That's a well known side effect of mathematics! May I suggest using an LLM to count them for you?

There's a lamb! That makes one!
Look,another lamb! That makes two!
Another lamb! That makes four!
And one more crocodile! That makes five!
There's another lamb! That's six!
...

It really should matter. If we can just decide the text means whatever we want it to mean, what's the point in writing it down?

Yes! This is the way. Unfortunately, our system is so dysfunctional we can't even pass normal laws now, much less enact and ratify constitutional amendments.

Surely not that. That would be dumb. And awful. And utterly corrupt.

Sigh.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

Will it catch the president, who has been on a rampant insider trading and market manipulation spree for his whole second term?

What about congress?

What will the SEC do when it flags top politicians? I think all of us know the answer to that question.

These kinds of undersea maps used to be posted regularly on this site.

They only show the sea cables of course, there are lots of buried land connections everywhere too. The world is way more connected than it was in the 1990s, when the Hacker Tourist went around chasing fibre.

In this particular case (Hormuz), the impacted Gulf states have 1) plenty of money to pay, 2) plenty of redundant connections with neighbouring countries, and 3) as you rightly point out, Starlink is also an option.

Iran has a few satellites itself, and gets help from Russian intelligence. That's how they've managed to pinpoint and bomb all the US military bases hidden inside the Gulf states.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

I already told you, the rent seeking won't work. This is a nothing burger.

Try Goedel LAMBs, they're ma-a-a-ny times easier to count!

He totally should. Iran would welcome the money, and when he set foot into his new "kingdom" on the first day they could hang him and make life better for the rest of us.

He definitely IS a gaslighting fucktard. He's always been one.

Years ago, when he turned Google from a promising tech company into an evil spy company, he used to prance around telling reporters to suck it up, because if they didn't want to have their private data hoovered up and published on the Internet, maybe they shouldn't be doing things in private at all. Then a reporter from CNET looked up Schmidty's address and published it in a story for all to see. Schmidt promptly attacked the reporter and CNET like the gaslighting fucktard he already was, misusing the growing power of Evil Google for his own ends.He's done lots of these things.

Maybe even all the real numbers between 0 and 2! (using twice the space)

IF this is true, it's a perfect, real-world, textbook example of rent-seeking. The classic example is putting a chain across a river used for commerce; this is exactly the same, updated for modern technology. Excellent! Economics students take note!

You're wrong on this one. The Internet was designed by DARPA precisely for this kind of situation, namely routing around damage to the network because of war damage.

The end effect of attempting to cut cables and prevent repair ships from... ahem... repairing the cables in Hormuz during a war or otherwise is that traffic will be transparently diverted to other cables in the network.

Nobody will notice, except for the neighbouring Gulf states, who will probably see traffic slowdowns, as their other connections must take the packets, and _possibly_ (but that's a long shot) more expensive Internet pricing.

Literally nobody in the rest of the world will notice any sustained slowdowns on packets. This is completely unlike the oil price hikes, which will remain for at least as long as the US and Israel keep inflaming the region.