> The US isn't ever going to leave anyone, let alone Iran, alone. The options are a) fight and cease to exist and b) don't fight and cease to exist.
Oh boy, I see we learned nothing from Afghanistan. The US will eventually leave you alone, There will be a power vacuum, and the local warlord will rise to that opportunity.
The "military operations" don't end in decisive vistory. They end with death and destruction for the young men sent into battle, and more enemies in the surrounding areas.
The US hasn't left Afghanistan alone. They were driven out of the country by force. They are still attacking it in multiple different ways and will continue to do so until they are defeated. Time did not end when the US was kicked out. They aren't just going to give up their goals.
I do not understand what argument you are trying to make. Nowhere do I say that time stands still or that the US doesn't still have a policy for Afghanistan. I'm saying that the US (and her allies, my country among them), with their war machine the likes of which has never been seen, could not bring peace and democracy to Afghanistan. Once we left, and we will always have to leave eventually, the existing structures of opression once again asserted themselves.
My country and my Government, sent people from my generation down there to die. My countrymen died in that war, and the only thing we got out of it was more enemies in the region. The Afghan is still getting persecuted for styling their beard wrong, and the Afghan woman is still getting opressed. We have nothing to show for that sacrifice.
I see no reason to believe the same thing isn't going to happen in Iran.
> with their war machine the likes of which has never been seen, could not bring peace and democracy to Afghanistan.
As far as i understand, the US propped up an unpopular governmet that many of the locals did not like (there were rumours about turning a blind eye to moral impropriety because it was politically expediant).
The thing about democracy is its not really democracy when forced from the outside.
> As far as i understand, the US propped up an unpopular governmet that many of the locals did not like
From what I've read it's not that simple. The American system was more well liked in the cities than the alternatives. Outside the big cities, which is most of Afghanistan, the government really didn't matter much. They were still dominated by local malitias, "elders", and gangs.
To add insult to injury, the US led effort to build up an internal defense force in the country found that the only people willing to fight for the country were the very same people who had fought for the Taliban only years before.
The question left unsaid of course is if all of these problems could have been solved by a more competent actor. I would argue they couldn't have, that you can't bring peace through war, but reasonable minds can disagree.
> Once we left, and we will always have to leave eventually, the existing structures of opression once again asserted themselves.
The US keeps coming back is what I'm saying. The US was kicked out of Iran in 1953. That's what all this is about. They will do the same to Afghanistan eventually. That's what I meant by time didn't stop. The Taliban isn't safe by any means. It's just a temporary reprieve.
> It’s not OK as a hard requirement for anything else such as banking.
It is in fact not a hard requirement. It just happens that when you have a relatively cheap and efficient digital identity, which is by definition trusted by the government, banks will use that to reduce risk. It's not that they can't verify your identity any other way, this is just the obvious and easy one.
I'm a banker. What you're looking for here is called "interbank clearing". In europe that would be SEPA[1]
But yes, most clearing is done daily. Each bank basically submits their daily flow of money to each other participating bank, and the central ACH (Automated Clearing House) keeps track of the balances. There's some processes in there by which banks can dispute charges, which is super interesting, but also way to complicated for me to detail here.
Side question, but what happens if there's a technical error with the service provider that leads to double spending?
Example: we bought tickets worth 300 EUR from Deutsche Bahn, they were hit by a DDoS and couldn't complete the transaction.
We got charged *twice* (i.e. 600 EUR and not refunded yet. AND no tickets!!!
Now they claim all they can do is to give us 600 EUR in vouchers (that are not even transferrable).
Would a Chargeback work in this case?
And my friend (who's ordered the tickets) has a very traditional bank that only gives a statement monthly, and probably accepts claims on every 29 of February, between 7 and 8 AM and only by fax (IYKYK those German companies...)
> well, luckily, that's not how money is stored, but instead, they're transaction based.
Not really. That's how the accounting works. It's the gold standard, and what we guarantee our customers, it's not universally how we store it though. Plenty of bank systems store just singular balances and infer that back into "transactions" in other systems to make the balance even out. Then the errors in those balances are manually corrected by looking at the sums.
