Yes, if they went back to being chronological feeds of people you follow, then they should get to keep Section 230 immunity.

When they are making editorial decisions about what to content to promote to you and what content to hide from you, then they should lose it.

"Not expensive" is a ridiculous claim. In another week or two we will have spent as much as the Department of Transportation's entire annual budget.

Worse than that, Iran has now proven that they have the ability to wreck the world economy at will, giving them a lot more leverage in all future negotiations.

If the proposal that Iran start collecting tolls on all traffic through the strait happens, that will give them such a large cash infusion that it's impossible to call this anything other than a decisive victory for Iran.

You are completely misconstruing his argument. It has nothing to do with lack of introspection.

It is that war was ubiquitous and accepted as a positive thing in society, unlike now where it is viewed as at best a necessary evil.

It's not just war. Take infant deaths. Absolutely devastating today, but a large percent of people went through that in the past. They even re-used the names of their dead children.

That would just render the blockade entirely pointless.

Prices are going up in the US because oil is a global market, not because that specific oil would actually have been delivered to the US.

I think "soft target" means it doesn't have a lot of military defenses, not that it's unimportant.

Parties would be more interesting if the balloons were filled with hydrogen gas anyway.

Reminds me of a demo my college physics professor did in our first class (presumably to get our attention).

He had two floating balloons, one about twice as big as the other. Pointed a blowtorch at the smaller one and it (of course) popped.

"That one was filled with helium. Now, there's only one gas less dense than helium..." and right as I thought to myself "he's not gonna do what I think he's gonna do", he pointed the blowtorch at the other balloon which exploded into a much larger (and much louder) fireball.

Attention captured, for sure.

Decapitation strikes work well in highly personalist regimes (e.g. Russia). They work poorly in institutionalist regimes.

Iran is extremely institutionalist. You could keep killing leaders for years and they will just be replaced with similar ones.

This war is unwinnable because there is no possible benefit that will outweigh the cost.

You don't win a war when you cause the most destruction to your enemy. You win when you achieve a political objective.

Since when do wars have to be profitable?

This isn't middle ages. Most modern wars have dubious cost-benefit at best. Doesn't stop them from being fought and occasionally even won, no.

If US sets its war goal at "secure the strait and the oil fields" or "dismantle the regime" or "dismantle the nuclear program" and pulls that off, doesn't matter how many billions they would have sunk into the affair and how much they would actually have gained from it. From a military standpoint: a war goal was set and accomplished.

Whether US can actually set such a goal and then accomplish it is debatable, but it is not in any way impossible.

> If US sets its war goal at "secure the strait and the oil fields"

You mean the strait that was perfectly secure before this war? Amazing objective.

"Dismantle the regime" is the only objective that is coherent with what the US did and it's very unlikely they'll achieve it at this point.

Given that Iran was able to close it? Definitely not "secure" then, no. Let alone now.

If US has a goal of keeping the global oil prices low, then those specific goals make sense.

"Dismantle the regime" can be accomplished with both direct action, and with a more long term "destroy the regime's income streams and supply chains and let it implode". Both are on the table, and the latter can overlap with "seize the strait and the oil infrastructure".

> Given that Iran was able to close it? Definitely not "secure" then, no. Let alone now.

They were able to yet didn't because doing it was sure to provoke a response. In fact if Iran acted first to close the strait it would surely have pulled in all of the European powers.

The only reason they clode the strait is because the US struck first so they had nothing to lose anymore.

"Securing the strait" is completely incoherent as an objective for this war.

You're just demonstrating that most modern wars have no winner.

If you didn't achieve a political objective, you didn't win.

"Drag Israel into a long protracted attritional conflict in Gaza" was a political objective, and that was achieved. Did Hamas win?

It's a really stupid stick to measure things by, in my eyes.

Does the value of that political objective outweigh the costs? Considering that it resulted in mass starvation among their own people, I doubt it.

A war that doesn't achieve a political objective has no benefit, so any cost outweighs that and it is not a victory; it is just pointless destruction.

Libraries don't get it right the first time, but there are often multiple competing libraries which allows more experimentation and finding the right abstraction faster.

Good code is easy to replace and bad code is hard to replace, so bad code is disproportionately long-lived.