I wish MBFC had coverage of The War Zone. TWZ is not very large, but they cite material really well, have informed discussion, and aren’t sensationalist. It’s great for mainstream coverage of military-related stuff. It’s bizarre that it started out on a car website, but it definitely has been one of my more-pleasant surprises online.
That might indicate that this really is a proportional response, the kind that Iran has already signaled they would not retaliate against.
Ehh…Iran said that they would respond against attacks on their “territorial sovereignty” or something similar, if I recall, which would be basically any attack against Iran’s territory. I don’t think that they said anything about proportionality. At least not that I saw (and I’d been searching Google News and similar repeatedly for a while).
That being said, there’s rhetoric and there’s action.
Back after the Iranian attack, Netanyahu said something about the people of Iran being free from their regime sooner than one might think or something like that, which could certainly be taken as indication of taking out the Iranian leadership, and unless there’s more going on than what’s in the news and Israel has announced, I don’t think that Israel’s trying to topple Iran’s government.
But, yeah, we’ll see what comes next.
So, couple guesses on my part, prior to information coming in:
If the attack is over – which I don’t know, but I don’t think that there’d be a reason to have it run over an extended period of time – and if these reports as to explosions are accurate, it is probably far smaller than the Iranian attack to which it was a response. That attack included 200 ballistic missiles. On the other hand, if – and we don’t know this yet, though I’m sure it’ll be in the news shortly – Israel actually hit IRGC headquarters, they probably caused more damage and killed more people than the Iranian strike; the missile fired at Mossad’s headquarters was inaccurate and hit an area by a nearby road, as I recall, and a number of the missiles were intercepted.
If Israel is aiming to mirror the Iranian attack in particulars, not just targets, the Iranian attack included two waves. I don’t know why Israel would do that unless it had something to do with intended damage by Iran, but thought it’d be worth a mention, since knowing when the Israeli attack is complete would be interesting information.
I don’t have the familiarity with the matter to say off-the-cuff myself, but there does appear to be an Iranian air base at Shiraz.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iran/shiraz.htm
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-826117
Five explosions were reported heard across Tehran and the nearby city of Karaj early on Saturday morning, according to Iranian media, in what is alleged to be the beginning of an Israeli retaliatory attack on Iran.
A second wave of airstrikes was reported following blasts heard in Shiraz later on early Saturday morning.
I don’t immediately know what the significance of those locations are, and there’s probably more-detailed information coming shortly, but I imagine that that alone is probably enough to give people who have been looking at the matter an idea of what likely targets were.
EDIT: Oh, wait, missed this bit (or it was added after I initially read the article):
Israel reportedly attacked the location of the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran.
Several of the strikes in Tehran targeted military bases across southern and southwestern Tehran, according to Iranian media.
Reports of explosions at the Imam Khomeini International Airport in the Iranian capital were also received, however Iranian officials denied anything was wrong.
EDIT2: Yeah, apparently they’ve been updating the article, whether or not that bit was already there.
EDIT3: I didn’t look at what-all was known about the intended targets of the Iranian ballistic missile strike a while back, but I do recall that it included Israeli airbases and Mossad’s headquarters. Hitting the IRGC headquarters and Iranian airbases would be analogous, I suppose, so that’d make sense if Israel’s intent is to have an attack that mirrors the targets of the Iranian attack.
EDIT4: An anonymous Israeli military source was quoted on CNN’s liveblog as saying that no energy targets were attacked, only military.
EDIT5: Israel’s foreign ministry also announced on Twitter (and probably elsewhere) that they were striking military targets, and I’d take that as more authoritative than whatever anonymous source CNN had.
EDIT6: Barrons reports that “Iran State TV Says At Least Six Blasts Heard Around Tehran”, so I guess that gives an idea as to scope.
EDIT7: This has some information as to attack composition:
https://jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-826126
Over 100 planes were involved in the attack on Iran on Saturday, including the cutting-edge F-35.
Israel’s preliminary strike on radar targets in Syria was aimed at “blinding” Iran’s capabilities, quickly escalating into an offensive targeting Tehran and Karaj, Iran’s capital and another strategic location.
