"Without ability to manufacture missiles, Iran would be unable coerce people to buy into it's Hormuz transit toll system, and the strait would reopen."
You don't need missiles to keep Hormuz closed. Cheap drones, naval mines and such are enough, and those don't require that much production capabilities, especially if you get some help from Russia. It's enough to hit a ship every now and then, which keeps the insurers away.
Even without any infrastructure IRGC could wage a guerrilla war for a long time.
In an industrial collapse scenario people in Iran, including IRGC, might have something more urgent than antagonizing ships. Things like subsistence farming.
That's not something I would cheer for. For what it's worth, this did not Germany, Japan, North Korea or Vietnam to collapse. What makes this time different?
Iran is already teetering on the brink of collapse, the country is suffering from a decade-long economic crisis, and massive riots nearly tore apart the country earlier this year.
It is highly urban country, where 75% of people live in modern cities. Cities cannot survive without a constant influx of food and water, both of which require electricity and fuel to be delivered. In the previous conflicts you mentioned over 50 years ago, Japan, North Korea and Vietnam had large rural populations that were less affected by access to electricity and fuel.
Also, consider how much of modern life now relies on vehicles and computers, which would be disrupted immediately if this conflict continues.
Regarding Germany, the allies did not focus on destroying German electrical infrastructure, they actually didn't consider it as a priority target. However, post-war analysis determined that if they performed a targeted bombing campaign on Germany's electrical generation, it would have significantly hampered Germany's industrial capacity, and pushed the war to a close months sooner.
> Iran is already teetering on the brink of collapse
"We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down"
- Adolf Hitler about invading the Soviet Union.
Again, I must reiterate my point: terror bombing has never ended a war. Post-war analysis also confirms that despite a very costly strategic bombing campaign, Germany tripled its production. Things fell apart when they lost men, ground, harvests and alloy mines to the Red Army. The war ended with the Soviets in Berlin, firing howitzers at government headquarters with open sights.
Perhaps the strategy that failed every single time so far will work if we ramp up the cruelty a few notches, but that's not a possibility I am excited about.
Cuba can barely keep electricity on amid fuel shortages and ancient infrastructure. They are in no position to fight a war, and don't really have a strong ideological force like IRGC in Iran. The ruling elites are way more likely to make a deal that allows them to keep their heads.
The "fuel shortages" are caused by the blockade started by USA a few months ago, which has also threatened with an actual unprovoked attack against Cuba.
Even just the blockade cannot be considered as anything else but an act of war, even if, as usual, USA does not declare the wars it starts.
In the past, USA at least made attempts to appear that it follows the international laws, but today it makes great efforts to perfectly match the stereotype of the lawless "Imperialist Americans" that was used in the past in the propaganda of the former communist countries.
Any act of war that Cuba would ever do against USA would be perfectly justified by the already done actions of USA, which make random Cubans suffer from serious shortages.
I guess that's how it is in America. If you are lucky enough to live in the Nordics, you pay far, far less, sometimes nothing at all. I don't think anywhere near 3000 a month for 3 kids is normal in most of other EU either.
So, over here car seats may be a much bigger factor than daycare costs.
It's free for over-3s in Scotland, and while I can't quite remember what it cost for a 2-year-old, I know it was around the £500/month mark.
You could put two children through the local Montessori nursery for three grand a month, but frankly the parents (and children) there are a bit odd. Nice enough, just a bit odd.
I agree. Whenever I've tried jumping into NodeJS world, I quickly get overwhelmed by the lack of obvious "right" solutions to common problems. There's no way to know which of the dozens of ORM's, auth libraries or whatever will be still around 10 years from now. With Java & Spring the choice is always obvious.
Of course there are "batteries included" frameworks for NodeJS too, but they all seem to be unstable compared to Spring Boot.
I tend to defer auth to JWT token usage... you have a properly RSA signed token against a valid public key, you're in.
In terms of ORMs, I actually avoid them... I like data adapters that make writing general SQL queries easier... for C# I tend to use Dapper... for JS/TS, I'll use a template string interpreter shim over the database adapter that returns Enumerable<T>?... very similar to my usage of Dapper.
