I basically believe you're right, but I can't wrap my head around this: How is it that they still have any control at all of the strait after all of this? Is their significantly depleted missile force enough of a threat as long as they have any credible capability whatsoever left?
Iran "controls" the strait by shooting missiles at any ship that passes through without paying them a protection fee. This includes ships that pass through Omani waters, which it has no legal control of. It's terrorism, and also an act of war.
Iran built thousands of fast-attack speedboats which patrol the strait, get up close, fire a few missiles, and quickly return. This video gives a good explanation of their strategy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKJHaODzP-0
This can be mitigated by the US/Gulf Countries, with a large number of airplanes / drones patrolling the Iranian shore, and preventing these boats from launching.
Yes, Iran built underground caves specifically to store their attack speedboat fleet. The US and Israel bombed the entrance to one on Qeshm Island multiple times, and it's unknown how many boats are still functional.
The straight is narrow enough that they could use artillery to hit the ships in it.
And for US and/or Israel to prevent it, they would have to occupy the correspondingly wide strip of Iranian coast. At which point we're talking about a massive ground invasion (and of course then the same artillery would be firing at those troops, so you can't really just stop there either).
Desert Storm involved half a million troops on the ground. Iran is about 4x the size of Iraq and has more than 3x the population. The part of Iraq involved was flat desert terrain. Most of Iran is mountainous.
> During Desert Storm, US batteries returned fire before enemy rounds even hit apogee.
That's something ground-based. And to avoid counter-battery fire, tanks move after every shot.
The Arleigh Burke class of destroyers[0] might have similar capacity since each one holds 90 missiles in the vertical launch system[1] (so they might be loaded with anything: anti-ship, anti-sub, anti-satellite, anti-aircraft, ground attack or maybe anti-missile missiles). However, to reload those missiles involves several days in port. There are only 75 Arleigh Burke destroyers at this time. Not all are near the Gulf. It wouldn't be too hard for Iranian forces to fire $10k drones that require $1M missiles to stop.
1. There is only a narrow passage through the strait which is "navigable" (meaning deep enough for supertankers - many are too big for the Suez Canal). This passage is within artillery range of the coastal mountains along the strait.
2. Now that the region is a "war zone", no insurance company will cover ships entering/transiting the strait. This was an issue during the Iran-Iraq war only solved by US Naval vessels escorting tankers. At that time, hitting a US ship would have started a war. This time, the US is an active participant in this war and every ship escorted by US ships would be a valid/legitimate military target. Shipping companies work on razor thin margins and cannot afford the risk themselves. Losing one ship (or it being out of service for months due to missile strikes) is an existential threat to the smaller shipping companies.
> I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably.
That's pretty much the definition of "average" (as most commonly used, to refer to "mean" rather than median or much less commonly mode), isn't it?
I don't think so, to put some made-up-but-illustrative numbers, I think AI is going to be worse than the 1% of people who do X professionally or at a high level, and better than the 99% who don't.
Can Suno make a better song than $YOUR_FAVORITE_ARTIST? Unlikely. Can it make a song better than 99% of a random selection of people? Probably.
I think this is actually a good thing in many ways. If I have a tool that elevates me on things I'm not very good at (like making songs) which far outnumbers the things I am good at, that's a big win for me personally, it's just a loss for the population since people who are going to push music further aren't going to be encouraged to struggle through the curve and find their own path.
I'm forced to do this at work. It adjusts the net value to very close to zero. Github's pay per prompt pricing model is phenomenal for users to the point of blowing Anthropic's subscription offering out of the water, much less API pricing. At Copilot pricing, it's quite a useful tool if carefully managed. At API pricing, it's very hard to find a use case for AI.
Of course, I have no idea how MS is justifying the Copilot pricing. I can't imagine any world in which it is sustainable, so I'm trying to get as much as I can out of it now before they jack up prices.
This is just like the debate over YAML. In both cases, the language is simple enough, and people use it sanely enough in practice that I just don't care about the warts. Contrast this with something like C++, where the warts are less avoidable and therefore more worthy of notice. Markdown as I use it is functional and simple and no one has suggested an alternative I like better, so I keep using it.
Also, as I use it, Markdown is effectively plain text. I very rarely look at "rendered" markdown. I guess in practice I actually use "plain text" that just happens to look a lot like markdown by this article's definitions.
I don't know YAML well enough, I never liked it. But if you want to write an halfway common marks compliant parser, then markdown is just nuts. It is just way too complicated for the simplicity it conveys. Look at lists, they can be freely nested, and contain all(?) other block elements. That is extreme overkill. If you need that much flexibility, then any wannabe "simple" markup is just the wrong choice.
