In chapter 11 of All Quiet on the Western Front Paul and his unit find an abandoned food cache in the middle of no mans land. Instead of secreting away the food back to their lines where they will have to share it, they decide to just cook and eat it right then and there. But a spotter plane from the allies sees the smoke and then begins shelling their position. Cue a terrifying, if hilarious, scene where the soldiers try and cook pancakes as shells explode around them. Paul, as the last to leave, takes his pancakes on a plate and dashes out, timing his escape between bursts, and just barely making it back to the German trenches. Its a rare comic scene in an otherwise horrific and very real look at WW1.
The scene in the book is just so familiar to the lines in Ukraine these days, nearly a hundred years later. Instead of spotter planes near the dawn of aviation, we have satellites and drones (similarly quite new in the role). Instead of just shells and fuzing experts, we have FPV drones and much more sophisticated shells. Instead of buddies from the same towns all huddled together in cold muddy holes, we have deracinated units spread far and wide in laying in fear of thermal imaging. This results in a no mans land again, but a dozen kilometers wide instead of a few hundred meters wide, and somehow more psychologically damaging.
My point is that absent any tech that will miraculously be invented and deployed widely in the new few weeks, the Iran war, if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today, which is somehow a worse version of trench warfare.
Even casual Victoria II players know that WW1 is essentially the final boss of the game. And the 'lesson' of Vicky II is essentialy: Do not fight WW1, it ruins Everything.
To be clear: The US is choosing to fight a worse version of WW1 without even a stated (or likely even known) condition of victory. We're about to send many thousands boys to suffer and die for not 'literally nothing', but actually literally nothing.
Ukrainian war is the way it is because neither side has a decisive advantage in air. There's barely any CAS - there are, however, lightweight drones.
If Iran were to become a major ground war, one of the sides would have air dominance, and we know which one. How that would change things remains to be seen. But it wouldn't be the same exact trench war, that's certain enough.
I don’t think air dominance will hold up for long if a plane costs billions and a drone a couple thousand. Any interceptor rocket the US uses will set them back millions versus literal peanuts on the other side.
Add that Iran is basically a mountain fortress and they’ll run out of money very quickly; disregarding that prolonging the war will be __very__ unpopular in the US.
They really got themselves into an unwinnable bind
How does a drone costing "a couple thousand" take out a plane? It doesn't.
Shaheds and quads offer no threat to US air superiority. Iran can fling them at the ground targets willy-nilly, sure, and that will inflict causalities on FOBs and ground forces. There's no ready-made solution to low end attack drones. But the sky is going to remain with the US. This allows US to dispense JDAMs at anything that pops its nose out into the open. Which doesn't play well with the notion of "positional trench warfare". Any "position" like this is a liability when the kill loops are tight and the sky speaks precision munitions.
If a major ground operation happens, I expect it to look closer to "2024 Gaza urban warfare hell" than to "2024 Ukraine open field war of attrition". Defending forces hiding from the air power in urban formations, causalities and collateral damage from the attackers trying to flush them out, humanitarian consequences from supply lines interdictions.
I very much agree that "the war is unpopular in the US" is a severe pressure on how much US can accomplish in practice. But what US sets out to do, how hard the US commits and how much can US actually accomplish there all remain to be seen. They could well purge the regime, destroy the key weapon facilities or grab-and-hold the oil fields before the domestic audience runs out of patience and pressures the politicians, or votes the decision-makers out.
Keep in mind: Iran isn't running off a pool of limitless resources either. The regime was already struggling a lot before US and Israel declared open season on the leaders - and the external pressure only buys you this much cohesion. Iran's military infrastructure is not in a tip-top shape, their income streams are dubious, they don't have many allies left after the proxy purges, they don't have reliable weapon suppliers overseas, and their own weapon stockpiles and production are unlikely to be sustainable in any way. They can sustain much more manpower losses and tolerate more hardship, sure - but there is no limitless tolerance. A regime that purges protestors by the thousands can't rely on its population being willing to suffer and die for it.
