Basically, violence in the Middle East started on a significant scale with the collapse of the ecosystem. Natural climate shifts in the area reduced food available and regions that were inhabitable. This resulted in massive population migrations (the Sea People, the Babylonians, etc). As natural resources were depleted and became highly centralised, violence became worse. The collapse of the tin market resulted in Dark Ages for many cultures in the region, where societies imploded catastrophically.

As wealth increased, corruption increased. We know all about a copper merchant in Babylonian times, but it was unusual enough that he wrote a long and rambling letter in cuneiform about it. These sorts of complaints weren't common but increased. Corruption requires chaos, and chaos generates conflict. So this relationship should not be surprising. It's not that corruption causes violence, but corruption and violence have the same cause and are tightly coupled.

We're you like, held out of school or something? It's hard to believe people can reach adulthood with such a hilariously shitty grasp of basic reasoning.

It's hilarious to see a federal government sue a state for banning an insanely unregularly shitshow.

"Minnesota banning prediction markets is like trying to ban the New York Stock Exchange,"

This is your future, United States. Just the dumbest shit spoken imaginable, in the service of protecting the freedom of separating people from their money, 24/7, backed up by an administration who nakedly wants dumb people to do dumb things - oh, the ways in which such policy posture enriches them personally? Totally unrelated.

Github was probably being used because someone in government considers it COTS software from a reliable American corporation. Those people who used to insist on using IIS instead of Apache are still around!

lol, shashdotters are an adorable lot, forever living in the past

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.

It seems to me they could redirect the 10 figures a year they are spending on building a VR world no one wants or will use. Or did they cannibalize that already?

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.

The big tech CEOs lined up to kiss Donald Trumpâ(TM)s ass and donate to his various grifts. Now heâ(TM)s started an unwinnable war and itâ(TM)s biting them on the ass. I hope Iran starts extracting millions of dollars a day from American tech companies and using the money to pay bad actors to hack other American companies. It will teach American business leaders a good lesson.

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.

*glances at Enron

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

I love you Angle-Westerns, you're all so obtuse!

(That made your whining sound particularly dumb.)