Ok, just follow through with the logic.

If the US 'flatteNed' Cuba (like Gaza) in response to a few drones - it would 100% make the US 'The Evil Empire' and turn the world 100% against America as a neo fascist entity.

The costs would be unthinkable, and probably the demise of the nation as a having a 'historical special place'.

It would not ever fully recover, and the 'New World Order' would be something really hard to imagine.

In reality - something else would play out ..

I think the response would be disproportionate, but probably focused, but it depends on the 'populist effect' aka what exactly Cuba attacked, and how it was provoked.

If the US attacked Cuba first, and responded with drones on a US military installation - I'll bet there is populist resistance to escalation.

Event that tussle alone would look really bad on US, would guarantee the DJT regime probably 'last place' for all US presidents, people would be calling for 25th Amendment and for new leadership, even at the same time as they might even support strikes in response.

It'll mean total political chaos until the Admin steps away, probably Congress/Institutions trying to put a 'bubble' around WH Admin.

It has already happened. Even in west Europe politicians are discussing how to protect their nations from US imperialism. Every remaining alliance the US has is strictly quid pro quo, there's no trust left anywhere (Israel being the singular exception). Meanwhile 50% of the planet is completely fed up and can't wait to have China take over as leader of the international order.

I couldn't imagine a delusional statement, considering we are literally at the moment, failing to 'change a regime' in an active war, once again!

The lack of self awareness here is ... scary.

Iran? Afghanistan? Iraq? Vietnam? Venezuela?

How many more lessons do you need, beyond than the one literally on your TV set right now ?

Here are some historical realities:

Nobody thinks of 'Castro Inc' as 'Communist' other than young folks on Reddit, or people listening to Joe Rogan.

Every adult - those living there, here, and elsewhere - know that Castro Inc. are ruthless authoritarians - their 'nominal communism' is barely relevant. Ideology is barely cover for anything as it is with all regimes.

If they have any residual popularity at all - it's for 'Standing up to America!' and those who held up the ancien regime in Cuba that 'Kept the people down!' - which has at least some historic resonance.

Nobody liked Saddam, nobody likes the Taliban, and the Communists in Vietnam were not popular in the South, and unlikely in the North as well.

Chavizmo had popular support, but that waned, and nobody likes the current regime.

And yet - where is all of this 'modern vehicles and commerce' in all these places?

The lack of self awareness is shocking.

The US ended up killing 100's of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Almost 1 million peopled died in Saddam's US-supported invasion of Iran.

The Israeli government has now admitted that up to 70K Arabs were killed in Gaza.

Many in the US have no problem bombing the smithereens out of civilians, so long as there can be some kind of populist cover for it even if it's totally disproportional.

If Castro Inc. were so irresponsible that they sent drones into a US base, it's entirely plausible that Trump Inc. bombs Cuba with enormous civilian collateral damage.

Whatever happens, the regime will not fall, thinking as much is a dangerous insult to reality.

The only way Cuba could be liberated by force is a 'full invasion', which is technically very feasible but completely unlikely, or, a long, protracted movement towards detente. That's it.

My experience with Cohere and interacting with their sales engineers has been boring, I say that is the most flattering way possible. Embeddings are a core service at this point like VMs and DBs. They just need to work and work well and thats what they're selling.

Your point is fair, but what is really nuanced is that the people who 'stopped' were the best ones at following the rules.

This seems interesting to me - they were conscientious about 'what was happening' - not just blithly following orders.

The 'rule followers' maybe were conscientiously applying the 'spirit of the test' and quit when they realized it was not reasonable.

The others were 'pressing buttons'.

Even then, it's subject to interpretation. There's a perfectly rational reason why people might subject to 'following the rules' if that's what they've been asked to do and have a sense of 'dutiful civic conduct' and 'trust in institutions'.

US Forces and Defence Complex have most of the talent they need.

Even with prevailing capabilities in many areas, it's not possible to do most things. Armies are not 'magic' - we're lulled into a false sense of understanding of capabilities by focusing to much on 'special forces' and other kinds of operations.

The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country, at the same time as there would be 'all out war' with Iran, which would be backed by China and to a lesser extent Russia, and whereupon an invasion would provide them with millions of determined fighters.

We're talking 'Gulf War' scale of operation against a much bigger, more capable country, and of forces willing to fight.

And the US doesn't even have anywhere to do it from.

Assuming a Gulf country would host an invasion force - extremely unlikely - there's no magical way for US to cross the Gulf with large numbers of forces, as we can't get capitol ships in there in the first place.

There's no amphibious capability at the scale necessary on the Arabian Sea.

Literally just the logistics of large scale landings is almost impossible.