IT systems only rarely match the legal frameworks they operate within.
It's not just a question of the long haul. About 25% of new model 3's failed their first inspection in 2024 in denmark. That means they aren't road legal without repairs. That's compared to 9% of other electric cars. And yeah, they run a 4 year warrenty, so when the first inspection is due after 4 years, it also conviniently out of warrenty.
It's even worse with the Y where 50% (yes, HALF) of 2021 models failed their first inspection.
They have had problems with the suspension arms, but word on the street is that it’s just the brake discs.
Denmark is significantly more moist than California, and EVs regenerative braking doesn’t wear the braking discs, so they rust, thus failing inspection.
The solution is trivial (periodically disable regenerative braking), but many people didn’t know.
> They have had problems with the suspension arms, but word on the street is that it’s just the brake discs.
That is certainly one of the issues, but 22% of the model Y's had loose suspension arms. So the brakes (which I agree is a more minor yet still inexcusable issue) aren't the only issue.
How does this solve the problem at all? You're just making more problems. Now you have to deal with a black market of "unlocked" phones. You're having to deal with kids sharing unlocked phone. Would police have to wal around trying to buy unlocked phones to catch people selling them to minors? What about selling phones on the internet, would they check ID now?
SOME parents give their children access to their ID. That is NOT the same as ALL parents, and therefore is not a reason not to give those parents a helping hand.
Even just informing children that they're entering an adult space has some value, and if they then have to go ask their parents to borrow their wallet, that's good enough for me.
It would not be solved without a culture shift. But with a culture shift, giving a kid an unlocked device would be as rare as giving them drugs.
I'm sure it will occasionally happen. But kids are terrible at keeping secrets, so they will only have the unlocked device for temporary periods, and I believe infrequent use of the modern internet is much, much less damaging than the constant use we see problems from today. A rough analogy, comparing social media to alcohol: it's as if today kids are suffering from chronic alcoholism, and in the future, kids occasionally get ahold of a six pack.
Doesn't the proposal as it's being implemented in the EU solve the problem under the exact same argumentation? Why are you dismissing a one proposal to then make your own that has exactly the same probable challenges?
The implementation is sound. Instead of getting an ID, the bouncer gets a serial number from you, he calls his government contact who tells him you are of age. The serial number is meaningless to him.
This would be impractical in meatspace, but works perfectly fine on the internet.
Instead of checking your ID, the bouncer sends you over to the shady broker, who takes a video of your face, photograph of your ID, checks you in the various databases (who knows, maybe you've been a bad boy previously), and only then gives you the permission slip to enter the club.
The data stays with them[1].
I think you grossly underplay the current practices.
[1] there's no hard, irrefutable proof companies like Persona (intimately connected with known law abusers, ie US government) keep their promises or obey the law.
Where in your metaphor are the club next door using Persona instead of that implementation, and the EU's reference implementation requiring a Google Play integrity check to acquire a serial number in the first place?
You're proposing that every porn site on the planet pings a user's government's API to see if they're adult or not? In other words, that any random site is able to contact hundreds of APIs.
Huh, interesting. Do you know if the government sees the identity of the company and the person being verified?
[edit] I did a little reading and it sounds like the company does not query the government with your ID. You get the cryptographic ID from the government, and present it to a company who is able to verify its validity directly. My source is mostly this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-europ...
> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves.
Is that really evidence of astroturfing? If we're in the middle of an ongoing political debate, it doesn't seem that far fetched for me that people reach similar conclusions. What you're hearing then isn't "astro-turfing" but one coalition, of potentially many.
I often hear people terrified that the government will have a say on what they view online, while being just fine with google doing the same. You can agree or disagree with my assesment, but the point is that hearing that point a bunch doesn't mean it's google astroturfing. It just means there's an ideology out there that thinks it's different (and more opressive seemingly) when governments do it. It means all those people have a similar opinion, probably from reading the same blogs.