Exactly this. At this point I read markdown as if it were rendered, with the exception of tables which are a mess visually in plain text.
But everything else, headings and bold and italics and lists, I’m honestly not sure I can tell the difference. It’s like watching movies with subtitles when you’re sufficiently experienced: your brain just fills in the gaps and you don’t even notice
YAML is actually very complex, to the point that basically nobody implements the full YAML 1.2 spec from 2009 (https://matrix.yaml.info/), while 1.1 contains footguns like `country: fr` and `country: no` parsing issues.
Though I agree simple usage is good enough in practice, there are a lot of edge cases that can cause subtle bugs.
Sorry for being too American to understand, but why would you need to talk to any medical professional to put a bandaid on your kid? Is this about NHS being paying for the bandaid? About medical expertise to apply a bandaid?
Not all disinfectants are child safe, and the wound was serious enough to require steri-strips (an alternative to sutures) -- it was not a matter of a bandaid.
You would have been best served by a Minor Injury Unit but not every town has one, so A&e is not excessive. The great majority of people going there do not need the full capabilities of it (resuscitation etc).
I do hope the doomers who think that the entire US government has been completely gutted will take note of this. The government workforce is in a bad spot for sure, SLS is far from a perfect program, but this still demonstrates that we are doing some real work still.
Take note of a project that’s about 15 years behind schedule and many multiples over budget finally progressed because we lowered safety standards to just launch?
I’m not sure how that’s proof the government isn’t gutted. Let me know what our schedule is for the next one and how that timeline has changed. Ignoring the projects that have been outright canceled…
You’re currently the guy saying “ya, all you haters that said I’d lose my house if I stopped paying my mortgage, who’s laughing now?” - one month into not paying your mortgage.
We’ll still be dealing with the after effects of doge 20 years from now.
Aren’t they still well above anything in the history of human space flight?
We keep treating these systems in popular discourse as airliners. They’re not. They’re experimental craft. With mass production maybe SpaceX can bring launch closer to general aviation. But the notion that any loss of life is intolerable is (a) unsustainably expensive and (b) not a view shared by the lives actually at risk.
The main critique of the handling of heat shields also happened at NASA in 2022-2024 and the project continued on. Artemis is largely a product of congress.
Remember when DOGE tried to cut out the inefficiencies and failed miserably? The "inefficiencies" and "bloated budgets" are there for a reason.
If Elon ran this project "without bloat", there is probably a 70% chance that the vehicle would have exploded, much in the way of his Starship and early Falcon vehicles.
But that explosion would have cost one tenth the cost a single SLS launch and the next one would go a little further. And eventually you would be flying the most reliable rocket in history more frequently than any other rocket for one tenth the cost of the competition.
This works for getting things to LEO. This doesn't scale well as the distance increases. You can't keep launching shit to the moon, crashing it over and over, until you get it right.
I knew The Discourse on this would be toxic and awful and so much of this thread has proved it.
My position is I would rather pay for 50 years of Artemis missions that never leave the ground than spend one more fucking dollar attempting to slow the descent of the American empire, or that of its colonies.
This was inspiring and amazing to watch. Actual history being made. Competence displayed proudly. No culture war bullshit. No insipid speeches by dullards about REAL AMERICA. Just us doing something because we can, and with plans to do even more.
Indeed. The GSA with 10k employees is going to fall apart without the 40k unused winzip licences DOGE so cruelly took away from them in their senseless spree of madness.
Don't confuse bureaucracy with "gutted." The federal government is bigger than at most any point in US history. Arguably that fact is -why- it's 15 years behind schedule.
That's per 100k (which just says it's mostly flat per 100k), net spending of the federal government is more than ever, and actual workforce is bigger than ever. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is stubbornly high despite us being in "peace time," and not recession spending.
If you all don't think bureaucracy is the main driver of government delays...well you clearly have never worked with or in and around government. I try to live in reality.
No, it's a plain headcount. Your first link is a chart of non-inflation adjusted spending. Your second link is all government, not just federal employees so it's not really germane to the discussion, and your third link includes things like Social Security, and frankly...good. Without the government stabilizing spending the economy would be even more of a dumpster fire of random investor panics.
I'm close to a number of people in the public sector. They're brilliant, they do great work and they aren't paid what they're worth. I've also worked for a long time in a mega-corp. It was frequently just as bureaucratic and wasteful, if not more so, than the government.
Even assuming what you're saying is correct and government spending doesn't matter (odd thing to say when you're arguing that the government has been "gutted,") your own chart is only flat over time because of USPS workers being less due to automation/retirement and there being less military recruitment (both account for about ~1.5M employees lost,) and doesn't include offloading to contractors. Underlying agencies and government is bigger than ever before. The government (federal AND state levels) itself is much larger, with more regulations, than it was even 20 years ago.