So there's nothing inherently "unwinnable" about this. It's a horrid mess of unknown war goals, questionable decision-making and dubious war sustainability, on both sides. Outcomes are very hard to estimate without some damn good intel.
This isn't middle ages. Most modern wars have dubious cost-benefit at best. Doesn't stop them from being fought and occasionally even won, no.
If US sets its war goal at "secure the strait and the oil fields" or "dismantle the regime" or "dismantle the nuclear program" and pulls that off, doesn't matter how many billions they would have sunk into the affair and how much they would actually have gained from it. From a military standpoint: a war goal was set and accomplished.
Whether US can actually set such a goal and then accomplish it is debatable, but it is not in any way impossible.
Given that Iran was able to close it? Definitely not "secure" then, no. Let alone now.
If US has a goal of keeping the global oil prices low, then those specific goals make sense.
"Dismantle the regime" can be accomplished with both direct action, and with a more long term "destroy the regime's income streams and supply chains and let it implode". Both are on the table, and the latter can overlap with "seize the strait and the oil infrastructure".
> Given that Iran was able to close it? Definitely not "secure" then, no. Let alone now.
They were able to yet didn't because doing it was sure to provoke a response. In fact if Iran acted first to close the strait it would surely have pulled in all of the European powers.
The only reason they clode the strait is because the US struck first so they had nothing to lose anymore.
"Securing the strait" is completely incoherent as an objective for this war.
Americans do not have the stomach to eat losses like Russia does. This is not een existential war for America. Having daily drone footage of American soldiers getting their face blown off won't do well at home. Casualties will be much higher than Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rig the election? You could pass a law that makes 1/3 of the country ineligible to vote, but makes sure they won't find out until they're at the polling booth. You could also prepare your allied goons to defend polling stations.
> if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today
I do not think this is correct. The problem in Ukraine is that anti-air defenses control the skies, so the only accurate long range fires are expensive missiles in short supply.
This seems to not be a problem in Iran. US forces can fly relatively cheap bomb trucks anywhere and drop ordinance on anything. Stealth aircraft and NATO doctrine apparently work.
I'm not advocating for a ground invasion, but there's no reason to believe it would go the way of Ukraine.
Iran is a large country, just getting to Tehran with large-enough force is logistically enormous task.
Complicated by the fact that the logistic convoys can nowadays be trivially decimated by FPVs.
Air superiority is not going to help you much against small dispersed resistance groups with FPVs (ideally fiber optics, so not detectable by emissions from afar).
There is a chance that there will be similar democratization with AA (you will need proper AA missiles, the physics of reaching a fast jet flying high simply demands it), but the distributed passive targeting is made much simpler with current commodity computing and optics.
Achieving AA Denial is difficult, but forcing the attacker to use standoff munitions instead of gravity bombs/close-in air support not so much: shifting the risk of losing an aircraft from 1 in 100000 to 1 in 100 will do it.
> The problem in Ukraine is that anti-air defenses control the skies... <snip> ...US forces can fly relatively cheap bomb trucks anywhere and drop ordinance on anything. Stealth aircraft and NATO doctrine apparently work.
In Ukraine, neither side has access to the air weaponry (in capabilities or volume) that the US does - so the battlefield has evolved into one of drone superiority.
So yes, the US could (logistics willing) pummel Iran with B52s, B2s, and the like, maybe largely unopposed. However, this would only achieve so much: "winning" would be very different, especially when it's likely to turn into into a grinding resistance/insurgency ground war. A better analogy than Ukraine may be the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, only Iran has far more trained fighters and weaponry from the start. Or Vietnam, of course.
Maybe the US could "win", but it would depend on the strength of the political will to continue losing soldiers and spending huge amounts of money; and it would certainty be seen as a "forever war". And of course (as noted elsewhere) the US' more recent forays into Iraq and Afghanistan show how difficult regime change by force is.
