This is tantamount to misinformation. The regime cut the Internet on January 8th. It was *never* turned back on for the general public. Iran started allowing some country-wide intranet only, with heavy censorship and *no* outbound communication (except for regime figures). There has been no way to communicate with people in Iran anytime since except (a) Starlink (illegal, extremely risky, and subject to jamming) (b) outbound telephone calls (monitored).

Because it started January 8th, it is clear the initial purpose is very different than this states. The protests themselves started in late December. The internet blackout corresponds with nothing else but the regime crackdown in which they murdered tens of thousands of Iranian civilians. The obvious main purpose has been to keep Iranians from sharing about the atrocities.

Is the war related? Of course. It has become only more important as Iran has sought to seize a diplomatic high-ground (or at least equivalency) to maintain full narrative control. And it is true there is an intelligence aspect as well, but more than cyber attacks (how is downing your *own* Internet a win there?) the concern is likely that the Iranian people have been happy to share information to help target the regime, as they did during the previous 12 Day War.

It is malpractice to quote "officials" - if those are indeed "Iranian officials" - and then offer their uncontested view, when they are the ones who blacked out the Internet specifically to be able to offer an uncontested view.

The myth that AI data centers are using up all the water comes from some incorrect citations that have then swept through sensationalist and poorly fact-checked (looking at you Washington Post) news stories. One major contributor was Karen Hat's "Empire of AI" which overstated the usage by three orders of magnitude. (She did publicly correct that, but you can guess how many people are interested in the non-sensational numbers).

For proportion, California almond growers use 90x the fresh water of all US data centers combined.

Which is not to say that a data center can't still be a strain for some communities, but not in a more extraordinary way than e.g. the local university wanting to maintain a golf course.

But "AI IS SUCKING UP ALL THE WATER PEOPLE NEED TO SURVIVE!!!" is a wonderfully concrete - if completely false - complaint for people uneasy about the recent advances in technology to latch onto

So this has nothing to do with the building being a "data center" at all. The water used if for construction and it could just as well be a stadium or an apartment complex. But since people are talking about data centers using water we'll take any opportunity to jump in on that even if it's amplifying a misconception by mentioning it in adjacency to unrelated events.

Can you answer the question of why he would lie about either exactly? What is his sourced motivation? How does that stack against his incentive to not blithely throw away his career as an accomplished academic?

The actual explanation is much simpler. He is a world-reknown biologist, not a computer scientist or philosopher. He sounds dumb talking about what he is not an expert in.

You (I assume) have some developed expertise in the AI tooling. You (quite obviously) do not have any expertise in biology, or even the context of Dawkins statements you are alluding to, so you sound at least as dumb characterizing what he has said as "anti-trans crap."

The same IEA has warned repeatedly of the precarious position Europe has put themselves in with regard to fuel dependence. The Russian war on Ukraine and subsequent sanctions should have made that tangible but Europe just switched over to Gulf suppliers, exacerbating the present problem. In fact instead of reacting to increase domestic refining and reserves just last year Europe shut down 4 refineries (~400000 barrels per day) of capacity. It lets politicians pretend they are being green while actually just paying someone else to do the dirty work.

The US does all of its own refining and is able to send both crude and jet fuel to Europe to offset at least some of the deficit. The markets are rerouting and many of the global tankers (especially from Asia) are headed to the US to resupply, with the US set to almost double its exports. Unfortunately extra-crude doesn't help Europe's jet fuel problem much since they can't refine it.

- hosting child sexual abuse material and taking a year to remove it
- creating a means for sex traffickers to turn their victims into $$$
- providing a means to sell sexual content of others (e.g revenge porn) without consent

I've seen a lot of comments here in discussion to gig work where it's considered exploitive for Uber/Lyft to not provide health coverage and other benefits, minimum pay accounting for externalities like vehicle wear, etc. Does OF provide any of that?

They can certainly be "better" than other porn sites in ways (although the lack of any physically present third party seems like a major exploitation risk, per links above) but that isn't itself some moral achievement. The guy who peddles crack is doing less harm than the guy who peddles heroin but I don't think he's due for any citizenship awards.

And OF is absurdly profitable so if they really wanted to engage in a humanitarian mission to make porn "ethical" they have lots of financial buffer to combat exploitation. It's clearly not their objective.

Allow me to rephrase with exactly the same meaning, "The problem is customers could receive a $2 discount for coming in on the low-demand day." Are you sure that is... bad?

