Control over the straight is one of the main reasons they’re still geopolitically relevant. I don’t see them giving it up for good, they will at least say that the blockade is still on. Given they have a lot of naval drones and missiles which are not 100% countered by US hardware, I don’t foresee any insurance companies co-signing on commercial ships crossing the straight.

Au contraire, a truly “mutualist” society would never fall for the bullshit that is happening.

If everyone had trust and a good working relationship with their neighbors and solidarity with their working class comrades, the US capitalist class and therefore the government in its current form would quickly cease to exist.

The problem is specifically that the US capitalists inserted themselves as unavoidable middlemen into every aspect of US life. Notice how you’re not getting food from your community kitchen, you’re getting food from Uber Eats. You’re not usually calling a repairman from your local community, you’re calling a company that sends one out to you. You’re not getting help from your community militia, you’re getting it from an armed wing of the bourgeois government.

(ironically, this was possible to do through years or “rugged individualism” propaganda, that you are repeating here; other things like car dependency also made things worse)

This lack of local community is a big part of why there is so little organized protest. It’s very difficult to rile up your neighbors to take up arms and meaningfully protest when you barely even know them. This would apply even more in your imagined scenario of everyone becoming individualists who raise their own cows - people wouldn’t even have time to protest because they would spend all of it on their own survival, and those who stick their head up are easily arrested and thrown into jail, with noone to protect them.

You’d be surprised

Can’t wait for agentic Claude Code to delete its own weights on all instances at some point

As far as I can tell, it’s been reality for like 20 years now. The drones became smaller and perhaps more precise, that is all

Politicians care because they literally get bribes for this shit

Yes, exactly, I mention it in my comment. It almost did the right thing and blundered in one detail.

This is what the California law requires BTW (except it makes the field mandatory which is shit). IMO in this case the EU solution is overcomplicated, it just feels like they needed an excuse to get more out of the COVID certificate investments…

Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight

Actually, one of main applications for batteries in the near-to-medium future is gonna be grid storage to supplement the explosive growth of renewables, and home backups to make the grid more distributed and replace diesel/gas generators during blackouts. For those purposes you don’t really care about the size, really don’t care about the weight, and a cheaper, more stable, less fire-prone chemistry suddenly becomes very appealing.

I agree with you that lithium is not going anywhere for a while, it’s the best fit for many applications like EVs, drones, etc. But I wouldn’t be surprised if its share in the battery market drops significantly over the next 10-15 years.

Can’t wait for one of them to be chasing me down for the crime of “thinking unfavorably about Peter Thiel”

Ah yeah, that makes sense. But I feel like it may be a bit easier to run away from a ground-based drone than it is from an aerial one. For one, they’re much slower so you’d probably have a more advanced warning.

Many labor movements throughout history started out due to advances in automation resulting in unemployment and rising inequality. This time around there’s also a huge cost of living crisis too, so things are lining up (you might hear “contradictions are sharpening” in marxist circles). If anything I’d have expected violence to start sooner and be more widespread, if someone gets laid off due to AI in this job market they literally have nothing to lose at this point.

It’s been happening for a good 20 years already. Do you think US drone strikes were all military targets? Do you think both russia and ukraine didn’t absolutely dronefuck multiple population centers? Do you think israel didn’t use drones to carry out its genocides? There are probably tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dead civilians due to drone strikes already.

And the moment they have a nuke and show it off, all hell will break loose

As you can see, all hell has been broken loose for them already even though they don’t have nukes and weren’t planning on making them. I think it’s time they armed themselves against the aggressors, with the only weapon those aggressors actually fear.

Nukes are the epitome of hard power tho. There is very little need to understand anything apart from “if I bomb that country, they nuke me (or, in this case, israel)”. I’m sure the financial markets would not appreciate a nuclear war either, so the profit incentive is there too.

Iran not getting nukes ensures that this war will happen again too. The only ways to keep sovereignty in the face of imperialists are:

1. Be economically irrelevant (a-la Cuba)
2. Kick their ass in a land war so hard that they are scared to even try (a-la Vietnam)
3. Have nukes (a-la North Korea)

If you don’t have any of those three you’re bound to be coup’d by US-backed fascists at some point, see: history of South America and West Asia.

Iran has oil and control over the straight of Hormuz, so (1) is out of the question. (2) is more likely but I’m not sure if the US leadership is dumb enough yet to just go head first into another land war in asia, and in any case this would lead to hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. This leaves us with (3) as the most viable strategy.

It is still presenting it as a point of discussion rather than a foregone conclusion, which it should be.

I really think we’re gonna lose a carrier to swarm drones before this is over.

Paraphrasing donald trump, “inshallah”

Plenty of propaganda outlets would cast doubt on it. AP is preemptively doing it right now. If you read the article it is not talking about the threats, it is specifically discussing whether bombing power plants would be a war crime. Shameful

Yesterday I was thinking that trump might get angry that Iran is letting through some ships and try enforcing a complete blockade… this seems like the first step towards that