I am genuinely curious - would the navy shoot down a friendly nation tanker who was just trying to cross?
That would be an insane escalation that helps nobody. Instead, if they watched it float by, that makes the USA look impotent beyond belief. I suppose they could "just" seize it, but piracy is not much of an improved look.
Excellent point. If I were China, think you would be obligated to push the issue. Either the USA does nothing or steals a foreign ship. The only issue is I know that ship nationality can be complicated, unless there is a state-owned vessel they could use for the process.
No, I’m not. I’m pointing out that distillation doesn’t work how you were told it does in middle school which is the reflexive argument people are making. The argument that all the methanol comes out early because it has a lower boiling point is simply incorrect. Mass spectromery proves it.
When you get into distilling you learn pretty fast that a lot of what you’ve been told about it is fake due to both deliberate propaganda, and the fact that a lot of it was learned before we had scientific tools to investigate deeper.
You would pretty much have to try to poison yourself distilling and yet everybody thinks it’s a real risk.
Being poisoned by a bootlegger who adds methanol because it’s cheaper (much like fentanyl in opiods) is not a fake risk, and a lot of people who think the first thing happened actually had the second thing happen.
And I’m certainly not criticizing people for this, I went to school for physics and yet was on the other side of this debate when I started distilling before I did research.
Need a non-paywalled link to glean anything here, because the abstract does not mention the distillation method. Were they even trying to boil off the methanol first?
>And contrary to lore, mass spectrometry shows that the idea that methanol comes off the still first (meaning that if you collected the early results, called heads, and drank them, you might get too much) is false or at least drastically oversimplified.
This is wrong. The boiling point of methanol is 65C vs ethanol at 78C. Methanol will come out first from distillation.
If it works that way, why doesn’t ethanol come off the still entirely and then water? There’s over a 20 degree gap between their boiling points and yet anyone who has ever distilled will tell you that they see a mix that’s at least 20% water at the very start. (You measure as you go along.) This is still well below the azeotropic mix too.
And, later on in distillation, when you’re much closer to the boiling point of water than ethanol, there will still be some ethanol coming out.
I get why you think that, I did too before diving deeper, but I assure you, your mental model of how distillation works is incorrect.
You're flipping the ingredients here. The vapor will contain some amount of the liquid that is NOT at boiling point. When you distill ethanol, the vapor contains some water. When you distill methanol, the vapor contains some ethanol. The output contains both.
That says nothing about the remains of the input. When removing methanol we are trying to get it out of the input side. So while the output will indeed contain both, that doesn't mean the input will still have any methanol.
Having seperate boiling points wont matter if they form into an azeotrope. Not all liquids can be distilled from one another even though every liquid has a different boiling point.
I have my doubts. There was a previous BBC piece[0] which went into some of the challenges with such a mission. The first being: it is not publicly known where Iran is storing its uranium. There are many putative options, most of which are going to be hardened and underground. Isfahan is near the middle of the country - safely getting troops there would already be challenging, let alone digging up any from the collapsed tunnels.
Minor blurb from the article:
Satellite imagery shows that the entrances to Isfahan and Natanz were badly damaged by US airstrikes. US forces would likely need heavy machinery to dig through rubble in order to locate the enriched uranium, which is believed to be stored in tunnels buried deep underground - all while facing potential counterattacks from Iran.
"You've first got to excavate the site and detect [the enriched uranium] while likely being under near constant threat," Campbell said.
While it is hard to believe that someone in the US military believed that such a mission for uranium extraction can be successful, it is at least equally hard to believe that the US military has spent around a half of billion dollars just for saving 2 men, while also risking the lives of a very large number of other US combatants.
Saving your men is important, but it should have been easy to do that at a much lower cost and at much lower risks of additional personnel losses, if that had been the true mission goal.
I can certainly believe that the assurance the US gives to its pilots that they will never be left behind and the public demonstration of that assurance as something the US values in the billions of dollars.
It is also clear that if the mission was not a purely rescue mission then it would have taken a lot more equipment than what appears to have been used. Even for an escalade style high-risk low-probability mission it would be inadequate.
