Who is going to profit from making an super STD anyway? How would regulating AI change their incentive structure?

Why am I supposed to believe that a virus created in a virology lab with AI assistance is uniquely more dangerous than a virus created in a virology lab without AI assistance?

And if this isn't US-centric enough for you, the previous US administration created a "Disinformation Governance Board" specifically to address the threats that they felt free communication among the people was posing to democracy, taking action to pressure corporate actors to censor disfavored popular speech in attempt to circumvent first amendment protections. At least the current administration isn't really pretending that attacking free speech is protecting democracy somehow.

Ideally, you would want them to be intentionally educated to a specific type of manipulable gullibility, where they are receptive to your messages, but resistant to messages from other sources.

A shift change of the prison guards more than a material change to the prison.

In this case, I think a network of mostly independent actors whose interests happen to align makes more sense. But maybe sometimes those interests are a little different than what people commonly understand them to be.

Iran's 60% enriched uranium stockpile is really not up for debate. Iran is happy to tell everyone that they have it. With the proper equipment, 60% can go to 90% in a single month. So the question is how advanced is the Iranian infrastructure for the final enrichment step, and (less commonly talked about) how ready they are to actually make a fission bomb out of that material. The latter task is not considered to be very hard, North Korea did it after all, so the main focus has been on the former. There does seem to be some decent information that the centrifuge array has been under active development at various points, and has been consitently, actively targetted by Mossad/CIA for at least the past 20 years or so. For example, Stuxnet was a joint CIA/Mossad operation that begain in 2005 and continued through both GWBush and Obama.

Unfortunately, even with some nice bribes from Obama, Iran was always a little cagey with the IAEA inspectors, and officially kicked them out in 2021. So after that, the only sources for the state of Irans nuclear infrastructure information effectively became Iran itself and Mossad.

The Trump administration is actively interested in the dissolution of the current global economic order. This is why they are relatively unbothtered by the global economic shock that is a Strait of Hormuz closure, whereas the globally-oriented neoliberal administrations of the past wanted to avoid this at all costs.

I suppose it is more powerful in an absolute sense than just temporarily shutting down the Strait, but like Russia's nukes, I think the threat is more useful than the play itself. Unless they are just looking to take others down with them.

They have less leverage. The have so much less that they are forced to openly use their last and most powerful card for their survival, when they never have had to before. That is a position of weakness, not strength.

The threat of the strait closure has always been a major factor in Iran policy from all relevant nations, it is just now explicit. It's hard to take the Russia point seriously when the war forced both Russia and Iran to shift resources form the Ukrainian theater to the Persian Gulf; it seems to be close to a wash. It's also kinda silly to gas up using interceptors for their intended purpose as "heavy damage" or catastrophize about rounding errors in damage to USA assets, while simulatenously writing off the total effect of all USA/Israel actions as inconsequential.

Disruption to global fossil fuel supply chains was also a goal of this war, so I am not sure you should list it as a negative. In the current state of the world, USA interests and global economic interests are becoming increasingly decoupled, and one shouldn't assume they are automatically aligned.

Also this has probably done more to hasten the world's weaning off fossil fuels than any action by any other government.

I call this process "learning"

If you have a better estimate, feel free to supply it.

The osmotic power plant generates about 100kW, so it's about 5% of the total desalination energy requirement.

Instead I got PIs happy to say that weak evidence "proved" their theory and to try suppress evidence that negatively impacted "fundablity". The most successful scientists I worked with were the ones who always talked like a PR puff piece.