That leaves the Kuwait / Iran border, and maybe something a bit wider.

And then fight through the mountains across the Gulf?

The thought is absurd, it's a 'major campaign theatre' - of which US forces were theoretically capable of fighting in two at once, but that's not pragmatic. That's 'wartime economy' kind of thing.

It's possible but unlikely that 10K marines and paratroopers are going to be able to do much, because it's very risky and likely won't accomplish much.

If you want to secure even 5 miles inland over 1000 miles, that's 50,000 square miles, or an area bigger than more than half the countries on earth, including North and South Korea,

Iran is the 18th largest country in the world

If you want to secure the entire Strait, sure. My understanding is you'd only seek to hold the area around the Musandam Peninsula, along with a couple of the islands near it.

Granted it may not have to be 'the whole thing' but something like it.

Sure, but its effect is far more dilute. In the Strait–in particular, around the Musandam Peninsula–it has unique geostrategic leverage.

Iran only needs to score 'one point' to win the whole game.

If they can threaten tankers, then the gulf will remain closed, and that's that.

It's really debatable if the US really has the capability to play 'whack a mole' and get all the moles.

It’s a lot more feasible to escort tankers after the Strait than it is before, when American warships have to come close to shore. Iran doesn’t have the resources to deny access to the entire Indian Ocean.

I have what may be a scale issue in my imagination, so bear with me if this is silly.

There are reports of international drug transport via seaborne drones in the 0.5-5 tonne range, and of these crossing the Pacific, and the cost of the vehicles is estimated to be around 2-4 million USD each. If drug dealers can do that, surely Iran (and basically everyone with a GDP at least the size of something like Andorra's) should be able to make credible threats to disrupt approximately as much non-military shipping as they want to worldwide?

Sure. Do you think that means worldwide shipping would shut down?

And the point isn't to take the risk to zero. But to a level where military escorts can feel safe.

I think there's a danger of that, at least if countermeasures are not easily available for normal shipping.

Even 1-on-1 rather than 1-v-everyone, there's too many players (not all of them nations) with too many conflicting goals and interests. If Cuba tried to do it, could they credibly threaten to sink all sea-based trade involving the USA? If not Cuba, who would be the smallest nation that could?

And the same applies to Taiwan and China, in both directions, either of which would be fairly dramatic on the world stage, even though China also has land options. Or North Korea putting up an effective anti-shipping blockade against Japan.

> But to a level where military escorts can feel safe.

Are there enough military ships to do the escorting?

Note that the era of free navigation is recent and short. Countermeasures would certainly emerge. But shipping wouldn’t stop.

> Are there enough military ships to do the escorting?

For critical passage, yes. If Iran is just taking pot shots at any ships anywhere, you basically have to actually blockade it.

Also the US and Europe would be pretty fucked since we depend on it much more.

China could still get resources from russia and is much more self sustained.

Also China and Russia want to break the us hegemony.

America would be fine. We have the Americas and Asia to trade with, and Iran can’t restrict those oceans in any meaningful way.

Europe, the Middle East, Africa and non-China Asia would get screwed.

I think the main limit on them interfering with that shipping would be that China becomes unhappy with them, not that this is infeasible?

(Also, at these prices I don't think it will be limited to Iran, or even to nations, so countermeasures will need to be invented).

Iran can control the Gulf and therefore 20% of global carbons.

This is enough to put the world economy into recession.

America is not 'isolated' from the global economy.

US carbon produces don't give smack about the nation generally - they will sell to the highest bidder.

If global Oil prices skyrocket - you will pay that at the pump.

US is net carbon exporter, but there is trade - the refineries in the south are designed for heavy crude from Venezuela and Canada etc.

Yes, some national policies could alter a bit, but only in emergency, and the current Administration does not give a * about national issues, other than populist blowback. They will prefer their oil buddies by default, but with a lot of leaway for 'gas prices' causing voting problems.

US companies sell abroad, a global recession affects everything.

Just google OPEC crisis - you can see what high oil prices do, they screw everything up.

There's 100% chance of global recession if Gulf stays closed.

Given the 'leverage' in US market that can come way down. US GDP is currently held up with AI spending - if that math falters, that AI investment slows down, the US drops into recession, that causes flight from equities etc etc.

I don't think we need to speculate about anything outside of the Gulf.

It's bad, it needs to be resolved.

You see this calamity in the daily statements from WH - they are 'in out in out in out' in the same day they say 'witdhdraw' and then 'we must open the strait'.

Iran hit an E-3's antenna in an airport in Riyadh with a precision strike. Was it not worth defending?

