Iran has also been freely bombing Israel and US assets around the Middle East. The Zionists bit off more than they could chew and now Iran is better positioned than ever before. Not only that Iran has earned a lot of respect globally and Israel/the US has lost what little they had left.
> Iran didn't escalate against anyone except their aggressors.
This is categorically false. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Qatar, (Kuwait,) even Oman and Turkey at various times, and Cyprus. Iran demonstrated superiority in only one respect during this war, and that was in recruiting otherwise well-meaning, levelheaded figures in media and government, even religious leaders, to spout incoherent nonsense as you did here.
Its neighbors are hosting US bases which were used to launch attacks on Iran. Bahrain in particular hosted the largest US radar station in the region which was being used as the control centre to coordinate the attack on Iran [1]. These countries were absolutely not 'non-aggressors'.
Doesn’t excuse bombing actual civilian targets, apartment complexes, &c, nor does it excuse executing peaceful domestic protestors - all of which this Iranian government has done.
Maybe if they, idk, stopped funding Hamas, Hezbollah, and Yemen rebels stopped trying to get a nuke, stopped stockpiling missiles for no reason and stopped chanting death to America we wouldn’t be here.
The Iranian government is terrible, but that doesn’t mean that the U.S. relationship with the gulf states isn’t worse off than in February. The United States made our alignment with Israel hard to ignore and was significantly unable to protect allied countries while drawing fire onto them. It’s entirely possible for both sides to lose a war and I’d bet we’re going to see enough of a shift away from us, likely to China, to solidly count this as a loss.
It hard to say which way this goes. It's a possibility. But China can offer even less protection than the US can.
We have seen that the US ability to project power is great. We've also seen (and I don't think anyone didn't know that) that power has its limits. Especially when it comes to fighting fanatics with nothing to lose.
The US is still the only world power that has the ability to e.g. prevent Iran from just walking in and taking the gulf countries. It's true that protection isn't hermetic.
But hermetic protection is REALLY important when your entire economy is based off of oil and water desalination plants. Iran still retains the ability to damage that infrastructure. The Gulf countries have some hard decisions to make, but I wouldn’t be surprised if several of them sprint closer to Iran. Already we are hearing of a joint Omani-Irani agreement on Hormuz administration…
But it's not new that there's no hermetic protection.
There is no real possible alignment between the regime in Tehran and the Sunni Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. There is no way they are sprinting closer to Iran.
Oman is more complicated but they are also not going to align with Iran.
It's hard to evaluate but I don't see huge shifts from the gulf states. The US is still their best bet (not to mention that they are heavily invested in that). They have major investments that aren't oil, i.e. unlike Iran they can live very comfortably even if the energy sector is shut down. They prefer to make money from oil and gas but they also prefer a weaker Iran.
It's looking like more of the same and counting down to the next round.
> it's not new that there's no hermetic protection.
I think what new is the realization of Iran’s willingness to escalate.
> There is no real possible alignment between the regime in Tehran and the Sunni Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. There is no way they are sprinting closer to Iran.
Can you please expand on that? I don’t understand why they couldn’t be aligned.
Basically they believe the rulers of the gulf countries should be overthrown and that those countries should be run by Islamic rules. So basically MBZ who rules the UAE (as an example) wants to keep ruling the country and strike some balance between economic prosperity and maintaining his rule while Iran would want to see him removed and his government replaced by a theocratic regime. Naturally the UAE also wants not to be bombarded by Iran but the personal survival of the UAE rulers is a bit more important to them than that goal.
> But China can offer even less protection than the US can.
I think a lot of those states are wondering how much protection they’d need if we weren’t based there and drawing fire. China can offer economic stability and sales of modern military equipment for self-defense, and I think the entire world is working through the implications of the United States allowing an unsound octogenarian to destabilize the dollar or declare a major war on a whim. There’s a lot to dislike about China but the gulf states aren’t exactly sticklers for democracy and stability is good for business.
