Epstein was an employee. He didn’t exactly buy a private island in the world’s most expensive area with his teaching salary.

Being gay is unnatural, that’s why you never saw a gay goat!

Actually, goats are unnatural. But you never saw a gay frog!

Actually, that’s Big Pharma making the frogs gay. But you never saw a gay bird!

Yeah, he’s reeling. He wants to do a 1-2 day massive bombing campaign, declare victory, and then leave. The problem is Iran says they will make the Gulf uninhabitable if he does that, and the grown-ups know that Iran isn’t bluffing.

For real, there’s so much incredible music from before I was born and I’m going into my 40s.

Here’s a song from 1974.

The USA has been bombing Iran regularly over the past week. Iran has retaliated by bombing a US base in Kuwait. Since it’s obvious that the US thinks it can keep bombing on a slow-burn schedule, Iran is escalating.

Meanwhile, Israel has been bombing world heritage sites in Tyre and moving across the Litani river.

Also, from Iran’s perspective, now isn’t a bad time to finally block Bab el-Mandeb. The United States can’t really withdraw that much more from their SPRs, so the effect will be maximized. Meanwhile Europe is growing more hawkish on Russia, so upping the ante is the right move.

Of course, this will cause incredible suffering in Asia with trickle-down effects hitting the poor of the world the hardest.

Consumption: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/use-of-oil.php

Production: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCRFPUS2&f=W

Gasoline/Petroleum is rarely imported. The common method is to import the crude and refine on shore, which is what the USA is doing.

No, they’re unhelpfully trolling you because they’re autistic teenagers.

Lynx is a text-only browser. It’s cool but it’s not what you asked for.

That’s true. The US produces 14 million bpd and consumes 21 million bpd which is more than any other single country.

US propagandists use a broad definition for what counts as petroleum products muddle the facts and call the USA a net oil exporter. The reality is that the USA must import at least 7 million barrels per day, even if they completely stop exporting.

Honestly I think this is a bit exaggerated. I think that this list describes pretty much the worst case scenario that still results in you entering the country in the end. There’s no way they interview every tourist flying in from Europe for two hours.

As far as I know it is also not a requirement to list all of your birthmarks or use the same attire in the visa application photo as the one you’re traveling in. These are just “good ideas” that the travel agency think will reduce your chances of being rejected at the border.

I haven’t personally traveled to the US after 2025, but I know people who travel regularly (for work though, not tourism). They’ve complained about a ton of other things, but they haven’t mentioned border checks or ICE being weird in any way.

Edit: As an aside, I traveled to the USA just before Trump was inaugurated. I’m from Iran, so naturally I was interviewed at the border. Dude asked me if I was an IRGC member. I said no. He was just so fucking happy and immediately told me to have a nice trip. As I was walking away, he had to call me back to the desk to answer a few more questions that protocol demanded (like, how much cash are you carrying and are you bringing in weird seeds).

Actually found so much good music this way. Good times.

China can’t offer us fertilizer or gas. For Europe, that comes out from Russia, Belarus or the Middle East. Among these, I’d pick the Middle East, but that’s going to put us on a collision course with the United States and Israel. Which I think is overdue, but we shouldn’t underestimate it or gloss it over.

I’m not saying we can’t do more with solar and wind, but I’d much rather see solar and wind in Africa rather than Europe. Global warming is global. Half of all jet fuel is used for cooking. The obvious fix is to provide solar panels to rural communities, rather than install them onto brick house rooftops in European suburbs.

But overall, I agree. We need diverse energy sources, and we absolutely should do more on sustainable agriculture. Having a slightly larger proportion of the work force in agriculture is absolutely fine.

That’s wishful thinking and not feasible. Of course we should speed up adoption of fossil-free electricity for many reasons, security being one of them, but:

• You (and your air force) can’t fly without fossil fuels
• Your trucks can’t haul without fossil fuels (batteries don’t work, trucks get too heavy and damage roads)
• Your tractors can’t work the fields without fossil fuels
• Your plants won’t grow without sulfur, phosphorus and potassium additives
• Your ships don’t run without fossil fuels
• Your medical imaging doesn’t work without helium, there’s absolutely no other alternative
• You can’t purge your advanced labs (rocket engineering, biotech, chips) without helium
• Your pharmaceuticals need oil-derived precursors, all of your plastics including medical devices rely on oil

The most disastrous of these is the fertilizer. People tend to think that you put a seed in dirt and food just grows, forgetting that famines were widespread before the Haber-Bosch process. We went from approximately >50% of people working in agriculture to <1% since the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, and it absolutely hinges on that.