The IDF confirmed the operation focused strictly on military targets, steering clear of nuclear and oil facilities to prevent wider conflict escalation. High alert remains as Israel anticipates potential retaliation, not only from Iran.
This large-scale assault involved over 100 aircraft, including F-35 “Adir” stealth fighters, covering approximately 2,000 kilometers. According to foreign reports, strikes focused on Tehran and Karaj, with the IDF stating that each wave targeted military sites exclusively, mitigating further conflict risks.
EDIT8: CNN reports that Israel says that the attack is complete.
Apparently, some London residents are getting fed up with social media influencers whose reviews make long lines of tourists at their favorite restaurants, sometimes just for the likes.
As Gizmodo deduced, the trend seemed to start on the r/London subreddit, where a user complained about a spot in Borough Market being “ruined by influencers” on Monday:
“Last 2 times I have been there has been a queue of over 200 people, and the ones with the food are just doing the selfie shit for their [I]nsta[gram] pages and then throwing most of the food away.”
So, I don’t know what the situation is in London.
But COVID-19 really clobbered a lot of commercial establishments, and particularly eateries. I’m guessing that at least some traffic might be a return of the public to restaurants, with the supply of restaurant capacity at a low due to having gone through hard times over the past our years or so.
kagis
Ah, right. This is Europe, and while the US got hit by higher energy costs too, the Ukraine invasion really dicked up energy prices in Europe for a while. And then you have the hangover from the COVID-19-related spending happening, as inflation bites, and reducing spending on restaurants is an easy thing to cut on one’s budget. And this points out that restaurants are a labor-intensive industry, and Brexit has driven labor costs up by cutting the labor pool.
https://www.ft.com/content/a36ad5fd-db20-4ba8-89ea-e185838c8aa0
UK restaurant sector hit by cost of living and Covid legacy
Stuart Devine thought his chain of fish and chip restaurants in Aberdeen had survived the worst when the UK government lifted Covid-19 lockdowns for good in spring 2021 and customers returned to enjoy the classic British meal.
But before the Ashvale could fully recover it was dealt another blow, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 disrupted global supply chains and sent energy and food prices soaring.
Devine’s struggles are shared by roughly 40 per cent of UK restaurant owners, who are operating at or below break-even point, after the sector was hit by a perfect storm of pandemic shutdowns and the cost of living crisis, according to data from UKHospitality.
The trade body estimates that up to 30 per cent of businesses in the sector have closed since Covid struck. About 1,169 restaurants shut in the past year alone, equivalent to more than three a day, according to UKHospitality and consultancy CGA by NIQ.
“The money coming from the front door is just not enough to offset the significant cost of doing business that the restaurants are facing,” said Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality.
While energy prices have fallen from their peak over the past 12 months, restaurants continue to bear the brunt of elevated food costs. The particularly labour intensive industry has also struggled with staff shortages, worsened by Brexit, and to keep pace with the statutory minimum wage. It stands at £10.42 an hour and will rise to £11.44 in April.
Devine said “the hardest thing is that the only thing you can do is put your prices up”, noting that there was a limit to how much lifting prices could help at a time of already weak consumer confidence and tight household budgets.
So the combination of all those things would tend to have squeezed the supply of restaurants, and it might be that if there’s enough demand to consistently fill restaurants in London, expand existing or open new ones, that things will tend to return to a more-normal state.
It is also likely to be unwelcome news in China, which has long been North Korea’s main ally but whose influence over the reclusive nuclear-armed state is being eroded by leader Kim Jong Un’s growing relationship with President Vladimir Putin.
Ehhhh.
On one hand, yes. North Korea plays Russia against China, and during this war, North Korea can provide things that Russia really wants, so China probably has less direct pull in North Korea than normal.
But…the flip side of that is that China’s influence over Russia is also probably at an all-time high, in part as a result of this conflict.
And my guess is that the China-Russia effect is much-more-likely to be a long-lived effect than the Russia-North-Korea effect, due to things like economic and technical ties being established. Just the other day, I read an article talking about how it was expected that North Korea’s relationship with Russia would probably do quite a bit to head back in the direction of normal after the war.
My expectation is that China can probably afford to play the long game.
In total, there were 118 false positives — a rate of 4.29%.