Every company has bureaucracy, but it's nothing compared to government work. Also, government has no competition, bureaucracy in big companies will eventually be punished (even if it takes a long time.) In government it is often rewarded, both internally and externally (via regulatory capture, etc.)
In any case, saying the federal government has been "gutted" is a flat lie. I don't see how people can argue otherwise. I want more money going to NASA, and more money going to civil projects like HSR, but would that magically remove 15 years of bureaucratic mess? No. More money to these projects can only happen on a large political scale if/when the bureaucratic red tape is cut to lower the costs. Adding an additional layer of bureaucrats and middle managers and pot of gold everyone can dip their hands in before it reaches the final project doesn't fix the issue.
> They're brilliant, they do great work and they aren't paid what they're worth
The headcount of such wonderful people you are describing has been reduced but then replaced by 3x+ times the rates Gov is paying for the contractors that were hired (I am one of them). so this headcount being low is a nothing more than political smokescreen that will probably be used in campaigns leading up to November election (not probably, certainly cause there is nothing else to run if you are member of the ruling party)
I am willing to concede that it would be more financially responsible for the United States to greatly increase the size of the permanent federal workforce, and to stop making its size a political football.
I have a really hard time telling if this is despite the current administration’s best efforts, because the current administration’s policies, or just an artifact of government inertia.
Top level: Super excited to witness this in my lifetime.
Edit: Also, my 40 years of life leads me towards the latter category.
For sure this is 90% inertia, although like Bridenstein in the first administration, who turned out to actually be a pretty good administrator in the grand scheme of things, I'm cautiously optimistic that Isaacman is working in good faith to make NASA the best it can be. (Which isn't to say that I agree with him 100% mind you.)
NASA has been well treated by both parties in general, with their budget rising faster than inflation most years. This administration also appointed Isaacman to be the NASA administrator which I think is a 10/10 choice for that job.
I’d argue that NASA should not have ever got into studying climate science, it should be a responsibility of NOAA. NASA should be focusing on NEP, atmospheric satellites, better aircraft, making life interplanetary and astronomy.
It’s not that simple. Trump admin requested a massive cut to NASA’s budget, which after much delay Congress finally rejected. Isaacman’s path to NASA administrator was also, erm, circuitous. Having a competent and knowledgeable NASA head was not really Trump admin’s priority.
Have you talked to any actual NASA employees (not just contractors) that work in science?
For what it’s worth, I watched today’s Artemis II launch with them. While proud of the mission, they’re likely in your “Doomer” category after a year being devastated and demoralized by having their science budgets slashed, grants/projects cancelled, having been forced to fire good contractors of 10+ years and then watching some of the most knowledgeable/skilled folks take early retirement. Don’t let the awe or Artemis fool you — NASA, especially when it comes to science, has been gutted and functionally degraded. For what it’s worth, they’re not focused on earth/climate science.
Yep, I work with them every day, since I am myself a NASA contractor. I'm curious what you think the major distinction is between a contractor and a civil servant in the first place. I work directly as part of a division (used to be "on site" before 2020, but now I'm remote so that doesn't quite fit) doing 80% the same job as any of my civil servant colleagues. I really don't think the range of opinions is all that different on either side of the fence.
I'll repeat that there are a lot of problems, but it's not nearly as bad as some people on the internet make it out to be.
Fair question—I probably overly delineated the two as I currently only know people on the civil servant side at NASA. Decades ago (!) I worked in the DC, hung out some folks, and often the ones who had strong opinions related to policy were the ones at risk of losing/keeping/winning a contract, not the government employees. That was probably in the back of my head when I made the distinction. I don’t really have a strong opinion either way now, but I felt it was only fair to answer you as best I could. Either way, I’ll try to be cognizant of that potential bias in future.
With that said, and while I haven’t had much exposure to what folks on the internet are saying, all I know is I’ve never seen this group of friends this worried or impacted. Most of them are also the type to just keep their heads down, focus on the mission, and wait for the winds shift.
While the current administration has multiple areas of improvement and isnt really taking feedback in an adult manner, the federal workforce has some of the most competent people working for it inside certain parts of the organization. im thinking especially of NASA and NASA JPL.
This is true, but a lot of the top positions are being replaced with unqualified loyalists. It's only a matter of time, if this continues, that the competent workforce gets eroded
JPL has been strangled by both parties. They had huge staff cuts in 2024, and then more in 2025. They've gone from ~6,500 to ~4,500. Trump closed their research library[1].