What Europe needs to do is to blockade and sanction Israel until they withdraw from their illegal settlements and unilaterally stop all of their wars. We need to make it clear to the United States in no uncertain terms to fuck off out of the Persian Gulf, and if they don’t we need to be ready for military action against the United States.

I’d also add that Europe is already roughly at max capacity for Solar and Wind power generation, which are the quick-to-build alternatives. If we want to decrease reliance on fossil fuels more, it’s Hydro, Nuclear and energy recovery from burning waste that’s on the menu. All of those take time, especially Nuclear which is the best alternative in the long run. Oil shortages in Europe will likely begin this summer as Strategic Petroleum Reserves run dry. Then what?

You do realize that it’s not just a single tourist who’s been detained in the US right? Did you forget this one? You can go find more as well.

And no, it is not normal to detain pending deportation unless there are specific risks with the person in question, for example if you’ve committed an actual crime or if you’re likely to not leave voluntarily.

You know, rounding tourists up into detention centers because they brought their work phone on their vacation is not normal behavior. Even if you want to deport them, fine - it’s your country, but detaining is not just a bit over the top.

Let them figure out where to stay and how to get home as soon as possible, then deny entry in the futre. Like a normal country that doesn’t get off on “tough” rhetoric.

So: Israel decided to murder Iran’s true opposition (by bombing Evin last year), then murdered their doves (all the top-level reformists who were willing to negotiate with the West), and - get this - they were trying to bomb Iran’s stupidest former politician out of house-arrest, but this caused even him to realize that he can’t work with the Israelis.

This guy - Ahmadinejad - is not just grossly incompetent, he’s also a holocaust denier and has been calling for Israel to be wiped off the map. That’s right, when Americans/Israelis complain that Iran has been calling for wiping Israel off the map, they mean mother fucking Ahmadinejad. And he’s the guy they wanted to put in charge. And it’s easy to see why - they don’t want peace, they want chaos and a failed state.

While Iranian leadership is generally not antisemitic, Ahmadinejad is a moron and a buffoon and likely also an actual antisemite (not quite sure, he might just be so stupid that he thinks that fronting like an antisemite might make him look tough). No camp respects him, and he would not have been able to lead a government even if Israel didn’t botch their plan.

As an Iranian I want to be very clear that Iran’s position is that the USA is the problem. Not Trump and definitely not Netanyahu.

Americans debate whether Israel is “wagging the dog”, as though America is the dog being controlled by its tail (Israel). Iranians think of the relationship as: hostile owner (America) of a rabid attack dog that it can barely control (Israel). But it’s the owner who’s responsible, not the dog.

I know that some Iranians that participate in English-speaking media play along with the American narrative that Israel is controlling the United States. That’s manipulative propaganda on their part. It’s designed to confuse Americans and weaken the USA, while playing along with or at least not contradicting the narratives that Americans tell themselves. It’s for US consumption, not what they believe.

Internally in Iran these ideas have no traction. They see Israel as an imperialist tool to destabilize the Middle East, which is the geopolitically most important region on the planet and must not be allowed self-determination lest the empire be doomed. It’s a vestige of the British Empire, inherited by the USA.

Make of this what you will.

If they’re random, they can not be racist. That’s my point. They’re returning output based on the data they’ve been fed (assuming we’re talking about training an LLM on Twitter).

I have noticed that North American grifters pretend that AI is much better than it is, thank you very much. I also notice that China is taking a different approach, with the population being significantly more hopeful about AI going forward as a result.

I think AI “critique” on Lemmy is, for the most part, North American backlash stemming from bad practices, overpromising, environmental destruction and a general financial grift that threatens jobs. Those are all very relevant and valid, but I think it completely misses the point to blame a technology rather than a political/economic system.

This time you have gone too far.

Eh, no. If you think you can offload your mental burdens onto any single source, then that’s a you problem, not an AI problem. LLMs are still getting better, but I don’t think we should hold our breaths to them getting to a point where no verification is needed. If you asked a human subject matter expert an important question, would you verify or would you just assume not only that they’re right, but also that you understood them correctly?

But your post really embodies everything that is off with AI “critique” on Lemmy. One paragraph: LLMs are just random (unlike true intellect which somehow presumably don’t emerge from probabilistic phenomena?). Next paragraph: LLMs are racist.

To be clear, the way AI is being pushed is bad in many different ways, and you didn’t even mention the worst examples which in my mind would be how AIs are currently being used to kill people, for example it is likely that it helped the US to murder 170 children in Minab. But again, that’s not a technology issue, it’s an issue with how humans interact with technology.

It’s wild to me that people are constantly complaining how “bad” LLMs are, because what, it can make mistakes or it’s not orders of magnitude smarter than the smartest humans???