No, and if I did, you would have happily quoted where I said that. Instead you are just being tactically obtuse so you can reframe the argument around an evaluation of US intentions instead of what I actually commented which was regime atrocities.

I am for the people of Iran no longer having to deal with a government they don't want and which blithely murders them en masse. Somehow in your reply you managed **not a single word*** for the Iranian people or the tens of thousands killed. Just desperate it make about your petty US internal politics.

A "pressure tactic" is to take out the Ayatollah? Why did the planning around this just happen to start after the mass killings of protestors?

If you don't want to side with the Iranian fine. It's frankly too late for your opinion to matter, for which I am very grateful. But just fyi, since you care so much about your domestic US political jockeying, the outcome here is already Iranians cheering in the streets. If the regime falls and all the images that come out are of the people praising the US - followed by hard evidence on the regime's atrocities - and then more gratitude to the US - you are going to have handgifted Trump a huge political win by allowing your side to be anchored to the defeated regime instead of seizing the opportunity to make it a "we all win here" outcome. I guess we'll see if your "ACKTUALLY EPSTEIN" response is a winning strategy for the midterms.

Iran is not an Islamic country. Persians were Zorastrians. Mostly they are now something like agnostics. They don't believe in Islam, they don't want to wear the hijab, they are just held captive by a fanatical government that requires them put "Muslim" on their birth certificates.

When has US sponsored regime change ever before come at the direct request of the people living there? (Maybe Vichy France.)

Persians hate the Islamic regime. They have been in the streets by the millions protesting against Khomenei (who is hopefully now deceased). In response he ordered his personal forces and secret police to open fire on them, killings tens of thousands of innocent people over just two days, another ten thousand put in prison and placed under sentence of death. They went to the hospitals afterward and executed anyone with injuries, and doctors who didn't comply. You can find pictures of people in bodybags who still have the hospital IV in their arms. I am not aware of anything like it in recent memory. Maybe the Rwandan genocide. Fyi the women taken prisoner will almost certainly be raped before execution. The regime believes that virgins go to heaven automatically, and in order to avoid giving their enemies a free pass into paradise by killing them, the rape is considered essential. That's what the people there have been enduring.

The only thing that has been keeping the present regime in place is having a monopoly on guns and firepower. The protests "ended" because Khonemeni was brutal enough to terrify all of his own citizens with the massive killings and subsequent armed militia patrols including imported from Iraq and Lebanon - always helpful when the people charged with mass murder have no cultural ties to the people they are expected to kill. (Some IRGC members refused to follow orders to open fire on crowds - they were also sentenced to execution.)

Instead of vague insinuations of bad outcomes, why don't you explain how you think that government is best option for the Iranian people? Persians have been perfectly capable of uniting under a peaceful government, and all of the older generation lived under the Shah. The have a leader in exile (the Shah's son) who quite likely has enough political goodwill to lead a transitional role to a democratic government. No vacuous chaos.

Can you at least muster up a "Trump is awful and I hate him and maybe the US and Israel are terrible too - but it's fundamentally good that a government that just executed 30-40k of its own citizens for peaceful protest faces consequences for doing that"?

Constitutionality is not the DoD's quibble.

Nor is it anything in the content of the Anthropic's objections. In fact the DoD explicitly insists they will not use AI for the surveillance or autonomous killing. (Which I suppose they could be lying about but then why not just lie about following the ToS, and they match in existing policy e.g. they insist on inserting human approval for any otherwise autonomous drone killing.)

If the DoD agrees with the principle of the restrictions what do they actually object to?

What armed forces do and decide is constrained by something like "Constitution -> US Law -> personal conscience -> Chain of Command." What they don't like is the idea of that ever becoming "Constitution -> US Law -> *various random companies' Terms of Service* -> ...".

In most other context I have to imagine most people here would agree. Should companies the justice department does business with get to place ToS limits on their judicial decisions if the provided resources are involved? Could the entity supplying a legislator's word processor ToS what kind of laws they can write? If so would it be acceptable for the legislator to use that word processor? If not, why shouldn't the executive branch similarly object to that kind of arrangement?

If there is a backlog of 30k vulnerabilities I don't see how AI is even relevant here. Linus Torvalds himself could have entered a fugue state and churned out 500 reports over the weekend and surely it would still be the case that his reports would be stuck in the queue.

The real concern is if while blue team is stuck on their trusty human-in-the-loop evaluation system, red team is 1000Xing exploits. (I don't think they will mind too much of 90% are false positives or implemented with crummy code.) In that case, be as skeptical as you want of AI code vs human code quality, acceleration-in-kind is the only alternative the blue team has to giving up and airgapping everything.

