> Against GP point though...
Fair point. But one word .... Insurance.
5,810 karma · joined September 24, 2019
Fair point. But one word .... Insurance.
The US has incurred plenty of costs though....
Those very expensive billion-dollar THAAD radars of which there are "not many" in the world ? Those are not getting replaced any time soon. IIRC following the destruction they have redeployed the one they had stationed in South Korea, much to the annoyance of the Koreans.
All those very expensive fancy missiles that have been used ? Expensive to re-manufacture and long lead-time.
The jets, helicopters and drones the Iranians shot down ?
The cost of running those ships they have parked off the Iranian shores ?
Those AWS datacentres ?
And that's before we get to the broader indirect non-military economy impacts.
That's the whole point of this war and Iran knows it.
Yes, Iran's GDP might have contracted 10% but that's nothing compared to what the US has incurred and the impact on the rest of the world.
> We've already seen the most Iran can do.
Except as Iran has demonstrated with the entirely predictable Part 2, the Houthis enter stage-left and disrupt Bab.
So now the US have the mess they created in Hormuz, plus a second front in Bab.
The only way out of this is going to be the US accepting old-school diplomatic resolution. More guns won't fix anything.
I'm perfectly open to people posting opposing points of view as long as they are made from an independent mindset perspective.
Don't just post a pro-war view from a man who we know is pro-Trump.
Its a bit like saying JD Vance disagrees with me. Well duh....
Hormuz was yesterday's problem.
Today's problem which was entirely predictable to anybody with a map and half a brain is Bab El Mendab now being heavily disrupted by the Houthis etc.
It was always a case of when, not if.
Which now means the old ~20 day alternative-route transits via Bab are now ~50 days becuase you have to go via Suez and Cape of Good Hope.
This is exactly why all the other US presidents said no. It was a Pandora's box that was not worth the risk poking with a sharp stick.
Would that be the same Mark Rutte who referred to Trump as "daddy" during an alliance summit and sent him a flattering text message which Trump published[1] ?
Yeah. Erm. I think we know what side of the bread Mr Rutte butters his toast on.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-rutte-text-message-nato-sig...
Its not my area of expertise by any means, but I would perhaps point out the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve chart[1] which is at its lowest level since 1982.
Also do not forget the oil and LNG needs to be transported and that is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.
It may well be that the artificial party cannot go on forever.
[1] https://en.macromicro.me/charts/41674/us-strategic-petroleum...
Maybe the only possible bit of credit we can give the guy is he said no when the Israelis wanted to use theirs.
Isn't it after all supposedly the world's worst kept secret that they have some too ?
But I'm also kind of concerned what happens in the unlikely event he does well in the mid-terms, and the same after the Israeli elections ....
Remember this is a war that Iran has spent 40 years planning for.
Netanyahu has been doing the same "two weeks away" stand-up comedy since 1992.
Netanyahu asked every single US president. They all took advice and then went back with a polite "thanks, but no thanks".
You don't need to have access to super-secret intel to know going into this frivolous war was a very stupid idea. You just need to look at a standard map and use your brain.
Finally Mr Netanyahu found a stupid enough US president.
And the problem with the current US president is he won't accept a loss.
He is not the sort of person willing to accept he has bitten off more than he can chew.
Nor is he the sort of person who is willing to sit down and have a proper negotiated discussion. Infact he's the very person who just tore up the JPCOA seemingly just because he doesn't like Obama.
Nor is he the sort of person willing to learn from Iraq or Afghanistan.
So we have a stalemate. And a US president who doesn't believe in diplomacy, old-school politics or anything else.
And this stalemate is not one that is going to be resolved with more military firepower. Again, just look at the map....
In other news, it has been demonstrated in a court of law that Mullvad "no logs" means no logs.
TL;DR: Six police officers turned up at Mullvad offices with a search warrant for logs and data. Mullvad said "take a look for yourself". They went home with nothing.
Lots of people on HN and elsewhere are spreading a lot of FUD about the EU and what the EU MIGHT do – remember MIGHT .... politicians discuss a lot of stuff, and a lot of it never gets implemented.
