Right up there with finding out Grimes was with Elon.

Maybe we should open our minds a bit, and also remember that a parasocial relationship (speaking for myself) isn't really knowing someone.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa... It's kind of a cheap shot at this point, but my point is why should we trust them today if 1 year ago they said the program was set back by years?

> Wikipedia: The majority of the documents were created between 1999 and 2003, after which the AMAD Project was halted and Iran's nuclear weapons research program was cancelled

> the documents contained no revelations about recent nuclear activity

Granted, additional background on the past affects trust levels in the present, but to be clear, AFAICT it was not showing violations of JCPOA. Maybe there is something worse that's classified.

I don't think it's fair to say he predicted all of its consequences when he also hoped the next president/congress would cancel it, and they did. Did he foresee that it would only last 3 out of the 10-15 years it was supposed to run, but that would be enough to doom us? Or would it have worked out better if it lasted?

Maybe you are right that the sanctions lift built them into a threat, but it still feels stupid there was an agreement in effect, Trump destroyed it, and 10 years later the best we can hope for is they agree again to give up their biggest lever and with sanctions this time. I don't think that will go well.

Arguably it's a weakness of the US system, or the particular laws in this case, that, whichever of JCPOA or sanctions was best, either can be undone at the next election. Rubio implied that's a strength though.

It is prescient that he predicted a lunatic would possess nuclear weapons and act according to apocalyptic religious beliefs, he just didn't say he would be working for the lunatic.

You're going to have to specifically address why ending the program with no replacement was better than letting it continue. Your other comments about cost, lack of conventional weapon limits, and perverse incentives for other countries doesn't do much for me. (For one thing, other countries aren't very relevant to this discussion, unless the cost of paying them off were to actually become prohibitive.) It was something, it had some positive effect on the "Iran can't have nukes" you keep harping on, and it was replaced with nothing but sanctions. Why wouldn't they resume development?

And they torched JCPOA – even with your arguments it was weak, it appears to have been more effective than doing nothing for years and then spending billions to stop them when they, completely foreseeably, stop following an agreement that the US broke first. https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Ira...

I'm rambling and don't know all that much, so to the point of your question: the conflict started because Trump and his people wanted to, and it feels sort of pointlessly speculative and hopeful to ascribe your own interpretations beyond that.

I guess we'll see, if it really ends, and what the new regime, sanctions, nuclear enforcement, etc look like. If there are any career bureaucrats left, maybe they'll pull off something good.

Google at least, I think people would say there was a period of near-universally believing it was a good thing, and an immigrant was a co-founder.

It definitely shaped our society. And if you think it's for the worse, might that suggest college-educated Anglo-adapting immigrants are more dangerous to us than the ones right-wingers are telling us to focus on?

If by machine translation you mean something like transpiling, that's a technology that has been proven over decades, and the translators were written by hand with some attempt at formal correctness and guarantees. Translating with LLM is much newer and subject to the errors LLMs can create, such as hallucination. And I think a lot of people would still be nervous about translating an entire project of that many lines, even with the best pre-AI translators.

> You are closer to a billionaire in your capabilities and agency in this society than a peasant was under an actual King.

How much of that is because I live in a democratic republic, and not because billionaires exist? I guess you might say they're the same thing, but I believe there are free-enough societies with less wealth/power inequality than the US. I think I care more about the gap between top and bottom than about my own personal level of power, but of course it's hard to be objective.

It is harder to draw the line with money than with literal kingship, but I don't accept that we should change nothing and let unbounded power disparities exist.

Edit: More to the point of the original article, maybe I can accept their existence if we plugged all the holes they use to pay a very low percentage, as discussed in other comments. They may remain billionaires, but the tax law would treat them more like the rest of us than like kings.

Who said that? Not in the post that prompted your reply, nor in the parent post.

> Illegal and legal immigrants are being completely supported by Uber right now in NYC.

Can you prove that taxis wouldn't have been able to do that, if Uber didn't exist? That wealth taxes wouldn't have been able to support them?

> The gate that previously blocked your ability to disseminate your ideas to a wide audience and create a living off of it has been completely torn down by the billionaires that create platforms

Musk is also erecting new gates, to promote himself and his ideas. I have to admit, I'm surprised what he lets stay up there, but I still don't believe it's an actual free platform.

> I wish there was a plugin for it so I can erase it from my consumption.

Vibecode it; the billionaires tore down the gates that previously blocked your ability to have any software you want -- as long as the billionaires accede to your use of their AI and running your own software against their platforms, of course.

You complain about open platforms filled with people giving you their ideas for free, and you just don't like what they're saying, but you just cited exactly that openness as one of the valuable things that billionaires deserve to have billions for.

> The premise that billionaires are less efficient than the government at deploying capital to serve society is incongruent with reality

Nobody said that, explicitly. Maybe the people arguing against billionaires don't believe capital efficiency is paramount, so you'd have to persuade them of that first, otherwise you're just saying "But capitalism is the right way, of course!"

You think a dangerous man at the helm with skeletons in his closet has no effect on national security?

I don't think these concerns are separable. If it weren't for Trump, we probably would not be at war right now. Russia might be more contained by diplomacy and sanctions. If it weren't for Trump's first term, Iran might have been less threatening right now.

And, in some sense, this doesn't matter, because like you say it's the real world and it's happening regardless of why or whose fault it is. I guess I don't want to sign on, even rhetorically on the internet, to destroying this axis that is effectively being created by vile and stupid men because Trump wanted to end the Epstein news cycle.

Xkcd 1357: "you're saying the most compelling thing you can say about your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express"

So now the AIs will do more of that, at superhuman speed.

> will we also not learn that we need to shift more to specification and validation

We'll just quickly learn what we've been trying to do for decades, while also treading water in floods of more code than has ever been written before? And some of the motivations to write correct code are being deflated - "just vibecode it again and see if the bugs disappear, it only took a week and $200."

I suspect you'll say the company owes them nothing in the US, which is true, but companies aren't/weren't always this stingy (or lying about financial strength), and you could have just said so without this strained analogy.