There is no political will in the US to spend billions of dollars and institute a national draft and have tens of thousands of soldiers dieing.
That would probably cause Vietnam War-style protests if not an outright civil war
I think the poster's point is that FPV drones & accurate/advanced shells mean that you get all the downsides of WW1 trenches and no-man's land, PLUS new downsides of trenches not helping so you're constantly under threat of death no matter where you are. Plus: the more people huddle together the better the target they are, so you get to hide in small groups (or solo) in the hopes that the economics of killing just you doesn't pencil out and the drones will kill someone else while _they're_ sleeping, instead of you.
If you're looking for more reading maybe start with WW1 trenches, then look for YouTube videos about Ukraine drone usage? The drone stuff may be too new for lots of writing about it, but you'll get an oblique view of it by looking at how the Russians put those roll cages / turtle shells over their tanks, etc.
If you find anything and wanted to share it that would be interesting (if morbid)!
Technically, they'd be sleeping in a dugout where the entrance is covered by tarps and has ideally at least 2 turns to avoid the blast traveling inside (and potentially to make non-fiber-optic drones lose signal as they try to maneuver inside in case they get past the tarps).
You're most likely to get droned when on watch or carrying supplies.
I don't know about places to read more about it, but if you want to be psychologically damaged yourself without even being a participant there is a lot of drone footage from the Ukraine war floating around on the internet.
These clips highlight lots of incredibly disturbing events like Russian soldiers having exploding drones blow up close enough to them to cause eventually-fatal injuries without actually killing them, forcing them to kill themselves (and in some cases, their friends) with their own guns.
Its horrific to see on a human level regardless of the political circumstances of the war and who is or isn't in the right.
"The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston" by Siegfried Sassoon. (Ignore the title, it's actually his autobiography, and you could probably skip the first book in the trilogy).
"Goodbye to all that" by Robert Graves.
Two of the best writers in the English language recounting their times in the trenches.
> Cue a terrifying, if hilarious, scene where the soldiers try and cook pancakes as shells explode around them.
In the 1974 movie The Four Musketeers, Athos needs to find a private place in which to impart some information to d'Artagnan. The musketeers are currently deployed battling some French rebels.
The solution he finds is to place a bet with another soldier that he and his friends will have breakfast inside a fortress that is being bombarded by the rebels. We see a similar comedy scene of five people attempting to cook and eat a meal while under attack. (Athos also struggles to get his information across, since the constant attacks understandably pull a lot of attention.)
(Interestingly, I would have said that the translation I read came from Project Gutenberg, but it wasn't the one I just linked and no other is currently available there. Does Project Gutenberg take down existing versions of out-of-copyright books sometimes??)
There are multiple older translations, but Project Gutenberg only has one at the moment. I'm conjecturing that they used to have a different one (also out of copyright; that's their whole thing), but have taken it down for unclear reasons.
It's also possible that I found a free translation of The Three Musketeers somewhere else, or that I read the same version PG has now and have misidentified it as being different.
Trump already said he was just going to bomb all their infrastructure so the economy of the country couldn't function if they didn't negotiate and then it's just going to be a mass refugee crisis. It would be a mass refugee crisis anyway with a protracted ground invasion, but more Americans would die, so Trump is choosing to get it over with the easy way for America at least if they won't negotiate.
IMHO, This is pretty much the strategy the Khans used in the 13th century when they encountered arrogant Islamist Sultans emboldened with the bravery of their faith who refused to capitulate. They killed all the islamic people in Baghdad and then proceeded to fill all their canals and burn all their books. This decisively ended the Islamic golden age and Europe was able to survive after a very difficult 14th century where it would probably have been easily crushed by Islamists from the East had the Khans not set them back at least a few centuries. Truly one of the big turning points in World History.
