>” That suggests a strong, long-term Iranian focus on strengthening Houthi anti-ship capabilities and a potential attempt to export Iran’s model of naval coercion from the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to the geopolitically important Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait.”
Can anyone who understands this conflict explain this more? What does Iran get out of helping the Houthi disrupt commercial shipping? For that matter, how do they benefit from naval coercion in the Gulf?
>What I saw this as was a group of people who had real concerns about Altman's leadership, and some of those concerns ended up sounding pretty valid, but who didn't have the experience/maturity to understand how to go about the next step.
That and that alone is enough to question their competence, though. The impression I get is that Toner has been in the academic/nonprofit world for so long that she doesn't understand how the real world works. In those places, the sad truth is nothing you really do is of much consequence to anybody in the grand scheme of things, other than you collecting prestige and a paycheck.
Then she tried making a consequential decision in an organization valued at around $90 billion, and lo and behold, people started caring about her actions in a way she has never experienced before.
You need to teach it what kind of stuff you like. If you go on Twitter and look at peoples’ bios, they often list their blue sky handles. Start following tech journalists such as
https://bsky.app/profile/gergely.pragmaticengineer.com
Then, peek into their own “following“ lists, and follow everybody you recognize/like.
Then go into their “following” lists, and do the same. Rinse and repeat.
Eventually, the algorithm will take the hint and start recommending you more tech stuff.
I think I’ve figured out what he’s doing. He knows Twitter is going to flop due to its tremendous debt, dwindling audience and the failure of his paid premium subscription scheme.
But this way, when it happens he gets to blame all of that on “woke corporations“, rather than on himself.
Many of us might feel that way internally or in private when we’re frustrated, but few would go up on stage, say that in front of the whole world and wait for applause afterward. Regardless of his political opinions or personal temperament, he seems to have lost touch with reality.
The scary thing is he got an extremely pro Trump judge in Texas, who is famous for making nonsensical rulings that even the current Supreme Court heavily disagrees with. So there’s a good chance he will win this and it will drag out in court for ages, despite the fact they are very obviously protected by the facts of the matter and the first amendment.
The argument is that you had to press refresh on your browser several times before a neo-Nazi post coincidentally lined up with an ad from Disney, and media matters just kept on doing it until they got the desired result. But aside from that, Musk isn’t even disputing it happens.
Bluesky is pretty lively and active considering how slow they roll out invites. Closest thing I’ve seen to a credible Twitter replacement so far. Lots of good accounts have already migrated there.
He seems to contradict himself. On one hand he says “fuck you“ to anybody pulling advertising like he’s throwing caution to the wind because he just doesn’t care, but on the other hand, he says the company is doomed if advertisers pull out, and that seems to really upset him.
So… Twitter is shutting down? There’s really no other plan other than blaming advertisers for pulling out, and ranting about how earth will judge them?
The Sorkin guy said maybe advertisers don’t want to be associated with it, and he said “let’s see what the courts say“.
So he’s going to sue people for not advertising with him? How can anyone who says this kind of thing claim to believe in free markets, libertarianism or capitalism?
This is true. But we are also up in terms of page views per month, unique visitors, etc., etc. reddit has probably been getting gradually bigger each year for as long as I can remember, and it doesn’t look like that trend has peaked off yet. At least not the subs I have access to.
At the end of the day it comes down to the upvotes, though. If the other users are on your wavelength, you’ll probably like whatever they recommend. But over time you could have less in common with the average user there, meaning what they upvote will be less relevant to you too.
>People don't want low end housing built in their neighborhoods.
The problem with this reasoning is that housing has gotten so expensive in many cities that anything that costs less than $750,000 can be considered "low end".
Polls show that most people want more housing built. The problem is homeowners don't want it built in their neighborhood. Everyone wants to pass the buck to somewhere else.
That's why it's no longer possible for residential zoning to be determined on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. States have to step up and come up with minimum zoning that reflects the state's larger interests rather than letting every block fight to "preserve" a historic gas station etc.
I'm on reddit a lot less these days, but subjectively it seems about the same for me, except most of the old subreddits I'm a legacy mod on are way busier than I remember. They're definitely still gaining users.
It could just be that the longer you're on there, the worse the quality appears to get to you as newcomers come. People always start to feel that way after being there some time. But then again people have been complaining about the quality of reddit going down literally almost as long as reddit has existed.
Only now are we starting to see actual democratic referendums on these topics. For a long time everybody was brainwashed into thinking more construction = “greedy developers”, so nobody treated adding to supply as a possible solution.
But the tide is starting to turn, and in a lot of state/provinces you are starting to see real change it last. British Columbia will soon up zone province-wide for example. And slowly you are starting to see some good initiatives passing in California.
In practice, the people that block new housing in the neighbourhood are a handful of crotchety retirees that go to the community meeting and raise a fuss. Most people can’t do that because they have more important things to do all day.
But we know the very vocal opposers don’t represent the true majority because of polling on the issue. For example most people in the Bay Area want to see more construction. And the younger people are and the more they rent, the more in favor they are of it.
Japan is a pointless comparison. Their reluctance to expand immigration has nothing to do with their reasonable zoning policies. People try to bash something they got right by bringing up irrelevant things they get wrong.
Your first proposed solution will do the trick just fine. For a long time, NIMBYS pretended that increases in supply of housing would have no effect on rising prices (or worse, somehow raise them!) by labeling it “gentrification”. Now that that argument is defeated, they warn of a crash. But realistically aggressive zoning would probably just slow the rise of prices and modestly decrease them rather than cause a dramatic crash. We know this from the examples of Auckland, New Zealand and Minneapolis.
This is such a cop out response. Even if we want to pretend there are no other investments, the real question is why don’t we just upzone cities end build more housing instead of artificially constricting supply so the baby boomers can get rich off the younger generations.