This is why my programs don’t come with documentation. If you want to use them, the best I can do is a messy script that “works for me”.

The dolphin was diagnosed only a few weeks ago, but it died over two years ago in March 2022.

If I recall correctly, when trade is considered to be zero-sum, the net exporter gains and the net importer loses. Therefore if what’s bad for Israel is what’s good for Turkey and vice versa, this is worse for Turkey.

Maybe I’m wrong - I wasn’t very good at macroeconomics.

It sounds like it’s worse for Turkey than for Israel.

The summoning circle is broken! You’re free!

I’m not saying that the US will attack Iran - I’m saying that the US will send ships to patrol the waters where this happened. There won’t be violence unless Iran messes with them, but I don’t see what Iran has to gain either from capturing a single freighter or from an increased buildup of American forces in the region.

I think it’s the other way around - the US is having a hard time suppressing the Houthis because there’s nothing in Yemen that’s worth blowing up other than the missile launchers themselves, which are mobile and easy to hide. Iran, on the other hand, has lots of valuable infrastructure.

This move keeps the U.S. out of the conflict

I’m not sure why you think so. The US usually treats freedom of the seas as a pretty big deal. I don’t think that there will be violent retaliation solely for seizing this ship, but I do expect American naval patrols in the region with authorization to fire on Iranians that try something like this again.

Strong black tea with a wedge of lemon (but I messed up my teeth so now lemon would make them very sensitive).

Did you know that turtles scream when they, uh, copulate? Imagine how loud a dinosaur would have been.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you, although I think Iran has a lot more ambition to expand its sphere of influence than the other Middle Eastern theocracies do and this would naturally bring it into conflict with the USA even if there wasn’t a historic enmity between the two countries. (Consider Russia as an example of a country that the USA had no particular hostility towards, despite the Cold War, but now actively opposes due to its ambitions.)

As the article states, a war with Iran would not be good for anyone but it would be worse for Iran than for the USA. If the USA and Iran were purely rational agents, the USA would push back against Iranian influence and Iran would back down - its options would be to lose without a fight or to lose even more if it fought a war.

Of course in the real world rulers are often irrational, or more concerned about domestic affairs than foreign ones. (Maybe it’s better to rule an Iran battered by war than to be overthrown in an Iran that passively accepts containment.) Even rational rulers can miscalculate or underestimate their enemies.

Still, I think much of Iran’s recent success in growing its influence is due to a lack of political will in the USA for any sort of foreign intervention after Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than to a deliberate decision that allowing Iran to expand its influence is in America’s best interests.

I don’t know about Oregon, but I see how people ride their e-bikes here in NYC and it makes me suspect that most e-bike/car collisions are the e-bike’s fault.

This time is different. If AI were to remain what it is today, the article would be correct, but AI won’t. It’s a fundamentally new kind of technology, unlike anything else that has ever been created by humans. It only seems like more of the same to some people because it’s so very new and primitive compared to what it will be soon. This won’t be humans losing their jobs, this will be humanity losing its job. There will be plenty of new industries created but they will be run by AI for AI.

With that said, it won’t necessarily be bad. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

That was the guy responsible for setting up Iran’s network of proxies. I’d say we didn’t blow him up early enough.

No, but I’m not paid hourly - if I sit around idle, I’m generally just wasting my own time.

From the article:

Both the “idle time”, which indicates a period of scanner downtime of ten minutes or more, and the “latency under ten minutes”, which tracks scanner interruptions between one and ten minutes are deemed illegal by the CNIL when it comes to data processing. The CNIL is using the GDPR as the legal basis of the case.

Amazon has also implemented a “stow machine gun” indicator to prevent mistakes. It signals an error if you scan an item less than 1.25 seconds after scanning the previous item. It sounds like a way to prevent double-scanning mistakes. But that’s a GDPR issue too, according to the CNIL.

I think these all seem like entirely reasonable things for Amazon to track.

That’s not what it means to breach an account…

I don’t think it’s technically correct to say that the US armed ISIS; ISIS seized weapons that the US provided to Iraq.

Israel does a pretty good job of opposing Iran, and we can be confident that weapons provided to Israel aren’t going to be used against the US. I think it’s likely that the Houthis are acting up now not because they’re provoked by Israel but because Israel is preoccupied with something else.

As for Saddam Hussein… He did a very good job of opposing Iran. The threat of eight years of war and hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers dead would be a very effective stick if we still had access to it. It’s ironic that the weak, pro-Iran government that is the result of US intervention in Iraq seems like it’s worse for US interests than Saddam was.

I wonder if treating the Houthis as Iranian agents and retaliating against Iranian assets directly would be more effective than playing whack-a-mole against these missile launchers without addressing the source of the problem. I assume Biden’s advisors are wondering the same thing, but it’s hard to know where the line between deterrence and escalation is…

Iran has enemies. Most of them are even worse than the Iranians, but maybe the thing to do is to find some sympathetic group, arm them, and let them take the heat, just like Iran is doing with the Houthis…