Oh yeah, we can't do this to Russia because they have nukes, but the Ukrainians are trying to do it piecemeal.
What this current administration is doing speaks much more of a lack of strategy than what the Khans did in the 13th century.
Not having any sort of counterplay to Iran's one big move (the blocking of the straight), in a nation of some of the brighest minds on the planet, speaks volumes of how advisors are clearly not being listened to. The powers of the once mighty Republic have seemingly been vested in the hands of a bunch of incompetent nepo babies.
To wit: Hegseth immediately demanded the loyalty or resignation of the entire officer corps upon taking office. Anyone who would’ve been the voice of reason likely resigned a year ago.
Its not a false assumption. The world today is full of innovative products built with American capital and mostly American minds. If Americans want to do something then they have an rich pool of talent to do it well.
Sure on average, the population of the US is stupid, but that's true of everywhere.
> built with American capital and mostly American minds.
I would say "built with American agency and commercial spirit", not minds.
Most of the things that we have were first built elsewhere (Germany being a prime supplier here with the mp3 or the Zuse), but turning them commercial was the input that came from America.
Just because you sold your soul to an economic superspreader meme that allows your products and inventions to percolate with the rapidity of an influenza-herpes-ebola hybrid doesnt mean that the minds behind it are brighter than the rest of the world.
> You mean the people who voted for trump or those who voted for the democrats?
I'm not talking about plebs, I'm talking about people who know their shit and work at government level. We could just look at the invention of the past century and pluck out relevant events like the moon landing, electronic computer, transistor or ARPANET. Clearly there are smart people living in that nation. They have the talent to draw from to get good advice about stuff like: what Iran's first response might be to an aerial assault.
> Are there some causal reasons you think americans are smarter than people in other countries?
I never said that. I said America is home to SOME of the brightest minds in the world. That sentence does not apportion all the brightest minds to that nation. What you read is clearly something different from what I wrote. Do you have a chip on your shoulder?
Your argument was that you could use your bright minds to win against the iranians. That implies they are brighter than the iranians.
I think america clearly had better opportunities for bright people in the past. Maybe some moved also there so the proportion is a little higher than in other places.
that wasn't my argument. My argument is that the US has enough intelligent people to wargame what would happen in response to their initial strikes on Iran. That they seemingly have no available counter-play to the blocking of the straight of hormuz implies that they have dismissed any experts from the decision making process and are just winging it. Because... why would you start a war when you're weak to your opponent's first obvious countermove?
So yea, you misread that to assume that I was making some quasi-racist statement about Iran. So my question to you, is why do you think you made that intentional misinterpretation?
I agree that what the US did seems like they didn't ask anyone with expertise and brain to make a plan.
I think I filtered that out since I don't wonder about such things anymore. I live in Germany and what our government did in the last decades was so beyond stupid (like blowing up our nuclear power plants and going out of coal at the same time) that I try to ignore these kinds of things.
'intelligent', yes, big scary performative navy/gear, very very costly, here take most of the tax dollars. This is whats going on since WW2, where are these intelligent people who couldn't understand this?
We don't have to infer that they dismissed the experts. It is a documented fact.
Exactly one year ago, Laura Loomer presented Trump with a "traitor" list, all of whom were fired. That included members of the National Security Council, including director for Iran, Nate Swanson. He has since been writing articles staying exactly what would happen in the event of a conflict.
We don't have all the intelligence but we do have many institutions to promote such talent. As well as formerly having policy which let other bright minds immigrate into the US.
and nor does it result in victory without the follow up of a ground assault.
I'm legit baffled by the US engaging in a war that suffers exactly the same negative properties as the Saudi's war in Yemen. You don't even have to learn from history, the Saudi/Yemeni conflict is still active today. Air campaigns alone are entirely insufficient, especially if your enemy has mountains.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. But man haves lots of people who don’t know what a war crime is really devalued the accusation. So much so I read yours and I just assume it isn’t.(again idk)
I and a lot of other centrist-leaning folks are radicalized now in a way we weren't then. Perhaps it still won't happen, I don't have a crystal ball, but right now I will only vote for primary candidates who promise to prosecute Trump's goons and plan to reject the legitimacy of any future government that does not follow through.