I think the most likely version of the claim would be that the Pentagon would have used the planning and execution of the mission as a valuable opportunity to learn for a dedicated mission to extract uranium in a contestable theatre. But even that is pushing it.
We know only approximately how much equipment has been lost. It is likely that much more equipment was used than what has been lost, i.e. many more transport airplanes than the 2 lost and many more helicopters.
Nevertheless, I agree that a possible explanation is what you propose, i.e. that the mission could have been more a test of the Iranian defense than an incursion that was actually expected to succeed.
In any case, if it was a test it was also a failure, as the defense was stronger than they expected, leading to excessive equipment losses.
>Given that the US failed to seize Iran's uranium stockpile
I did not think this was possible. The three sites that were bombed in 2025 are all pretty centrally located within the country. Even if you can get troops there, the facilities are hardened and at least partially underground. Depending on how effective you believe the 2025 strikes to be, some of the facilities may be collapsed under tons of rock. There is no way to smash-and-grab the already enriched uranium.
It seems that there was a failed US incursion towards Isfahan, where much of the enriched uranium is buried, a week ago.
They could not reach their target and they had to scuttle and abandon two MC-130J airplanes and a helicopter, apparently because they were too damaged by the air defense to fly back.
The official version is that the purpose of the failed incursion was to save the crew of the previously shot down F-15E.
However, the use of a greatly disproportionate amount of people and aircraft for a supposed search and rescue mission has lead to the speculation that the true goal of the failed incursion was the extraction of the uranium and that the downed F-15E had participated to the preparation of this mission.
It is estimated that the cost of this operation has been around a half of billion dollars.
While the 2 men from the F-15E were saved successfully, it seems that this should have been easy to achieve at a cost much less than a couple hundred million dollars per head, which makes believable the hypothesis that most of the operation was unrelated to saving people, but it intended to reach the uranium deposits.
Public information on Isfahan says the entrances to the underground areas is still caved in from the prior bombings. Unless the Iranians have already dug out the tunnels, the soldiers would have to land in enemy territory with their own heavy equipment. Then attempt to excavate the area while open to counterattack.
If it were so easy that commandos could drop in and dig out the site in a day - seems improbable that the Iranians would not have already done the same. If the Iranians had already excavated the tunnels, it would seem prudent to immediately move the uranium to another location.
A defensible fortress is nice, but even better if the enemy does not know where you hide the goods. Supposedly there is <1000 pounds of the good stuff, you could move that anywhere. Without any immediate plans to use the uranium, securing it for the future strikes me as the sound choice.
I may be misremembering a drunken conversation with a developer but IIRC the root cause was choice of cross-platform APIs available in early 2010s & the JSON file was tiny when introduced.
The problem was not in delivering JSON. There were better ways, but it was good enough.
The failure is that loading times had been a complaint for years, and nobody involved lifted a finger. It would be impossible to use the platform without feeling the pain.
The software was released on 7 platforms, not counting multiple Windows versions. I don't know the risks or what platforms changes impact today or the test effort involved. I expect "it's still functioning as expected" was the default.
What is a typical price difference between the paper and spot prices? 1% or 10%+ is common? In the past 24 hours, the futures price dropped a huge amount. Is the spot market dynamic enough that prices can get reflected so quickly? Where does it stand in the past few days?
It is also interesting to think about the game theory on how you respond to markets during volatility. If you are a producer or have excessive storage capacity - when do you sell? From my armchair position, it seems like conditions are only going to get worse. Do you hold back some reserves, hoping to cash in on a higher pay day in the future? Then you have to wonder how many might be doing the same.
This is hard to say because physical delivery prices aren't easily discoverable (as mentioned).
Here's one way it matters though. Futures markets are typically in a state of backwardation or contango. Backwardation simply means the spot (or physical) price is higher than the paper or future price. Contango is the opposite. Whichever one it is, says something about the current market and the expectations for the future.