Stuff like this effectively winds up very economically progressive because people for whom that discount matters will go to the extra effort to get it and people with high-incomes won't care and will effectively subsidize the low price. What do you think that $2 coupon from the newspaper is doing? Setting up exactly the same $16.99 vs $14.99 price differential.

Conversely, consider on Saturday the person who absolutely needs the tomatoes to finish a dinner already in progress can pay the high-demand price and the person who was just thinking about things nice to keep stocked in the pantry can wait, vs pricing low so that the item is already out-of-stock from indifferent shoppers when that person who really needs it walks in.

It's easy to sell people a story in which price differentiation is a means of screwing them over but it is just as often to their direct benefit. People implicitly accept the good of this for things they already experience like coupons, but anything new sounds scary.

Here is the actual story, transcription repeated from here:

So, no, contrary to your unsourced claim, it was based on (a) a specific incident (b) material concern about the implications of the specific incident (c) escalation through the chain of involved parties (d) without apparent direction by the "convicted felon president and war criminal in chief".

Also pretty clear from the anecdote how it is that DoD has sincere concerns with actual grounding. Debate over the legitimacy of those concerns, the ethicality of what they want the software to do, etc. would all be reasonable to discuss. But it really does help if you want to argue against something to start by properly understanding what you are debating.

They didn't exactly whittle down their options before settling on sending missiles and drones at the civilian populations in neutral neighbors. It was among the first things they started doing.

In fact, during the 12-Day War Israel took out their missile command so thoroughly that for a long time there was no one to launch missiles in retaliation. Iran learned from that and had given the IRGC members pre-determined launch orders so they could at independently. That means shooting missiles at everyone in the vicinity was their plan even before any operations started.

I think people struggle to grasp that when it's called a "terrorist regime" it's not name-calling, it's actually how Iran's insane theocratic leadership thinks. They kill their own people by the tens of thousands and don't bat an eye. They would legitimately struggle to answer why killing a few civilians next door for leverage should be considered an immoral act.

Can't believe "it's the Jews!" gets +5 here. Same any century I guess.

Iran and it's proxies have killed hundreds of not thousands of Americans over the years. In US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq hundreds were killed by Iran backed militias which were supplied with Iranian weapons. Retaliation for that was the justification for the US strike to kill Iran's extraterritory general Soleimani who was still operating in Iraq in 2020. Iran has frequently harassed ships and threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz through which ~20% of global oil passes. Just recently the Iranian assassins who tried to kill an American in New York (Masih Alinejad) were sentenced. Two years ago they tried to assassinate the same American who has now ordered the strikes against them. The Iranian response to that stine has been to fire missiles into all neighboring countries including their specific *allies* like Qatar, hitting a number of civilian targets including multiple hotels, commercial buildings and airports, in hopes of blackmailing those countries into pushing for a ceasefire. Would the US be likely to let a country that does that get enough missiles to have effectively nuclear-level blackmail and be untouchable? Right now they have ~2000 missiles but they were producing 80 per day with a goal of at least 8000. To say nothing of actual nuclear deterrence; Iran openly admits they have enough 60% enriched uranium to make ~11 bombs and throughout the negotiations has refused any possibility of sending it abroad.

The US obviously has a lot of interest here. It doesn't always have to be Jewish masterminds behind everything to where you say "that's all you need to know" and don't even bother to think that in complex geopolitical questions, countries strategic decisions might be based on a range of inputs. Maybe those inputs are even wrong. But the us notoriously considers its own interests and not really those of other countries when it makes strategic decisions, especially DT.

It was just 7 weeks ago the people across every strata of Iranian society were pouring out by increasing millions to protest his government and seemed like he was about to be ousted (to the point that many top government officials were wiring all their money out of the country in preparation for exile).

Then, also just 7 weeks ago, he ordered his forces to just... kill all of them. Machine guns fired into crowds. Survivors were found and executed at the hospitals. In one case they set a market on fire, trapping the protestors, and then shot anyone who fled. Tens of thousands were killed. More were arrested and sentenced to death. Anyone who wanted to recover their loved one's body had to pay an exorbitant fee to the government for the bullets. The streets were now patrolled by armed militia breaking up groups of even a few people. No more protests.

And your question is - "Why not just let the old guy live out his days"?

I'm sure in your society unpopular leaders are removed from power. That's not how it works in a despotic regime in which the ruling party has a complete monopoly on force.

