To me this is like the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo during WWII. The tactical result isn't important, the range of the strike is, and that it happened at all. Japan thought it was immune from air attack on the home islands in 1942, and the raid shocked them.
Iran is showing the world (especially Europe), that it's more vulnerable than it thinks. Europe has more skin in the game than just the price of oil and nitrogen. Also think about what would happen if Iran is able to recreate something like the Cuban missile crisis now that we've moved a bunch of our military assets to the middle east.
Strategically, it seems like a dumb move. Right now, Congress is unlikely to approve Trump’s request for $200B to fund the war effort. But if Americans can be convinced that Iran could somehow hit American cities, they would call their members of Congress in a heartbeat and that money would presumably flow without interruption.
Why time the medium range missiles now? It seems like yet another own-goal for this desperate and poorly coordinated regime.
I can't speak for Iran, but it may be a warning against attempting to land troops on Kharg Island. They're showing that they've been "nice" so far, but they have escalation paths America may not have considered. I think most people thought they were limited to short range missile strikes.
They just don't need to be convinced of anything. It's not like normal people have a say in this, just a few leaders doing what they want. A few fake news stories saying that there's so much support.
Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc.
It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.
That’s a fair point, but a combination of “fake it ‘til you make it” together with extracting massive “compensation” before you actually make it amounts to pretty much the same thing.
He has been selling a lot of Tesla stocks through the life of the company (not that it matters to him as other shareholders are giving him load of free shares all the time).
It's not the usual type of 'dump', but he will probably again request massive bonus or threaten to leave. And his statements are the key for pumping part.
So is your issue here that a CEO makes public claims if his company that may be predictions or aspirations for the future, then sells shares he owns in the company to buy another company?
Fair enough. I may just be cynical enough to assume CEOs are always talking out of their ass with regards to the future, but I do understand if people would rather things not work this way.
My evidence is that in America people sue for these things left and right all the time. It's a popular pastime for lawyers to get a class action lawsuit for securities fraud together. But as far as I can tell, Musk / Tesla weren't convicted of these things in conjunction with the sale of Tesla stock to buy Twitter.
There is a meme for this kind of move. It's pump and dump because it isn't worth what the underlying assets are worth and because there is a sale. Whether people sue for it and whether or not they were convicted is immaterial.
Agreed. Anyone with a modicum of common sense knew this was the plan all along. It's not like it was hard to find people saying this before the election.
It's not that great even if you have money. Unless you're talking about the type of money needed to pay for all of your treatments out of pocket, and give you access to special private care most people don't even know exists.
My experience has been: if you have an immediate health issue with an obvious solution, you can get pretty good care. Say if you have a broken arm, gun shot wound, heart attack, stroke, etc. Anything uncommon, or that requires ongoing care, is a life sucking nightmare.
I'll give some examples from my own life. I live outside a major metropolitan area. A relative was visiting me and had a stroke in my living room. I called 911, and an ambulance appeared 5 minutes later, in 25 minutes they were in a hospital with a telemedicine link to a stroke expert. The expert said they needed to be brought to a downtown hospital so they were sent there by helicopter. One of the two best neurosurgeons in the city performed an endoscopic removal of the clot and saved their life.
Contrast this with a different relation who struggles with chronic pain and spine problems and has spent the last 20 years bouncing around various doctors, battling insurance companies, pharmacies, waiting to be seen, waiting endlessly for specialists, tests, and having to keep track of all of their information themselves because the system is fragmented and every office wants a complete restatement to their medical history.
LLMs seem better suited to help with the Tower of Babel we've created for ourselves: aws commands, Terraform modules, Java libraries, Javascript/React, obscure shell commands, etc.
`trash` is good to know, thanks! I'd been doing: "tell app \"Finder\" to move {%s} to trash" where %s is a comma separated list of "the POSIX file <path-to-file>".
the people with all the firepower won't let you buy your own private military (or develop your own weapons systems without being under their control). The end-of-line power (violence) is a closely guarded monopoly.
But, on the flip side, coercive power cannot stand on its own without money too. The CCP's Politburo know beyond a doubt that they have coercive power over billionaires like Jack Ma, but they try to accommodate these entrepreneurs who help catalyze economic growth & bring the state more foreign revenue/wealth to fund its coercive machine.
America's elected leaders also have power to punish & bring oligarchs to book legally, but they mostly interact symbiotically, exchanging campaign contributions and board seats for preferential treatment, favorable policy, etc.
Putin can order any out-of-line oligarch to be disposed of, but the economic & coercive arms of the Russian State still see themselves as two sides of the same coin.
So, yes: coercive power can still make billionaires face the wall (Russian revolution, etc.) but they mostly prefer to work together. Money and power are a continuum like spacetime.
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