It is the job of politicians to discuss issues of the day and potential ways to deal with them.
One thing that is clear. The EU is not a dicatorship. They have a long history of listening and acting on what industry experts tell them. Even if it means "watering down" ideas being discussed by the politicians.
I have a lot of faith that Mullvad (and, frankly, all the other VPN providers) would make a lot of noise if any of this EU FUD people are spreading actually ever became reality.
Until then, I suggest people put the EU FUD tin-foil hat to one side.
[1] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/4/20/mullvad-vpn-was-subjec... [2] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/update-the-swedish-authorities-a...
Its just very, very, very unfortunate that they chose the US for Obscura.
Of all the jurisdictions in the world you chose the one that has become exponentially untrustworthy in the eyes of non-US users ....
And its closely related cousin, Joomla.
Not only that, but the trades stick to their trades.
You don't get, for example, datacentre electricians rocking up pretenting they can install network cable to spec and running away having (if you are lucky) only done a continuity test on the cable they just installed.
Meanwhile every man and his dog, or even just the dog, will very happily turn up at your house and tell you they can install your CAT6 to spec for you when they've never seen a Fluke in their entire life.
I want to know what country you live in that you can find domestic tradespeople who will do work to the same standard as datacentres, and do it at domestic prices. ;)
TBF (and the subject of government tech and procurement aside) there are good ones in Europe.
The problem tends to be how much of the US-cloud cool-aid your organisation has drunk.
If you've drunk the whole bottle, i.e. the random alphabet-soup of interdependent microservices, then sure you'll have a tough time finding a like-for-like equivalent.
But if you've still got old-school IT brains in your IT team, then its perfectly feasible to find equivalence in Europe.
Not only that, but you'll probably pay at least 10x less in Europe because you're not paying through the nose for the alphabet-soup of random interdependency.
Also the EU providers price sheets are clear and it is easy to reliably forecast how much you will be paying. As opposed to the US provider's muddy price sheets full of small-print and all sorts of random invented proprietary billing units that are nigh on impossible to reason about.
Because US-in-EU is fake-EU.
CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc. US headquarters doesn't escape the arm of US law.
Remember a long time ago there was a famous case where Microsoft fought the US DoJ when they came looking for somebody's data in Azure Ireland ?
That was then. Now is now. Do you honestly think Microsoft would put up the same fight today, especially if the US President decided to lean on them ? I don't !
CLOUD/PATRIOT etc. has gone from a theoretical risk to a real one. And now you have a US President in office who doesn't care much for bypassing all that anyway.
I think your numbers are off.
For a start you are effectively calculating a GPU only number.
I think 100Twh would be the minimum level to think about "all-in". And even that is probably being generous.
Remember, afterall that Google have just bought half the capacity (4.1Twh) of a nuclear power plant in Finland, on top of 630 MW of wind and 94MW of battery.
This is to cater for three new sites at Kajaani, Muhos, and Vaala and expansion at Hamina. So basically 3.5 datacentres.
But Finland is quite a small place. The US has more sites and bigger sites, so the numbers probably grow exponentially very quickly.
You can get there by boat if you're in another better connected part of Central London.
In most jurisdictions there are often laws related to unfair contract terms.
And even if there are no such laws, judges remain free to rule clauses and contracts void.
So you might waive that right in theory. But in practice I doubt you'll find it would hold up in court.
Its not a regurgitation. Its the facts.
It applies to small businesses too.
A mom and pop shop will (or should !) also have ADR clauses in its contracts.
And the court will certainly take a very dim view if you try to sue a mom and pop shop without having tried ADR.
First to be clear, I am speaking in general terms. I know nothing about this case, I don't want to know anything about this case, but I have just scrolled through people's thoughts on arbitration here and thought I should offer a general alternative perspective. To be clear I'm not interested in blindly defending Uber either. So here goes...
Arbitration clauses will be found pretty much everywhere. They come under the auspice of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) of which the top-three ways are: mediation, arbitration and ombudsmen.