How divorced can you be from any concept of what is actually going on there? Iran could not care less if any of their citizens died they are by an unfathomable margin the ones killing the. And there very first response on the attack was to launch missiles at all neighboring countries hitting hotels in Dubai, office buildings in the UAE, streets in Bahrain, and of course killing civilians in Israel. Your picture of who the Iranian government is and their motivations doesn't match up with *anything.*

It's not a "metric" and "idiotic" is trying to shove across the implication that the attitude of the local population into irrelevance. That is intuitively unintelligible. A rational person could contextualize the popular sentiment as less important than some other factor if they had good evidence, but to dismiss it out-of-hand is just flailing. Provide evidence. Provide examples. Show me where the United States has people cheering for outside attack and for British monarchs to reassert themselves, since apparently you think that's an equivalent thing that exists.

Do you want to watch the videos of Iranians in Tehran cheering on news of the Ayatollah's death? How about millions protesting the government in January? Unlike past protests, these including member of every class in Iran including the merchants (historically conservative and supportive of the regime). Why did the government have to engage in all-out slaughter against the protestors if they didn't represent a majority? Why did they have to cut out the entire countries internet? The protests were across hundreds of cities and towns. (Some towns even fully seized control before regime forces showed up with machine guns. The IRGC was talking about using their own missiles against cities that fell.)

What is your apparent counter-evidence that Iranians are somehow mostly en camp with the Islamic government?

Tbh, it's not unexpected for people without ties to the area to be ignorant of what it's really like in Iran. You don't get a great picture from Western media, which mostly focuses on the government. But I don't understand knowing nothing about it and then feeling justified to make sweeping claims.

No, and if I did, you would have happily quoted where I said that. Instead you are just being tactically obtuse so you can reframe the argument around an evaluation of US intentions instead of what I actually commented which was regime atrocities.

I am for the people of Iran no longer having to deal with a government they don't want and which blithely murders them en masse. Somehow in your reply you managed **not a single word*** for the Iranian people or the tens of thousands killed. Just desperate it make about your petty US internal politics.

A "pressure tactic" is to take out the Ayatollah? Why did the planning around this just happen to start after the mass killings of protestors?

If you don't want to side with the Iranian fine. It's frankly too late for your opinion to matter, for which I am very grateful. But just fyi, since you care so much about your domestic US political jockeying, the outcome here is already Iranians cheering in the streets. If the regime falls and all the images that come out are of the people praising the US - followed by hard evidence on the regime's atrocities - and then more gratitude to the US - you are going to have handgifted Trump a huge political win by allowing your side to be anchored to the defeated regime instead of seizing the opportunity to make it a "we all win here" outcome. I guess we'll see if your "ACKTUALLY EPSTEIN" response is a winning strategy for the midterms.

Iran is not an Islamic country. Persians were Zorastrians. Mostly they are now something like agnostics. They don't believe in Islam, they don't want to wear the hijab, they are just held captive by a fanatical government that requires them put "Muslim" on their birth certificates.

When has US sponsored regime change ever before come at the direct request of the people living there? (Maybe Vichy France.)

Persians hate the Islamic regime. They have been in the streets by the millions protesting against Khomenei (who is hopefully now deceased). In response he ordered his personal forces and secret police to open fire on them, killings tens of thousands of innocent people over just two days, another ten thousand put in prison and placed under sentence of death. They went to the hospitals afterward and executed anyone with injuries, and doctors who didn't comply. You can find pictures of people in bodybags who still have the hospital IV in their arms. I am not aware of anything like it in recent memory. Maybe the Rwandan genocide. Fyi the women taken prisoner will almost certainly be raped before execution. The regime believes that virgins go to heaven automatically, and in order to avoid giving their enemies a free pass into paradise by killing them, the rape is considered essential. That's what the people there have been enduring.

The only thing that has been keeping the present regime in place is having a monopoly on guns and firepower. The protests "ended" because Khonemeni was brutal enough to terrify all of his own citizens with the massive killings and subsequent armed militia patrols including imported from Iraq and Lebanon - always helpful when the people charged with mass murder have no cultural ties to the people they are expected to kill. (Some IRGC members refused to follow orders to open fire on crowds - they were also sentenced to execution.)

Instead of vague insinuations of bad outcomes, why don't you explain how you think that government is best option for the Iranian people? Persians have been perfectly capable of uniting under a peaceful government, and all of the older generation lived under the Shah. The have a leader in exile (the Shah's son) who quite likely has enough political goodwill to lead a transitional role to a democratic government. No vacuous chaos.

Can you at least muster up a "Trump is awful and I hate him and maybe the US and Israel are terrible too - but it's fundamentally good that a government that just executed 30-40k of its own citizens for peaceful protest faces consequences for doing that"?