So the silver market was in backwardation where the paper price was $75+/oz but the physical price might've been $100+ but nobody was buying. People with silver delivery obligations were simply borrowing silver from those who had it rather than buying it on the spot market. There's a whole separate market for borrowing commodities and the premiums soared. But people who had shorted silver simply couldn't afford to buy on the spot market without going broke so they didn't. They kicked the can down the street, borrowed and then lobbied for the exchange to pop the bubble (which they did).
The best example of a contango market was in March-April 2020 with the oil market. This was the beginning of the pandemic and oil demand fell off a cliff. So people who already had oil couldn't move the oil they had and thus had no room to take delivery of oil they'd already bought (via futures). Producers only have so much storage room before they have to shut off production. Side note: Gulf producers have had to do this in the last month.
But the net effect was there was all this oil and nowhere for it to go so for a brief period the price went negative. That's right. Producers were paying you to take oil. That was an extreme contango market.
So in the last month I've heard data points like Dubai crude was $120-130 paper and $178 physical. That's a huge margin. I don't know what the normal range is really. In a healthy market you'd expect physical prices to be pretty near to short-term future prices.
In any bullish market, you'll get hoarders. There are limits to what you can store though and those are very real because if you shut off production, you might still be accuring a lot of costs and it can take days to restart production. As such I think you'll find producers generally just want to sell.
But a lot of hedging goes on too. This can make price spikes worse, actually. Now it's pretty common for US oil producers to not drill a well until they've already sold part or most of the oil it's expected to produce on the futures market, for risk purposes. But in times like now, nobody's going to drill a well to sell at a future price of $70 (which the 1 year price might still be) and because there's a lead time on oil production, this can create future shortages.
A hack of the L.A. city attorney’s office compromised 7.7 terabytes of sensitive LAPD records.
If you are at a FAANG, you have dedicated teams who can do nothing but monitor for data exfiltration. Is there anything plug-and-play that can do a reasonable job of flagging/disconnecting massive outbound data transfers? Presumably insidiously difficult now that everything is expected to be in the cloud, so that bulk data movements are the norm.
I just hate it that every official interaction of my life is digitized for all time. It seems a given that all of my medical/financial/embarrassing history is destined to be viewed by someone I would rather not have it. Which is not even considering how many businesses will gleefully sell my interactions to ad companies.
> Is there anything plug-and-play that can do a reasonable job of flagging/disconnecting massive outbound data transfers?
I don't know of such a tool but you'd have to run it everywhere you have data. If the LAPD's data was not on prem, which is expected (but not necessarily a good practice for sensitive data), it would be harder to both have an exfiltration monitor for the data they do have on prem and for the data they have in whatever hosting provider or "cloud" they stored it at. Maybe the bill for the egress transfers in the morning plays such a role to a certain extent.
"We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated."
The ten point plan which had previously been rejected outright? The 10-point plan which leaves Iran in an incredibly better financial position? So, apart from blowing up children, what did the US gain out of this?
> I don't think the people paying half again as much at the pump feel like it benefited them.
Since when has the current US government done anything to benefit average citizens?
The war in Iran helps those who actually matter -- the oil companies that spent 445 million dollars getting Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024.
Just pointing out that oil prices going up definitely looks like a benefit to the people the government is beholden to (which ain't the average citizen).
There have been some pretty large protests and such, but US citizens were definitely not prepared for what happened to them in 2024. The US government has operated for our lifetimes on voluntary norms that were casually accepted as if they were law. People still haven't figured out how to effectively deal with a bad actor that has the full power of the executive and no restraint. Aside from yelling, nobody knows what to do other than wait for the next election.
Giving the oil companies, some of the richest companies on the planet, MORE money is a benefit? Is that your idea of good governance? You don't think there's better uses of that money that's coming right out of your pocket and everybody elses?
That's absolutely not my idea of good governance, playing with oil prices is extremely dangerous considering that economy is strongly tied to them. Starting a useless war is crazy in the first place.
But it is more money in America (for the government / oil producers to misuse) which is a benefit from the standpoint of the government. Not sure it exceeds the losses though.
I think this 10 point plan drops the need for US to pay reparations instead relying on transit fees which will be split with Oman.
Missiles are still flying so it’s hard to say who has really agreed to what.