> We have seen that the US ability to project power is great. We've also seen (and I don't think anyone didn't know that) that power has its limits. Especially when it comes to fighting fanatics with nothing to lose.
My unprovable pet theory is that the US would've had less black eyes if we didn't have incompetent people like Kegseth in charge, and especially if he hadn't been allowed to dismiss top brass across the military just because they were too woke/not "warrior" enough.
Hegseth didn’t help matters at all but the problem started at the top. In past administrations, the various people leading the military & State would’ve pushed back against Netanyahu/Graham’s sales pitch that it’d be an easy war, identified actual goals, and planned ahead to achieve them (e.g. assembling a coalition like their counterparts did against Iraq twice) but everyone with backbone or independence was purged under the Republican’s new unitary executive theory. Hegseth was selected because he would never say “sir, that’s a bad idea” as happened so many times during Trump’s first term.
Nobody is taking the side of the IRGC here, it's an awful regime that should fall in a just world. But it's inevitable they will retaliate against their neighbors, if their neighbors are complicit in attacking them. Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait are not innocent, they picked a side and are paying for it.
That’s fine just stop grandstanding about little ole’ Iran being attacked or civilians dying if you don’t care that innocent civilians in other countries are dying. When you do you are taking a side and suggesting Iran is the moral actor here. They’re not.
Lots of people here are taking the side of the IRGC. It's not ok to attack the civilians of the gulf countries because they are aligned with the US whichever way you look at it. Attacking US military assets are fair game.
Lots of people are taking the side of the US, which has attacked civilian infrastructure and killed civilians in Iran and threatened to completely destroy Iran. And you have lots of people taking the side of Israel, which is has been conduction a genocide openly. All the sides have blood in their hands but I would argue the IRGC has the least blood in their hands.
There is no data based view of this world where the IRGC and the Islamic Republic doesn't have the most blood on their hands and is the least moral player here by modern standards by far. Just in 1988 they executed 30,000 people. In 2025 at least 1000. In 2026 10's of thousands.
Dissidents are being hanged in Iran as we write this.
Israel has claims of self defense after being brutally attacked. The US has claims of wanting to take down the regime and prevent them from getting nuclear weapons. You can argue about claims and actions. The Iranian regime has no shred of excuse other than their total lack of humanity.
What in the world?? Iraq was a million civilians killed by the US. Gaza was 100,000 civilians killed by Israel in the last 3 years. And that’s not including all of the other atrocities committed by the two countries.
And there is no proof of the 10s of thousands of protesters killed claiming. That was just propaganda to enable this recent war.
Countries can claim this and that about defense and brutal attacks, and depending on who you are you believe the propaganda or not, but in the end what matters is the destruction and killing they do. Which US and Israel and done more of by a long shot.
I would still call countries that host a radar station non-aggressors as they were not active participants. Either way Iran was pretty selective in terms of its "aggressor" definition. It didn't attack Syria or Iraq despite those countries contributing their air space. It didn't really attack Turkey other than like 3 rockets that were shot down.
Clearly this was not about attacking someone that's attacking you or military assets. This was about leverage. Attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure of countries that are assumed to have some lever over the US to force it to stop while at the same time are too weak or too afraid to defend themselves (which is why you did not see the same scale of attacks e.g. against Turkey despite it also hosting the US). It's a tactic. It's also a war crime.
Russia is the aggressor there, and I don't recall Ukraine targeting other countries with Russian bases. Also, the war in Ukraine is about Russia expanding territory so it involved boots and occupation since day one, which is not the case in Iran.
At least there is an idea that at least one of the reason Russia attacked Ukraine was to prevent it from joining NATO, which would have enabled US military bases in Ukraine.
I was at a party once with Facebook employees and they were telling stories about how they would spy on who visited who's profiles. They thought it was so funny, they could "tell" who had a crush on who. I deleted my account as soon as I got home. Vile company.
After getting scammed on Facebook Marketplace, I look at the profiles of sellers, particularly if they don’t have much in way of reviews. That seems more prudent than creepy to me. I’m not stalking anyone and I’m not looking to be their friend.