Indeed it did not. But Trump and the members of his administration have announced, repeatedly and explicitly, that they hate me and wish me harm. So I can't accept being governed by them or by a system that tolerates them. If they decide they'd like to apologize, and offer some explanation for how I can be sure they won't return to their misdeeds, perhaps we can hear them out.
> If they decide they'd like to apologize, and offer some explanation for how I can be sure they won't return to their misdeeds, perhaps we can hear them out.
Nothing short of life in prison for the ones that plead guilty will accomplish that.
That's dual use infrastructure. Its also used for military and goverment purposes, right? The same as China providing weapons components to Russia, masking them as "civilian".
What's the problem. The Russians do stuff that you say are "war crimes", and what happens to them? Nothing. So why should anyone care if some person on the internet says these are war crimes? There's obviously no penalty against doing them, so they're not really war crimes.
Remember that war crimes were defined to protect civilians. It's usually better for a civilian to be on the losing side in a war with no war crimes, than the winning side of a war with many war crimes.
That was standard practice for much of recorded history. Surrender now or we will kill you all. Alexander the Great did it to Tyre and Sidon. The Romans did it to Jerusalem. The Israelis did it to Gaza. The orange madman and his henchmen have made it very clear that they don't give a shit about the rules of warfare.
> Trump is choosing to get it over with the easy way for America at least if they won't negotiate
That is… not the easy way. That’s how you get a nightmare for decades to come, endless waves of refugees and a limitless supply of terrorists.
Though, to be fair, there is no easy way of doing what Trump claims he wants to do. Which is why it’s spectacularly stupid to do it in the first place. I mean, they did not expect retaliation in the strait of Hormuz. Amateur hour does not even begin to describe it. Spectacularly stupid is probably way too kind.
If you must learn from the Khans, you’ll find that decapitation is not enough. You need people to put in place of the former leadership, and enforcers so that the underlying power structure stays in place to serve the new masters. The reason why is that, as the US learnt in Iraq and Afghanistan, it takes a bloody lot of soldiers to keep a whole population in check. Trump does not want to do the former and does not have the latter.
This just came up yesterday in the sauna with a bunch of dudes. Everything feels unique and special, but we're just repeating history again. Nothing about this situation is actually unique. Change a few names, a few numbers like the year or GPS coords, but most everything today is just history repeating itself.
Don't let capitalism convince us to do bad stuff cuz it makes us feel like the moment is special. It isn't. There is a tomorrow. It will be yesterday soon enough.
Was this started as a resource war, or as a money-making scheme, or as a distraction from the Epstein files, or just because DJT developed actual old age dementia after purging anyone who might say 'no'?
To the extent it's a money making scheme, well, capitalism gets blamed for all money making schemes even if it's supposed to be a specific subset of them which is useful for the feedback one can get from open markets.
(As that's a caveat inside a caveat, I'm mostly agreeing with you).
It's all of those, yet none are the real root reason.
For that, you must look at the main beneficiary. Which country stands to gain the most from a completely dilapidated Iran? Which country stands to gain more when all the regional powers that could stand up to it have been destroyed?
> Was this started as a resource war, or as a money-making scheme, or as a distraction from the Epstein files, or just because DJT developed actual old age dementia after purging anyone who might say 'no'?
Or because America is filled with demented cultists who think a two thousand year old property dispute is the key to triggering the Apocalypse so they can all be whisked away to paradise.
It's not a 2,000 year old dispute. Zionism began in around 1900. It was spearheaded until recently by "secular" Jews, who were borderline atheist. The Jewish religious texts themselves make wishing for a "return to Zion and Jerusalem" sound like wishing for a utopia or world peace. It pretty much reads like a metaphor, not like a political programme. Finally, most highly devout Jews were strongly opposed to Zionism, at least until after WW2.
