What I find interesting is that while the actions of the US have been incredibly foolish and poorly thought through, Iran’s ability to make things hurt is very much a sword that cuts both ways.
There is now very strong incentive to develop alternatives that bypass what Iran can effect, which is exactly what’s happening. It will take a while for the infrastructure to come online, but as the months and eventually years go by, Iran will find its biggest lever for control rapidly diminishing even if the war was stopped now. Likewise, the move to EV’s will likely accelerate.
Americans have proven passive enough that I don’t expect political/military change unless the democrats pull their head out of their ass long enough to win the 2026 November elections and start impeaching and prosecuting the trump regime.
"There is now very strong incentive to develop alternatives that bypass what Iran can effect, which is exactly what’s happening. It will take a while for the infrastructure to come online, but as the months and eventually years go by, Iran will find its biggest lever for control rapidly diminishing even if the war was stopped now. Likewise, the move to EV’s will likely accelerate."
I am old enough to have lived through the oil shocks in New Zealand. It got so bad the government rolled out an alternative fuel system network of compressed natural gas. Many fuel stations had installed the tanks and pumps and many cars were converted to it. NZ has gas deposits enough to meet all its own demands.
As soon as the oil shock was over it was all ripped out and we all went back to oil.
It's not that poorly thought out if you look at it from the right perspective. Iran is the biggest enemy of Israel, and Iran has been significantly weakened. Israel was wiling to roll the dice on regime change in Iran as long as someone else was doing most of the fighting.
The U.S. was a power in decline before the Iran war, and the U.S. population was turning against Israel anyhow, so it made sense to get America to give it one last hurrah before they became useless to Israel.
It will take _many_ years for alternatives to come online in the US and most other places. So much of the west is unable to execute on any kind of large project. In addition, in the US, the current administration has an irrational opposition to the main cost-effective alternatives.
What if I told you that manipulating the oil futures market was a foolproof way to make themselves filthy rich? Would you still think that opposition was irrational?
Well you see, it has to implement IStateful and IBooleanExpression, and both of those involve virtual methods so you have a vtbl pointer as well.
So that's 64+1 bits right there.
Then you also have the address-alignment requirements for that vtbl pointer, so practically speaking were talking 128 bits.
Or 80 bits of you're rolling dirty and say "screw it" to that alignment assumption.
Now if your on x86-64 and want to smuggle that bit value into the unused part of that "64" bit vtbl pointer, you could probably bring it down to just 64 bits overall I guess. Well probably want to let the compiler know about that though, before anyone tries actually using that vtbl pointer.
But, if we also need to make this accessible to Python, then...
Not the military stuff but Arab tribal society, read "The First Muslim" by Lesley Hazleton, about Arab society around the year 600. It's an absolute eye-opener.
AoW is one of the most important historical treatises, it's not just 'something that was written in history', maybe the oldest true 'textbooks' of objective knowledge, and also realpolitik. Also there's hints of metaphysics in there, in a way. It absolutely stands up today.
The very first work of the Western Cannon: Trojan Horse.
Information / espionage and deception has made most of history; Hannibal, Caesar, Alexander etc.
A fun exercise would be to look at battles of history from the lens of information warfare and deception, and contemplate the outcome without it.
To be fair, modern "English" is a nebulous smorgasbord of words from a lot of different languages. I'm sure we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms.
> we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms
Not really, because every synonym imparts a slightly different meaning, usually perceptable only to native speakers. That's why they persist, because they are useful even if not strictly necessary.
I recall a team working on machine translation starting by translating English into a simpler form before translating that into the target languages. This was a couple of decades ago. Perhaps not a new idea even then.
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