The whole point of ADR is that:
1. there are only so many courts in a given jurisdiction and there are only so many judges in any jurisdiction, and both courts and judges tend to have large backlogs.
2. added to which going to court is expensive and time consuming. And if the other side has deep pockets and you loose, you end up paying the hourly rates of very expensive lawyers in smart shoes that the opposition employed because 600+/hour/person is peanuts to them.
So that's where ADR comes in. Its more informal, its cheaper to do and the costs side if you loose are kept under control.
Because ADR is an informal environment, this can also work in your favour. The timetable and parameters are flexible and the final agreement reached can easily be better than whatever a judge might have handed down after listening to both side's lawyers bicker.
Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given some sort of ADR a go first.
Is it perfect, of course not. But neither are the courts. Your outcome in court is effectively dependent on both side's lawyers and what judge you get, so you having a better outcome in court is not necessarily guaranteed !
It is no secret that Apple work closely with various well-known app developers, and in the case of Shapr they are even featured on the Apple developer site[1].
And it sounds like the collaborative efforts are paying off given your statement "I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience". :)
Point still remains. They will be family members of people with suitable job description and rank.
As an extreme example, nobody seriously expects a janitor at an embassy to be given diplomatic immunity.
There are a large numebr of roles at an embassy that simply do not require diplomatic immunity. And based on the media reports, it seems this person was in one of those roles that did not require diplomatic immunity.
Also reversing a table drop doesn't solve extra corruption routes such as cross-table dependencies.
The point remains that if they ran Claude against a test database they would have found the bug without killing their production database, and therefore also not need to come up with an over-engineered "solution".
Sometimes also the less over-engineered the better. Stuff like PITR and pg_dump is battle-tested and easy to reason about.
Hmmmmmm......
1. "Claude-generated bug". No it was PBCAK (Problem Between Chair And Keyboard) a.k.a "foolish person ran Claude against the production database without testing it elsewhere". There, fixed it for you.
2. This "product" is solving a problem that is already solved. You can for example use a SaaS provider such as Aiven[1] who will provide you with PITR (Point-In-Time Recovery) point and click solutions. Alternatively there is more than one piece of Postgres backup software that lets you do the same on a DIY basis.
3. "Out of the box" you have pg_dump. You could have just done a simple pg_dump before letting Claude loose on your database.
Not according to this[1]
She refused to attend court in the UK. After a lot of pressure she reluctantly agreed to appear via video link. She was sentenced in absence by the UK court to eight months in prison, suspended for 12 months. The UK court had no choice but to suspend her sentence as her lawyers made it clear she would never travel to the UK to serve time.
Meanwhile the Wikipedia entry makes zero mention of any attempts by the US justice system to prosecute her. There was an attempt at a civil lawsuit by the Dunn family in the US, but no sign of a criminal lawsuit.
So in effect she got away with it.
This person was allegedly looking at CSAM.
Police and courts interrogating someone as to why they were looking at CSAM is a specific line of enquiry and doesn't touch upon their job.
Also from the US State Department website:
Under international law and practice, persons enjoying immunity from the jurisdiction of a receiving State’s laws nonetheless have a duty to respect those laws. Immunity is not a license for misconduct. It is a doctrine intended to benefit the sending State or IO, not individuals.
Yes, but the point in this case is that we are told the person did not have diplomatic immunity.
Not everybody who works at an embassy has diplomatic immunity.
The Geneva Convention dictates who gets diplomatic immunity, and that is based around your job description and rank.
This is not the first time either that the US has flown somebody out of the UK in questionable circumstances before they were questioned by UK police.
The UK is not a third-world country, there is no reason why somebody should not be questioned by UK police or dealt with in UK courts.
You can also bet your bottom dollar that if the tables were turned and the equivalent happend on US soil, there would be little chance of being flown out covertley. Most sensible people don't like "One rule for US, another rule for everyone else", even more so under the present US administration.
So it does not make sense that the same companies would then magically sign-off on allowing their entire codebase to be spoon-fed into a whole bunch of LLMs for benchmarking.