Earlier this year, investors filed a class-action lawsuit, accusing company executives of overstating the devices’ capabilities and claiming that “Evolv does not reliably detect knives or guns.”
I mean, in terms of performance, I’d be more concerned about the false positive rate than the false negative rate, given the context. Like, if you miss a gun, whatever. That’s at worst just the status quo, which has been working. Some money gets wasted on the machine. But if you are incorrectly stopping more than 1 in 25 New Yorkers from getting on their train, and apply that to all subway riders, that sounds like a monumental mess.
Yeah, I was gonna say…GPUs have to be more significant today for general compute than they’ve ever been.
Okay, yeah, maybe you don’t need one for CAD acceleration in 2024, but that has to be a vanishingly small thing compared to parallel compute on stuff like AI work.
Did NVIDIA stop selling videocards in Russia?
kagis
https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-to-stop-all-product-sales-to-russia
Nvidia Stops All Product Sales to Russia
March 5, 2022
So, yes, though I don’t think that it matters a huge amount, since companies are just gonna re-export them out of China or Kazakhstan or wherever. I mean, it’s not like the hardware has some kind of region-locking. It’s a piece of consumer hardware, sold and resold anonymously all over the place. It’s not some kind of specialized military hardware with four end customers and tight control over the movement of the product.
kagis
https://hardwaretimes.com/nvidia-loses-just-2-of-its-revenue-as-offices-are-shut-down-in-russia/
In October [2022], NVIDIA officially shut down all its operations in Russia as sales of both data center and consumer graphics cards were wrapped up. At the time, around 240 employees worked for the Santa Clara-based company. These folks were given the option to either relocate abroad or look for other jobs.
Furthermore, NVIDIA hardware has been banned from sale via official channels.
Fortunately for Team Green, the Russian Federation represented a minor market for its wide portfolio. Disclosures from the Q3 2022 earnings report indicate that the Federation accounted for just 2% of its revenue and 4% for the gaming business.
Although channel partners are forbidden to sell the latest GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards, Russian gamers can still procure them from the grey market.
It’ll probably add cost and some risk of getting ripped off and no manufacturer’s warranty, but I would be surprised if someone who wanted a new GPU couldn’t continue to get ahold of one in Russia, given enough funds.
EDIT: Does make me wonder about Windows-side driver updates. Like, people here are talking about Linux. Windows requires driver signing, and I don’t know if those signatures are region-specific.
You can operate a VPN service in Russia legally, but it is obligated to block state-specified stuff internally to the VPN.
https://www.cloudwards.net/russian-vpn-ban/
VPN vendors have to get approval from the authorities to operate within the Russian borders. Usually, this means the provider has to comply with Russia’s censorship demands, like connecting to the FSIS.
Most sanctions, aside from ones aimed at individuals, are going to have indirect effect. That is, they will produce pressure on Russia in aggregate, and that means that they’ll impact the typical citizen.
But that being said, there have been a lot of sanctions applied, and…the impact on Nvidia drivers isn’t, I think, really a huge one relative to those. Like, things like cutting off access to all kinds of electronics parts and payment system access and stuff are going to be, I’d say, a lot more impactful to a typical person in Russia, even if the impact is secondary.
Other than as a mind game, I don’t see the point.
Google provides a centralized service. They own the generator system.
You could solve the whole problem much more simply and reliably by just retaining a copy of all generated text at Google – the quantities of data will be miniscule compared to what Google regularly deals with – and then just indexing it and letting someone do a fuzzy search for a given passage of text to see whether it’s been generated. Hell, Google probably already retains a copy to data-mine what people are doing anyway, and they know how to do search. And then they could even tell you who generated the text and when.
The birth rate, or the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime, has dropped from 1.58 children per woman in 2021 to 1.35 currently.
In the years from 2011 to 2016, Germany’s fertility rate rose from 1.39 to 1.59 due in part to better overall conditions for families with children as well as the arrival of immigrant families with higher fertility rates.
So, basically, all the recovery since 2011 has been lost.