I’ve heard rumors that Iran has agreed to dilute its highly enriched uranium so maybe the US could count that as a win. Given they’ve demonstrated sufficient conventional deterrence they may feel that they don’t need the nukes, especially if they can get some sort of Chinese backed security guarantee. But that might be a trial balloon or wishful thinking.
FWIW, money is the easiest term to agree to. We have lots and lots. I agree, it will never be called "reparations", but you can trivially structure it in a zillion ways that just look like foreign aid or debt forgiveness or whatever. The WHO forgives some loans or the UN agrees to build some infrastructure, and we coincidentally make a new fund of about the same size, etc...
Iran and US can each declare "victory". TRUMP can say he achieved his objectives, IRAN can say it "won".
What IRAN is really after is lifting the sanctions and ensuring that Israel will not attack again randomly in 2 months.
The problem is that Israel is not going to be happy about this, so I full expect another round of escalation eventually. The only way to deter this is Nuclear Weapons unfortunately and IRAN very well understood this.
No matter what the agreement says, we can be assured Israel will break it, as it has done time and time again. Why would this round be different?
Yeah, the US overplayed its hand and is in a weak bargaining position and will likely have to accept less than what it could have had. Now with TACO Tuesday who could take his maximalist carpet nuking threats seriously anymore. I hope to be wrong but I doubt the ceasefire holds.
Under Obama's plan they agreed to reduce its Uranium 97% and keep it well under weapons grade and got $2B for the assets that were seized after the revolution.
Here they stand to make $100B a year on tolling the gulf and get to keep their weapons grade Uranium that they stockpiled after Trump pulled us out of that agreement.
Its only a 2 week ceasefire. Maybe after 2 weeks the sides stay settled down. Maybe they go back to shooting each other. I wouldn't call it over yet.
As far as the geopolitical consequences of all this, i think its still pretty unclear where the chips will fall, but whether a win or a loss for usa, i think the consequences of this war will be significant.
some people got very very rich. like rich - that their great grandkids don't have to work.
that's the price of "freedom".
both sides get to save face - Trump says they won, his cronies n himself got rich. Iran gets a better deal than before.
Israel gets rid of US bases in the Middle East via Iran.
of course the poor and downtrodden get shifted - that never changes.
Honestly? I presume Trump and Iran both gain the ability to kick the can... which they both want. That ten-point plan is 'unrealistic' but he gets to beat his cheats and it looks like both sides are 'claiming' victory here. That this isn't a workable long-term solution seems almost irrelevant. We're at a point where our bargaining frictions are so high, that we'd both rather remain in this standoff as long as possible even if we don't actually resolve it, because resolving it means serious pain on both sides, whereas the US has about a week before the pain really starts hitting consumers and investors.
"What Causes Wars: An Introduction to Crisis Bargaining Theory", by William Spaniel, PHD and professor, specializing in game-theory and specifically crisis bargaining theory: https://youtu.be/xjKVcl_lDfo?si=NFHvjOdWbLbPOOvA
IMHO that's bad analysis. This is a VERY good solution from Iran's perspective. They stared down a superpower and won. They've gone from an international pariah and nuissance to a genuine regional overlord in a single tweet.
"Whoah there, folks. Stop your tankers please. Thanks. Last year was rough for our farmers. We're increasing tolls on the straight again. Don't like it? Come on over and bomb us again you infidel fucks. See how your precious stock market likes that."
If it holds they’ll be a regional hegemon instead of Israel, which is why Israel will not let it hold. They put everything on the line and they’re not going to give up now.
I warned you specifically that this Iran war was coming and would not end up in Israel’s favor. As I stated “the Iran war is already unpopular and it hasn’t even started yet.” I understand that it is not yet over.
Iran and its proxies can slow squeeze Israel like Israel was squeezing Gaza. I see this war as a breakout attempt to fracture Iran into a failed state so that Israel would be the uncontested regional hegemony. Israel is losing popular support, which precedes losing political support and military support. You had some fantasy that Israel would dump America and find some other client state to support it.