How many tankers inside the Gulf do they need to hit before the rest of the world decides it's a bad idea to send new tankers to the Gulf?

And if new tankers don't go into the Gulf, then it's simply not open for business. That's their leverage.

Hard to see it any other way.

(Edit: highly professional I might add. There are quirks, and obvious hints of 'nationalist bias' - but that's to be expected. They are not the 'cultural problem' we see on the news - at least not for now. They lean 'normal')

The current Joint Chiefs is a bit obsequious but he's not crazy.

These are very sane people, for the most part.

They may be pressed to do something risky, like land troops at Kharg island, but not completely suicidal.

That 'risk' may entail getting a number of soldiers captured, but that's not on the extreme side of military failure, it's mostly geopolitical failure. It would certainly end DJT as a popular movement.

Having a ship hit, or a few soldiers captured - and this sounds morose - is normal. That's why they exist. It's the political fallout that's deadly.

They won't do anything to crazy. The craziest thing they could do is 'full invasion' and Congress won't allow that. It's very unpopular and DJT has populist instinct as well - he's trying to 'find a way out'.

I don't know, they've been talking up a lot of crazy stuff, like strikes on desalination facilities and the power grid.

> The craziest thing they could do is 'full invasion' and Congress won't allow that.

Genuninely unclear to me whether Congress has control here; don't they currently have a Republican majority who will agree to anything anyway?

- Congress is in charge. First - they need budget, and the GOP majority has zero appetiate for approving this.

Remember that most of the GOP dislike Trump, and they also don't like this war, it's risky to the US - and - their own jobs.

So the GOP finds ways to 'resit' Trump without sticking their neck out. They do this collectively by grumbling and not passing legislation.

The majority leaders tell Trump 'We just don't have the votes for it!' thereby not taking a position against Trump, more or less 'blaming the ghosts in the party' kind of thing.

That's very different than passing legislation that reels Trump in, that's 'active defiance'.

So by 'passive defiance' and not approving $, the majority holds the Admin back.

Remember that nobody wants this, not the VP, not Rubio. Hegseth is a 'TV Entertainer'. The Defence Establishment and Intelligence Establishment knows this is stupid. 80% of Congress wants it over now.

If DJT has 65% poularity and 75% for the war, the equation would tilt, but as it stands, there is not enough political momentum.

But anything could happen ...

The death or capture of US soldiers could strongly evoke people to move one way or the other.

I'm paying relatively close attention.

Just FYI, US forces are enormous, and with a very long and institutionalized history, and it would take at least decade to tilt them in such a manner, moreover, it's not even happening in the way you're insinuating.

Removing certain DEI polices will have a very marginal affect on anything but senior officer promotions, as US forces are very meritocratic in most ways already.

Removing transgender personnel etc. is arguably unfair in many ways - but will have absolutely zero effect on those institutions overall. None.

Nobody is getting 'retired' for not being sufficiently MAGA, other than a few select positions in Washington.

Your comment is uninformed and unwelcome; you'll have to do a bit better than consume Reddit in order to gain actual knowledge and perspective, and save yourself the embarrassment.

Civilian leadership takes a few forms, there is a division between the powers of Executive and Congress. The military won't pursue anything long term without the backing of both.

There are a lot of legal thresholds, Congressional approval being just one of them.

There is institutional incumbency, and the military will push back extremely hard on things that it deems impossible, or excessively risky.

Populism etc. etc..

There are so many factors.

If they want to mount a risky 500 000 person invasion of Iran, they'll have to do a lot of 'convincing' and get a lot of buy in from stake holders. There is no chance that the Executive count mount that kind of operation without a lot of institutional buy in.

Fair to push back ... but your assertion implies one of the greater fallacies of free markets.

Free markets don't magically work like that.

When there are only a handful of participants in any given market, they don't provide all the options as we would like.

It's 100% true that Apple makes some 'good tradeoffs' for build quality - but it's also 100% true that they make tradeoffs for vendor lockin.

Lightning connectors are great examples of that.

The answer may be regulation. It depends, and it has to be careful.

While it's a very 'iffy' situation with respect to keyboards, if we move the conversation to 'batteries' you can see how we might want regs that enable some way for consumers to mechanically replace batteries - and definitely 3rd party repair - and plausibly enable standard 3rd party batteries.

These companies have incredibly monopoly and monopoly power, they reason their margins are so high is partly because of demand, but also because of 'market power' which can significantly distort innovation (think apps on iPhone, totally captured market etc).

Unfortunately it's never so easy as 'always regulate or always not'.

The AI is already substantially better than most humans for a huge spectrum of at least narrow tasks. Those 'skills' will expand in scope, the evidence is overwhelming and unequivocal.