They already nailed this guy a bit back – I was confused for a sec, thought I recognized his face from previous coverage. The article is just saying that the IDF is confirming that an earlier airstrike that had targeted him did, in fact, kill him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2024_Dahieh_airstrike
October 2024 Dahieh airstrike
On the night of 3 October 2024, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out an airstrike on an underground bunker in Dahieh, a predominantly Shia Muslim suburb in the south of Beirut, Lebanon, where Hezbollah leaders, including Hashem Safieddine, had convened in the headquarters of Hezbollah’s Intelligence Branch.[1][2]
It sounds like both Lebanon and Israel had suspected that he was dead prior to this point, just weren’t certain:
Fate of Hashem Safieddine
According to the Israeli Channel 12, Israeli security officials were “increasingly confident” that Safieddine had been killed in the attack.[3]
On 5 October, a Lebanese security source reported that Hezbollah lost contact with Safieddine, and that Hezbollah has not heard from him since the airstrike.[9][10]
Al Arabiya and Al Hadath reported that Israel confirmed the assassination of Hashem Safieddine and all Hezbollah leaders that were with him.[11] On 8 October, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that Safieddine was likely “eliminated”. The claim was later repeated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.[12][13][14] On 22 October, the IDF formally announced his killing along with Hussein Hazima and other senior Hezbollah members.[15][16]
“Europe is the largest consumer of cocaine worldwide, bigger than the United States, so the demand is there,” said Schindler, a former U.N. Security Council and German government official.
Dammit, London.
Top Gun
kagis
Apparently this is at least his second election doing this.
I’m a little suspicious that the goal is to promote his business more than running for office.
He apparently bought a furniture store and converted the whole thing into a massive gun store with a bunch of amenities with "the largest showroom and indoor shooting range in the Midwest. "
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/08/27/top-guns-gun-store-indoor-range/
EDIT: As I vaguely remember, when US legislation went through restricting unsolicited telemarketing and such, there was an exception for political campaigns.
checks
The National Do Not Call Registry gives you a choice about whether to receive telemarketing calls
You can register your home or mobile phone for free.
After you register, other types of organizations may still call you, such as charities, political groups, debt collectors and surveys. To learn more, read our FAQs.
Yeah. Thinking that might be the angle.
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-21-2024
Russia appears to be scrambling to reduce tensions with South Korea following credible reports of intensified North Korean cooperation with Russia, including South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence warnings that a contingent of North Korean troops has deployed for training to Russia. South Korea’s Foreign Ministry summoned Russia’s Ambassador to South Korea, Georgy Zinoviev, over reports of the deployment of North Korean military personnel to Russia.[12] The Russian Embassy in South Korea falsely framed the event as a voluntary meeting, as opposed to a diplomatic summons, and notably claimed that any cooperation between Russia and North Korea “is not directed against the security interests” of Seoul.[13] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed that Russia-North Korea cooperation “should not cause concern” to other states, and that information about the alleged presence of North Korean troops in Russia may be “contradictory.”[14] The Kremlin’s apparent desire to assure South Korea that its cooperation with North Korea is not a threat to Seoul suggests that the Kremlin remains very concerned about the prospect of Seoul’s potential pivot towards providing Ukraine with necessary military support, and the implications of worsened relations with Seoul for Russian security interests in the Asia Pacific region. Russia has previously attempted to court Seoul in order to mitigate the impacts of its growing reliance on North Korea, as ISW has noted.[15]
Well, if ISW is correct about the Kremlin aiming to reduce tensions, it doesn’t sound like tensions are being reduced a whole lot.
“probably 1% of the companies will stand out and become huge and will create a lot of value, or will create tremendous value for the people, for society. And I think we are just going through this kind of process.”
Baidu is huge. Sounds like good news for Baidu!
The embargo? Seized a bunch of American-owned property in the revolution. The US said “you can nationalize it, but you gotta pay for it”. The Cuban government said no, and the US said “then we won’t do business with you”.
Lot of property owned by Americans out there in the world. Makes people think twice about treating it as a free cash grab bag if the last group to try it regretted it.
Also, as someone else pointed out, it’s an embargo, not a blockade, which would be forcibly preventing them from doing business with anyone else, like, parking warships offshore and not letting anything in or out. A blockade would be an act of war. Embargoes are not.