I’m mot incorrect; what’s true is that the stats are highly contested. The stat saying almost all Iranians are Shia Muslims comes from the Iranian regime. It ignores the very obvious fact that many Iranians are actually Zoroastrians, and there are significant other religious minorities including Christians and Bahai, although much persecuted. When you look at independent surveys like GAMAAN, the stats are startlingly different. I also note that 50k out of 75k mosques have closed down.

The most likely truth is that many Iranians are allowing themselves to be nominally labelled as Shia because anything else is too challenging in an Islamist society.

You’ve also oversimplified Shia demographics, eg Azerbaijan is majority Shia.

Yeah, I saw that. Crusades bullshit. Fucking nutty stuff.

I had read that the Iranians built a 4x succession plan to help with resilience. I’ve also read that Israel has killed at least two of the people layered into the 4x plan for several key positions eg defense minister and supreme leader. I bet some defence analyst somewhere is tracking it eg Jane’s but I’ve not looked

If that was a serious question, here’s a reasonably dispassionate answer. It’s complicated. Lots of motivation for acting, both noble and ignoble: Epstein/wag the dog, Project 2025 and Christian nationalism, the Iranian regime and its proxies being severely weakened militarily and economically in the last couple of years, a long term strategic assessment by Western and GCC policy makers that Iran was a major destabilising threat in the form of nuclear ambitions, ballistic missiles and proxies. Who knows what else, too. Maybe a covert capability was at the point of use-it-or-lose-it, eg the traffic cameras or a humint source or what have you. Woman, life, freedom and the murder of tens of thousands of Iranians was deeply affecting. For Israel, a chance to rebuild a narrative and relations with the 75% of Iranians who aren’t Muslim, plus with the GCC when Iran retaliated by attacking GCC territories and assets. Lots and lots of reasons. Purim, even. As I said, a mix of noble and ignoble. It may end up being dreadful and even worse than it was six months or one year or three years ago. But it may end up better, too. I say that recognising that this is one monstrous set of men who are sexually violent towards women attacking another set of monstrous men who are sexually violent towards women (I’m talking of American and Iranian leaders).

That’s a huge oversimplification that is apparently driven by a desire for a narrative about bumbling and incompetent Americans. The truth is, killing so many senior leaders damages Iranian capability and capacity in several important ways. Above all, it reduces the competence and experience of the leadership who must make crucial decisions in the war. For example, it’s reasonable to see the attacks on the GCC states as a significant misstep by Iran. They inflict frankly paltry economic damage, and instead of driving the GCC to pressurise the US into giving up, they have caused outrage among GCC nations who had been building a detente with Iran over many months, and have actually repaired intra-GCC relations (eg Saudi and UAE) to some degree and even with Israel. Iran made itself the common enemy. No-one can know for sure, but that decision certainly smacks of a mix of inexperience, incompetence, and as you note, a hardline mentality. Which is to say, hardline ideology is a net negative for the Iranian regime, because it reduces strategic optionality.

There are lots of other ways that decapitation strikes harm the Iranian regime, too, for example, by putting a huge amount of stress on all those new leaders, who will be very uneasy about the safety of both them themselves and their loved ones. That stress will cloud their thinking further, and make it more likely that some will cut and run.

Already have done, I think. Although my sense is the European OEMs will compete reasonably effectively.

Rwanda isn't electrifying its *cars* first, you silly billy. It's electrifying its two and three wheeled transport, along with urban buses. Given that these are the dominant modes of ground transport because as you so cleverly noted, the average wage in Rwanda and many other African countries doesn't stretch to buying new cars, this is a very smart move by Rwandans.

That's why Rwanda has focused on electrifying high-utilisation vehicles first, on battery swap rather than home charging, and on electrification as energy security and health policy, what with petrol motorcycles generating 90% of urban particulate emissions, because they're all crappy two-stroke machines.

Since January 2025, Kigali banned new petrol motorcycles from registering, and already by early 2024 -- 24 months ago -- there were 4800 electric motorcycles operating, about 20% of the Kigali fleet; estimates are that the number now is something like 8 or 9,000, and they're already routine and common, as my wife found last year when she was there on a trip. The plans are for another 16k or so in 2026, making this among the fastest growth rates for EV penetration globally. In addition to that, the infra being built to support electric motorbikes by fleet operators is also bieng used by fleet operators to create a new tier of e bikes for cargo deliveries, complementing the use of electric motorbikes for passenger rides, and replacing walking and informal delivery mechanisms.

There are also already electric buses operating and extensive policy shifts in place to support a wider rollout.

It really helps if you drop the imperialist / colonialist attitude and focus on engaging with African countries as they actually are today. It would also help if you didn't just refer to Africa, and understood that countries differ dramatically.

Penultimately, you have completely misunderstood vehicle numbers and EV penetration in Rwanda overall. The 400k figure you quote includes everything, not just cars: about 55 to 60k cars, 45 to 50k SUVs, 180k motorcycles, and the rest being trucks, buses, three wheelers, etc. So your 500 figure is just the cars and SUVs. As I said, you silly billy.

Finally, it would help you to learn about stocks and flows. The stock is obviously dominated by ICE. But the flows are changing rapidly, beginning with motorcycles, followed by e-bikes, and now buses too, with minibuses to come.

All of this knowledge was available to you on the internet, if you could only have put aside your various prejudices for long enough to learn.

It’s the world’s richest consumer market, but it’s not the world’s largest auto market, and it’s not a large slice of the planet. There are diseconomies of scale in building a different drive train, and the car manufacturing business leverages global supply chains for managing margins, so there are major disadvantages. If you’re amortising the cost of your exhaust systems across your slice of 16m new cars, while other OEMs aren’t even having to pay for exhaust systems in the first place, and can amortise the costs of their motors across their slice of the other 70m+ cars, you’re going to see very painful margin compression.

Solar and batteries running community microgrids, specifically. But Viol8 likes to live in a cliched past, unaware of what’s happening in Senegal and Rwanda and Ethiopia etc, where ground transport electrification is well on the way.

Dunno, ask the companies serving the LP or CD or CRT or floppy disk or fax machine or pager device segments.

Ulttimately, economics will be the motivator. When your competition installs them, you as a landlord will feel the need to as well. It will take a long time, but it will happen. Same way as AC got installed everywhere in the US over time.

The average daily distance driven in the US is 37 miles. You’re projecting

That will eventually change when volumes increase, but it’s a decade away before we need to worry about this problem. Interestingly, sodium batteries have several advantages over lead acid for starter battery applications, and one of them is that the disposal and recycling streams are a lot easier due to lower toxicity.

Those are silly points to make.

1. We will only start recycling lithium batteries once they are no longer (a) usable in a first-life product and (b) re-usable in a second-life product. The volumes just aren’t there yet, but once they start arriving, the economic value is so enormous that recycling is definitely going to happen
2. Obviously mining is Very Bad. We should do less of it. The single most effective method we have for cutting mining volumes is to switch to EVs, because we swap literally endless mining for fuel for a single mining encounter for battery materials. The quantities of fuel we mine are so enormously larger than the quantities of lithium and other traction battery metals, it’s not even funny. Stocks and flows are quite important things to know about

This is such an obviously wrong way for large OEMs to analyse the future of their domestic market, though. The % of people who buy cars for the reasons you describe is vastly outweighed by the number who buy cars to meet their daily transport needs with as little fuss as possible.