This is indeed consequence culture, but working exactly the opposite way to the way you intend it. The consequence of the US increasing the hostility of its border crossings is that it sees a drop in international visitors. For some in the US, that's a feature, not a bug; but not for the organisers of this event or for hoteliers or others who rely on international visitor income, and not for the games industry etc.

I am going to engage with you in good faith, although I suspect I may regret it.

You are arguing that if someone writes a post that "is a simple statement of the poster's perspective on [an] issue", then that in itself should not be cause for vilification. But a poster's perspective can be absolutely obnoxious. Their perspective may be a Nazi perspective or a pro-paedophilia perspective or a pro-slavery perspective. Just because something is said calmly or in a measured way does not make it morally neutral.

And people ought to be free to respond to a statement in whichever way they please, including expressing vehement opposition. Anything less and you are asking them to self-censor so that one voice, the original, gets heard at the expense of others.

Your position is muddled and not thought through.

It is truly incredible that you think that what the OP was referring to in that picture were the *masks*, as opposed to, I dunno, the giant guns and tactical gear. You are so deep in the rabbit hole. And also hilarious that you point to those countries and think we don't fucking notice that you don't point to a Nordic country, or Spain, Italy, the UK, Germany...you're so pathetically transparent.

That's a very silly way of thinking. It's not like this robot will be used for only one operation, and the costs of that surgeon are a lot higher than just a plane ticket.

Seriously, why would you assume that the people who bought this thing are gibbering idiots incapable of running the numbers to ensure they get value for money? The people who will make the decisions will include the CFO, the CMO, the CMIO, senior surgeons, etc. They understand maths and finance and budgets and medicine and the cutting edge of tech and have bought and chosen not to buy kit many times before.

Also, you pulled that maintenance figure out of your backside, didn't you? There's no way it costs anything close to a million bucks a year to service. You're just making up a story to help yourself feel better. Prove me wrong by showing links to the numbers.

Capex vs opex, amortisation over time (a second order but crucial benefit of choosing capex investment over opex spend), scaling, flexibility of deployment... lots of reasons. Hopefully you don't need me to spell each of those out and can think them through.

The entire purpose of antitrust is to protect consumers' interests. The reason we have antitrust regulation is that anticompetitive behaviours harm consumer interests, eg price fixing keeping prices artificially high.

Exactly. What sane consumer wants these companies to be able to track them like this? It's gross behaviour, and it's even worse that the German regulator is considering acting against the interests of consumers at the behest of these companies.

I would say “both-and” rather than “not even”, but yes, volumes really matter. This was a key concept behind the reorg of stroke services in London (done by the incredible and formidable combo) of Ara Darzi, Ruth Carnall and Hannah Farrar, back in the day when we had half-decent investment in the NHS. It saved hundreds of lives a year.

Getting it wrong this way kinda undercuts your conclusion, doesn’t it? Gibraltar has surgical facilities and teams, but not world-class urologists. Expertise remains the most expensive asset in medicine

Just in case anyone was wondering. The NHS may take this up one day — Ara Darzi pioneered many aspects of robot-assisted surgery in the NHS, after all, and Prof Dasgupta works within it as well as his private work — but this was done at a private clinic.

Any answer about the Middle East that says "it's really quite simple" is going to be simplistic and ultimately lack explanatory and predictive power. It's always a complex mess of motivations, actions, alliances and enmities, shifting over time. I see no value in being reductive.

Oh really? There's plenty of authoritarian regime who have been unable to prevent collapse in the face of an external attack in recent years: Syria, Libya, Iraq, Serbia, etc. A few managed to survive or resurge, eg the Houthis in Yemen and Taliban in Afghanistan. But it's a pretty short list. It's also not obvious that the path to survival was a hardline crackdown.

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.