China already gets its way in forcing Hollywood and other big industries to self-sensor on its behalf, down to the individual level (e.g. sanctioning NBA teams if their members made a post in solidarity with the oppressed in Hong Kong).

But even when you have no business with China you still have to worry about what will happen to your business if you acknowledge their persistent genocide of the Uighurs?

This isn't a situation to passively accept.

The idea you can disburse massive money with less oversight and get *less* fraud is as crazy as it sounds.

In fact we got a nice empirical taste in what to expect in the pandemic payouts. Numerous persons and addresses were invented. Checks were intercepted in the mail or redirected to a different address and washed. Or people were scammed e.g. by being sent fake "overpayments" they needed to "partially refund" to the scammers. That was hundreds of billions defrauded from the government just from two payouts.

What do you think will happen in terms of domestic abuse and human trafficking if a constant influx of dollars magically accompanies any person even if they never leave the house?

What about people with substance and compulsory addictions? Or ties to violent crime organizations? Do you just send them money and not care what it's ultimately used for?

It is very appealing to redirect money spent on bureaucracy to its intended targets, but the idea you can reduce misuse by making free money easier to access is just not so.

NHSTA data shows Tesla's being ~1/2 as likely to be involved in a crash as comparable cars. That already covers the premium reduction.

Tesla often claims much higher safety advantage (up to 10x) and has been criticised for misrepresentation as those numbers are based on pretty selective data - telemetry collected when FSD is turned on. Which is obviously not all the time and in fact most likely to be used on the easy part of the route, so not at all represent of the average risk.

But in this case those are exactly the conditions in which Lemonade is offering the reduction, so they are providing a 2X payout for 10X payoff. And even if that affects the statistics negatively (more use of FSD in risky conditions for reduced premium) you would expect that to at worst converge to the overall 2X payoff.

But honestly they are probably going to get their real savings from the telemetry and being able to back their non-payouts with ironclad proof, and, conversely, not spend legal and investigative resources when they should just payout.

Assuming AI tooling did offer a productivity advantage, if both you and your competitor move from not having it to having it, then you have gained no net advantage. That doesn't mean you could just as well have skipped it, because then your competitors *would* gain an advantage.

In short, you need to measure something besides $.

True, but I think what they really, really don't want is free flowing Iranian oil. The "evil regime that gets heavy sanctions" status quo is very agreeable to them because it appreciates the value of their one major asset.

You have no concept of the region at all. Iran is not Syria. They aren't even Arab. And 250k people of Iranian descent live in Israel now, which is a sizable portion of a country with only 9 million people altogether. The people of Iran and the people of Israel are friendly, to the point that you often see Israeli flags and the old Iranian lion and sun flag displayed together at ex-pat events.

If Israel wanted chaos in Iran they could certainly have achieved that. They didn't have any problem at all taking out Iran's defenses and claiming air superiority in their last altercation. Why stop and leave after you win if your desire is to make a mess?

Contrary to the summary, the mass protests are not really continuing at this point. The Iranian regime has killed anywhere from several thousand to several tens of thousands of protesters - open fire with machine guns into crowds, setting markets on fire and shooting people as they tried to escape, sniping from rooftops - and that's been ruthless enough that people are now afraid to go out in most places. The streets are generally deserted. (Even groups of two have been enough to get shot in some places.)

So why is the internet still blocked?

Doubtless a number of reasons, but part of it is the Iranians have been using the internet to share videos of the massacres, of the bodies, of the armed militia patrolling the streets, and plea for help. A revealing component is that the government forces have been going door-to-door confiscating satellite equipment and arresting people in possession of Starlink. Especially given their Russian jamming equipment, those devices are not being used to effectively coordinate protests. But they *are* letting civilians fire off odd messages saying what has been happening.

In particular, the regime has upward of ten thousand additional protesters who are presently arrested, and the Iranian justice minister has declared they will be executed. Those executions were supposed to start yesterday. Allegedly, the regime is holding back after threats of outside response, but the suspicion inside Iran is that they are choosing to perform those killings more quietly.

Unfortunately the blackout strategy is highly effective. The reports of extraordinary brutality and atrocities come across as extraordinary claims, for which Western journalists therefore want significant evidence, but with rare exceptions the Iranians can only get out occasional short messages. Meanwhile the IRGC and Basij are busy doing all the things their leaders are equally busy promising that they aren't doing.

Here is the slashdot article where AOC's 10% cap was discussed. Interesting to look at the comments and observe the very different community reaction to the identical proposal with different name attached.

As far as the people of Venezuela, they seem be dancing in the streets and waving American flags.

Their total profits have been roughly equal to the revenue they get from membership fees, which suggests the customer experience (rather than marked up goods) is what they are really selling.