15,000 bond. We also now collect and store foreigners' biometric data indefinitely.
- Let's not forget the tariffs on virtually all other nations, to say nothing of "America First" and the new "Greater North America doctrine".
The US accepts immigrants from 200+ countries around the world with the top 5 being Mexico, Cuba, India, Dominican Republic and China. None of that has changed under Trump.
I think you got lost in the rhetoric somewhere.
Tariffs are just the US adjusting to reality which other countries are slow to do. Free trade died all on its own, because the pandemic showed that critical industries were hollowed out by free trade in a way that could be appreciated from a national security perspective. That situation was favoring China too much, so we need to unwind that some.
Tariffs already existed in many countries in practice, so it's not like the US reinvented modern tariffs.
Putting some numbers into the discussion census.gov [0] is tracking a sharp decline in net immigration due to both, a decrease in immigration and an increase in emmigration, from the start of 2025 to the present. Trending towards a net negative.
Pew [1] suggests that the changes around the start of 2025 were due increased restrictions on asylum applications under the previous admin and EOs by the current one to restrict new immigration. Given the rough numbers [2] of about 40k asylum grants per year in the early 2020s, I doubt the previous admin's actions are playing much of a role here.
Stating that none of it (immigration acceptance) changed under this administration might technically be true - with respect to the number of countries applying, but misses this point.
No doubt some changes were made by both Biden and Trump, but the argument being made is that this was fundamentally xenophobia, which is not supported.
Are you seriously trying to reframe the largest tariff war in 100 years, targeting 180 countries and territories, as a readjustment against China? And in both of Trump's terms he's radically changed immigration more than at any time since the 1960's. Either this is a great troll, or you need help, man.
Free trade isn't only a China issue, no. It's only the most important one partly as a function of China propping up massive state companies while also trying to avoid becoming a consumption led economy.
If you feel like formulating a good argument about immigration, I'll listen, but you haven't provided one.
Privacy is a concern everywhere, but the center of gravity of the issue moves further up or down the chain depending on the country.
The structure of the US makes it basically the single most secure democracy anywhere right now or in history. No country in Europe or Europe as a whole is even competitive by comparison. The main issue we're facing is that we are by far the primary target for foreign funded activism and systemic attacks, because China and Russia hated NGOs promoting color revolutions.
That is also part of the rule of law issue, but the system is overall managing quite well. It's all moving in slow motion, but many important metrics are going in the right direction, which we need as that's part of deterring China.
From Wikipedia, United States government and policy, citing several democratic institutes:
"The United States was the most prominent liberal democracy for much of the 20th and early 21st centuries, but has undergone significant democratic backsliding and a shift toward a hybrid regime—a political system combining autocratic and democratic features.[185][186][237] There is an ongoing debate among political scientists on whether the country is more appropriately classified as an electoral autocracy or illiberal democracy, with few still considering it a robust liberal democracy.[238]"
> The structure of the US makes it basically the single most secure democracy anywhere right now or in history. No country in Europe or Europe as a whole is even competitive by comparison.
How do you figure? I hear you have roving gangs of masked thugs beating up random citizens with the backing of your government, that doesn't sound very democratically secure, especially with what healthcare costs over there.
> The structure of the US makes it basically the single most secure democracy anywhere right now or in history.
This is just not true. It is failing visibly and loudly fast. It used to fail slowly but the process speeded up.
American administration supports Russia now. It praises Russian, Chinese, Belarus leaders again and again. It praises Orban. It hates last bastion of democracy - Europe.
China is not detered. Its power is growing while American one is going down. Trump openly admires its leader. China is celebrating current state of America.
That's not really accurate. The US is structured so that it is self-reinforcing from the bottom up and the top down simultaneously. State laws cannot violate the U.S. constitution and many types of elections cannot be gerrymandered. Even gerrymandered legislatures have limits on what they can do. You can't simply have one party change a state's constitution. Even congress can't be entirely gerrymandered.
Also, we have guns. LOTS of guns. The U.S. military's first and sole responsibility is to the constitution itself. If any state or the federal government tries to get rid of their constitutions, the military can rightfully take it over and re-establish a constitution.
There is no other country that's even remotely close to this secure.
It used to be named the Department of War and Palmer Luckey suggested naming it back. People agreed, so they did. It's just another part of changing the posture to match the philosophy that the best defensive is a good offense. It seems to be working pretty well, if you know what we're defending against.
For a few years before it was the Department of Defense it was the National Military Establishment (with an initialism with a very unfortunate pronunciation given its function) and before that it didn't exist at all.
Now, before the National Military Establishment was formed to unify the nations military bureaucracy, there were two separate cabinet level departments, the Department of War (which oversaw the Army) and the Department of the Navy (which oversaw the Navy, including the Marine Corps.) When the NME was created, the Army was split into the Army and the Air Force, and the Department of War was likewise split into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force. Both of these new Departments and the Department of the Navy remained (briefly) cabinet-level departments with their own Secretaries, while the NME was headed by the new Secretary of Defense.
