There is almost no example where tactical bombing ever achieved a strategic victory - without real boots on the ground. (Even the atomic bombs in Japan may not have worked if Russia had not also invaded the same week.) Remote bombings historically only strengthen resolve.
Bombing Iran into surrendering was never a realistic outcome.
Controlling whole country after that is even bigger question. Someone living there and being bombed could make them think that you are ready for lot of pain for lot of years to come. You only need enough drones every year or every other year.
It got much more than that - they blockaded off the entire Persian Gulf. They are a few shots away from removing the East-West Pipeline. Their proxy in Yemen had already demonstrated that they can block off the Bab al-Mandab Strait - even a replacement US aircraft carrier is going around Africa right now just because the threat exists. This is a proper clusterfuck if you understand the logic of global freedom of navigation, as enforced by the (clearly declining) superpower. No wonder the leader of Kuomintang went to Beijing to talk things out with Xi Jinping.
The leader of the KMT going to Beijing shouldn’t be read in too much. They haven’t been in power for a long time and their whole support for “one china” is why they remain politically unpopular in Taiwan.
Houthis are not an Iranian proxy, they have autonomous strategic decisions. They are/were funded by Iran to be a pain for the Saudi. The Saoudi published articles about it. People there know more about the local situation than western pundits.
The revolutionary guard probably view it as a win for them. No more clerics or civil bureaucracy to argue with now they are fully in charge. They don't need their navy or airforce to assert even more control over the civilian population. Bombing them further will probably be about as successful as it was with the North Vietnamese (another chain of tactical successes while failing strategically).
There was regime change, just not in the direction anyone else wanted.
It's worse than that, they used to be a police branch, they now basically replaced the army as well. In a way, that makes the Iranian regime way less resilient in the long term though.
To use a WWII metaphor, it's as if we killed Hitler in 1934 and instead of the Night of the Long Knives, the Sturmabteilung are now running the whole country.
Except it may be even worse than that. While you might expect some infighting among SA factions, the Revolutionary Guard is a distributed force that's ideologically united by both a common religion and a common cause.
90 million people, and fairly well educated and industrious at that. Iran is not some tribesmen at low development in Afghanistan, they would actually be a solidly developing country on par with China if they weren’t heavily sanctioned and held back by the clerics and revolutionary guard.
Good try. When you are complicit in genocide in Gaza, destroy multiple countries on pretext of democracy and human rights, start wars with blatant lies, the "let's shoot at it for shits and giggles" is actually being kind.
> In 2025 USA is supporting russian dictator more than Ukrainian democratic government.
Are they? I see USA still supplying Ukraine with weapons, how many weapons have Russia gotten from USA? None, USA is not selling any weapons to Russia still.
The built-in bloatware (LinkedIn, TikTok, Clipchamp, etc.), the constant nagging (like full-screen reminders to buy Office 365 to "protect" your PC), Edge is basically forced on you. MSVC has insane licensing terms — you can’t use it outside of Visual Studio or VS Code, not to mention it's lacking support for C. Windows seems actively user and developer hostile.
Beyond that, Windows' architecture is a mess, I hate it (There's a reason Microsoft has to ship WSL2). macOS runs all of my tools fine, just like Linux does.
I hate Win11. It is horrible, but the first few points don't really make sense. I use it in 2 environments.
- enterprise version: no bloatware, no ads, and edge is there but never has to be used for anything
- professional version: bloatware is uninstalled in like 2min after OS install, another 2min later all ads are disabled. And it usually stays like that after updates too. Edge is never used at all.
Windows architecture is great. the WinAPI is better documented and more comprehensive than anything on Linux or Mac.
There are so many other issues.
- The file explorer gets slower and more broken with each update. context menus randomly don't show, or take literally 30 seconds to load.
- The renderer crashes randomly once a week (it's not a huge issue, but the screen goes black for 10 seconds or so)
- the settings dialog is bad. goes through like 5 different layers of Windows generations and recently makes the old dialogs hard to find but doesn't offer adequate replacements (looking at network and sound)
- and much more...
I uploaded a video because no one can show me this alleged slowness or context menu stuff, it's all "vibes" and it is getting ridiculous on hackernews.
I have a huge problem with windows - some api uses "@" for something, so all my folders with @ in the name(it sorts alphabetically before everything and is easy to type - on macos it's option-8 for similar, Linux I use @ as well) and because of that Windows API most applications crasb if you last saved into a path with @ in it and do file->open. Notepad++, notepad.exe, handbrake, VLC, mplayer, and so on.
Its a frustration, but it is my fault for developing a stupid habit back before metadata or changing colors of folers or what ever exists now to force an arbitrary sort order.
With every Windows release since 8, it feels more and more like the OS is actively antagonistic towards the user. This has come to a peak with Windows 11.
Not too long ago I booted up an old laptop and put a fresh install of Windows 7 on it for kicks. Amazing how much of a breath of fresh air that was.
Not the OP, but one thing I've run into is that I've had three or four Windows installs (both Windows 11 and Windows 10) just fail to upgrade - one of them new upgrades just stopped showing up, I had to install an 'enablement package' and that fixed it but there was literally no warning or instructions of what to do, I just had to Google it when I noticed I wasn't getting updates.
The others just failed with random hexadecimal error codes, again I had to Google to try and work out what was going on.
With one of them I had to use the command line and diskpart etc. to expand the recovery partition because apparently the default size when I'd made that Windows 10 install was no longer big enough, and Windows Update couldn't work this out (the error code from the failure was nondescript, took ages to find out what was actually wrong) and couldn't fix it. Had to do it manually in Powershell.
Another one I think might have fixed by running sfc and dism recovery commands in the command line, again it would be nice if Windows could work this out itself!
To be fair, macOS isn't much better in this regard, the error codes can be quite cryptic, for example what is a -2003F.
For some reason, a game I play called DCS can be buggy and I've been told by the support to sfc /scannow and dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth. For some reason on every install of Windows 11 I've ever done, it always picks up tons of broken files. This is installing using the latest at the time Microsoft ISO. I've had this issue on multiple different systems, a modern gaming pc, a Mac with bootcamp, an older Lenovo M93p and when installing inside VMWare or KVM.
I do get less application and operating system crashes on a Mac though.
Looks like the intention is to force courts and legislative decision on a constitutional matter. I guess most in congress want to keep the babies and the young. The general population is usually emotional and protective about culture and race. Trump had to do it to appease them and make it someone else’s problem
Not a bad thing to learn some conservative/libertarian values too.
Going by the spying argument, every US social media company should be banned elsewhere because all data is siphoned by US gov.
>Going by the spying argument, every US social media company should be banned elsewhere because all data is siphoned by US gov.
Yes. All big social media should be banned for just this reason, we already had Cambridge Analytica to know this. Banning TT for spying is just a good first step.
With this said, the US.g has had the power to ban business with entities for a long ass time and those laws are pretty well established, especially in the case with foreign entities.
Would it be within the realm of possibility that US intelligence agencies have this proof and have not released it publicly?
Here in Victoria, Australia the state government has deplatformed itself from TT and banned the app from government phones due to security concerns.
Clearly, the state government has taken instruction from the federal government who has received advice from somewhere (5 eyes / intelligence agencies) about the risks.
“ he rarely made use of specific equations to grasp at mathematical truths, instead intuiting the broader conceptual structure around them to make them surrender their solutions all at once.”
Something that caught my attention recalling Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy on the need for conceptual or apriori knowledge based proofs than empirical or derived in math.
reply