Author seems to not care about the prospect of the Iranian regime developing nuclear weapons, putting those weapons into the hands of its terrorist proxies, and sitting back while those proxies turn Western Europe and Palestine into radioactive wastelands (yes, Palestine, because it is not possible to restrict the fallout to just Tel Aviv, and the regime has shown itself to be far more anti-Israel than pro-Palestinian, the prospect of Palestine being a radioactive wasteland for a century is an acceptable price for destroying Israel). The US and the rest of the West should, apparently, just accept this as inevitable historical destiny, because $5/gallon gasoline or putting boots on the ground are apparently so utterly reprehensible.
Author's analysis, as critical as he is of American presidents breaking their promises, is completely absent of analysis of what would happen if American presidents broke their promises to never allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Never mind that JCPOA had a sunset clause that would allow Iran to resume nuclear enrichment to weapons-grade after the sunset clause.
The author's analysis pretty blatantly exposes reality: the West is losing because it does not have the political stomach to win. Instead of deciding that maybe society should try to develop that political stomach, instead of paying attention to a Trump who got elected in large part on mantras about how America was losing and it needed to start winning, no, Author says this was all a horrible idea and implicitly we should just sit back while our enemies progress along the road of putting nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.
You seem to suffer from selective memory, your president declared Irans nuclear program "totally, totally destroyed" and your post "fake news". That was half a year ago. What necessitated another obviously useless strategic air campaign?
Its ironic it's not even discussed anymore in the US. A year in and you can't find a political post on HN, it's all blackholed - we've gone past "I didn't vote for him" straight to posts like this from alternative reality where he doesn't exist, doesn't say or do things.
> What makes you think they will give nuclear weapons to terrorists or use those weapons at all?
The Islamic Regime is effectively a terrorist organization itself, so Iran getting nuclear weapons would be effectively giving a terrorist Jihadist organization a nuclear weapon. The Islamic Regime simply cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon and the military costs to stop them will continue to get higher as time goes, this is a problem that we will inevitably have to deal with and dealing with it sooner rather than later is likely always going to be the best option as the costs to deal with the Regime will only continue to increase.
> This does not happen even in the most insane examples like North Korea.
North Korean leaders value self preservation much more than the Islamic Regime leaders do, they also do not use terrorism in same way or to the same degree as Iran does. North Korean leaders also don't generally have ideologies similar to Martyrdom/Jihad like Islamic Regime leaders have(these ideologies specifically make traditional mutually assured destruction deterrence strategies largely ineffective).
> What makes you think they will give nuclear weapons to terrorists or use those weapons at all?
a. They have armed and financed their terrorist proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and others), who used those arms and capital to commit acts of terrorism against their regime enemies (the US and Israel).
b. Witkoff literally offered them free nuclear fuel forever for civilian purposes and they turned him down, bragging that they had enough highly enriched nuclear fuel already for nuclear weapons
c. I can put 2 and 2 together
In what universe does having nuclear weapons protect you from getting schools and hospitals bombed? Israel very likely has nuclear weapons, but Israeli schools and hospitals are getting bombed by Iranian missiles. So what?
>Witkoff literally offered them free nuclear fuel forever for civilian purposes and they turned him down, bragging that they had enough highly enriched nuclear fuel already for nuclear weapons
Can we believe anything that the senior people in the current US administration say, at this point in time?
Israel can't just be bombing Iran and then nuking them when Iran retalliates by bombing them back. Because this will be too much bad PR even for Israel as the vast majority of people will find evaporating people indiscriminately is unacceptable.
With all this considered I think it is clear why Iran is able to bomb Israel back and Israel can't just nuke them.
I think the points you made about why Iran would give nuclear weapons to terrorists make no sense. Because Iran would, presumably, get obliterated when those terrorists use those weapons on any country.
As far as I know, full-on invasion of a country that has nuclear weapons has never occured in history so far. So Iran having nuclear weapons in a defensive capacity is obviously good for them. In fact all countries having nuclear weapons in middle east might have made it more peaceful but would have been obviously terrible for Israel/USA
Donald Trump obviously doesn't care either, because every action he has taken during his two terms has increased the risk of Iran developing nuclear weapons.
JCPOA was highly flawed, but it was a lot better than nothing, which is what Trump traded it for.
If Trump was serious about stopping Iran's nuclear program, he would have made taking Isfahan a top priority of the initial strikes.
People repeat themselves saying "JCPOA was highly flawed, but it was better than nothing", as if JCPOA would have prevented Iran from getting nuclear weapons. It would not - it only delayed Iran getting nuclear weapons, and so by that line of thinking, it only delayed the onset of war.
