IAI hasn't build a fighter since the Dagger/Nesher that Israel sold to Argentina after the IAF was done with them. They tried to build an F-16 competitor, the Lavi, but stopped when the US refused to allow any funding to be used towards its development.

Israel likely has the technical capability to build a modern fighter. Whether it has the money to do so on its own is an entirely other matter.

Price of silver has also dropped about 50% since it's peak in January. Yet, silver is valuable as both a monetary metal and industrial metal.
50% drop in the value of an asset is not that unusual.

If you have assets, you are wise to spread them out because anyone of them can underperform or fail. If you want to put 2% of your portfolio into BTC, you can only get burnt by 2% by that decision. If you invest in pre-IPO stock, you should limit percentages because risk of failure is high though returns can be spectacular.

If you think nothing more that betting on a greater fool you're in good company, Warren Buffet said, "Now if you told me you own all of the Bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25, I wouldn't take it because what would I do with it? I'd have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn't going to do anything."

Personally, I hold no BTC. I do hold some gold and silver, I hold some pre-IPO stocks, but most of my assets are spread around in what is considered low-volatility assets, mostly stocks.

I am reminded of some source code for a company-specific program that I saw in the late 1990s. I don't remember why I was perusing it, as I was in IT and absolutely not a developer. But I remember being tickled at one of the comments before a block of code. It was something like, "I have no idea why or how the following code works. But every time someone tries to change it, everything breaks, so please don't touch it."

I'm not sure if that's true, but it would make sense if it was. Alpha males (ignoring there is no such thing) are the most restricted by laws, because they are the most likely to get their way if there was no enforcement of laws (through the natural law of might makes right). So it shouldn't be surprising that they'd be the least likely to let something slide without getting the police involved to get the same outcome they could have done themselves if the laws allowed them to use their own physical force. "Less alpha" individuals may be more used to not getting their way regardless of the laws, are therefore feel less entitled to get the police involved as quickly.

On the contrary, this is exactly within the legal definition of insider trading. Polymarket is legally not considered gambling, it is commodity trading. The fact that this is a silly classification matters not at all to the legal situation.

That's not the reason that both bombs were dropped. They were dropped because the military saw them as just another tool in the toolbox, just like the bombs dropped on all the other cities that continued to be dropped on other cities until the surrender. Truman ended the military's control of atomic bombs after Nagasaki, when the USAAF was preparing to use a third bomb, establishing civilian control of atomic weapons. Firebombing continued, though, right up to Kumagaya, Akita, and Osaka getting hit in the 24 hours prior to Hirohito taking to the airwaves.

The agreement expired in 2030. It did not authorize Iran to pursue nuclear weapons at that time. There's a difference.

The agreement was the best available at the time. Diplomacy sometimes requires taking a temporary win, and it usually means that neither side gets everything they want. The hope was that Iran would find that they would not want or need to develop nuclear weapons. If they did go down that path, there were penalties for doing so. Future negotiations were planned to modify or extend the agreement as it got closer to the expiration date.

That's how such agreements work. Every arms treaty signed between the US and USSR had an expiration date. The expiration date was not an agreement that at the end, both sides would immediately rearm. They were meant to establish a new normal and a baseline for future negotiations, and that's what happened. Over time, the arsenals were negotiated down from tens of thousands per side to a few thousand per side, with only a fraction of them deployed or even deployable. The last one expired a few months ago, but neither side is racing to add to their deployed warhead count.

There is no way to outright prevent Iran from developing a nuclear warhead without occupying the country and removing its entire current government. That is hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and an even worse look for the US than it has right now. Negotiating a deal like the JCPOA is the best option available. But every time Trump starts to talk about a deal and details start to leak out, they look a lot worse than the JCPOA. Trump is incompetent, he started a war that even Republicans are turning against, and he's arguably left Iran in a better place than it was before. Iran now knows that they can cut off the Strait of Hormuz, and no one can or will do anything about it. Worse, Trump has stated that he would be OK with Iran charging transit fees. If that starts, everyone else who controls a waterway that is otherwise internationally accessible is going to charge them, too. Indonesia and Malaysia would be the top two who could affect global trade, and while both have said that they would not, it's hard to say what future governments would do if they came under budget stress and had a precedent to point to.

Latest top performance is expensive, and electronics in general are more expensive, if you haven't noticed. There are still plenty of Wi-Fi 5 devices, and a lot of networks don't go faster than 1 Gbps anyway. If you need faster, the USB-C port is capable of 5 Gbps Ethernet via USB-CDC NCM, so there's probably enough there to connect a 2.5 Gbps USB NIC.

The whole design is supposed to be open, so maybe you can gather a few friends and figure out how to install faster components that meet your expectations.

My guess is you don't use Cursor very much if a $20 monthly subscription is enough for your needs. I still run into limits with Anthropic's $200 per month (I have 13% of my weekly allotment left with 13 hours left in the week), and I just use it as a hobbyist. Even though I am a very active hobbyist, I still can't imagine someone using these tools even 10 hours a week on just a $20 per month plan.

Who do you know that was trained on stuff that will happen in the future?

26 atomic worth - assuming 14 kT each means 364 kT. This is 423 GWH of total boom. The Utah hyper data center is projected at 9 GW. 24 hours gives 216 GWH - Throw in full heat load for thermal generation based on light-water nuclear generation and you are likely adding over 600 GWH of heat load in total. It's not at crazy as it sounds. Meaning that the total load thermal load could well exceed that of 26 smallish nuclear weapons.

This does not count the massive firestorms associated with the bombs of course. But after a short while nothing would be left to burn anyway, so I think it's fair to neglect the firestorm in the thermal load calculation.

It is insane that the EU hasn't done more to create local tech companies to reduce their reliance on the US. They need their own version of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (among others), just like China does. It's fine to leverage allies for certain parts of your economy, but the tech sector is right up their with military when it comes to industries where the EU shouldn't be depending on external allies so strongly. It's not like the EU has the same religious devotion to free markets that the US has which would make them hesitant to prop up their local tech companies for 10+ years until they could survive on their own.

I found an EU report from 2025 that suggested it would take $5 trillion to do this, which would be about 5% of the government revenue of all EU countries combined if done over a decade. Just like efforts to become less reliant on the US military complex, the EU should really get started.

In 1998, 1 Mbps of bandwidth cost $1200 per month. Today it is about 10 cents. The past never perfectly predicts the future, but I wouldn't be on the side who thinks AI won't be significantly cheaper in the near future. My Claude subscription costs be $200 per month today and gives me $2500-3000 worth of tokens per month. But in 5 years that same amount of usage will probably be a few hundred, and in ten years it will probably be $50.

You obviously weren't around for the petrified with hot grits era of Slashdot.

I'd say the government is far more capable of determining what's in the best interest of their children than the parents, but in its current state they don't leverage that capability or even have a desire to do so.

The chances that a parent has the same access to child psychologists, researchers, teacher's associations, and any other groups necessary to determine the child's best interests is laughable. The chances that a parent will base their decisions more from their own biases and ignorance than on careful research is high.

But the chances that the government in practice will do all of those things, and put in practices to effectively allow parents / teachers / etc to provide feedback on an individual child to make exceptions to broad rules, are also laughably low. So in practice it's far better to allow parents to make those decisions, even though I wouldn't consider it ideal.