Very quickly, though, further reforms were adopted in law and the NME became the Department of Defense and the service secretaries were formally subordinated to the Secretary of Defense and were now subcabinet positions (which is how the DoD got its unique, within the US executive branch, Department with its own cabinet level Secretary with subordinate Departments headed by a subcabinet level Secretaries organization.)
TLDR: The Department of War was not an earlier name for the Department of Defense, it was the name for the Department of the Army before the Air Force was split out from it.
> Palmer Luckey suggested naming it back. People agreed, so they did.
Well, again, it couldn’t be named back to “Department of War”, because its only previous name was “National Military Establishment.” And while some people obviously agreed that it should be called “Department of War”, they didn’t actually rename it. The name in law of the organization named “The Department of Defense” in 1949 by amendments to the National Security Act of 1947 remains “The Department of Defense”. It hasn’t been renamed. The present executive branch leadership has adopted nicknames for the department and the titles of its officials ("secondary titles” in the language of EO 14347 which formalized the system of nicknames [and also recounts as if true the false history that “Department of War” was previously the name of the Department of Defense].)
There are technicalities around all of this yes, but we used to have a Department of War with multiple branches of the military under it. Now we have a Department of War with multiple branches of the military under it. It's only named by executive order, which in practice is almost indistinguishable outside of some paperwork that few people will ever see. It's largely the spirit of the thing and the shift in communications posture.
> we used to have a Department of War with multiple branches of the military under it.
No, we didn't. When the Department of War existed, it had exactly one branch under it, the Army. The Navy (including the Marine Corps)—as well as, in time of war only, the Coast Guard—was under the Department of the Navy, which was a separate cabinet level department.
When the US Army Air Forces, which were not a separate branch of the military, was turned into the US Air Force, which was a separate branch—by the National Security Act of 1947—the Department of War was abolished, and replaced with the Department of the Army (which had only the Army under it, just as the old Department of War had) and the Department of the Air Force (which had only the brand new Air Force under it.) There was never was Department of War with more than one branch under it.
This was also the same time that the National Military Establishment, headed by the Secretary of Defense, was created to provide unified structure within which the three military departments (Army, Air Force, and Navy) were embedded (but not, initially, actually subordinated: all three service secretaries were still cabinet-level officers.)
Two years later, amendments were passed to the National Security Act of 1947 which renamed the NME to the Department of Defense, and formally subordinated the service secretaries and their associated departments to the Secretary and Department of Defense, and, but for some minor changes like the creation of the Space Force as a separate branch within the Department of the Air Force, remains the structure in law today.
The only cabinet-level departments that ever had multiple branches of the military under them were the Department of Navy and the Department of Defense. (The Department of the Air Force, as noted in the preceding paragraph, has for the last few years also had multiple branches, but did not in the brief time it was a cabinet level department.) The Department of War, and the Department of the Army that replaced it a (both as cabinet level departments and when the latter was a subcabinet department) have only ever had the Army.
Again, you're missing the spirit. What we would consider today's Air Force and Navy were both under the same Department of War around the founding of the country and we're having the 250th anniversary of the U.S. It's clear that between the anniversary of the country and the threats the country is trying to deter, there is a clear purpose behind these changes and they are rooted in some history. I can get pushing back a little on imprecise language, but whatever LLM you're using is missing the point and wasting time.
In small tribes you don't need as much organization, but the larger the scale the more organization you need. Weak and powerless people are usually that way, because it is natural to them. It is nonsense to say that only a tiny number of people have any influence over the world. Some people have more influence than others, yes, but that exists even in tribes.
Every country that ever aspired to communism had people who were at the top and people who were at the bottom, far more so than free market countries.
How many of the famous names you can think of that changed the modern world started off from old money? A lot of these things come from new money private investors or government incentives and grants, or they just bootstrapped themselves and grew organically.
It might be fair to say that we should do more to preserve inexpensive rural life as a viable alternative to many people, because a lot of people born in cities today may more realistically be better suited to the pace and burden of rural life.
Alternatively, we should renormalize people living together in larger numbers the way they did in the 1800s and early 1900s (though not to the same extreme). Individualism is expensive, but many people preserve a more individualistic lifestyle even if their personal finances don't easily support it and then they blame everything outside of their life rather than their own choices.
You're sculpting out a bit of a zietgeist that has some accuracy and nostalgia to it, but I do think there's more to it. Starting a business and selling software can be a bigger trust signal than free or open source for some kinds of things, for both individuals and businesses depending on what it is.
"I don't have enough confidence in this thing to sell it", or "there might be something wrong with it and I don't want to be on the emotional hook" with actual customers to worry about it. It's not necessarily those things, but those doubts can exist.
There's also a subtle rejection of patent risk in open source, as if you are less encumbered with the stress around having to research what might step on some company's toes. Companies can solve some of that risk with professional liability insurance.
Realistically, I think a lot of people just don't want to run a company, getting committed to something they can't drop at a moment's notice, or they don't know where to start and it's easier to build reputation rather than dollars. It's more complicated than not doing it in many cases, and less complicated than not doing in other cases.