Well the hard thing about astroturfing is that only the people running the platform have the hard data to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt.
But I don't think we need 99.99% confidence -- isn't even acknowledged that 30% of twitter is bots or something? I think it's safe to conclude there's astroturfing on any significant political issue.
Also as far as documented cases, there were documented cases of astroturfing around fracking [1], or pesticides [2]
An ex friend of mine was once involved in some thing where they got paid to astroturf for Monsanto. Despite living in the city, they suddenly developed deeply informed opinions about glyphosate and how important it is for agriculture, and they would share these opinions aggressively in online discussions along with pro-Monsanto articles. It was disturbing to watch because the behavior was completely uncharacteristic (and seemingly in conflict with their core beliefs). One day they quit doing it just as suddenly.
This was before the heyday of influencer culture, so I can only imagine how sophisticated things are nowadays. It’s not always bots.
I recommend the book Trust Me, I’m Lying for a deep but somewhat dated look at the online influence industry.
> it doesn't seem that far fetched for me that people reach similar conclusions.
How do you suppose it is that millions of people, separated by vast geographic distances, somehow all reach similar conclusions all at once?
Related: How do you suppose it is that out of 350-700+ million people (depending on whose numbers you believe), there's always only two "choices" and both of them suck?
In the same way that they came up with the idea of divine being(s) in the image of man that rule nature.
In the same way that patriarchy rose amongst them all.
In the same way that a shared currency was deemed necessary.
Escpecially in matters of governance, there is something to be said about how humans like to organise themselves. No country has truly escaped capitalism so far.
You noticed the facts, but completely failed to understand how the facts came to be.
> In the same way that they came up with the idea of divine being(s) in the image of man that rule nature.
Thanks to the diligent efforts of the Priesthood, of course, who never cease in their 'education' of humanity as to the 'truth.'
Before the world came under centralized control of the Priesthood, there were many tribes of 'Nephelim'--or no-faith-God-people. (ne-phe-el-im.)
(Nope, it has nothing to do with aliens. Guess who is telling that lie also?)
> In the same way that patriarchy rose amongst them all.
Not among my ancestors the Cherokee. They were a matriarchy. They were wiped out (genocided) by foreigners who were controlled by a paternal Priesthood.
In our own history, we were once ruled by such a priesthood. They were called the Nicotani, or Ani-Kutani. They grew insolent and arrogant and eventually crossed the line when one of them raped a man's wife. They were subsequently exterminated, to the last man.
> In the same way that a shared currency was deemed necessary.
By whom? Who made that decision for you? Is it you who is deciding to get rid of cash and make everything digital too, so that you can be even more easily tracked, controlled, monitored...enslaved?
> Escpecially in matters of governance, there is something to be said about how humans like to organise themselves.
That's just the thing. It's not you organizing yourself.
Sorry, I don't quite understand your argument. There will always be people with different ideas. That is what makes us human. My argument is that such ideas and the societies that are organised from them are quite fleeting (as noted by your matriarch example). Genocidal priesthood may have forced people in one region to believe in divinity, but I doubt that with the technology at the time, they would have enabled the expansion of so many other religion - abrahamic religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikh etc etc.
Again, I did not come up with currency and it does not matter if I personally believed in it. Enough people did and now we have capitalism. The people organised themselves, and if it is not what they wanted, history has a recording of many many revolutions and uprisings.
> The output is more or less what I'd be writing as a principal engineer.
I certainly hope this is not true, because then you're not competent for that role. Claude Code writes an absolutely incredible amount of unecessary and superfluous comments, it's makes asinine mistakes like forgetting to update logic in multiple places. It'll gladly drop the entire database when changing column formats, just as an example.
Oh boy, I see we learned nothing from Afghanistan. The US will eventually leave you alone, There will be a power vacuum, and the local warlord will rise to that opportunity.
The "military operations" don't end in decisive vistory. They end with death and destruction for the young men sent into battle, and more enemies in the surrounding areas.
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