Within 12 months it will be considered a 'security concern' to not have AI at least to some degree of autonomous review.

It's very easy to overstate the impact of AI (and sometimes it's annoying), but it's just unreasonable to be in 'denial' at this stage.

The only concern really is how, when, and with what kind of oversight we use the new tools - that that 'they are used'.

For example, I'd rather use a calculator to do calculations than ask an LLM to do it. I'd rather use LanguageTool for grammar than asking an LLM to do it. Id RTFM then have an LLM summarize it.

New code will still need to be written though.

It's not reasonable to suggest that AI is only going to repeat older patterns that have been trodden before, or 'things that don't matter'.

AI will be writing most new code, by far.

Without even getting into complicated arguments about 'creativity' - the AI is an encyclopedia of best practices, and can think a couple of steps ahead for most things you'll ever want to do.

Like pro chess players thinking they're going to beat the algo with some kind of fancy human creativity.

Developers roles are changing, very fundamentally, you're now 1/2 a layer of abstraction above the code, and you're not going to writing it better than AI (in most cases) any more than a human will be better at sawing wood than the power tools. And yet, carpenters still exist.

But you’re also never going to convince the people who still only run vi on the Linux console, without Xorg…

Edit: I have my popcorn ready for when the VC subsidies end.

Do you even know what your job is?

Your job as a developer is not to produce brilliant code - it's to produce code that is so standard, disciplined, off-the-shelf and normative that it's utterly boring.

That is exactly what the AI is good at - 'the boring standard'.

-> AI is not harming anyone's cognitive abilities.

-> Cost of AI is marginal - $200/mo for a tool while devs earn >>$100K, is the cost of tires on a car

-> Token prices are dropping by 90% per year, today's AI is already pretty good, it will be a commodity soon, but we'll continue to pay probably even more than $200/mo because the value is there.

I taught myself BASIC in the 1980's and there's code I wrote in the 1990's that is literally still in production to this day. There's probably a decent chance that I've had code in production since before you were born. Over the span of those decades, it's very clear that there's a fundamental transformation, which is totally unassailable.

No, they literally identified a plausibly sensible policy flag, not some arbitrary action.

These flags are used in literally every system imaginable.

They they don't conform to some hard criteria, to your criteria, or to some working or ideological group's criteria is a bit besides the point.

Every system has these for good reason.

We have laws and regulations for all sorts of things to help people - including children and parents - in a complex society.

"The state has no business listening in on private citizen's communication."

The absolutely do, depending on circumstances. While Facebook is not a place for state monitoring, it's definitely in the public interest if they flag something that is 'very bad' by some reasonable criteria, so that the state can then act if necessary. They do so within the boundaries of the law subject to judicial oversight.

Facebook is a popular social network, a place that they want people to feel imminently safe. It's a Starbucks lounge without coffee - not a 'personal hyper protected zone'.

Other places, such as Signal, Telegram etc. can have different levels of privacy aka e2e given the different offering and expectations of privacy.

Facebook more or less wants to offer a relatively safe place where the kids can hang out, where they know crazy people are not going to attack their kinds. It's a community centre not a hacker zone.

If we can get past that, then we can move onto basic issues of privacy, advertising etc. which are damaging to everyone, especially young people, for which Facebook has perverse incentives.

The absolutely do, depending on circumstances.

So primary is this concept of privacy, that it requires an entire legal framework, evidence of potential wrongdoing, proof that there is no other method to achieve the goal of validating guilt, proof that the crime is severe, and not a hunting expedition, approval via a warrant after a judge has examined that evidence, and strict controls around the entire usage of that warrant.

Wikipedia says:

Lawful interception is officially strictly controlled in many countries to safeguard privacy; this is the case in all liberal democracies.

Using this edge case as "depending on circumstances" is clearly not the generic I was referencing. The statement that

"The state has no business listening in on private citizen's communication."

Is valid, correct, accurate. Listing edge cases, is not invaliding the rule. It is the exception to the rule, and considering the sheer volume of communication, compared to the volume actively tapped in a legal means, it is the most edge case of edge cases.

There is no reason I would deem a mega-corp to somehow be OK to do what I would demand the state not. That our democratic societies have deemed that our states should not.

To highlight that, the phone companies of old would be in infinitely hot water, should they listen to communication between customers, in any fashion.

A platform is not a parent, should not police, should not act as an arm of the state, or as an arm of parents, except as I stipulated, by direct request of the parents, and only to enable the parents to be a guardian. Under no circumstances should that involve the platform scanning anything, instead, the platform could simply give parents direct access to a child's account.

No it doesn't.

