> why Waymo doesn’t just IPO, or raise 100% private raise by Google
This lets them validate their valuation and build a base of investors who could play a bigger role in writing chequew in the future. When IPO comes, those factors make the sell simpler.
> law makers in various cities will start to pass laws to ban them or the number of regulations will make it impossible to run at a profit. This will almost certainly happen
No they won’t. And Waymo’s playbook would be Uber’s if they did: preëmpt at the state and federal levels.
> burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name
Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.)
That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and response to criticism at Redmond.
I can criticise Australian urban planning for days ... but many visitors to Australia do effuse about how much outdoor recreational space we have and plan for.
First link has Australia, the country, at 32% obesity Vs. USofA at %41.6.
My only observations, having travelled in both, is that Australia like eveywhere has gotten more urban in past 20 years and I've got a feeling the percentage of Australians significantly past the technical bar of "obese" is very low compared to rates in the US of "well past" "just merely obese".
I'm not sure anyone's broken down the obesity quintile demographics.
Yes. Iran’s territory includes ethnic minorities that could be joined to its neighbors, neighbours who are less brutal. Starting there might be a good first step since we’re now firmly back into redrawing borders with force.
Really? You are advocating regional/civil war, aligned with ethnic ties at that, instead of surgical regime change by the US? How would a regime change of the Mullahs equate to "redrawing borders?" No such thing happened when they were installed and won't need to happen now. Seems like that's what you are suggesting.
> How would a regime change of the Mullahs equate to "redrawing borders?"
It doesn’t. Maybe there is a Delcy Rodriguez in the IRGC. I’m doubtful. If there isn’t, we have the option of creating a power vacuum or quarantining the problem.
I’m arguing for the latter. The Azeri-majority northnorth to Azerbaijan; the Turkic areas to its west to Turkey [1]. Balochistani southeast to Pakistan. Arab southwest to Iraq. Hell, if you’re ambitious, find a way to give Bandar Abbas to the Emiratis and secure the Strait of Hormuz.
There's a widely popular Shah who is ready to take the helm, at least for a "transition" and that's what the majority seems to want in the protests. I'm certain given enough enticement from United States, we can easily find someone who is able and willing from the army or even an IRGC figure who would eagerly jump on the opportunity. Plus, you somehow think the Iranians would just roll with your whiteboard map? Even among the minorities--let alone the majority--you specified, it is not clear that separation is the predominant preference. Many of those plans may look attractive today to some simply because Islamic Republic has mismanaged the economy, not because there is no national bond. To boot, why would United States prefer to hand over such important region to arguably as bad or worse governing bodies like Pakistan, Taliban, or Iraq, and questionable partners like Turkey[1], rather than own Iran by installing its own preferred partner as an ally[1]? Are you delusional?
[1]: I won't be surprised if regime change will be coming for Erdogan not too far from now, after Iran is done.
[2]: If US really wants to shit on the region like that, there are various cards they could have played much easier: unleash groups like MEK/Kurds and start a civil war. So far, it does appear Israel/US behavior, like the way they conducted the 12 day war, is to keep Iran intact and does not mess with the balance of power in the region as much as possible.
> we can easily find someone who is able and willing from the army or even an IRGC figure who would eagerly jump on the opportunity
This is not the history of nation building.
> Even among the minorities--let alone the majority--you specified, it is not clear that separation is the predominant preference
They have insurgencies for a reason. Many of these groups were also promised some level of self governance, promises which have been trotted back.
> why would United States prefer to hand over such important region to arguably as bad or worse governing bodies like Pakistan, Taliban, or Iraq, and questionable partners like Turkey
Never said Taliban. We have influence over Iraq. And even Pakistan isn’t really fucking with American interests that much, and giving them Balochistan might help them with their anti-terror mission. (It would also piss off India. So maybe skip that, too.)
> to keep Iran intact and does not mess with the balance of power in the region as much as possible
I’m not suggesting this is currently U.S. strategy. I’m saying there are advantages to it over trying to do the Shah again. Namely, it shatters a regional problem more evenly and protects choke points around the Caspian and Strait of Hormuz.
Sure if you watch #AyatollahBBC or Democrat media who created the beast in the first place under Carter.
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The rest I will just let you wait and see... There may be some success on the Kurdish/Azeri separationist fronts, but there is less than zero chance Pakistan and Iraq could take over the rest of the country.