Delaying the onset of war is not worthless, but it is not the same as arguing that war could have been avoided, which is what people who roll out that claim are really trying to argue. It's only true in a universe where Iran would have collapsed from within before the expiration of the sunset clause, and that clearly was not going to happen.
That depends on what Iran does in the meantime, does it not? If Iran effectively turned their missile program into a true deterrent then negotiated delay is worse, because it would remove the ability to stunt the development through military means. Which is very much the argument being made for the “why now” of this war.
> It's only true in a universe where Iran would have collapsed from within before the expiration of the sunset clause, and that clearly was not going to happen.
No one can know this hypothetical, but some def bet their entire futures/careers on this: that an Iran with a more prosperous middle class (as a result of JCPOA) might have had a better chance for social/internal reform, i.e. regime change.
That doesn't change in the least the argument the OP made. The UN's IAEA has declared that Iran deceived them, didn't follow the agreements, and even accused them of violating the agreements with the intent to build a bomb.
As to Trump's motivations, they don't change this calculus. Iran intended to nuke their neighbors, and Israel, not just before Trump came to power but literally before the first Bush became president. And the full situation is even worse: right after the mullah's came to power in a leftist revolution in 1979, they begged for US and Israel's help to stop Saddam Hussein from nuking them. They got that help ... and then figured that nukes are a great idea.
Here's what the mullahs are most afraid of btw. The biggest threat to their power, the biggest problem for their central-London villas:
This local opposition to them has systematically worsened over time, btw. So I wouldn't put it past the mullahs to nuke Iran itself, eventually. It also means that Iran's islamic regime is threatening everyone, for the simple reason that if they make a single concession loosening their grip on Iran, they'll be lynched, one by one, in the streets, by people they went to school with. That is how much Iran's regime is "winning".
JCPOA was followed with minor discrepancies like having less than 1 ton too much heavy water. US intelligence agencies agreed that Iran was not working on a bomb as US left JCPOA, as they testified to in congress.
(they preliminarily reported the same stance even in 2024, before any attacks)
TLDR: Iran, despite having signed a treaty allowing access, is hiding highly enriched uranium, enough to build 9, maybe 10 nuclear devices. It is also not complying with its other obligations under the NPT treaty.
And then Iran responded to this ... by boasting of making nuclear weapons grade uranium to make bombs, to American diplomats:
Now I get that American diplomacy is a shitshow since ... a certain event. However, I fail to come up with a worse attitude that Iran could have had at the time. They are openly boasting of having "the divine right" to enriched uranium that can only be used for bombs in negotiations ...
I also get that Americans (and everyone else, for that matter) feel that it's entirely unfair that they have to care about nuclear weapons in Iran. But if nobody does ... Iran's leaders have made it clear that as soon as they have the weapons, nuclear war starts. What I find baffling is that nobody cares ...
Of course, now it turns out that UAE and Saudi Arabia have since been SCREAMING at the US to do something. But the people it will affect the most are of course in Europe and Asia (everyone except Russia, Norway and Ukraine), who are effectively going to see yet another 3-4% tariff, except this one applies even on goods they produce themselves, for themselves. The EU is burning massive amounts of political goodwill trying to get a few percent savings, and now they'll have to do tell their people they're saving at least double that, in a few months time, with no real warning.
They started again in 2021, years after Trump left the JCPOA and imposed heavy sanctions. You see how one thing might lead to another? Its almost like someone wants this to happen.
I don't really care what you say, this is the IRGC, who massacred 50 people at Brussels airport for example. If they feel they are unfairly treated in any way, they can always report to the Belgian authorities, who I'm sure will provide a small windowless room with free meals.
And until they do that, and until they're let out again, no amount of arguments will ever make me agree that it's just not fair. In fact, if everyone even remotely involved with them gets shot THAT I will call fairness.
Yeah they should. Netanyahu and Israels leaders should report to the ICJ.
You don't really care because you don't have a valid argument. Fact is Iran was complying with JCPOA, as all US intelligence agencies agreed on. It was working. But it had one flaw, Obama signed it and the orange baby couldn't deal with that, and likely Israel/Netanyahu influencing Trump back then as well as they were opposing the deal from the start.
Now I don't think Iran should have nuclear weapons, but lets be fair here, they followed the deal, but still got sanctions put on them as if they were building a bomb, why not do it then? If we're to judge them by what politicians, generals or religious zealots has said in the past, then look no further than the US and what they thought about using nukes post ww2, I would argue they were much much worse no matter what Iran has said.
Like I said you cannot make a reasonable argument that Iran respected international treaties and is now being treated unfairly. That's utterly and completely ridiculous, regardless of the specific treaty.