Life is no Reddit, lawyers and technicalities.

It's made up of regular people in communities.

If you see some guy creeping on 10 year-olds, you can notify the police and Facebook will do that as well - for the same reason.

It may not at all need to involve 'state surveillance', and Meta can probably hand over whatever they want to the police in that circumstance.

The police can make a decision as to how to proceed.

A bit like if someone was harassing someone on the street.

Or if an unknown person starts hanging out outside by a schoolyard in a way that seems inappropriate.

We don't want to transgress people's rights but we also are going to look at 'negative signals'.

"The state has no business listening in on private citizen's communication."

So yes, the concept of privacy is so primary that the it requires an entire legal framework for the state to listen in.

--

In terms of the rest of your post, even though you quoted out of context, what you're saying is fine. But the people noticing things on the street, have nothing to do with those who maintain the roads. You really don't want corporations to have algorithms which mean they have to report trigger words to the police or state.

Instead, as I said, empower the parents. Legal guardians. It's their job to watch.

They already do.

The entire financial system, all of social media, and many organizations past a certain size.

I did not quote out of context - the commenter was missattributing context.

And some things are reported, others are not, point being, yes E2E isn't reported for obvious reasons. Loads of stuff isn't reported on social media; in fact, that's the absurd complaint against Meta!

And regardless of what is done now, that doesn't mean we want it. I didn't say it is or isn't done, I said "You really don't" want that. The more encroachment in that realm, the less free a people are.

We 100% absolutely do want 'basic surveillance' on many systems, and it's not even an argument.

It's like saying 'We shouldn't have police, because they are oppressive!' and assuming things would just carry on and not go to pot.

It's a wild assertion.

Formally - the entire financial system is about attribution, fraud, monitoring and security.

That's probably more than 1/2 of the function.

Your money would not be safe if your bank didn't have good controls, or if we did not have good regulations around those functions.

It's why if you send > $10K overseas, it gets flagged. We generally want this, though obviously within a regulated context.

Less formally, we absolutely, 100% do want the 'Starbucks employees' to have enough common sense to call the police or to flag something if there is some creepshow doing something that may be 'legal' but is obviously not appropriate - within reason.

Starbucks has not only 'policy' around behaviour, but also we have 'common sense' as a society.

It's not even remotely contentious that Starbucks is both private property and can set some 'terms' , but that it's also a regular community locale, with social conventions.

Just as Facebook - and many (most places) like that are 'community hang outs' - subject to regular social conventions, established by the 'owners'.

They're not 'no-identity-hacker-zones' for folks to publish their freak-ware or whatever, with ultra privacy guarantees.

Conversely - yes - it's just as important that if people want to establish their 'hacker-zones' - they can do that. That's important. And obviously Facebook has to be subject to some minimal privacy regulations.

But most places will have some degree of social overview (like literally the grocery store would have) and 'that's normal' in any civil society.

It's already pervasive because it's impossible to have basic social function without them.

Read the story about the former Twitter CEO who talks about this kind of thing pre-Elon Musk. 'Moderation' is most of the job and by far the hardest thing. We think of it as 'back end systems' it has almost nothing to do with that. It's the 'social' part of the 'social network' that's the key part. Moderation.

Let's say a 40 y/o man finds a phone on the ground, sees a name stuck on it, googles "name + town" and finds the facebook of a 12 y/o girl, and messages "Hey I found this phone, do you recognize it? <photo>"

With e2e encryption, you can't easily tell the difference between that and a creep.

This thread is advocating that exactly that case should result in a police visit with the assumption of guilt.

Imagine no e2e for a moment for FB. Policy can be smart enough to pick up that this communication is not represntative or normal. That's part of detection.

Second, a single message to someone on a random phone is not going to flag anything.

Third - there is no assumption of guilt. Not even an arrest is assumption of guilt.

Finally - those are extraordinary corner cases. They will happen, but the get resolved the moment the guy says 'oh, I found this phone' - because that will be 100% clear in that context.

Obviously - things can go awry. Meta flag something as bad, sends it to police - they do not follow procedure, or don't apply something correclty and arrest a guy at his place of work. But in the scenario you described, its literally not a problem - there are 'common sense checks' through the whole thing. The algo, the human making the notification to the police, the police, the judge if a warrant is required. People are not going to be arrested because they found a phone and texted their niece - if that happens, then we have another set of problems.

We can 100% have our 'friendly community' with Facebook.

Now - with an e2e thing like Signal, well, yes, it could theoretically be a problem, but the likelihood of some rando finding a phone, that's not locked, and being able to text some other 12 year old, an effectively 'pose' as their 'contact' - well that's a rare case scenario.