larnmar

You could well be right, maybe Iran’s air defences are on a par with Syria’s.

I’ve suddenly realised something important — I’m commenting on important issues based on nothing but information gleaned from probably equally ignorant comments posted somewhere else. Why the heck am I doing this? I’m no expert on Iranian military capabilities.

Why do we all feel compelled to pollute the Internet with our ill-informed speculation on important issues?

I feel like I should just quit commenting on anything outside the narrow areas in which I’m a proper expert, and so should everyone else.

If casualties are zero, we can laugh it off as an impotent hissy fit by an incompetent adversary.

If casualties are non-zero, the President will be obliged to carry out his “52 targets” threat. This is probably the right move — don’t play tit-for-tat against a less powerful adversary, instead immediately escalate to a level they can’t possibly match.

Unfortunately Iran’s air defences are more potent than anyone the US has bombed recently, so we might be about to find out just how good US technology really is.

What happens next? I’m not sure. I can’t imagine the US committing to a ground invasion of Iran, but it should be possible with an air campaign to reduce Iran to the level of a 2000-era Iraq.

Edit: President Trump’s latest “all is well” tweet, and his intention to hold off on doing a briefing until tomorrow, seems to imply that US casualties were zero after all and that he’s chosen the “laugh it off” response, which is a great relief to me.

Counteranecdote: I made a fake account for work purposes (needed to look at certain things on Facebook that you can only see while logged in, and didn’t want to use my personal account) and it got deleted pretty quickly.

Is anyone aware of any compelling evidence that these fires were meaningfully worsened by climate change?

Pretty easy to get the “consent of the governed” when you kill anyone who comes close to expressing dissent.

I’m guessing you’re not an Uyghur?

Bushfires haven’t got any worse over the decades, but the writing about them sure as shit has.

Sure, in the same way that trying to build a ladder to the moon might eventually lead to inventing rocketry.

Money terrible spent, just another billion poured down the drain on inefficient renewable energy technologies that would have been much better spent developing better technologies.

For a billion dollars you could hire five hundred brilliant (or at least clever) scientists and pay then each $200K pa for ten years to work on promising technologies in photovoltaics, ranging from sexy stuff like multiple exciton generation to prosaic stuff like how to make silicon sheets cheaper.

If people choose to give their money to others, then that’s fine. The problem with society is that it is taken from us against our will.

What’s really odd is that this is an article at all.

In a world where billions of things happen every day, how does a garden-variety franchisee contract dispute in Japan become an article in the New York Times?