Is there a better way to do seller verification? It does seem like an information leak to me. Craigslist and eBay don’t share my identification as a potential buyer. I don’t love the marketplace being tied to a social network, but it’s what many people are using these days.
sure, showing up on suggested friends is weird. the way linkedin does it makes more sense: "these people have viewed your profile". i was picking up on hiding it outright. while that may be justified in your case, it's also reasonable to let them know.
the only people i would really not want to find out that i look at their profile are spammers and scammers (oh, and stalkers).
so both sides have a fair reason. so guess, if you can, choose the social network that works the way you prefer.
sneaking up to someones house and peeping in theier windows is creepy. or just camping out in front of their window from the street legally.
but that person had to put their info into the website, themselves, by choice, and then chose to let their privacy settings be such that others can view them.
if you pin your photo up to a cork board, don't be surprised if people see it
but the reverse is true too. if you look someone up, don't be surprised if they find out. really, i don't see how that would be a big deal.
with more and more illegitimate tracking being done, informing those being tracked seems a benefit, not a drawback.
there is a difference however between one institution tracking who all the people are that i am looking at, vs the person i am looking at finding out for themselves who is looking at them.
what i understood is that "showing up on their suggested friends list is creepy, and it's an information leak". the way i read that is that they would prefer not to show when someone visited their profile. and that's what i consider creepy.
Wouldn't surprise me. Everyone clutches their pearls and hits the downvote button as soon as you mention the Zucc quote, but has there really been any evidence that the company culture has matured away from "They Trust Me - Dumb fucks"?
Absolutely not. I'm no friend of Zucc, but the graph is protected by a permission system that won't show almost anything for employees without a making a request including legitimate business reason, for a limited time and scope, and managerial approval.
It was more than one person and yes, it's vile that they had access to this information and a culture of spying (and joking about it). They also said they could tell how long someone was looking at each image. The whole company is basically perverted spyware, which absolutely makes sense if you know how and why it was conceived.
It's totally crazy that Tesla gets included with real companies. It's a meme stock with a 323.88 price to earnings ratio. It has no business being in the S&P 500 and should quite frankly be delisted.
Nasdaq announced today that their Fast Inclusion policy as official starting May 1st.
15 days of price discovery for SpaceX instead of 1 year for inclusion into indexes. Will be one of the largest wealth transfers from common people to the wealthy since it'll exploit all passive investments to provide exit liquidity for elon and his investors.
Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. There are still plenty of people who still take everything Elon says as the truth in 2026. I know people who are otherwise very reasonable, immediately get defensive when presented with the mildest of the criticisms of Elon.
Sinclair's quote rings especially true here. Threatens a person's money, no matter how irrational, and you'll get the most disciplined thinkers devolve into 4chan level tirades.
Yeah, I don't understand Elon's plot armor, especially after the calling a cave diver a pedo. That's when I definitively stopped liking him, though I always thought that the Hyperloop seemed pretty dumb.
I am not the first person to say this, but I guess I took a lot of what he said at face value because I don't really know anything about physics or rockets beyond a high school level. Then he started saying stuff about computers that were "slightly off" at best, and since I know a lot more about computers it made me realize he was kind of full of shit.
Worse yet, he doesn't seem to realize when he's full of shit. He's very confidently wrong. It makes me so curious to understand what his competencies actually are. Clearly he's not an idiot; he's got to be great at some things. I just can't tell what it would be anymore.
I actually think he might just be an idiot. I think a lot of people respond to people who are extremely confident, and whether or not they are "right" about anything is secondary.
I mean we have a president who has almost never even completed an entire sentence, but he tells you how smart he is all the time and people just believe it.
Tesla also doesn't have the margins or growth rates of software companies. Top automakers in the world all have a p/e of around 5-10. Microsoft is 26. Tesla is 320.
>It has no business being in the S&P 500 and should quite frankly be delisted
S&P500 inclusion is a simple math calculation based on market cap. By definition, Tesla must be included until its value drops far enough to exclude it. That will probably never happen short of an apocalyptic event.
