I can't speak for Iran, but it may be a warning against attempting to land troops on Kharg Island. They're showing that they've been "nice" so far, but they have escalation paths America may not have considered. I think most people thought they were limited to short range missile strikes.
To me this is like the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo during WWII. The tactical result isn't important, the range of the strike is, and that it happened at all. Japan thought it was immune from air attack on the home islands in 1942, and the raid shocked them.
Iran is showing the world (especially Europe), that it's more vulnerable than it thinks. Europe has more skin in the game than just the price of oil and nitrogen. Also think about what would happen if Iran is able to recreate something like the Cuban missile crisis now that we've moved a bunch of our military assets to the middle east.
Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc.
It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.
Agreed. Anyone with a modicum of common sense knew this was the plan all along. It's not like it was hard to find people saying this before the election.
It's not that great even if you have money. Unless you're talking about the type of money needed to pay for all of your treatments out of pocket, and give you access to special private care most people don't even know exists.
My experience has been: if you have an immediate health issue with an obvious solution, you can get pretty good care. Say if you have a broken arm, gun shot wound, heart attack, stroke, etc. Anything uncommon, or that requires ongoing care, is a life sucking nightmare.
I'll give some examples from my own life. I live outside a major metropolitan area. A relative was visiting me and had a stroke in my living room. I called 911, and an ambulance appeared 5 minutes later, in 25 minutes they were in a hospital with a telemedicine link to a stroke expert. The expert said they needed to be brought to a downtown hospital so they were sent there by helicopter. One of the two best neurosurgeons in the city performed an endoscopic removal of the clot and saved their life.
Contrast this with a different relation who struggles with chronic pain and spine problems and has spent the last 20 years bouncing around various doctors, battling insurance companies, pharmacies, waiting to be seen, waiting endlessly for specialists, tests, and having to keep track of all of their information themselves because the system is fragmented and every office wants a complete restatement to their medical history.
LLMs seem better suited to help with the Tower of Babel we've created for ourselves: aws commands, Terraform modules, Java libraries, Javascript/React, obscure shell commands, etc.
`trash` is good to know, thanks! I'd been doing: "tell app \"Finder\" to move {%s} to trash" where %s is a comma separated list of "the POSIX file <path-to-file>".
The Intelligent Investor by Graham talks about investors putting so much money into airlines and air freight that it became impossible to make a return. I don't know if you would call that a bubble, maybe just over exuberance.
Yeah, it's certainly difficult to balance the game if players have complete flexibility.
From my limited DMing experience, much of the challenges is handling when players do something you haven't anticipated. For most encounters (video games do this too) I think about
1. The stealth approach (why yes there is a secret entrance underneath the castle).
2. The direct approach. Like just kicking down the door and heading in.
3. Negotiation: Is there a way to strike a deal with the bad guy?
Beyond that I fall back on trying to provide a realistic response from the game world, but sometimes the players are creative enough that you have to redo the whole thing on the fly.
Yeah, it's just a scam so companies don't have to keep vacation on their books. It just means if you give your boss enough notice, maybe you'll get some time off, as long as your project is progressing well.