Your web browser is a robot, and always has been. Even using netcat to manually type your GET request is a robot in some sense, as you have a machine translating your ascii and moving it between computers.
The significant difference isn't in whether a robot is doing the actions for you or not, it's whether the robot is a user agent for a human or not.
You can trace all their problems back to the 1979 Islamic revolution. If they would have simply kept the Shah as the ruler and stayed a client state to Britain, they wouldn't need to fund any of these militants, and would probably be a friend to western countries.
Its been 46 years, there have been opportunities for peace along the way if they wanted it. It would have required compromises though.
Iran's not war not peace policy is an expensive one, both directly and indirectly (e.g. turning them into a parriah state). In the end it seems like its also been largely ineffective. Instead of keeping them out of war, proxies like Hamas ended up drawing them into one, and it ended up being a pretty one sided war not in their favour. Although i suppose prior to that point it was yielding geopolitical gains.
Iran in 1970s certainty wasn't a British client state, that's a dumb fucking claim. If anything they were a US client, not a British one. And even the claim that they were an US client is pretty weak. They were a pretty strong regional power back then and while they were clearly allied with the US, they had their own politics and strategies.
Analysis that looks at countries like Iran simply as tools of Superpowers is reductive Cold War area analysis that has gigantic blind spots.
So what you’re saying is if they stayed quiet and supplicant to the British while they drained their oil resources while the extreme elites made all the money, everything would be okay? The Islamic revolution was a populist revolution, supported by the vast majority of the country because their lives were shit.
This is an out of date take. Not long after the fracking boom that began in the mid 2000's, The US is now by far the world's largest oil producer. We used to produce less oil than Saudi Arabia, now we produce 66% more. We produce 4x the oil that Iran does. Oil is just not the same geopolitical force that it was in the 80's to 2010.
Pretty weak argument. Norway has been an oil producer for a long time and recent issues have nothing to do with oil and applies to everybody working with the US.
People focus to much on oil in international relation, its a factor but by far not the only one.
In a monarchy all justice, authority, and moral order are centered on the person of the monarch, symbolically and legally.
In medieval and early modern English law, the “King’s peace” was the fundamental idea behind criminal justice. The Peace was not an abstract civic order; it was the personal peace of the Sovereign, extended to the realm.
The Crown was the earthly reflection of divine order. To offend that order — whether by sedition or obscenity — was symbolically akin to rebellion against the sovereign.
Pretty cool to think about how different that was, compared to today when people want the law to be based on maximizing the greatest good. What if this was banned simply because it offends the King?
Here's a point about all the insurance companies: UHC administers the medical plan on behalf of your employer. For all practical purposes, they are a whipping boy for the real 'man behind the curtain' (your employer).
Your company (for self-funded plans) actually decides what’s covered and what isn’t, sets copays and deductibles, and ultimately saves or spends money on healthcare costs. UHC’s role is to apply those rules, maintain the provider network, and handle the billing and customer service.
If your company offers insurance, there is someone who can tell the "insurance company" to cover the service they are not covering. Usually the HR Benefits Administrator, or 'plan sponsor'. And they do it all the time! If you have a sad story and the budget is ok for the quarter, they will help! If you are a company officer, you can also have whatever your company can afford.
This only applies to large employers. Smaller ones are just presentef a limited list of plans to pick from, and the plans change every year. Most of the time, as a startup, you can’t buy a Mag7 equivalent health plan for any amount of money off the marketplace
It depends. If your employer is part of a self-funded group of other employers, then there is a group of trustees from all the employers that can approve.
If it's a 'fully insured' group plan then the insurance company is technically in charge, but your company can do an Employer-paid exception (aka carve-out reimbursement) to cover something thats getting rejected. They also have the option to purchase add-on policies to add coverage for upper class stuff like fertility treatments, weight loss drugs, or gender-affirming care.
Mag7 surely is self insured. They have an amazing risk pool of young people. Probably biggest cost is babies. So in this way employer sponsored health insurance screws the rest of the market, as it "hordes" the best risks. The insurance companies then wail about the cost of the risker pool of those of us stuck in the smaller plans...