Iran's government organizes massacres, inside and outside of Iran. Could you illuminate further to me which treaties that little practice follows and how unfair it is it causes bad things to happen to them?
You, me, solatic and acoup probably all agree that a nuclear weapon in Iranian hands is a huge danger.
But it's only Donald Trump that has used that as an excuse to make that danger greater.
And acoup has a great counter-point to your tweet in the article.
The Soviet Union dealt with massive internal protest quite successfully for pretty much every single one of its 70 years of existence. The Soviet Union only fell when insiders took it down.
Iran appears to be in absolutely no danger of that happening.
In all my years, I've never seen Iran care one bit about influencing or bothering any country outside of its sphere of influence. But I've seen Iran be antagonized nonstop and respond accordingly.
As an American who lives abroad and travels around the world, I've never had the slightest worry about "oh man what if Iran does something?" But I've had to adjust flight and travel plans several times, I've had cost of living surge, I've witness chaos causing terrorist splinter groups that attack countries around the world because Israel and America have started some stupid conflict and said "we had no choice bro we had to attack them because in 80 years they would've made a bomb that might've killed a civilian bro you have to trust me bro." And frankly, I'm done even taking those arguments in good faith. I simply refuse. The mess these two countries cause has caused far more death than even if Iran had a nuke, ten nukes, or one thousand nukes.
> I've never seen Iran care one bit about influencing or bothering any country outside of its sphere of influence
Its sphere of influence includes Israel, Gaza (Hamas), Yemen (Houthis), Iraq (various Shia splinter groups), and Lebanon (where Hezbollah refuses to accept the sovereignty of the Lebanese government). You are being willfully ignorant.
Nope, not ignorant. I know that. And I don't care one bit if Iran dominates that area. I'm at a point where I'd prefer it because it's absolutely better than the mess the first country on that list causes, with hacking, election interference, terrorism, war, and ethnic cleansing to name a few. I think a growing number of people globally are sick of it.
And funny you mention Lebanon. Iran isn't the country bombing Lebanon every few years or seizing land there either. But right now another country is invading and seizing land and not accepting the sovereignty of the Lebanese government. [1] Always funny how accusations in 2026 really just are a way of confessing.
Hezbollah has assassinated multiple government leaders and politicians and administrators within Lebanon, including a bombing that killed 23 people including the Prime Minister, and shootings that killed investigators responsible for investigating the Beirut port explosion a few years ago. Suspiciously this was shortly after Hezbollah was found by those investigations to have many links to the circumstances in which so much ammonium nitrate was being stored improperly in the first place.
Hezbollah also assisted the Assad regime in Syria during the Syrian Civil war - participating in laying siege to entire villages for long enough that people starved to death.
You are willfully ignorant. There is tremendous anger at Hezbollah even within Lebanon, especially since they restarted the war on Iran's behalf in recent weeks, giving Israel the causus belli to resume their bombing campaign against them.
> I've never seen Iran care one bit about influencing or bothering any country outside of its sphere of influence.
There’s this weird attitude I see where people claim “realpolitik” to give other nations colonial rights to their neighbors while denying the same to America. If you buy into “spheres of influence” as a concept it’s time to accept that the US, as the world’s preeminent military and economic power, has a sphere of influence that spans the globe.
The math and economics on missile defense are broken.
If your adversary uses nuclear-tipped missiles: within hours if not days, you are virtually guaranteed to suffer impact. Congratulations, New York is under a mushroom cloud. Lose.
If your adversary doesn't use nuclear-tipped missiles, you have a war of attrition whereby the cost of interceptors is greatly more expensive than the cost of building the conventional missiles. Congratulations, you wrecked your economy, if you can even keep up production of interceptors for long enough. Lose.
The only winning moves are to either use ground troops to invade and dismantle your opponents' missiles to prevent that risk from being realized, or to play mutually-assured destruction games trying to convince the other side that you're just an insult away from doing it anyway. And a Western world that seems desperate to keep boots off the ground is not playing that winning move.
Shot exchange is a huge problem, made even worse by the arrival of cheap drones. But you're implicitly assuming that the adversary is on roughly equal economic footing. If your defense budget is $800 billion and your adversary's defense budget is $8 billion, you can afford to spend 100x as much shooting down their missiles as they spend lofting them.
There's also a danger in projecting linearly from the beginning of a war, where invading forces both tend to use more expensive stand-off munitions and also have to deal with more aggressive missile launches. As the defender's own air defense system gets degraded, the invader can switch from expensive long range stand-off munitions to cheaper stand-in munitions (like glide bombs) launched from much shorter range. Additionally, the invader will be able to diminish the defender's ability to launch missile strikes in the first place, either by destroying the launchers, the missiles themselves, or their production, thus reducing the demand on expensive high-capability interceptors.