The other side of your argument is that almost none of the big things got into your pocket without some company trying to run a business which gave them the capital to direct that capital towards change. The number of examples of open source or free things that wouldn't exist today if they didn't sit on top of the foundation of a business making money is huge. The world would suck more.
Let me frame it like this. Let's say there is a non-profit organization. The mission is X. They are mildly successful at their mission. They believe in it, they're passionate. It's mostly local, mostly volunteer, the amount of time dedicated to it by all is constrained, budgets are constrained. Demographics mean the people who were naturally interested in the mission are fading off and younger people aren't as captivated by the non-profit.
Meanwhile, some company who has excess capital yet believed in a similar mission achieved 9x the success in that same non-profit motivation, because they could direct the energies they've gathered towards a purpose.
It doesn't have to be an emotional or moral struggle between whether people should be low energy potential and poor, but idealistically purposed, or high energy potential and rich, but lacking in any sort of philosophy as to what goodness is.
We went through too many years of communism in the world that paints dollar bills as having evil fangs on them and I think it rubbed off a little on the internet and some open source communities.
Fundamentally, it comes down to logic. Many things rely on someone else's money to become a success or catch on. In terms of sustainability, in many ways that applies to software as well. If some idea can economically sustain the personal investment into itself, it might grow to reach its potential in a way some weekend warrior project does not after it gets discarded.
At the same time, it is nice and liberating to simply do something fun and interesting, to put it out there like the demo scene or like when bit torrent dropped or some new compression algorithm. When those kinds of things excite you, it makes you want others to feel that way too. It just depends what you're after.
I watched this video earlier today and came away unconvinced. Labeling this HN post as debunking feels a bit leading as that is not the title of the video. They did not follow all of the necessary logic to debunk it.
They boiled it down to: might be technically possible, but it's improbable, if you make assumptions we're making that are unreasonable.
Whether the video was just sloppy and weak by chance, or they're trying to bury this, or it legitimately doesn't work, I don't know. This video doesn't answer that.
Doesn't this need line of sight? If a fire starts outside of the line of sight, that's the time the fire needs to get out of control and you would have to test this system in that scenario. Sprinklers will soak everything and make it harder for the fire to spread.
So long as you don't require deep search grounding like massive web indexes or document stores which are hard to reproduce locally. You can do local agentic things that get close or even do better depending on search strategy, but theoretically a massive cloud service with huge data stores at hand should be able to produce better results.
In practice unless you're doing some kind of deep research thing with the cloud, it'll try to optimize mostly for time and get you a good enough answer rather than spending an hour or two. An hour of cloud searching with huge data stores is not equivalent to an hour of local agentic searching, presumably.
I think that problem will improve a little in the coming years as we kind of create optimized data curation, but the information world will keep growing so the advantage will likely remain with centralized services as long as they offer their complete potential rather than a fraction.
After the USSR fell, they left behind many countries abused by Russia that didn't believe it would leave them alone. Those countries wanted defense guarantees in case of future Russian aggression.
NATO wanted to be deliberate and slow about admitting any new members, but countries that wanted to join felt that anyone who didn't join might get attacked or face hybrid measures from Russia to prevent them from joining next. So they grouped up and 7 countries joined NATO simultaneously. NATO was never begging them to join, they wanted to join NATO.
People push this vision of NATO being some hungry bastard that can't get enough, but it's largely outside pressures pushing countries to want to join it.
Sure enough they were right. Russia invaded both Georgia and Ukraine, which wanted to join already because Russia kept interfering in their societies.
The problem is that Israel bombed their entire leadership structure and there's seemingly nobody to deal with now. It's fragmented between people who want to make deals, people who can even facilitate any kinds of agreement and the radicals who simply want the world to burn and will throw any human in the way to die for that end.
We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.
At the same time, showing the vulnerabilities in getting oil from that region means China is now buying more oil in USD and even directly from the US via the Pacific which helps further deter World War 3. In the case that something did still happen as part of a global strategy by China, Iran no longer exists as a lever that can be pulled to expand the chaos of a war with the aim of further diffusing the US military away from the Pacific.
If we wanted to fully end this mess, we would probably have to send the military in on the ground, which nobody wants except Iran. They are extremists in general and willing to die over this nuclear issue.
Barring that, we've largely neutered their capacity to make war and reorganized oil trade further in favor of the US. We will have to wait to see if Iran's leadership structure sorts itself out and they come to the table. Until then, if Iran wants to prevent their neighbors from benefiting from international shipping, Iran can be denied that too. Countries are developing workarounds to rely less on the strait, so the longer Iran sticks with this strategy the weaker it will get over the years.
It's popular to say the US lost this or the US lost that and it's a ridiculous country, but it's usually some kind of political gymnastics or financial judgement as it pertains to cost vs benefit. We always lose fewer soldiers and generally come out of it better than if we hadn't done anything at all. We almost always go into something for many more reasons than are publicly stated. A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now.
Sometimes doing the right thing is unpopular, but you should still do it.
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