There should only be one risk pool which is the whole country. Unfortunately the republicans want to go the other way and push sick people into high risk pools which will be unaffordable for a lot of people
Insurance companies are a whipping boy, but for doctors not your employer.
Doctors charge massively high prices, which is why insurance bills are high. Doctors have the most powerful trade union on the planet and strictly limit residencies, thus limiting new doctor supply and keeping prices super high.
There are all sorts of ugly industrialized systems required to support our world of 8 billion people.
It's incredibly difficult to square them with how we want to perceive life. Your brain immediately wants to slip into a counterfactual fantasy, "Meat isn't required, we could all be vegetarian" etc.
I don't have an answer to it. Factory farming is a nightmare beyond most horror. It's hard enough to even make a list of all these ugly areas. I think the necessity of plastics is another, lesser example.
Source? Keep in mind factory farms are subsidized by corn subsidies (used for feed) and by not paying for externalities, namely the antibiotic-resistance they breed due to their overuse of medication to keep animals alive in such oppressive environments. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a far greater threat to that world of 8 billion people than slightly higher meat prices.
> counterfactual fantasy
20-40% of India is vegetarian, and factory farms barely existed before the 1950s, and become widespread even later. Far from a fantasy, it did and does work.
There's nothing lazier than looking at a system, and declaring, without evidence, that no other way could work. Especially when there are counterexamples in living memory.
The impact to quality of life could be minimal. Right now, today, there exist plant-based burgers (Beyond) and even steaks (Juicy Marbles) that are in every way superior to the average offal-based "meat" you get from the average fast food joint. Granted that you can't replicate the very nicest of fine cuts with plants - yet - but how often are you really eating rare sirloin for lunch anyway? Right now the plant based alternatives are more expensive than animal meats, but this is an economic artifact that would evaporate in a hypothetical world where meat consumption was de-normalized (and meat subsidies halted!).
Perhaps you mean it's counterfactual because you don't think it's a social norm that has a hope of being challenged. I think that's defeatist. Vegetarianism is practiced globally. You must begin from the following perspective: this is an indulgence, not a necessity for survival or even a requirement for a happy life. Raising an entire animal only to slaughter it for consumption is wanton extravagance of both physical and moral resource. Its practitioners deserve no subsidy, financial or social. Most people would be quite put off their meat if forced to viscerally confront the reality, but are carefully insulated from it - usually by simple distance and pleasant marketing, but in some places by actual legislation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag
In short, like most of the evils of world today, it's not a necessary evil. Just a lazy, can't-be-bothered-to-change, would-upset-the-current-economic-order evil.
There's a wide range between factory farming and vegetarianism. Moderate, humane farming and lower-but-not-zero meat consumption is a perfectly realistic alternative to the extremes.
We can just eat less meat, and the meat we do eat can be non-factory farmed. Eventually lab grown meat will take over (not because it achieves sentience, but because its tasty & cheap).
It's too big of a topic for a HN comment but do a google or LLM search and see. One widely-accepted aspect is that a child can not "self soothe" until 5-7 years. It's not developmentally possible, and using that language is a bit of a PR move to gloss over what is actually happening.
I had to look up at what temperature diamonds start to oxidize/burn[0]: Different sources say different things but apparently it's somewhere between 700°C and 900°C (depending on the exact conditions I suppose).
Starting from what should be considered "writing" to how to identify specific artifacts as abstract words.
Some researchers spend years in the forest studying one animal to isolate one single word they're speaking. Understanding other kind of intelligences is a crazy complex task.
Reupvoted you from gray because I don't think that's fair, but I also don't know how much there is to add. As far as why I'm contributing, I haven't been socially involved in the ffmpeg dev community in a decade, but, it is a very reasonable floor to assume it's 80% not full time paid contributors.
The significant difference isn't in whether a robot is doing the actions for you or not, it's whether the robot is a user agent for a human or not.
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