Drones and mines continue to offer asymmetric warfare options that are very hard to counter without a robust low side on the high-low mix. Ukraine are the world's leading experts in this currently, and hopefully are involved with US and Gulf forces to try to improve this shot exchange ratio.
I am assuming nobody is using nukes though. That completely changes the picture. One must always assume "(some of) the missiles will get through". Traditional MAD does not require boots on the ground - merely the assurance that if Iran gets one nuke through and hits New York, the USA will respond with 100+ nukes. The real question then is what the other "large" nuclear powers (Russia and China, primarily) will do in response to that.
Defense budget is an abstraction. At the end of the day, there are only so many factories with only so many raw inputs producing only so many interceptors per day. You cannot simply increase the defense budget in the event of a war of attrition and then attempt to outspend your enemy. And this is beside the political unpopularity of high defense budgets in peacetime, when they would need to be higher, to build the industrial capacity ahead of when it would be needed.
All true, and of course the $900B plus defense budget of the USA is not dedicated to interceptors to the same degree that Iran's $8B is dedicated to missiles. Shot exchange is fundamentally an economic problem though. The USA is not going to go broke shooting down missiles - they're going to run out of interceptors. Money is a much larger constraint for Iran than the US, but even there, the real constraint is military and diplomatic.
The "if only one nuke gets through, you lose and the whole thing is pointless" is completely wrong. Even if surrender were mandatory after one nuke, all the other intercepted nukes would be thousands if not millions of lives saved.
> the cost of interceptors is greatly more expensive than the cost of building the conventional missiles
And the same thing is true with this comparison. The cost comparison is not interceptor vs conventional missile.
It's interceptor vs conventional missile + the damage the missile would have done.
Yes, you don't want to use Patriots to intercept Shaheds but that's an argument for using the right tool for the job. It's not an argument that the economics of interception are completely broken.
Ukraine has interceptors that are cheaper than Shaheds.
i don't think complete invulnerability was ever the goal of missile defense. It was meant to be a countermeasure to something where before there was none. I'm actually surprised it works as well as it does. Back when these things were first being developed and tested the thought was intercepting nuclear armed ICBMs, they were supposed to be massively destabilizing with respect to MAD and could conceivably give a nation first strike advantage. First strike advantage means just bare minimum survival not that you never get hit at all. Fortunately, that never really materialized.
Ground troops that can't advance due to a cheap nonstop drone and missile barrage is also not a solution as you are going to run out of troops before ypur enemy runs out of drones.
Ukraine is a poor example here because we've been poor allies to them. Drones are manufactured in factories that can be bombed, stockpiled in warehouses that can be bombed, transferred to the front lines in trucks that can be bombed. But Ukraine doesn't have the air force assets to achieve that. The Israelis do, and the amount of drones that have been launched at Israel has dropped considerably over the last three weeks.
Whether it's high altitude drone swarms, terminally guided artillery munitions, hypersonic rail guns, or high energy laser defense, all are orders of magnitude cheaper than the interceptors and could be less than the cost of the (nuclear?) missile. It's true that generically defending against nukes is basically a fools errand, but if they're (also stupidly) limited to putting them on ICBMs with non-detonating fail safes, then it's probably economically doable and cheaper than the $10T forever war.
I'm sorry, the whole framing of this (OP) question/answer seems artificial and fundamentally silly.
The ban is on reporting the exact locations (i.e. coordinates) of where missiles land, because it's information that is useful in helping the enemy to calibrate where missiles will land. Reporting on other details is perfectly acceptable.
Arguably, only Apple is able to pull this off, due to huge investments in their supply chain and fully ordering out entire factories.
It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.
Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.
> Not a single founder wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves: "oh I wish I could make my company XYZ-123 compliant!"
Somehow I doubt that you are in the B2B/Enterprise space. When you're pitching demos and you hear from people "we really wish we could buy your product but we can't because Finance won't approve the expenditure unless you get XYZ-123", and you hear that over and over again because that is the real-world industry that you live in, then you better believe that there are founders who wake up in the morning wishing that.
You clearly have no understanding of what compliance does. Compliance does not "shift responsibility". Compliance is you demonstrating to your customers that you give enough of a shit that you're willing to pay the table stakes to sit at the table. You can complain that the game has table stakes, but all worthwhile games have them.
> we really wish we could buy your product but we can't because Finance won't approve the expenditure unless you get XYZ-123
So you are not dreaming about XYZ-123 compliance, you are dreaming about being able to make sales to corporate entities.