Just about the simplest things that I can do to get things going, and generally in the simplest path forward. Today, generally speaking, hono, zod, openapi with a bit of hand-wiring as described above. At least for the backend, services, etc. With open-api configured, I can generate client adapters and relatively easily integrate with an OAuth provider of my choice (often AD/Entra in practice).
I will also usually create a self-signing JWT auth for dev/testing to make it easier to be "anyone" in any role for testing... where the release application is more restricted.
I believe in this case regulation would work just fine. My old Macbook Pro from 2012 was just as solid and high quality as the newest models, but much more repairable. It's possible to create repairable devices without compromising much in other areas.
US car culture has been dead for a long time, at least internationally. People like big American cars made in 50s - 70s for their looks, but since then all I can think of are oversized pickups, Nascar and Tesla which is getting eaten alive by Chinese competitors.
That is unfortunately not the case - see all the ridiculous ginormous American pickup trucks invading Europe as a "look at me, I'm rich" or "look at me I'm (local equivalent to) MAGA" signifiers.
The C8 is great, The Hellcat, Demon, etc are kinda US specific (won't be great on the curvier roads in Europe) but still cool. Modification/Tuning is very alive and well due to lack of regulation in comparison to Europe or pretty much anywhere else..
Car culture is getting killed everywhere because safety and comfort by far outweigh fun in gov priorities but I'm literally considering the US because I'll be able to drive whatever I want. Good luck finding someone running nitrous on the street in Europe nowadays, stretched bikes, engine swaps, etc. It all comes with administrative fees, a lot is forbidden and even if your documents are in order you'll get in trouble because police officers are not qualified or incentivized to deal with severely modified vehicles.
Just cross the border to Sweden or Finland, and the share of EV's of all new cars drop from around 90 to something like 30-35%. The EV transition is going to take a while longer in most EU countries.
Of course something to note is the absolute number of cars sold, which has dropped dramatically at least here in Finland. Most people who are priced out of new EV market simply don't buy any new car at all, and the average age of cars is climbing fast. Either way, few people are looking for new ICE vehicles. No point buying outdated tech new, when the used car market has perfectly good ICE vehicles that perform just the same.
Don't you have private healthcare in the UK too, if you aren't satisfied with the NHS?
IMO universal healthcare is awesome as the final safety-net that provides critical care, no matter your financial or employment situation. Yet it doesn't need be the only option. If businesses or people with money want to pay more to get care faster from private sector, that's okay too. It's how the system works here in Finland.
Ditto Australia, hybrid public / private healthcare ...
* private is good for better rooms, more scenic views, personalised spa like service and near immediate access to non life essential procedures
* public keeps the majority of people alive and triages procedures, you can get overnight heart stent surgery for free if required, might have to wait a few months for non critical knee surgery.
Private healthcare exists in the interstices of the NHS. The gorilla in the room squishes everything else into the corners.
Safety nets would be great, but a net that arrives several days after you have already fallen to the ground is not very helpful. That is what rationing-by-queueing does. Maybe Finland is great - I believe you! Britain's system is not.
But where will office workers displaced by AI leave? Industrialization brought demand for factory work (and later grew service sector), but I can't see what new opportunities AI is creating. There are only so many service people AI billionaires need to employ.
No, you cannot ignore every argument by claiming someone else made it before. Make an actual response.
What new opportunities does the LLM create for the workers it may displace? What new opportunities did neural machine translation create for the workers it displaced?
In what way is a text-generation machine that dominates all computer use alike with the steam engine?
The steam engine powered new factories workers could slave away in, demanded coal that created mining towns. The LLM gives you a data centre. How many people does a data centre employ?
As models gain a deeper understanding of the physical world (e.g. Google world generator), I see nothing less than a new renaissance in our future.
Forget about data centers, all the little things will iteratively start getting a little better. Then one day we’ll look around and realize, “This place looks pretty good.”
Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away.
IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.
So many clothes are already shipped to poorer parts of africa that it ends up being essentially indistinguishable from a landfill.
There are more clothes produced worldwide than there are people to wear them. Shipping unwanted refuse to poor counties is treating them as a landfill and patting yourself on the back.
You don't need missiles to keep Hormuz closed. Cheap drones, naval mines and such are enough, and those don't require that much production capabilities, especially if you get some help from Russia. It's enough to hit a ship every now and then, which keeps the insurers away.
Even without any infrastructure IRGC could wage a guerrilla war for a long time.
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