Iran has historically been a friendly trade partner with France.

By contrast, its straight up open season on any country in North Africa. Macron practically lead the charge when it came time to carpet bomb Libya. And he was all on board in the overthrow of the Syrian government.

If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders.

Artificial scarcity is its own driver of revenue. At that point, you’re not competing for space on the screen, you’re competing for number of people who see your content. “Do you want 5000 views or 50,000? Do you want them to see this once? Ten times in a month? Daily? That’ll cost you extra.”

The value of an ad has diminishing returns. One billboard on the side of the road attracts your eye. Ten in a big messy cluster get ignored.

Facebook could have leveraged this to command higher rates for their ad content, rather than trying to engage on sheer volume. Now the website is down the same rabbit hole as Yahoo.

It’s not the ceos who are the reason for all this. It’s that all this causes boards to chose ceos that operate this way.

The Founders trade out shares to partners who then occupy the board. Normally, one of the Founders is the original CEO, because they have a controlling stack in the firm. New board members are introduced by the founders and often have a personal relationship with them. And with stock swaps, the CEO of one company can sit on the board of another. Michael Dell sits on Broadcomm’s board for this very reason.

Tesla’s board is a classic example of this incestuous back-scratching. Robyn Denholm moved from CFO of Juniper Networks - a major supplier for Tesla - to the audit committee chair of Tesla (and yehaw, what a job that must have been, given their shady business practices). She also is an operating partner at Blackbird Ventures, a venture capital firm which is a major investor in xAI, another of Musk’s pet startups.

Once you climb to the top of these hierarchies (or you start getting into seriously investing in any of them) you start noticing these circular networks of leadership and trade. The Oracle / OpenAI / Nvidia circuit is another great example.

As for AI. They don’t care about replacing humans.

The very real and explicit and demonstrated belief among these tech billionaires is that they can automate away the need for humans - both as labor and as clients. They’re building (or, at least, trying to build) a financial closed loop.

😂 It’s between 2000 and 5000

The displaced are between 200,000 and 800,000.

Since when do we care about the aggressors in a conflict?

When the aggressor is Russian or Chinese.

even after this war decimates the US economy

War has traditionally been a boon to the American economy, as the US workforce is heavily integrated into the Military Industrial Complex. The surge in state spending under the Trump administration, combined with the construction boom from AI, is what’s currently keeping us out of recession. And domestic oil exports only benefit when countries like Kuwait and Qatar can’t export fossil fuels.

Losing Vietnam didn’t teach them anything

It’s the Max Bialystock strategy. You win by losing. Another multi-decade long military engagement means multiple trillions of dollars invested in equipment, technology, and private contractors.

Iran, Ukraine, Venezuela, I guess Cuba is next, maybe we get to Nigeria or North Korea down the line… the wars never end and the profits never stop flowing.

Florida Rep. Neal Dunn faced a terminal illness and that he had helped him get lifesaving care because he liked him but also “needed his vote.”

All these months of people insisting Trump is on death’s door and the breaking story is about a hack Congressman with a treatable condition. Lolz.

The Russian march across Eastern Europe involved much more than raw manpower. Soviet Tanks were a force to be reconned with. Their use of artillery was inspired. Georgy Zhukov was a genius field marshal and outmaneuvered the fascist armies both retreating and advancing. He did not just win on numbers.

That said, you’ll find quite a few Cold Warriors who took the view - after the dust had settled - that Europe would have been far better united under a German military dictatorship than bifricated between NATO and the Soviet Union.

Business Collaboration with Nazi Germany

I would also refer you to the Lord Halifax, Documents And Materials Relating To The Eve Of The Second World War Vol. 1

The Nazi War machine only existed thanks to the Trans-Atlantic military industrial complex.

Serbia should have been allowed to genocide more Muslim Bosnians and Albanians.

The NATO intervention killed and displaced more civilians than the Bosnian genocide.

The Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic had shown his ruthlessness earlier in Bosnia, and now, facing armed attack from Kosovo nationalists, attacked Kosovo, killing perhaps 2,000 people and causing several hundred thousand to become refugees.

An international gathering in Rambouillet, France, was supposed to try to solve the problem diplomatically. But it presented terms to Yugoslavia that seemed certain to be rejected: NATO control of all of Kosovo, and NATO military occupation of the rest of Yugoslavia. On March 23, 1999, the Serbian National Assembly responded with a counterproposal, rejecting NATO occupation and calling for negotiations leading “toward the reaching of a political agreement on a wide-ranging autonomy for Kosovo. . . . ” The Serbian proposal was ignored, and was not reported in the major newspapers of the United States

The following day, NATO forces (meaning mostly U.S. forces) began the bombing of Yugoslavia. Presumably, the bombing was to stop the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo, that is, the forcing of Albanians out of the province by death or intimidation. But after two weeks of bombing, the New York Times reported (April 5, 1999) that “more than 350,000 have left Kosovo since March 24.” Two months later, with the bombing still going on, the figure had risen to over 800,000. The bombing of Yugoslavia, including the capital city of Belgrade, apparently intended to unseat Milosevic, led to an untold number of civilian casualties.

From the People’s History of the United States, Chapter 24

Also Ghadaffi should have been allowed to butcher his population.

Again, the French airforce and subsequent NATO occupation has killed an order of magnitude more in the last decade than Ghadaffi managed in his entire time in office.

Wielding the power of destruction in a manner that produces positive outcomes

Is this even possible?

Live where they rent is cheap and find out.

a guy getting his ass kicked

The Americans and Israelis have massacred an extraordinarily large number of people, demolished billions in critical infrastructure, and plunged the country into a bleak future of warlordism, poverty, and famine.

It cannot be adequately expressed how nightmarish life will become in Iran in the next few months, without a globally organized relief campaign.

What they’ve accomplished militarily is impressive, but it hasn’t come anywhere close to breaking the genocidal grip of the imperialist powers around their collective throats.

Cuban expats are a popular target for human trafficking. Come down to Houston or Miami and you’ll find Cuban migrants all over the strip club scene.

As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue.

I’d say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people’s pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they’d have made long term.

It isn’t merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they’re gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.

It isn’t enough for Zuckerberg’s company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into… the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they’re doing, to make human labor irrelevant!

Because they’ve bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.

There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose.

So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.

It’s increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.

The United States is absolutely part of NATO.

And Israel functions as a forward operating base, from which European military powers can control the Suez and the Eastern Mediterranean. It’s fundamental to the Western allied control of North Africa and the Middle East, even before you get into its function as a money laundering outfit and testing bed for military technology and policing strategy.

European leadership has a closer relationship with Israeli military than Turkish military, as a point of comparison.

No terror attacks on USA

You just have to pretend Israel is part of the United States

Mark Penn, who is apparently a “deep state” conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter

Among other things.

NATO is not for undocumented wars.

Glances at the last 80 years of NATO history

:-/

How would such a large number of professionals coordinate their efforts?

You’d need some kind of organization, ideally with a leadership to coordinate actions among its major players. And you’d need lines of communication that weren’t compromised by the business interests you were negotiating against. You’d also need a state body willing to enforce the terms reached by the workforce and its employers. And you’d need a public that valued the dignity and prosperity of individual workers above the potential temporary disruption of the treat train.

Does Japan have any of that?

democrats are as bad as republicans

liberals never went to war with Iran for the regime change

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has repeatedly intervened in the internal affairs of Iran, from the Mosaddegh coup of 1953 to the present day.

From military coups to political assassinations to stuxnet computer viruses, we’ve been launching and directing military operations against Iran for over 70 years.