And the heads of the rest of the world's developed but militarily impotent countries who are so eager to weigh in on the various foreign policy issues du jour are painfully silent. Why aren't they standing with Trump in supporting the Iranian people? Pathetic.
> The crackdown on protesters in Iran has prompted an outcry among European leaders, with High Representative Kaja Kallas denouncing Tehran for its "disproportionate" and "heavy-handed" response.
> The European Union has sharply condemned the crackdown on protesters in Iran who have taken to the streets to show their discontent over the Islamic Republic.
The Telegraph (aka Torygraph) is a well known source of misinformation - they're approaching the Daily Mail (aka Daily Heil) in terms of just making up shit.
However, I certainly don't want to be seen as supporting Starmer - he does seem to have remained silent on Iran or the MSM is not interested in reporting it.
"We are deeply concerned about reports of violence by Iranian security forces, and strongly condemn the killing of protestors. The Iranian authorities have the responsibility to protect their own population and must allow for the freedom of expression and peaceful assembly without fear of reprisal. We urge the Iranian authorities to exercise restraint, to refrain from violence, and to uphold the fundamental rights of Iran’s citizens."
Because of the results in Libya and Syria are shining examples of the benefits of covert intervention? Because the people running these policies are not as smart as the Cold War era leaders?
"Some years ago, Dourado and Russell pointed out a stunning fact about airport noise complaints: A very large number come from a single individual or household.
'In 2015, for example, 6,852 of the 8,760 complaints submitted to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport originated from one residence in the affluent Foxhall neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. The residents of that particular house called Reagan National to express irritation about aircraft noise an average of almost 19 times per day during 2015.'
Since then, total complaint volumes have exploded—but they are still coming from a tiny number of now apparently more “productive” individuals. In 2024, for example, one individual alone submitted 20,089 complaints, accounting for 25% of all complaints! Indeed, the total number of complainants was only 188 but they complained 79,918 times (an average of 425 per individual or more than one per day.)"
"In 2025, the UNGA adopted 15 resolutions on Israel and only eleven resolutions on the entire rest of the world, which includes one resolution each on North Korea, Iran, and Myanmar, as well as six against Russia and two against the United States, as detailed in the charts below."
Why doesn't your explanation apply to every commodity? Gold, cocoa, mustard seed, electricity? These are also essential products subject to the influence of markets and market makers.
You can substitute cocoa sources globally, but you can't substitute a house in Charlotte with one in Phoenix.
If cocoa prices spike, you buy less chocolate. If housing prices spike in your job market, your options are: pay more, endure a brutal commute, or uproot your life. The demand is far more inelastic.
I can easily live a full and meaningful life without owning gold, drinking cocoa or eating mustard. Those aren't essential and have decent substitutes.
Electricity is essential, just like housing and it's very highly regulated.
That's overly reductive. I was hoping that the specific commodities weren't going to be the focus, but I guess that was naive.
If you're going to use "housing" as an umbrella for its substitutes, let me do the same. Instead of wheat, beef, pork, cocoa, sugar, etc, let's call that "food". So now food is as essential as housing. Why doesn't the housing complaint against speculators work for food speculators?
The argument is either intellectually dishonest or you just really haven't thought this through very deep and are just puppeting this neoliberal bullshit.
We could start with I have traded wheat futures and could hedge with future contracts on all those commodities. You can't trade single family home derivatives in the same way because it is not the same.
This is unthinking market religion stupidity and the result is going to be a massive over correction towards socialism. You don't help free markets with this bullshit. You are helping to destroy them in the long run.
So on one side, we have a theory which suggests increasing supply to reduce prices. And on the other, we have playing whack-a-mole with the bogeymen du jour who are manipulating a vast market. One solution makes economic sense and the other appeals to populists who favor state control.
And you're claiming that the reaction to opposing state control and socialism is socialism? Not compelling.
In other words it doesn’t work that way. The people who actually pay for the end product do not have the opportunity to apply market pressure by choosing a different source.
Yes, they do apply market pressure. They can change who they buy from and there are different deals - like fixed rate, or different charges for different time periods.
The intermediate players "electricity retailers" then participate in a day ahead and real time market to fulfill their obligations to their customers. This is a good summary (https://chatgpt.com/share/696170d5-5d08-8002-a0ff-e2f45e42c4...) - if you hate ai links, so be it, this is a good description of an esoteric topic.
You'll find most markets actually work this way. When I go to the supermarket to buy sugar, the price isn't jumping around real time with the underlying price of sugar. Same for coffee etc. But it changes with a lag, and consumers respond and the effects flow through even if not in real time. Similar things occur in most markets where there is a wholesale market for something and then several players between that market and the consumer, each player doing some combination of logistics, risk eating, aggregation/disaggregation etc.
So you weren't really "just curious". You felt it necessary to cherry pick a particular commodity to debunk the notion that markets are markets? Do harder to steel man it.
It seems more likely that it crawled into the stack vent on the roof and came down with the current. Still doesn't address why it didn't stop at any of the floors above, but maybe they were all occupied.
I don't understand your point. Isn't the galvanic isolation implemented in the optoisolator by an air gap between the light transmitter and receiver? Maybe I don't know the definition of air gap?
"For this reason, some new hardware technologies are also available like unidirectional data diodes or bidirectional diodes (also called electronic airgaps), which physically separate the network and transportation layers and copy and filter the application data. "
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