That comment accurately described what American evangelicals believe.
American evangelicals don't care about 1900, differences between secular and religious Jews or their disputes. They don't care at all. They actually agree with a lot of what loosing side of WWII said and thought. And they in fact do believe the end of times prophecy and their duty to speed it up.
If you are unaware of that, maybe you should not be so arrogant when comment on politics. Because the radical American religious leaders are literally talking to the troops now as minister of war is their disciple.
There's something darkly funny about the reality being so demented that just describing it on HN gathers downvotes because it objectively sounds so awful.
The really crazy thing is just how few death cultists it really takes. The smallest minority of them have been busy radicalizing teenagers and biding their time for the past 20 years and this is what it’s come to.
It's so bizarre how OP was downvoted. It's a truth. History repeats itself. It's not the first war. It's not the last war. Maybe his (or her) tirade on capitalism annoyed the HN downvoting shoggoth.
> Was this started as a resource war, or as a money-making scheme, or as a distraction from the Epstein files, or just because DJT developed actual old age dementia after purging anyone who might say 'no'?
I don’t think we should look too far for reasons. He got all excited with the adventure in Venezuela and wanted to do it again, but with bombs and his pal Bibi. He’s itching to do the same thing to Cuba, and he’s not subtle about it.
> Was this started as a resource war, or as a money-making scheme, or as a distraction from the Epstein files, or just because DJT developed actual old age dementia after purging anyone who might say 'no'?
We won't know until everyone publishes their memoirs. I imagine absurd reasoning is entirely on the table. Given the administration's blind luck with its raid on Venezuela it assumed that scaling up the same plan would function, without realising how fortunate it was the first time. Reminiscient of Blair and Kosovo leading to hubris on Iraq.
I think they were extremely fortunate that their complex plan actually went off without a hitch. Its quite a lot of moving parts and hoping that certain people will react in certain ways.
> Maybe US also had people on the inside in Iran, but killed them by accident on the first strike with the "precision bombings".
Yeah but no. Iran isn't Venezuela by a long shot, extremely different properties all round. Its hubris to think what worked out well in one case would apply to a completely different one on the other side of the world.
The way this reads. I thought the analogy was "i'm frequently in a hot tub with dudes, with different names, the faces change, but i'm still in this hot tub with another set of dudes"
Honestly, it's all clickbait in the end. 'Real' investors are still quietly just plugging their weekly contribution into their 401k week after week without even remembering it.
Edit: He withdrew this morning and is running for the GOP chair now.
Bobert is quiet these days but I'm sure she'll ramp up after her primary closes.
The various school boards are perennial sources of my idiocy. My (former) board would go into public meetings and just openly and freely admit to crimes.
The county commissioners in DougCo recently decided to fine the victims of shoplifting from r not reporting it. No, you didn't read that wrong.
So, in summary, the GOP and many, but not all, of their state level membership aren't really sending their best these days.
A late uncle of mine did his thesis at Arizona on the practical limitations of interstellar travel.
The TLDR of it is that teenagers suck.
They assumed the physics of those days (mostly unchanged) and no faster than light travel [0] and that you can't reasonably cryo-sleep a human or grow them on site[1].
From that, you follow the logic and if you want to run a ship out to some star, it's going to take a long ass time. So much so that you have to have kids, a 'generation' ship. And that's where the trouble starts. Because teenagers are going to teenager, they just will not trust you when you say that the outside of their very little world is deadly. And then when you get there, it's going to take a lot of convincing to reprogram them to jump out and start colonizing.
The only solution is to build a really big spaceship. He reasoned that it's usable surface area needed to be about that of Japan [2]. So you get to a Stanford Torus or the like. That's when you can finally 'trust' that the people living on this thing wont blow up halfway there and can remain 'stable' enough over the (possibly) millennia of travel.
