> When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time.
Where's the proof that Iran has, or is even remotely close to having, nukes? I mean, actual proof, not the kind of "proof" that led us to invade Iraq in '03.
> I'm not at all mad at the US government for deciding to get rid of Iran's regime.
Ah, you're one of those people. You probably thought "Team America: World Police" was an instruction manual, and not satire, yeah?
Iran having nukes is unsubstantiated. I also don’t think they wanted to have nukes. But they also enriched Uranium up to 60% according to IAEA which has no non-military use. They perhaps wanted to use that as leverage in negotiations which turned out to be not much of a deterrence.
It's a lot more than "just" not bombing. We also need to stop meddling in other countries' affairs. 9/11 and the war on terror are a direct result of all of our "nation building" over the prior decades. If we'd left well enough alone, the twin towers would likely still be standing, and we might still be able to bring as many liquids as we want on planes, and see our loved ones off at the gate when they're taking a trip and we're staying behind.
We need to stop treating business's resource extraction from foreign countries as "national security".
And I'd be all for "nation building" if it actually worked and moved countries to be democratically run. The +$6T spent on Iraq and Afghanistan are an indictment of our efforts to "help".
We just fucked with Venezuela -- where are the reports of us "helping"?
Your "just" there is doing a lot of work. Don't trivialize the difficulty of starting a company. Most people who start companies and are successful either have some financial backing or reserves already, or they have very little in the way of other responsibilities (like a spouse, children, or elderly family members) to cause them to think twice about living on ramen for years.
Yes, there are exceptions, as with everything, but this isn't a path to be taken lightly. Your average worker who lost their job due to globalization ends up scrambling to find a job, any job, immediately, or else risk their family living on the street.
That's a reflection/continuation of a very old meme (from before we called them memes). "Why your idea won't work" checklists were passed around USENET and other forums, and one of the checklist items was almost always something like "your idea requires immediate total cooperation from everyone at once".
This is formally known as a "collective action problem", and CAPs always make achieving a solution damn-near impossible.
I would agree, except that de-escalation generally assumes there's a rational reason for conflict. That is, both sides want or need something that makes sense, and the failing to come to some sort of terms is what leads to war.
In the case of both Russia/Ukraine and US/Iran, there's nothing rational here. You can't de-escalate in these cases, because the aggressors (Putin and Trump) are making war for ideological or ego reasons. Putin wants glory and more territory for the Russian Empi-- oops, I mean Federation. Trump wants to distract from Epstein and other problems at home (which hasn't worked as well as most manufactured wars often do), and is in general just someone who likes to break things.
> AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated. Control of the future belongs to all people and their institutions. AI needs to empower people individually, and we need to make decisions about our future and the new rules collectively. I do not think it is right that a few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future.
What a bullshit thing for someone who is not actually democratizing access to AI to say.
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