The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

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.

I think it's more horses for courses, and can also vary considerably between what different demographics, both contemporary and historical, think of as "perfection". Hollywood is largely driven by white western males, so they naturally favour your "20% silicone", although that does seem to be undergoing a gradual change of late, but that's not the case for world cinema as a whole; you'll find far fewer wannabe Barbie Dolls in African cinema, for instance.

From a people portraiture perspective, especially candids, there is also a night and day difference between what a photographer would most typically want to shoot in a studio vs. on the street. The former is very much about some ideal of perfection, with hours spent on makeup and clothing the model(s) and setting up the lighting rigs, before the camera even gets turned on, whereas in the streets and fields, you are totally going to home in the people with the most interesting features, and those often tend to be very much the definition of imperfection. You are actively looking for the aged faces with more lines than a metro map, more piercings/tats than Vogue would likely ever consider acceptable, and anything else that really tells a story about the kind of life the viewer of the resultant image might imagine them to live. For the right images, there is absolutely value that can be measured in both clicks and dollars there too.

Also, why limit it to women implanting silicone to comply with some visual aspirational idea of perfection being forced on them by men (mostly), media, and entirely unrealistically proportioned dolls? Have you seen the lengths some men are going to as part of the "looksmaxxxing" fad? There's going to be a Darwin Award winner there real soon now, I'm sure.

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.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

Actually, I think it was Fred Schwed Jr. 86 years ago, but still just as relevant. In case it's not obvious from the fee, this is totally not about making YOU financially better off.

*glances at Enron

Actually, that sounds truly brilliant. Let's raise the legal requirements so that happens...

I'm guessing the tank has enough positive pressure left internally that it can withstand the pressure exerted upon it by the upper stage's engine exhaust without collapsing until the upper stage is clear. If it deforms, then presumably it would not be able to be reused, but if it can withstand the pressure long enough just fine then that removes the need for some additional shielding, and the mass that entails.

I went through every backup and drive I had and found my old wallet from around 2010-11. Then realized I had ran the wallet but did not select the option to mine.

VeraCrypt is a particularly strong full-disk encryption, although you don't hear much of companies using it. However, BitLocker security issues keep getting mentioned and it looks like VeraCrypt fixed a number of theirs. However, code quality seems to be listed as unclear on some sites. Not sure how true that actually is though.

BestCrypt is another, but I'm not happy they permit fragile encryption schemes, as those could potentially be used by the software as standard for something important. Being commercial software, that wouldn't be easy to check.

BitLocker seems to be a typical Microsoft failure in terms of what it does, used only because it's Microsoft and that gives CTOs and CFOs someone to blame.

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

You're assuming the companies with these fleets of (currently largely non-existant) robots are still going to solvent if the bubble pops. That seems highly unlikely in many cases given the business model for AI is apparently "borrow massive amounts of money to fund it using the promise future orders as collateral". Asset strippers have no interest in salvaging a business; their business model is to buy the physical assets cheap, dump the debt on to bagholders (the shareholders), and sell the assets off to whoever wants it, hopefully for more than the cents on the dollar paid they probably for it. I buy stuff from these auctions from time to time; it's a great way to get nearly new, and often still on the market, kit at a fraction of the retail price.

Also, Facebook might not be the best counter example there. Remember what happened to many of the hires, business units, servers, and services, Meta setup when Zuck went all-in on the Metaverse? What do you think he'll do if going all-in on AI doesn't pan out for him?

Yeah, but these are Humanities students. That, by its very definition, is an area where AI should have very limited use, where it is applied should be done really, really, carefully, and job losses are far less likely than in many other fields. Sure, there's analysis of datasets, especially of geographical and historical data, but that is one of the areas where a specifically trained model can really be of use, but an AI is never going to painstakingly brush away dirt from some ancient historical site, and I shudder to think what would happen if AI hallucinations get let loose on philosophy or religion. That said, it would probably be very amusing watching those who buy into the output; and doubly so if the model was trained on the Butlerian.Jihad from Dune, less so for actual crusades, jihads, and "holy" wars.

Still, if these presumably tech savvy Gen Z students are not fans of the tech, regardless of whether that's because the recognise how its being used by corporates or some other reasons, then I think the people that need to be more worried about this are those that have built the massive pyramid trillions of dollars of debt to build something that few seem to want or trust. Like the .com boom, the bubble must pop sooner or later and sort out who is a "pets.com" and who is a "google.com", and there are growing indication that, unlike .com, the demand that will be required to pay for it all just isn't there, and we're already way beyond the scale of any previous government bailouts. That kind of crash only has one outcome; a lot of shareholders (which includes pension funds) are going to lose their shirts.