It's not quite that simple -- there are other criteria. E.g., MSTR is not included in the index. And technically the committee overseeing it has some discretion.
That said, I agree that TSLA easily meets the criteria for inclusion -- even if you assume a normal automaker P/E of ~5 instead of TSLA's meme-stock ~330.
> During his payments toward the credit default swaps, Burry suffered an investor revolt, where some investors in his fund worried his predictions were inaccurate and demanded to withdraw their capital. Eventually, Burry's analysis proved correct: He made a personal profit of $100 million and a profit for his remaining investors of more than $700 million.
Yeah, if Elon pulling off a Seig Heil and literally running away with a country's data wasn't good times to short, I don't know what will.
You basically need to predict his death at this point. Which is unlikely due to being rich and not extremely old. But not off the table if you look behind the scenes at his habits.
I do hold TSLQ (and it's been doing great). That being said, Musk has engaged openly in fraud on a regular basis and the SEC has done nothing. At this point I have zero faith in the markets to adhere to the law.
TSLQ has been doing barely okay. The problem with investment vehicles like TSLQ which are daily shorts, is that over a period of time, it will suffer the same drawbacks as holding a short position and therefore making the timing of the position very important.
If you're going to gamble on $TSLA, shorting is probably the worst way to do so. It has unlimited downside (well, at least as much your broker allows before margin calling)
If you want to gamble, buy put options and size according to how much money you're okay with losing (the premium is all you pay)
True short positions are out of reach for basically any normal investor except those with completely broken risk tolerances (selling unbacked call options), eg the degen gamblers of r/wallstreetbets.
The problem is it's very easy to make a long-term bet the stock will go up (buy the stock) but it is very hard to make a long-term bet the stock will go down (you have to pick a date by which it occurs).
You're correct, but your assertion needs a qualifier: it's hard for small investors to make a long-term bet that a stock will go down.
Large investors do not need to purchase index funds, instead they can direct index and purchase the underlying stocks directly. If you're a small investor, the index funds offer diversification but without the ability to divest from individual stocks covered by the index; large investors that are direct indexing can just decide to exclude meme stocks and not buy them, and in so doing make a long-term bet that those stocks will underperform the rest of the index (and without needing to pick a specific date by which that underperformance will happen, unlike a short).
There's an argument to be made that there should be a maximum share price (stocks that reach the maximum trigger an automatic stock split), and that stocks should be allowed to trade for fractions of a penny (after all, what really prevents this in a day and age where all trades are electronically settled? Nobody needs to cash out for literal copper pennies...). Much smaller individual share prices would make it more feasible for smaller investors to build direct indexing strategies.
True, though there are some ways of even relatively small investors doing direct indexing.
But when you start modifying the index you're not really indexing anymore ...
And this is not really a bet against the stock, just a value tilt away from it betting that there are better performance elsewhere. You don't make money because TSLA tanked, you make money (or don't lose money) because your money was elsewhere.
Silly. You should be selling off th ese trash stocks. Don't know why people keep recommending market cap weighted funds when they're being manipulated by scam artists like Elon and Trump into making the world's retirement funds into bag holders.
You believe that anyone who lives on stolen land is not a citizen and deserves to be bombed? Americans live on stolen land too, as does much of the rest of the world population.
If it was 1570, it would absolutely be valid to remove settlers from the Americas. If fact the Pueblo Revolt is considered to be one of the more successful and justified acts of indigenous resistance.
Ok, it sounds the principle here is if any land was stolen in the 20th century the people who live there now aren’t citizens (regardless if they are children or not) and deserve to be bombed? I hope nobody tells the balkans.
Crazy that saying 'all Israeli's and Israel supporters are fair targets to kill' (and later stated this includes children) is not just not dead, but not even downvoted here.
