Iran claims 1T USD damages as a result of US leaving JCPOA alone - in 2021. Now add in 5 more years, wars, sanctions before JCPOA was signed, direct expenditures on enrichment...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/21/us-sanctions-inflic...

That's their claim for how much less economic activity Iran (not just the government) had in total due to sanctions, not how much the government "spent on the nuclear weapons program" that could have instead been spent on desalination plants.

But without a nuclear weapons program, the entire sanctions regime wouldn't have started (yea, I know today half of those are anti-terrorist sanctions, but that's not how it started, it was morphed later on). It should be considered as part of the losses.

A treaty whose key articles would start expiring in.. late 2025. Which Iran had no motivation whatsoever to extend had it being kept (imagine this Iran but with 2-4 trillion dollars more, more than a few going to drones and missiles). You'd have this war but on way worse terms.

Yea, the US joined in in 2025, what should it imply about a future war? The assumption that Iran doesn't know who's bombing it sounds rather dubious. If anything, it should be very much in their interest to assume away US involvement unless 100% proven, given fighting an additional enemy tend to be very bad and US is so powerful. Unless...

Maybe the strategic balance creates a situation where it's advantageous for Iran to pull US in regardless of non-involvement. They don't do well against Israel alone (see rather low damage of 4 separate large scale attempts at attacking Israel directly), but US is so much easier to pressure via the Gulf. Indeed, this scenario doesn't quite need Israel.

So US risked getting pulled in not due to attacking in June 2025, but because the cheque given to the Gulf was starting to expire, the power balance was objectively swinging in favor of Iran at the location where Devereaux sees as the most important part of the Middle East. Now, say there are powerful states who feel they are in a decent position now but also that the strategic balance would slip away. What do they tend to do? Devereaux can consult his WW1 history.

We saw regime collapses in the Arab Spring - it's not a simple or short process, most regimes survived (either directly or via reversion). Even when a regime was overthrown, the replacement was usually not more hostile to Israel. e.g. Syria isn't more hostile than it was. Thing is there isn't all that much 'fury' since Arabs already assume the worst of Israel, while reasons for relative peace remain as is or are actually strengthened by the revolution process (e.g. economy, desire for quiet following violent revolution, new regime wanting to establish itself, etc.)

Look, it's a done deal. Some of the choices Wayland made are not to my liking, there will be a long term cost (even static linking won't save you from differing protocol implementations). But it's done and there's no point in complaining.

(Running X11 right now, I'll switch when the distro forces me to, in hope I'll get a bug free experience after everyone else runs it)

Everyone Iranian leader who is killed is post-facto named 'moderate', with very little proof of being moderate while alive.

Nobody forced Iran to bomb gas and oil fields that aren't even of their enemies, and to start doing it before Pars was bombed (e.g. Shah gas field was targeted 2 days ago). Place the blame on Iran who is actually 'wrecking Asia' and not the ones fighting it.

>I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting...

>But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight

The era doesn't matter. The incentives are so bad, eventually you'd get a horrible result even with oversight. These markets are prone to this and shouldn't exist.

Even then, there were better options in the Windows world (RAR/ACE/etc.). Also, bzip2 was considered slow even when it was new.

RAR/ACE/etc used continuous compression - all files were concatenated and compressed as if they were one single large file. Much like what is done with .tar.bz. Bzip on Windows did not do that, there was no equivalent of .tar.bz2 on Windows.

You can bzip2 -9 files in some source code directory and tar these .bz2 files. This would be more or less equivalent to creating ZIP archive with BWT compression method. Then you can compare result with tar-ing the same source directory and bzip2 -9 the resulting .tar.

Then you can compare.

The continuous mode in RAR was something back then, exactly because RAR had long LZ77 window and compressed files as continuous stream.

>continuous compression

'Solid compression' (as WinRAR calls it) is still optional with RAR. I recall the default is 'off'. At the time, that mode was still pretty good compared to bzip2.

"fighting back" == blowing 3rd party civilian installations.

It is similar to way how Russia / Ukraine war is fought. Both sides will show you when civilian area is hit and both sides will try to conceal actual hits on sensitive military targets.

So in the news you will see that Iranians are bombing hotels, but what you won't see is that Iranians were able to knock out for example THAAD and now USA needs to move one in Korea into the Middle East.

Except here the entire Iranian strategy (what's left of it) _relies_ on targeting civilian 3rd parties. Without threatening Gulf oil, they've got nothing.

That’s how it works when you’re fighting a county like America. Do you think if the U.S. invaded Canada that we wouldn’t do flavours of the same?

America prosecutes wars depending on political popularity. Making it incredibly unpopular to do so is a very real strategy.

Not that I’m suggesting it isn’t still ugly and horrible to bomb civilian targets like girls’ schools.

They randomly shoot in all directions but they also managed to hit some things (e.g. the US installation in Kuwait and a US radar) that are probably actual legit targets. But yes, hotels, apartment buildings, (civilian) airports, container ships etc. are high on the list of things hit.