Oh fuck I finally get it, didnt realize it was the leguin book, thanks for explaining.

Yeah ok I was wondering about this—this seems much more possible, but I’m not sure if it would be enough to cover their retreat… but as you say, uranium extraction is almost certainly going to fail spectacularly.

Maybe if they went in and bagged khomeini, that would have symbolic power… but boy that wouldn’t improve US assets life span in the middle each much…

I thought I saw a post earlier about delta/seals and SF flight groups deploying in theatre, or en route, likely from marmite (the air focus)

It feels way more probable that they’re planning some sort of symbolic SF strike (maybe to “get the uranium”) and the marines and 82nd are being brought closer in to be there in case of emergency or QRF. The idea of bringing SF into Natanz, digging up uranium (if it’s even there, perhaps they can remote sense somehow) and then exfilling seems hardly plausible, but I just cant think of a meaningful thing they can do with a group like that that would give them a good symbolic reason to claim “victory” and slink away beyond something like this.

Storming either of those islands has never made much sense to me—the fuck do you do once you’ve taken it? you’ll be getting hit with everything nonstop and it doesn’t feel like it would meaningfully interdict Iran’s ability to exert control over the strait.

Basically they can’t control the strait with SF insertions, nor can they topple Iran’s govt and make the country as a whole cease its strikes against the aggressors. They could do a highly symbolic and possibly disastrous thing that will let them claim they have achieved their goal (granted they’ve stated 30 different ones) and retreat with face. Of course it would really be the empire losing and being kicked out of the Middle East mostly, but this would provide some cover for that wound. It’s meaningless though, they enriched uranium once they can certainly do it again and there’s almost no chance they’d actually get any of it. Not to mention unless it’s completely faked, ie they drop some bombsand have SF beardos pretend to dig something up in a remote part of Jordan, it feels like there’s almost no way it would work out.

Anyway basically I can’t really imagine what they’re thinking to do, because none of it makes much sense to me militarily, but also, that doesn’t seem to be a criteria for them when deciding go/no go on ideas so who knows…

I agree, but I wonder if that’s the analysts input there or if that’s being drawn from CNN or Bloomberg sim breakdowns?

At this point, they should only report something he says if it actually weirdly turns out to be a true statement—like since 99% of his statements are lies and all over the place, the only newsworthy event would be when he told the truth.

This might weirdly be one of the only examples of a service that looses more money the more people actually use it. Err scratch that, probably half of the tech services are losers I guess, but this is an extreme example of a loser haha.

Honestly I was confused about this as well—the zombie or “dead tanker” thing was what threw me off. Maybe they’re trying to… I dunno hide who they are from the west? Not sure how that would help, but anyway I think the upshot is that a bunch of tankers have chosen to pay the fee/sell in yuan and are not US affiliated?

Also forgot to add, they seem to be targeting residential hardware here, and I’m sure there have been security issues with those, but IIRC a lot of that salt typhoon stuff was entering through large scale telco infrastructure that was running old hardware/non updated systems. Could be misremembering though, been a moment since I was reading about that.

Win-win for the telcos/major ISPs I’d imagine—this will further entrench exploitive rent-hardware schemes they already love to do, and you as a consumer will have less (possibly none) options to avoid, and definitely less control over your home networks. I still can’t quite believe it, feels like something that would need to be phased in over time, but then again I couldn’t believe they banned new DJI drones either…

It makes my stomach turn how they all treat this kind of outcome as good and inevitable.

Yeah you nailed it on the battery/storage—fossil fuels are transportable, electrification needs infrastructure to deliver or comparable ways of making it transportable. To add to your point with a lesser importance point, the energy grids in most countries are designed to deliver for existing loads—lights, appliances, some building conditioning, etc. but if you want to take substantial portions of the energy currently delivered by fossil fuels out of your energy makeup, you need to account for that same energy flow in the Grid. In most cases the grid can’t handle that capacity of flow, and also doesn’t have the generation. Which is why we’ve seen the Chinese so impressively scale up their national grid in ways that seem unimaginable in the western world.

There is some skepticism that we have enough fossil fuels and key inputs like copper to actually make that switch—because for the moment you still have to use fossil fuels in the extraction of materials and manufacture of renewables, and the cost of that rises inexorably as we exhaust the easiest to access energy sources. Or rather, there might be enough fuel and material physically in existence, but we will run out of economic ability before we can access it, barring major energy paradigm shifts that currently don’t exist.

Yeah this seems a likely outcome. Hopefully this (Iran/hormuz) goes so bad for them that they literally just do not have enough political currency to do it though.

Entirely possible at this point.

I saw someone else in here saying that since Iran won’t talk to him, he’s just moved on to talking to imaginary Iranians, and will simply will it into reality via force of will.

It lists the three conical sections plus the rim base. There are triconic warheads that don’t have fins also.

I would add-I don’t implicitly trust it, but I try to only use this type of query with web search—ie I want it synopsize some web links based on the context of the request and often since actual internet search is so garbage it tends to average out.

I’m not claiming it’s accurate though—I haven’t independently corroborated it. That’s why I disclaimed it as an AI output.

No, that’s because I spelled it MERV when asking the question, you’ll note it corrects me.

So I hear you about slop, but in this case the slop was me and it caught it. I suppose it should have further corrected me though to mention the acronym was MIRV.

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Yeah I agree with what you say, that was an interesting good episode (can’t tell if pape is really full of himself or autistic, he’s got a weird communication style, but his info is quite good and he definitely knows this subject area backwards and forwards). And actually the “trump owns the decision” take was from the most recent prestige episode, with the former state dept person whose name I can’t recall off the top of my head.

I still think this all might support the “it’s part of the plan” idea in that the plan is so baked into the environment that they are following it even though it will fail or backfire. As in it’s less of an intentional decision but more of a baked in outcome of how the people, system, etc are structured.

It gets pretty confusing to me when I try and sort out the distinction between grand geopolitical strategy and financial motives. Brian Belitics (sic, guy in new atlas) claims that a. They are predetermined to do this based on need for infinite growth to maintain their system, and b. They will try this, despite the clear reality that it will almost certainly fail/backfire, because they are the window closing wrt China, and to a lesser degree Russia, Iran, etc. They in this case not being Trump or Israelis, but the deep state/corp power/decision makers that undergird the whole system.

Looking at the tech leapfrogging going on, it seems pretty clear to me that the window is mostly already been closed, but again he’s talking about this almost zombie like structural basis for strategy that is hard to reform/correct under the current deep state/ corporate power havers.

I’m not claiming to support this view completely, but it does answer some nagging questions about various choices/behaviors with these recent events. So I’ve been trying to mull over how to square stuff in my head.

There’s an alternative option to all of this also, which has some allure given the last couple years: they know the goose is cooked generally, and everything is essentially fire sale and raiding the larder until the music stops. And they somehow feel that they will be able to insulate themselves from the fallout aftermath or enjoy their lives as they always have (I suspect they do a lot of magical thinking on this last part).

It’s more about increasing total supply input so that pricing drops, I think. US won’t likely physically purchase or use the unsanctioned oil, but having more input will help mitigate price inflation.