> Israel is losing popular support, which precedes losing political support and military support
This is a very Western-centric view. Step outside that gap and you'll find Israel maintains solid ties in the Emirates, India and even in Europe. In any case, on the time horizons you're talking about anything can happen. If someone wants to hold on to random hopes, I'm not going to rain on their parade.
> Iran and its proxies can slow squeeze Israel like Israel was squeezing Gaza
This doesn't make sense. Gaza was blockaded. Iran and its proxies have zero ability to blockade Israel. (Hell, Israel has an easy option if they do–bomb Kharg.)
Take Israel's nonsense in Palestinian territories and Iran's penchant for terrorist proxies out of the equation and the Middle East is more or less balanced. (Famous last words.)
> You had some fantasy that Israel would dump America and find some other client state to support it
Israel isn't dumping America. If you're continuing a thread from another time, I was probably arguing that the notion that Israel existentially depends on America is nonsense. Israel depends on America to be a regional hegemon. (Probably.) But it's perfectly capable of turning its military-export machine and gas fields into sources of sovereignty. Anyone who thinks the region is anything less than transactional has emotionally wedded themselves to a cause the world isn't invested in.
We will have to agree to disagree on Israel’s long term viability without the support of the US. Perhaps if Iran was defeated but so far that has not happened.
look again at iran's peace terms - there's nothing in them about destroying israel, and this is Iran shooting its best shot.
Israel might not be able to contjnue with the genocide, expand its borders, or be a hegemon without US support, but the other powers around aren't calling to destory it or using the lack of its destruction as a bargaining chip. Israel's continued existence is pretty secured unless it falls apart from within
Until they are able to rebuild their country, they are actually in a very, very bad position. Saving face is great and all, but rockets are still hitting much of their infrastructure anyway.
My point is that their demands are not realistic. That the can has been kicked is good for Iran, it's also good for Trump. Conflict here is bad for both parties, the problem is there I currently don't see a way to step back from the precipice at this point.
> rockets are still hitting much of their infrastructure anyway
As has been extensively discussed over the past week, hitting civilian infrastructure with rockets (or otherwise) is a war crime, and we aren't doing it.
They lost some military hardware they couldn't have deployed anyway, they have a bunch of holes in runways that they'll fill within the week. They lost their head of state and a bunch of miscellaneous leaders, but it turns out their chain of command was robust. It's gotten stronger for the stress and unity, not weaker.
No, we have to take the L here. The USA went to war with Iran and got its ass kicked. We achieved nothing useful in the short term, and made things much (much) worse for our interests in the long term.
> As has been extensively discussed over the past week, hitting civilian infrastructure with rockets (or otherwise) is a war crime, and we aren't doing it.
I agree, but want to add that the threat of hitting civilian targets is itself a war crime, so there's a pretty solid case that we already did over the last few days:
"Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited." -Article 51(2) AP1 to Geneva Conventions
> threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population
If Trump's tweet meets this bar, it's a meaningless rule. The purpose wasn't to scare civilians. It was to scare Iran's leadership. What it probably wound up doing was scaring American leadership into talking the President down from his ledge.
Cool that's a nice workaround of the Geneva conventions - any threat you make while negotiations are underway is actually a negotiation strategy! The law tends not to be friendly to such workarounds in my experience, especially if it's trivially easy to enact ("be in negotiations"). Or perhaps you can help me understand what distinguishes this situation in the way you suggest.
> any threat you make while negotiations are underway is actually a negotiation strategy
No, I'm saying there is no evidence the threat was made "to spread terror among the civilian population." If the threshold is just any act of war, which naturally causes some amount of terror among civilians, then the rule is meaningless. Whether it's done during negotiations is irrelevant.
I don't have a crystal ball into Trump and Hegseth's minds. But I don't get the sense the threats were aimed at the civilian population. Instead, they were aimed at leadership.
Ah. Didn't he threaten to destroy every power plant and bridge in the country? Do you not find this threat credible? I think the US military is capable of it and obviously that's a threat against the lives of civilians. But it's not a war crime if it's "aimed" at the leaders or because Trump generally bloviates something like that? Any explanation I come up with is exactly the kind of legal workaround I'm talking about.
