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Politics, not warfighting.

A thing about buying American is that the stuff often has been or will be used in battle; there's always a lot of field testing going on. Mostly proven products.

"Generic congressional ballot" measure is relevant to House, not Senate (and not presidency either). Due to some advantages favouring Republicans (mainly, more efficient voter distribution), customarily D+1 to as much as D+3 is reckoned a dead heat. RCP average has been running between D+6 and...

Autonomous mechanical spiders programmed to gather up the threads.

Failure to fulfill the arbitrary desires of governments in the face of their equally arbitrary decisions which impede free market behaviours is not a failure of a free market. Governments impose the structures which provide some of the incentives which drive behaviours. Regardless, putting...

The usual lines on nightly news go something like this: Government (minister or premier): this is the fault of Trump's tariffs Industry: this is the fault of BC government forest industry policy I suspect both are true, owing to a generally observable chain of events: governments squeeze...

Lack (or at least apparent lack) of Iranian WMD efforts in the 2003 to 2008 frame may have been influenced by what was going on next door and how keen the US administration of the day was to choose "military intervention" from its list of options. I have no notion that any far-reaching...

I'm OK with that. They make big misjudgements and miss big things coming all the time. What are you including and excluding from "effort or work"? I count anything (theoretical, experimental, engineering, logistical) which shortens their path to a nuclear weapon. They haven't "done...

My assertion is "Iran's government is going to continue pursuing a working nuclear arsenal unless it is forcibly stopped." I don't care if it proceeds in fits and starts. What is the concensus for Iran's time-to-breakout now? A year or less? I am skeptical of negotiated delays like the...

The principles of caution of Gell-Mann Amnesia apply. If a source is wrong about things you know well, you have to assume it is wrong at least in equal proportion about things you don't know well (and thus are not easily in a position to check), and verify everything accordingly.

DNI threat assessments are not dispositive, especially in view of the track record of the IC. Any conclusion or argument based on them is much more liable to dismissal.

See after next. I expect the consequences of that decision to explode into a multi-national, multi-continental war roughly along religious majority lines, if the conflict hasn't already done so before anyone even starts threatening nukes. The Islamic demands of Israel aren't that it sit...

Yep. And as recently as the 1920s and perhaps into the 1930s the border between the US and Mexico was pretty porous, and it didn't matter much for most peoples' standard of living on which side they lived. (Working poor everywhere were pretty much the same.) More recently, though...

Rogue AI isn't a fraction of the risk that AI capable of all the same things, but under direction of rogue humans, is.

Always best when someone else volunteers to be the horrible warning. It should be a short leap from "countries have different standards of living" and "countries have traditionally had controlled borders" to speculating on the ways in which the latter contribute to the former.

I don't care about the haphazard US administration control of its military power. What I'm looking at is the politics. There are really only two possible futures: one in which Iran never has the power to follow through on its government's desire to extinguish Israel, and one in which it...

As I wrote, "...and every corporation with operations in a country which co-operates with Iran...". If China is propping up Iran, let corporations trading in/with China bear a cost. There is an obvious risk in forcing corporations to decide whether to be all in or out of a particular set of...

You don't try to take the country. You force it into approximately the position of having to be an autarky and let nature take its course.

There aren't that many unique mass human behaviour patterns. One of the archetypes is the tyrant or tyrannical regime emboldened by successive capitulations until eventually an intolerable provocation results in a conflict more destructive than if a conflict had erupted earlier. The most...

Any country that chooses, on its own turf, by legislation. Suppose foreign-based corporation X does business in/with the US and Iran. The US levies fees against its business in/with the US. Any of X's competitors willing to forego opportunities in Iranian markets for opportunities in US...