This is a subtle semantic difference.
> there are founders who wake up in the morning wishing
Wishing juicy corporate customers. Not the XYZ-123 compliance per se.
> Compliance is you demonstrating to your customers that you give enough
money and time to emulate the asinine requirements of detrimental standards to pursue corporate sales instead of directing said resources to make your product better.
I think you're the one confusing something here. Wishing for "juicy corporate customers" - why? You might as well say that you wake up in the morning wishing for an ocean of money to flood your accounts and become Scrooge McDuck. I'm not sure what site you think you're on, but this is Hacker News, you know, the site of YC where PG wrote his famous essay telling people, "make something people want"? https://paulgraham.com/good.html
Well guess what people told you they wanted? They wanted XYZ-123. And you're not going to find success until you learn to get obsessed about making something people want.
> a lot of companies that need their own package repositories
Every company needs its own package repository. You need to be able to control what is running on your environment. Supply-chain risk is very, very real and affects anybody selling software for a living.
This is besides the point that in the real world, not every risk is addressed, at least in part because available resources are diverted to address larger risks.
Both Artifactory and Sonatype have somewhat restricted open-source options, which is part of their "get a foot in the door" product-driven sales strategy.
There are no competing open-source projects because such projects would need to provide more value than Artifactory/Sonatype OSS, which are both already huge projects, just to be considered.
> 'adversarial tenant/landlord' is that the theory doesn't line up with reality
So disconnected from reality that it beggars belief.
Anytime you put two or more adult people into a relationship together and at least one person feels like they do not have the option to leave if things get bad (e.g. landlord feels like the tenant is wrecking the property but has no right to evict, tenant feels like landlord is not taking care of maintenance but feels pressured to stay due to artificially low rent), the result is toxic suffering.
Rent control is literally the removal of the right to evict a tenant who refuses the otherwise-uncontrolled rent increase you request. The inability to evict them for refusing the rent increase is what de-facto keeps the rent from increasing beyond its controlled limit.
Oh, I get that, but what's stopping the landlord from evicting someone who damages their property? Or if the landlord no longer wants to rent and wants to live in it themselves?
> it's the notion that 'homes are markets' that is 'warped'
A market in this case isn't a literal street market with vendors hawking their goods. The word "market" describes the relationship between people who have more than they need selling to people who need and would prefer to exchange their money (or vouchers etc.) to acquire it.
Housing can't not be a market anymore than food or labor could not be a market. It's like saying it's warped that water evaporates and becomes clouds and turns into precipitation. It's a word that describes one of the natural systems of how the world works.
Even in communist societies where the State owns all the land and all the housing and decides how to distribute it, you still have a State-owned-and-directed market between citizens who need housing and a State that has excess housing and provides it to citizens.
The way the post is written, I wonder if the author is working for a company going through a growth spurt and where, through sheer size, everything is becoming more "corporate".
There's a huge difference between having AI clean up a text you send privately to someone you have worked closely with for years, versus a broad spectrum text sent by a VP to hundreds of people or more. The first case is reprehensible, for the reasons the author lays out. But as for the second case, corporate doublespeak has been a meme since long before the advent of AI and it would remain even in some AI-pocalypse. Just because your boss puts out sanitized language in a mass communication, doesn't inherently mean your boss won't still be present and real with you in a more private setting.
On other side it is what they are tuned to produce. It is what majority wants or accepts or at least expects. If that type of content is everywhere. And various types of "leetspeak" or slang is considered unprofessional and thus undesirable. That is what you have left.
On other side, you have to think uproar what something that could be perceived as say racist by most radical people would cause... You really don't have much left and to aim at blandness. With certain flourishes that makes you look more "Learned".
Claude says it can speak 5 kinds of 1337. It even built a simulated blue box for me complete with keypad, 2600 button, and KP tone button. Then it made a modem simulator with buttons for all the different tones/warbles/screams.
Which is to say, tuning fights with prompts less as the models and interfaces improve.
Author's analysis, as critical as he is of American presidents breaking their promises, is completely absent of analysis of what would happen if American presidents broke their promises to never allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Never mind that JCPOA had a sunset clause that would allow Iran to resume nuclear enrichment to weapons-grade after the sunset clause.
The author's analysis pretty blatantly exposes reality: the West is losing because it does not have the political stomach to win. Instead of deciding that maybe society should try to develop that political stomach, instead of paying attention to a Trump who got elected in large part on mantras about how America was losing and it needed to start winning, no, Author says this was all a horrible idea and implicitly we should just sit back while our enemies progress along the road of putting nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.
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