> Ok, I did win. Do I get cheaper gasoline now?

Yes, in 10 years. Because even though gas prices go up hour by hour they take years to ever so slowly drift down.

That guy is dead or dying. He’s not in control of anything. There’s been no audio or video of him since the opening strike.

Whoever is in charge doesn't matter, I can guarantee you they're not in a more favorable mood than 4 weeks ago. They also killed one of only rational diplomatic Iranian officials, during active negociations, if you want to make it clear negociating with the US is useless that's exactly what you'd do

When was the last time the NATO navy do anything anyway? They’d just be sitting ducks and probably not even know which directions to point what pointless weapons they have.

Being sitting ducks is the point.

The underlying reason is too many people will readily believe that if someone died for something it means it's worth fighting for, and this has been abused by strategists for a very long time.

Being empathetic to someone who wants to kill you does not make you safer. How ridiculous.

It’s trivial for either the US or Israel to do that with one phone call (completely destroy infrastructure on kharg island and the gas fields, this yields an Iranian failed state). The fact it hasn’t happened proves you wrong.

The only reason that has not happened is because the West needs that oil to flow.

Idk, I don’t think Europe has the capacity to do anything except launch their nukes. If missiles started falling on London they’d run to the UN and start writing letters. It would take months for NATO to start having planning meetings to figure out how to plan the response. I feel like the only military capability is maybe the SAS and nukes. There’s nothing in between.

That's ridiculous, but Europe has no reason to intervene in this craze. If attacked, things would change. Europe has participated in previous wars like Irak or Afghanistan, why wouldn't we be able to act now?

To be fair Trump admins most optimistic timeline was “4-6 weeks maybe longer”. We’re at the end of week 3.

I recall it was 12 days, or 4 weeks. Perhaps I missed an early prediction from the state that it could be 4 to 6 weeks.

The 12 days, and 2 weeks is what I recall most. But reality is what we want to see and hear. Some would say we are at week 4. Some that we are ending week 3.

Reason would be to accept we are taken for fools anyway. Or worse, run by fools.

The thing is Iran has long promised their max range was 2k Km and so defensive only. This shows that was a lie.

All countries publicly understate the max range that their missiles can go. This is generally understood in the defense community.

What's the point? Naively one would think it is the opposite.

I heard the same about the number and location of French nuclear war heads, or their exact red lines. If you tell the enemy your limit they're gonna sit exactly on it.

To surprise your ennemy. I've heard recently that they tune military hardware differently in peace than in war, e.g. radar signals frequency.

there are no friends at the global scale just alliances. If Europe doesn't want to help then there's no forcing them to. Conversely, if the US manages to get the strait open and oil flowing there's no stopping them from requiring Europe to pay a little extra for the trouble. Fair or not, who's going to stop the other side? You can't exactly ask to speak to the manager.

It's exactly this kind of transactional approach that is reducing the US's influence on its allies in the first place.

If the USA manages to get the strait open and oil flowing, then allies might be satisfied with the harms the USA caused, even if there is no apology, much less restitution. At that point, we will be back to the status quo.

If, at that point, the USA perpetrates any sort of further economic attacks on allies, then of course they will respond appropriately.

> We're about to pull the rug underneath all knowledge workers. This will disrupt wage earners lives. This will disrupt the economy.

to tie back to the actually article, if you believe a rug pull is imminent then you got to get off the rug. Idk, you have to make a decision because we're certainly at a fork in the road. There's no guarantee waiting will result in a better outcome nor one saying it will be a worse outcome. There's going to be winners and losers always and lot of it is really just luck in timing. I guess, in reality, the careers we've built come down to a flip of a coin; stay on the rug, get off the rug.

/i'm thinking of buying a welding truck and getting in to that, then hire a welder and rinse repeat until i have a welding business. There's plenty of pipe fence in my neck of the woods and i see "welder wanted" all over the place so there's opportuntiy too.

Good luck to you and your welding business. Personally I'm getting to a point where I'm just "too old" (and grumpy) to start over, so I guess for me it's going to be a retirement to some LOCO that I can afford.