> A war continuous until one side has caused the other more suffering than it can take.
The article is in large parts about how that's not true. It makes the point that the very existence of the Iranian regime hinges on its opposition to the US, to capitulate would mean for the leaders to lose all support, be overthrown and likely die: so there's no level of suffering that it "can't take anymore". And similar in the US, the leadership cannot survive politically to a capitulation. Hence endless escalation on both sides.
The Iranian regime is unlikely to capitulate fully. They don't want to end up like Syria and Lebanon, where Israel can just bomb them at will.
Trump has more flexibility. Really all he needs is an endpoint that FOX News is willing to describe as a US victory. He cares more about image and perception than reality. So, in that space, there is probably room for some negotiated outcome.
They definitely have. Github evolved a lot faster after the microsoft acquisition, I remember being mildly impressed after it was stagnant for years (this is not an opinion on whether it was evolving in the right direction or if it was a good trade-off)
But it's not that the duopoly is disappearing. It's just that the previous two parties are being eclipsed by two different parities. That's occurred previously in both the UK and US.
The last time it happened in the US was 1856 and its only happened 2x in US history. The US democratic party is the oldest existing political party in the world. For reference, the UK is actually only about 90 years older than the Democratic party.
Measure no, but only engineers care about that (and I'm not even saying that they're right, engineers care a whole lot too much about hard data). You can show alternative solutions, estimate, make assumptions, even make up numbers and boom, you have "data" to show you improved things. You don't even have to lie: you can be very open that these are assumptions and made-up numbers, that it's just a story, what's important is that people come out with confidence that thanks to you, things are better by a bit/a lot/enormously.
> being a regular corporation is not the only possible model
the point is that it _is_ the only possible model in our marvellous Friedmanian economic structure of shareholder primacy. When the only incentive is profit, if your company isn't maximising profit then it will lose to other companies who are.
You can hope that the self-imposed ethics guardrails _are_ maximising profit because it the invisible hand of the market cares about that, but 1. it never really does (at scale) and 2. big influences (such as the DoD here) can sway that easily. So we're stuck with negative externalities because all that's incentivised is profit.
>the point is that it _is_ the only possible model in our marvellous Friedmanian economic structure of shareholder primacy. When the only incentive is profit, if your company isn't maximising profit then it will lose to other companies who are. You can hope that the self-imposed ethics guardrails _are_ maximising profit because it the invisible hand of the market cares about that, but 1. it never really does (at scale) and 2. big influences (such as the DoD here) can sway that easily. So we're stuck with negative externalities because all that's incentivised is profit.
I'm curious about your thinking on this subject, if you email me at the email on my profile I have some specific questions about your views on this matter.
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You really don't? It's just a ton easier for most users: it's (almost) like already having an account. Just click a couple times and you're in, no typing at all, no email confirmation or anything like that.
I also avoid it because I'm concerned about being over-reliant on google (what if they close my account?) and I know how to use a password manager, but I easily understand how 90-99% of the population doesn't care enough and goes the low-friction route.
Not to mention that B2B SaaS needs to provide the login methods that their customers need for their operations, and these typically rely on Google, Microsoft, Okta, etc.
I work on auth for a European startup and this is the case.
> I also avoid it because I'm concerned about being over-reliant on google (what if they close my account?)
Most if the "sign-in with google" accounts I have seen treat it as a shortcut to creating and logging in with an account with the primary email address of the Google account. So you can hit "reset password" and get a conventional password log-in to an account you previously made with the Google auth. If you get locked out of google, it's NBD.
Of course, this is probably not universally the case.
It's not so much that they'll leave, as much as some percentage will abandon during the signup flow. I know somewhere out there are statistics on those who have to click a link in an email only to get distracted by other emails, to say nothing of the time to fill out forms, create a password, save to password manager, open your 2FA app for the more advanced users, etc.
The higher the friction, the lower the probability of conversion. E.g. Amazon famously found every 100ms of latency costs them 1% in sales.
At its most simplified, this can be thought of as a simple function of time — the more time something requires, the higher chance something else happens during that time, invalidating the original task.
The best sign-in flow is none at all — that's what e.g. Discord does. They let you use the app immediately, with an automatically created provisional account. Amazing user experience.
This applies universally — convenience is everything.
Passkey signup could be almost as easy. Type email address, click register, invoke WebAuthn flow (which is no more complex than social registration), done. Maybe you need email address validation for some reason, in which case it’s a wee bit more complex. Ideally there would never even be an option to make a password unless passkeys are unavailable.
Sure, and there’s a UI for rejecting passkey enrollment. I’m just saying that there’s no need for anywhere near as many clicks to enroll a passkey as are often needed.
The article is in large parts about how that's not true. It makes the point that the very existence of the Iranian regime hinges on its opposition to the US, to capitulate would mean for the leaders to lose all support, be overthrown and likely die: so there's no level of suffering that it "can't take anymore". And similar in the US, the leadership cannot survive politically to a capitulation. Hence endless escalation on both sides.
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