"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will,"
> "just any act of war, which naturally causes some amount of terror among civilians"
I think we just may be working with totally different perspectives on this since I'm struggling to see this the same way as you.
> hitting civilian infrastructure with rockets (or otherwise) is a war crime, and we aren't doing it.
I mean there is no world policeman that’s going to stop Trump. While I agree with you on the practicality of the situation, we have been on tenterhooks all day exactly because Trump can dramatically escalate this if he wants. It’s just that that escalation will be extremely painful in all sorts of ways, especially if Iran wipes out the oil production infrastructure.
My point here isn’t to “pick a side.” I obviously think this whole escapade was unwise. My point is only to point out that the bargaining frictions point to continuing the conflict.
Iran is happier to delay because the oil crisis is about to hit America. Trump is happy to delay because he can always launch a strike tomorrow, and concessions via existing infrastructure breakdown, or improve his position with intelligence, and this may prevent a more serious oil crisis.
That means both parties see opportunity in maintaining the status quo.
> Until they are able to rebuild their country, they are actually in a very, very bad position
Iran will get a buttload of cash from China. If we're copying their kit [1] China can one hundredfold. (If Iran can keep playing its role as a heatsink for American weapons, better still.)
The war began because the Epstein compromising material will likely be made public soon. Once that material is public it ceases to have any value to those who were holding it over various people. Those people in turn were ensuring US military support of a certain country. The logic of the war is that it had to happen now, before that material is released, because after that there is some chance the USA would no longer support said country.
The best steelman argument[1] is that it was a failed gamble. The protests of a few months back (also the improbable success in Venezuela) made them think they could topple the regime. They couldn't.
It's been clear for weeks now that the US has lost this war. The only question was how long it would take Trump to disengage and what the trigger would be.
And the answers appear to be "two more weeks" and "when one plausibly genocidal gaffe went too far and fractured his domestic coalition".
[1] Which... I mean, steelman analysis has its place. But really no, this was just dumb.
> Which... I mean, steelman analysis has its place. But really no, this was just dumb.
I rarely hear people use the term "steelman" while arguing in good faith. It's basically a tacit admission that you are either advancing a position that you don't actually hold (why...?), or more likely you know it's an unpopular position and you want to argue it while having plausible deniability that you may not actually hold it (which is just cowardly).
Stepping through other peoples logic to understand why they may have a position that you do not understand/agree with is sensible for sure. But if you do that in conversation with others so often that you need to preface it with a special term I'm going to be suspicious that you're just trying to obfuscate your actual opinions.
(see also: "just playing devil's advocate here, but...")
The term "steelman" arose from people who misunderstand the term "strawman". Such people coined it out of the idea thinking that a strawman was an an attempt to make an opponents argument look weaker than it is, while a "steelman" elevates it to it's highest state before attacking it.
In reality, a steelman is just another strawman. A strawman was never simply a matter of making your opponent's argument look weak, they're about making a separate argument that your opponent isn't even arguing, and attacking that to make it look like you're winning the argument while not actually addressing the opponent's actual argument/position. A steelman does the same. In other words, they're about fabricating an argument and making it look like it came from the opponent, before attempting to prove it fallacious. They're both failures in logic - a fallacy of relevance.
Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body.
Well it's good to be honest, and so I commend you on that.
So the hierarchy is
- our kids
- "third-world orphans"
- other species
For what it's worth, I'm not denying the benefit we obtain by testing on animals, nor am I suggesting that we live surrounded by rodents that we know to be vectors for multiple diseases that would affect us.
The comment above was merely an observation on the value of life and how little attention we pay to it.
We subject sentient beings to untold amounts of horror every day, and we are completely destroying the balance of life on earth with a system that is entirely devoted to serving humans--individual humans, not humanity.
The statue is not the point. The point is what this little creature did and how we might learn to show mercy and respect to our fellow sentient beings.
That would be an insane escalation that helps nobody. Instead, if they watched it float by, that makes the USA look impotent beyond belief. I suppose they could "just" seize it, but piracy is not much of an improved look.
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