This assumes that they can outlast Iran.

They can’t. Iran can maintain control of the Strait longer than Western economies can survive high energy prices.

They’ll continue to become more and more unpopular, though. Winning elections isn’t always enough to remain in power, they still need legitimacy. If they keep making things worse and rig all the elections, people will turn to other means.

Another stellar post from reddit.world

The dream is deskilling, not necessarily making workers faster or more efficient. Instead of relying on highly skilled employees who have tons of leverage because of their experience and education, they’d be able to just put anyone on the keyboard to review and troubleshoot the chatbot’s outputs. They essentially want coding to require as much skill as any other assembly line work.

Or: a recession is driving job cuts and AI is being used to distract investors from bad economic conditions.

The funniest part is that it doesn’t work outside of Reddit, there aren’t enough posts for downvotes to even matter for content sorting.

All it does is make the number lower, it doesn’t effect people’s ability to see the post.

They are not acting like there are going to be midterms.

Calling oil sales aggression is some interesting spin.

And now Germany suffers because it can’t access Russian energy. Win/Win for the US.

I think that’s a short-term victory, though. In the long run this will drive the EU away from the US.

I had a thought: in previous decades it was advantageous for the US to invite academics from China because we could impress them with our highly developed standards of living. We could work them over with intelligence and maybe even turn them as US assets and informants. As life in China gets better and life in the US gets worse, though, this has become a hindrance as those same academics now see the squalor of US cities and decline of US prestige. Now we need to keep them out or the whole charade of US supremacy will collapse. Now they can only be allowed to view the US from movies and television.

I’m not going to touch your belief that the attacks on US collaborators are unprovoked. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that Iran has the ability to make demands because the GCC can’t do shit about it. Iran has a position of strength over the GCC too.

Because Iran is negotiating from a position of strength and has the ability to make demands.

Remember when NATO “”“defensively”“” destroyed Libya? I remember.

And they’ll just roll over and accept it.

Iran has played the US into becoming the sin-eater for the consequences of blocking the Strait.

Kind of what I expected. Iran has all the cards here, and the US was already starting from a poor negotiating position due to Israel’s aggression against Lebanon. Iran agreeing to anything right now would have meant taking a loss for no reason.

Tie me to a missile and fire me at Tel Aviv.

More like “lung” than “long”

I, for one, am glad that Iran is discouraging young people from enlisting.

The billionaire ruling class controls NATO, they killed Qaddafi, and now Libya has open slave markets.

That’s what they want for Russia.