First, this is completely untrue. Hamas and Hezbollah have been launching missiles at Israel literally nonstop for 20 years. The houithis have and will continue to launch missiles at US assets along the Bab al-Mandab Strait. All of these missiles came directly from the iranian regime. Those groups are an arm of the Iranian government
Thats not the point though. There is no reason for either party to respond proportionally in a war. Going to war against an equal weight class as idiocy, sun tzu figured that one out forever ago.
So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents? Doesnt make sense to me. Thats before we even get to the major economic damage their terrorist network has caused. The US morally must just sit back while Iran funds and arms the group that routinely shuts down global trade and costs americans billions?
> So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents?
israel has killed even more "untold innocent children and innocents", so you should expect to continue finding no global sympathy or solidarity for them as they, an aggressor, initiate a war of choice against someone else.
By your logic, israel has greater causus belli against themselves than iran. Yet we don't see israel warring against itself. The only conclusion is that israel doesn't actually care about kids being killed, and started this war for totally different reasons.
That's because its existence is predicated on the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians. It was literally formed via the Nakba, a brutal crime against humanity and it's been maintained through terrorism and now genocide. What's the point of the UN existing if it doesn't at least condemn these actions?
NASA is exploring space, our money to Israel encourages US participation in genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and global war. I'm in the US and support a single state solution: Palestine. I think most people under the age of 45 are in agreement.
We primarily fund the other Middle Eastern countries to keep Israel safe. Were it not for Israel, we would just have normal diplomatic relations with them.
I wouldn't go that far. The U.S. and other European powers have a long history of involvement in Middle East politics. Significant parts of the Middle East were once parts of various European empires. Many of them gained their independence only to find there were still a lot of strings and (pipe)lines of exploitation attached.
The U.S. did more than its fair share to glom onto those lines of exploitation and keep them alive at the expense of locals. e.g. Iran is what it is today because of U.S. oil interests. The CIA installed an authoritarian Shah when Iran's (at the time) democratic government started taking control of its own oil industry (American oil companies would have had to start paying taxes). Rule under the Shah was "unpleasant" for Iranians and revolution was the direct response. Hence, theocracy.
Israel is a special case in the Middle East. The zionist movement gained state sponsors and convinced European powers (and the U.S.) to pour money in instead of sucking it out. How they did that is a question that stretches back well into the 19th century. I'd argue that a lot of it was the result of people who had their hearts in the right places. Things just went sideways when it came to Israelis and Palestinians co-existing peacefully. At least some of the idealists of the early zionist movement honestly believed the influx of Jewish people would be a benefit to Arabs already living in Palestine.
> Things just went sideways when it came to Israelis and Palestinians co-existing peacefully. At least some of the idealists of the early zionist movement honestly believed the influx of Jewish people would be a benefit to Arabs already living in Palestine.
Teodore Hertzl (Zionism’s founder) was explicit about the need to ethically cleanse the Palestinians from their land.
Herzl, nor Hertzl. Do you have a citation or resource for this?
(I ask not because it's inconceivable, but because Herzl died almost half a century before Israel declared its independence. Ze'ev Jabotinsky is more consistently identified with revisionist Zionism/territorial maximalism.)
> "We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back."
Thanks. This demonstrates a world view that I don’t agree with, but it doesn’t really read to me like a justification of ethnic cleansing. The mention of removal is of poor people, and it doesn’t mention Palestine at all.
This is in marked contrast to Jabotinsky, who says these things explicitly[1]:
> Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonialization.
And:
> We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached
This isn’t to somehow excuse Herzl; he’s still an essentially colonial thinker. But from what I can tell he never thought deeply about the political mechanics of Israel/Palestine itself, in part because of European colonial assumptions around a lack of Palestinian connection to the land.
(Or in other words: Jabotinsky’s “innovation” is realizing that the Palestinians are a people with real attachments, not just realtors. It’s from there that he concludes, decades later, that displacement is the only workable strategy. He is, needless to say, also wrong.)
Edit: or another framing is that Herzl was too racist and provincializing in his limited view of Arabs/Palestinians to see where his movement would go.
reply