I honestly don’t think they’re going to find the profit when the time comes to charge for chat bots. Very few people are going to pay $10/mo max 300 messages or whatever compared to the user base now. And they built data centers for MASSIVE demand.
The “average American reading level” is vastly skewed by ESLs.
I knew I’d hear this take. And I don’t buy it, in fact I think its very ignorant. No effort post with links this time since its been discussed to death. Iran’s current regime has been incredibly belligerent since they overthrow the Shah in 1979 with the help of communists, and seized total power by then killing all of the communists. In the 45 years since they’ve been shouting “death to america” and after two straight generations of this, only now are at they having the war with america their grandparents wanted. Maybe great great great grandparents since they marry 9 year old girls. That’s one of the “rights” they started a civil war for.
Plus they get in lots of smaller conflicts with their neighbors and they killed tens of thousands of civilians last time they had big protests (the equivalent of just pulling out an artillery regiment on BLM).
This is a military government which uses conflicts to stay in power and always needs a conflict.
I got curious what Iran’s national budget actually looks like and theres not much good information there’s a Wikipedia article with no hard numbers.
The cited sources also seem to lack hard numbers. Here’s one of them. As a funny aside half of them are apparently dated by an Islamic calendar, so these budgets are from the year 1402. Iran definitely acts like it’s still the year 1402.
I didnt bother trying to get a translation of the articles cited since, again, they seem to discuss relative changes but no hard numbers. However, I think this picture gives us an idea what is going on.
We know from the Wikipedia article they raised the retirement age by 10 years, increased government and military pay, instated road tolls, and slashed the road budget at the same time. They raised their military budget by the equivalent of $5B USD (against a GDP of $375B) while raising electricity, natural gas, and water prices by 35% to pay for it.
To do a last bit of comparative math, the USA’s total military budget is about 3.33% of GDP, while Iran’s 2025 budget raised military spending by about 1.3% of GDP from whatever it was before. And again no hard numbers, but Iran’s direct government and military spending is very large, apparently it’s a driver of inflation.
So, actually, I think this take is basically correct.
I honestly am not sure where I’d stand on the EU as a good example of privacy. Unfortunately I don’t think the GDPR has been effective in retrospect. They’re at times hostile towards corporate spying, which is good. But, they’re extremely bullish on state spying and policing social media. They’re willing to outsource this to corporations sometimes too. It’s pretty good, or some countries are, if you want to stay private from US corporate interests but when it comes to themselves the EU seems to think your right to privacy online is an obstacle for them.
Dont hold up California as a good example of privacy when they’re leading the charge in demanding OS level age verification…
Twitter, for all its faults, proved that a lot of people online with strong opinions about US politics are located in India, Pakistan, and southeast Asia. In my opinion one of these is the likely origin.
It says $4 million per hour. It’s from one of those places that uses dots instead of commas.
But I do like to imagine someone in a really low CoL area like the Philippines wearing a tuxedo and laughing about how wealthy they are making $4/hr.
No, I just hate Palestine redditors lmao
One retired medicare recipient had $800m of our money (on paper, not in actual fact).
Like it or not, thinking that gays shouldn’t be thrown off of buildings but also disliking trans men in women’s bathrooms or whatever the current argument is about, just makes you a moderate.
Go practice it. Use your mirrors.
Okay but what armed conflict ever do you sit and wait for them to pick up ammo.
Interesting. Kind of like what’s happening in England.
Iran’s military would NEVER attack a defenseless target!
How about we destroy all of their military assets and if the soldiers don’t want to get killed, they can desert?
This is actually something I don’t understand when this argument is brought up. Havent they both been killing each other since well before the modern period?
It made a little more sense when the argument was that Hamas is bad, but that doesn’t justify collateral damage to Palestinian civilians when targeting them. But it seems to me the rhetoric I see often has switched to making excuses for Hamas, who directly tries to kill children whenever they get the opportunity, including putting their own Palestinian civilians in the line of fire to confuse attacks against them and get them killed as “martyrs”. Which they use to justify their actions, even though they caused it.
I don’t see how Israel’ careless around getting noncombatants killed justifies deliberately targeting civilians, which Hamas does constantly, or doing things like putting a rocket launcher on top of a hospital just so it looks bad for Israel when they destroy it. It’s not like Hamas wants a peaceful two-state solution and Israel just isn’t playing along. And theres not a lot of anti-Hamas sentiment in Gaza since they get murdered by Hamas, and they did vote them in in the first place.
She hosted Motaz Azaiza, the “journalist” who frequently praises Hamas, and was present with Hamas at the October 7th attack itself. So I correct myself, he only might have participated in directly killing civilians and children, but he was at least hanging out with his friends when they were doing that.
She hosted Motaz Azaiza, the “journalist” who frequently praises Hamas, and was present with Hamas at the October 7th attack itself. So I correct myself, he only might have participated in directly killing civilians and children, but he was at least hanging out with his friends when they were doing that.
She hosted Motaz Azaiza, the “journalist” who frequently praises Hamas, and was present with Hamas at the October 7th attack itself. So I correct myself, he only might have participated in directly killing civilians and children, but he was at least hanging out with his friends when they were doing that.
It’s $3.79 in Iowa. Yes, even with the war. Just being in California almoat doubles the price.