The issue, of course, is that you'd just build all these things for use in the Sol system anyway - why bother traveling?
Something something new lands something exploration something.
Okay, so, like, the end result is that putting human on a new planet in another system is just not happening when you really take a look. That was the essential conclusion to the thesis.
It's too hard, teenagers suck too much, and the 'cheaper' alternatives are too good.
[0] He made a great point that you should not assume that our modern understanding of physics should remain the same when doing really long term calculations like this. We have advanced so much in our knowledge and likely the understandings of other fields will compound much faster in the future.
[1] Same for biology, but they had to start somewhere.
[2] this assumption is a bit much for me even today, but the steps he takes are sound. You can argue them down a lot though, I feel.
Why would you want to even live on Mars? You have to essentially live in a very small pressure bunker at some rad-safe depth. Doing so for a little while would be fun and exciting, sure. Homesteading that life? Every one of your kids would opt to leave (if possible) the second they got a chance.
It was a cheaters website and you could pay to send messages to other cheaters, I think that was the business model at least.
Anyways, since the userbase was like 99.99% male, there just were not the numbers to talk with others. So, they just side stepped it and has very crummy chatbots that you would pay like $1 per message to talk with. (this was well before AI LLMs, think AOL bots from the naughts). Thing was, just like with the 'Nigerian Prince' scams, the worse the bot, the better the john.
It all got exposed a while back, but for me, that was the real Turing test - take people and see if they pay real actual money to talk with bots. Turns out, yes, if couched correctly (...like selling ice to Eskimos, just call it French ice).
So, I'm not sure that LLMs are going to unveil a wave of scams. Likely it will be a bit higher, of course, but the low hanging fruit is lucrative and there is enough of it to go around, and that's been true since really forever.
It's like outrunning a bear, you don't actually have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than the poor sop next to you. Same goes for the bear, there is plenty of prey if you just do the little amount of exercise.
A good 'Service Writer' (the term you use for this job) isn't cheap and typically aren't outsourced. Usually because your (local) competition is going to be using them too. And also because customers aren't going to trust a person that is writing service for multiple shops.
That said, a good service writer is worth their weight in gold. Also, they are typically going to be the person you end up selling the business to when you retire. Most mechanics aren't good enough at the business side of things to actually buy, but service writers are.
Generally, by whether they know what’s going on at the shop. Usually if I’m calling on the phone, it’s for a specific answer that’s not gettable through a computer.
“Hey can you look out and see if Joe’s almost done with the blue Chrysler?” is an easy ask for the phone answerer at my local Joe’s shop (it’s his wife, and as a bonus she’ll also holler at him or his crew to hurry up because @alwa is waiting on it).
Contrast with the grant-funded pharmacy I use. Some management type suggested they could deal with their insane level of overwork by automating away the phones to a hostile and labyrinthine network of IVRs. Oh, it has “AI,” but only to force choices between forks in decisions trees corresponding to questions I didn’t have—and every path still eventually ends in “this voice mailbox is full, goodbye.”
After literal hours of my life trying to wrestle their IVRs into helping—I do sympathize with their workload and don’t want to be a special snowflake—I now drive 30 minutes to ask questions face to face.
In general I’ve maxed out what’s discoverable by automated means before I call. So a call center is both useless and insulting.
Responsible (directly or indirectly) for quite a few of them, mostly oldish and wheezy; I’m not myself mechanical; and we use the shop mostly for routine maintenance—rotate the tires every few thousand miles, swap the brake pads, deal with the oil changes/fluids/filters, etc.
Partly as a preventative measure: we trust them. In the rare cases when they find something, it’s real. As a consequence we get ahead of brewing problems.
Plus loyalty, to some extent; we try to throw work their way when we can, even if we probably could handle it ourselves. The relationship between our families goes back a good 60 years by now.
