One really important takeaway from this, as professor Marandi mentioned, is that the ceasefire is also time for Iran to replenish their missile and drone stockpiles and reorganize their forces. Yes, the US and Israel are certainly using this opportunity to regroup and prepare for the next strike as well, but Iran is not sitting idle, and they can continue to churn out munitions faster than the US can produce interceptors. He also makes it clear that the Iranians were largely expecting this negotiation to fail, so it wasn't some 'fell for it again' moment.

Well, it also depends on how long the half life of protons are (if they decay). If it’s anywhere near the lower bound of 10^34 years, then baryonic matter would effectively cease to exist a lot sooner anyway.

Hopefully Iran uses this ceasefire, however long it lasts, to make a sprint to the bomb. I don’t think anything can truly offer sufficient deterrence other than a verified nuclear weapons test. I have no idea how quickly they can manage that, however.

The Myth of “Consensual” Flirting

Interestingly, one of the biggest winners in the region from this war could be Oman. They emerged practically unscathed from this war, with all their infrastructure intact, and they suddenly get a cut from the Hormuz toll system that Iran will set up.

Of course, tourism and international investment would likely take a hit, as with every other country in the region, but I think the new toll would more than make up for those losses, and they can take direct advantage of increased oil prices with their undamaged oil infrastructure.

Didn’t the Vietnam War, arguably the poster child of American overreach, happen with the existence of the USSR as an active counterweight? It seems like an American habit to go gallivanting around the world in search of children to bomb regardless of external circumstance.

I think he’s part of Drop Site, so it’s almost certainly a joke rather than a deranged fantasy.

I assume the 11th one is Palantir?

Wow. If only there was a country that had foreseen this and started stockpiling months ago, while simultaneously churning out renewables.

Iran's ability to externalize the consequences of this war (i.e. cause a global oil and economic crisis) is a point of leverage that the other countries invaded by the US lacked. This means that the war isn't likely to settle into the kind of stagnant forever war that characterized Afghanistan, bur rather force the US to either keep escalating or back down. I believe the US would keep escalating until they suffer significant casualties, which might create enough domestic and international pressure for them to formally offer genuine concessions.

Alternatively, they (or the Israelis), may decide to go for the nuclear option instead. The same justification that the US used to nuke Japan, that they are fanatics in highly defensible terrain and thus too costly to defeat conventionally, can easily be repackaged and sold to the public for Iran. In that case, I can't really make any predictions beyond that point. I really, really hope that doesn't happen, but I can't dismiss this possibility either.

Likely Iran’s intention. I have no doubt they have deeply analysed the broader impact of closing the Strait of Hormuz for decades, and more crucially know which countries are most vulnerable. It also helps that they can control who gets to go through and who doesn’t.

I don’t see what’s wrong. They have enough diesel for the current quarter. That’s as far as anyone should care about, right?

The main problem I see with this system is time. You don’t have the luxury of heating up the target over hours or even minutes, especially for the faster or shorter range ones. This means you either need an absurdly powerful laser, or limit yourself to FPVs and the like.

Maybe it can work on Shaheds too, which would admittedly be quite useful, but it’s not like Iran is limited to those, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to devise countermeasures.

I wonder if whoever made these slides considered that it might be because of these tight political controls that allowed China to lift so many people out of poverty. After all, most countries are capitalist, and none have come close to the sheer scale of China’s development.

Turns out killing someone's entire family does not make them more likely to submit, who knew?

Honestly, even if you believe transformer-based LLMs running on GPUs are the end-all, datacenters are still such a rapidly depreciating asset just with incremental improvements in processing technology. Add in the possibility of ASICs or a different computing substrate entirely, as you mentioned, and you're looking at these multi-billion dollar investments becoming obsolete in a few years.

Well, as long as he focuses on the actual windmills and not the wind turbines, it’s not too big of a deal. Too bad he doesn’t seem to know the difference.

Clearly, they just needed to show some guts and everything would've worked out.

You’re telling me they planned a whole two quarters in advance? Impossible!

Well, clearly it protected the rest of the country from at least one drone hit.