The majority of Iranians hate Pakistan and Arabs. The whole undercurrent of the protest is a nationalist movement to kick Islam and Arab culture out. You take a province here a province there; what to do with the rest?
> Sure if you watch #AyatollahBBC or Democrat media who created the beast in the first place under Carter
Non-English language assessments from countries in Europe or Asia that haven’t been calling theirq shots wrong in the Middle East for two generations.
I’m not saying we can conclude the Shah is unpopular. Just that we only have quality evidence that he is narrowly popular, and at that moreso abroad and in English-language press.
> You take a province here a province there; what to do with the rest?
Let them have their mullahs. (Or not.) Taliban has been fine from a regional-security perspective. So, increasingly, is Syria.
Well yes. The question is how many more would have had to die to get it. This question doesn’t have an easy answer. To the extent there are wrong ones, it’s anyone claiming confidence.
A nonsensical false dichotomy of sorts. Between "Japan surrenders without a single further death" and "We have to nuke two cities for them to surrender" there are numerous steps of gradual escalation that could have been taken before arriving at the "nuke the cities" option. One such possible step could have been nuking a remote area, or at the very least sparsely populated area, to achieve the demonstration of destruction without hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I have no sympathy for the Japanese who killed tens of millions of people in their WW2 atrocities, and the two bombs killed orders of magnitude fewer of their people. I also see no reason to pretend that there weren't obvious alternatives to USA dropping nukes on their cities if we are to believe that the objective was merely getting Japan to surrender (an objective most difficult to believe). No need for pretense -- they wanted to demonstrate their new weapons, AND they wanted to kill a lot of Japanese.
> One such possible step could have been nuking a remote area, or at the very least sparsely populated area, to achieve the demonstration of destruction without hundreds of thousands of deaths
There is a reason it took bombing both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cause surrender. And if you telegraph that you’re going to bomb a remote place and the bomb fails, you’ve undermined your weapon’s credibility in unique ways.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just that your confidence is wrong. What you’re talking about was contemporaneously and continues to be historically debated.
Does anyone have a link to a good political model for Iran?
This looks maximally stupid given the American hardware in the region. But there may be internecine angles I’m missing. (Which factions benefit from American air strikes?)
Unfortunately (perhaps) Iran isn't as "weak" as we in the west are led to believe - the drone strike on the USA base in Qatar, for example, we were told that there was no damage done to the base, and the POTUS laughed at how "weak" Iran's attacks were.
Then it turned out to be bluster, there /was/ damage.[0]
It's /really/ hard to get good independent coverage of most politically charged events (The fog of war, etc)
I'd recommend Vali Nasr and Payam Mohseni's works.
But frankly, Iran as it stands today is structurally similar to pre-1976 PRC, and requires an Iranian "Deng Xiaoping", but the only reason Deng even got as far as he did was because the Sino-Soviet Split made the PRC an attractive partner against the USSR and because it took someone with the stature of Mao to host a "Nixon in China" moment, which made partnering with America politically palatable.
The key economic and political institutions in Iran (Army, IRGC, Bonyads) would need to be incentivized to flip to being pro-EU and pro-America in order to sustain the semblance of democracy and secularism because frankly, Russia, China, India, portions of the Gulf, and much of ASEAN is fine working with Iran as it stands today because it is a critical regional power.
Turkiye, the UAE, Qatar, KSA, and Pakistan are probably the best regional players to push a gradual re-opening of Iran.
sure this writer has developed a model, but I disagree with his assessment: when they open a "diplomatic channel" just to say "our existential weapons programs are nobody else's business", it just creates the appearance of diplomatic cooperation in global media without actually having sincere diplomatic conversation.
No one is afraid of the US. Iran has continuously waged war on America since the revolution, killing countless soldiers, as well as murdering civilians on western soil. America’s response has been essentially non-existent.
Short of an unignorable mass attack on the homeland, America has a proven track record of turning the other cheek.
After waging war on America continuously for 46 years, the response was to take out a handful of targets, leaving the entire theocratic regime and nearly all of its regional military capabilities intact.
> Nobody has mentioned the dramatic increase of non-white immigrants and illegal aliens since 1985
Genuine question: do we have data for native-born non-Hispanic Americans?
This could be an artifact of immigration. Anecdotally, I think we have a divide driven by class-based device access (poorer kids are on their devices and social media more than rich kids and more than anyone was in the 80s).
This lets them validate their valuation and build a base of investors who could play a bigger role in writing chequew in the future. When IPO comes, those factors make the sell simpler.
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