Fully grant that my situation is unlikely to be representative. And no shade toward OP—it sounds like a cool project thoughtfully done, and a real improvement over the status quo for her relative!
Plus, maybe the customer would prefer to support a business that invests in and employs from the local community, even if it costs a little more. Or they see it as a quality signal. If I call a plumber who outsourced their reception to a call center to save a few bucks, I'm starting to think, "What else is he willing to do to save a few bucks?"
Would redirecting them to a website where they can go through a guided intake and get some confirmation of a callback? A well designed UI that allows them to ID their vehicle (make/model/year) and the issue they're having? HTML5 has decent speech to text out of the gate and they can just talk it out.
Obviously that process could happen purely via voice but I think there's not as much love for walking through forms in a phone call.
If Joe has a PC in the shop with a tailored UI, he could get pings of pending requests and when he comes up for air, update the intake (via voice to minimize greasy hands) and initiate a call back then and there?
Related - Monro Muffler Brake apparently switched to an offshore call center model to handle scheduling every single auto shop location. I hear nothing but complaints from both fellow customers as well as the shop managers themselves about their local phone number being ripped away from them and handed off to a call center to try to schedule vehicle service from thousands of miles away.
You can talk to the foremost mango growers on cultivating mango trees and learn everything there is to know about making mangoes. You can consult with the best chefs about how to make the best mango dishes and desserts and learn the absolute best way to prepare and eat mangoes. You can learn from the masters of how to paint a mango so lifelike that you'd think the painting was real. Etc. You can learn and truly master everything surrounding the act of eating a mango.
But until you sink your teeth into a mango and actually eat it, you've no idea what you're talking about.
So, until you actually have the kid, all this worrying is for naught.
You will be just fine, the kid will be just fine (they have their own agency too, you know), the world will keep turning and you have the agency to put a person in it and teach them what they need to know.
The real question is if you want to eat a mango or not.
Before kids, you take a look around a diner or a store or a playground and you see little ones happily eating some chips or browsing the foodstuffs or playing on a slide.
You think that this is what kids are like. They sit there, they walk a little, they giggle on the playground, they look cute as all get out, etc.
Then you have kids and you know.
You know.
Those kids sitting there in the booth sipping on their milk quietly while mom and dad happily eat their lunch? Those are the top 5% most calm kids out there. The other 95% of kids are with their adults screaming and throwing fits and covered in who knows what.
Life lied to you. It did it directly to your face, unashamed. The bias is real.
That's not the impression I hear from my many intentionally childless friends. They take the negative behavior - the screaming, tantrums, chaos - as the norm.
It sounds like you always wanted kids. I don't say this to criticize - it's great that those who want to start families do so - but I don't think your experience is universal.
> only the more well behaved kids are going out in public.
How would that work? Do you think they have life-long domiciliary arrest? All children need to go to school or like to occasionally walk or go to a shop.
The scene in the book is just so familiar to the lines in Ukraine these days, nearly a hundred years later. Instead of spotter planes near the dawn of aviation, we have satellites and drones (similarly quite new in the role). Instead of just shells and fuzing experts, we have FPV drones and much more sophisticated shells. Instead of buddies from the same towns all huddled together in cold muddy holes, we have deracinated units spread far and wide in laying in fear of thermal imaging. This results in a no mans land again, but a dozen kilometers wide instead of a few hundred meters wide, and somehow more psychologically damaging.
My point is that absent any tech that will miraculously be invented and deployed widely in the new few weeks, the Iran war, if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today, which is somehow a worse version of trench warfare.
Even casual Victoria II players know that WW1 is essentially the final boss of the game. And the 'lesson' of Vicky II is essentialy: Do not fight WW1, it ruins Everything.
To be clear: The US is choosing to fight a worse version of WW1 without even a stated (or likely even known) condition of victory. We're about to send many thousands boys to suffer and die for not 'literally nothing', but actually literally nothing.
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