Of course this is a drop in the bucket, the entire science research apparatus of the United States is being burned to the ground[2]. This administration is doing to the future of scientific research what the Mongols did to Baghdad.
NASA also has some of the most incompetent people working for it, and a lot of them are responsible for overseeing SLS and Orion. JPL hasn’t been doing to well lately either (Mars Return?).
> Orion that’s dodgy as fuck not the booster. I.e the new thing
I mean, newly shaped and partly reformulated.
Avcoat was “originally created…for the Apollo program” [1]. (“A reformulated version was used for the initial Orion heat shield and later for a redesigned Orion heat shield.”) The new things are Orion’s size and weight and the size of the tiles. All of which has precedented flight in Artemis I.
At the end of the day, I’m going to trust the astronauts. This issue was openly discussed, despite NASA’s original—and fair to criticize—instinct to cover it up. While any manned reëntry is a nail biter, I don’t think this one is especially so.
Aren't astronauts by definition bat shit crazy? We have people lining up for one-way missions to Mars. Not to say this is a bad thing, but their ROI calculations are not normal.
By poetic definition, e.g. “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” yes. Clinically and technically, no. They’re paragons of human explorers, and exploration is a fundamentally human trait.
> We have people lining up for one-way missions to Mars
Part of me finds it inappropriate to do the two things at once. Advancement in scientific knowledge being somewhat at odds with blowing up one of the oldest civilizations in the World.
I certainly hope the mission goes as planned but it does feel like SLS is the wrong approach in the time of reusable rockets, even if this specific mission profile would probably have demanded the booster be expendable. Using the Shuttle main engines - designed and made to be 'refurbishable' rather than 'reusable' but still dumped into the ocean after each mission - and the SRBs (solid boosters) still gives the impression of the booster design being dictated (at least in part) to accommodate the needs of former Shuttle contractors. If either Starship+Superheavy or some other fully reusable heavy left vehicle comes on-line it will be hard for NASA to justify spending billions of $ on, well, a flying pork barrel. Sure, it has been proven time and time again that canned pigs can in fact fly but that does not make them the go-to transport.
Not entirely a doomer, but I would wait to grandstand until after the crew is returned safely, considering the allegations regarding the capsule heat shield.
> The mission's objectives are to conduct tests in low Earth orbit with one or both commercially developed lunar landers—SpaceX's Starship HLS and Blue Origin's Blue Moon—and the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) space suit.
"That this Artemis launch is happening in the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday has heightened the sense that it’s a nostalgia act for the Baby Boomer gerontocracy. All the more so because Donald Trump, the oldest person ever to be elected to the White House, is presiding over the whole affair. His administration has sought to sabotage NASA’s scientific missions, but the president seems delighted to have the agency gin up a national spectacle on his behalf, just as he was happy to have a military parade on his birthday."
I agree the government needs to spend far less money on all of these things. Deficit spending to pay for tax cuts is bad and tax hikes to redistribute wealth is also bad.
Different people have different standards. I've done many sleeper trips and several coach trips across the country over the years. Coach was fine when I was a teenager, now that I'm approaching 40, I'll pass.
Round-trip coach on Amtrak from Indianapolis to Las Vegas* in my early 20s is definitely a fun thing I'll never do again.
One of the friends I was with threw in the towel and bought a plane ticket home, though to be fair she was traveling with her 18-month-old daughter at the time and it's honestly a testament to youthful indiscretions that she even went along with the plan in the first place!
Personally, I find driving to be a much better way to see the US than trains, especially if you avoid interstate highways.
Living in Indiana with much of my family on the east and west coasts, I actually prefer driving
Like Amtrak, driving is rarely cheaper than flying, especially when traveling alone on a multi-day trip if you're not willing to sleep at rest areas and don't have friends to stay with at convenient points along the way.
For reference, from Indy, on the interstate, NYC is an easy one-day trip (~12 hours), and LA is a long but viable two-day trip with a stop in Denver (~15 hours/day), but SF and the Pacific Northwest are pushing it even in two days. Taking non-interstate routes can take much longer, especially when traveling through the mountains or major metro areas.
* Actually from Chicago to Needles, CA, with a bus between Indy and Chicago and a van between Needles and Vegas, because Amtrak didn't even offer service to Indy or Vegas at the time.
What $900 laptop with a similar form factor and build quality to a Macbook Air am I supposed to buy instead? I did quite a bit of research on this a couple of months ago, with a strong preference for a Linux compatible device (I've never been a MacOS user, and I'm done with Windows after 10 dies all the way). After weeks of research, I came to the conclusion that my best bet was to buy a Macbook Air and hope that Asahi support for M4 chips comes sooner rather than later.
reply