It’s funny to see how "normal" people talk about 40 million in gold and like a few million in foreign currency.
That’s really nothing in the theatres the CIA operates in. They simply gave it to him and followed up only after the agency’s bureaucrats couldn’t find it during auditing half a year to a year later.
To gain at least some loyalty from a warlord-based Middle East militia, the US was willing to spend 500 million in cash, plus another 200 million in weapons.
If you wanted to bribe a high-level drug trafficker, 40 million would get you laughed out of the room or put in a barrel and shipped around for other associates to laugh at.
According to the 2012 annual report of Sos Impresa, the total annual turnover of money by criminal organisations operating in Italy would be valued at €138 billion, with a net profit of €105 billion.
What’s 40 million to someone moving billions in product?
You’re also wrong about the gold. Gold is easily moved in the hawala system. You give the gold bars to a hawaladar in the US, they give you a piece of paper with a few numbers and you can take it out of the network minus the agreed fees at a different physical location within the network within a few hours in local currency or gold.
Witnesses testified that the trafficker kept track of his drug transactions using relatives who were hawaladars and who recorded the drug transactions
and profits in ledgers.
The ledgers were seized and presented as evidence at trial. One ledger, covering the year 2006-2007, contained a series of money transfers linked to opiate and precursor chemical transactions. Another contained financial records of heroin transactions, arranged by a trafficker, covering
the period March 2006 to March 2007. Analysis of the ledger determined that the defendant produced and sold over 123,000 kg of heroin, worth more than USD261,000,000: this represented over 19 per cent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide in 2006, based on UNODC figures.
My bet is he is probably responsible for Middle East-related activities and saw an opportunity in this Iran mess to gain some pocket money while simply squeezing his contacts in the Middle East for whatever favour the CIA needed and keeping the money for himself. Not the first time this happened.
This usually either surfaces because the contact tells someone on a tapped phone that he got his balls squeezed by the CIA and not even got any money for it or when someone in CIA finance says, “Hey Lisa, I need to make this report where the billion for the Iran stuff went and how much we spend and for what and we’re missing six paperclips and 40 million in gold and a few mil in foreign currency. Did someone take it home with them again to make Breaking Bad Ka$h bed photos for their Instagram?”
I think that someone gets an overall tax rebate when they have children is a reasonable decision for a society to make.
But the real problem here is that there are a ton of adults who would love to have kids but are medically not able to for a bunch of reasons, from autoimmune disease to genetic differences to the simple fact that young people get cancer too and infertility because of treatment or the illness is a thing too.
Is it really wise for a society to treat them as if they willingly deny the society additional benefactors and valuable younger members?
It feels wrong for me that you get treated unequally by the law because of circumstances that are not choice-based and your decision to make in the first place.
Lots of things that are wrong are also imposed on parents. Not to say involuntarily childless people are to be blamed for anything, or that two wrongs make a right, but society is immensely misaligned against having children, and forced charity already exists in various forms whether you like it.
But honestly, developed countries not having children itself isn't that bad a thing. I feel that our existence and the hedonistic treadmill drains too many scarce resources, and population growth should not last long. On the other hand, it seems societies still gain productivity in spite of the slow population growth. There should be plenty of slack for everyone, so that middle-class parents don't feel like they are constantly in a deathmarch, and voluntarily childless people don't need to be pressured. There's an immense misallocation of resources that is hard to solve, and you end up seeing proposals like this.
I had a rather pleasant conversation with Mike Tyson on a flight a good while ago and asked him, “Mike, how did you deal with all this trash talk before you’re stepping into the ring?” And the man said, “You look at what they do with their hands, not at what they do with their mouths.”
I will tell you the same. Look at what Altman actually does to make the life of the "replaced because of AI workforce" a good life, not at his mouth.
Altman is a liar. It’s his profession. He hypes up the product in order to sell it to investors. Of course, he told everyone whose loyalty is to their shareholders and their own bonus payments that you will become exponentially more wealthy after replacing those pesky workers and their hard-fought rights with machines that never complain about working for too long or too hard and that he is selling such soulless Tinmen to the evil Fortune 500 witches at scale if they are interested.
You can’t trust the man on a single thing he says because his actions don’t line up with the words that leave his mouth. They never did.
Now he is lying again because he is unfortunately afraid of him and his family getting murdered, and AI can’t solve the problems he created by making the statement that AI will be able to do and replace most of the jobs employers pay humans for.
And now people actually see this, their friends and family members getting laid off by email, by AI or because of AI and suddenly their lives get exponentially worse instead of better.
Betting on AI is a losing bet either way. It’s a “dehumanising" technology, controlled by a handful of people at currently zero overall value for humanity itself, because the base of this technology is flawed by design. Hallucinations are not a bug, they are a baked in feature. It’s like building on sand.
This whole AI displacement of human values and creation won’t go down without a fight, what we see are just the first ripples of human collective anger
and unlike in the movies, my bet is on the humans.
We will just add an "if it uses energy, we can shut it down" to the "if it bleeds, we can kill it".
> AI is a losing bet either way. It’s a “dehumanising" technology, controlled by a handful of people.
That's not a law of nature, it's a consequence of the current system of laws, and only one of its problems among many others - this is important to understand because removing AI (an impossible task, but let's hallucinate), isn't going to fix the system.
> at currently zero overall value for humanity itself,
The value of AI is currently negative - the costs outweigh the benefits, but the reason for it is the rushed and economically reckless deployment. Again, that's not due to how AI has to be it's due to how we do it.
> This whole AI displacement of human values and creation won’t go down without a fight,
There are a lot of ways to "fight", the good ones don't involve getting physical or getting mad.
> what we see are just the first ripples of human collective anger and unlike in the movies, my bet is on the humans.
Anger is a recipe for disasters. AI is here to stay, the cat is out of the bag, there's no way to put it back in, it's basic politics. Fixating on AI, instead of fixing our ways of using AI, is a major blunder.
The fix isn't as simple as "in the movies", it's outside of the mainstream but that space is a minefield too - there's a lot to learn before good choices can be made.
Don’t forget to give it the cheerful personality of Jamie Oliver afterwards to recommend you a death row meal that is nutritious and will make the experience more pleasant.
It’s all about adoption and the bigger picture.
The US is an untrustworthy, isolated island in the AI future if you vote another idiot into office in a few years. If you’ll still be able to vote at all, that is.
The largest part of the world is not the US. The cutting-edge US models are way too expensive for most parts of the world, and that also shows in adoption.
China is building an ecosystem of open-source models that are both cheap and good enough for most use cases. While most of the US AI sphere will collapse under the pressure of making profits, which means having their models and infrastructure adopted by as many enterprises and individuals across the world, China’s models will have become global standards and hard to displace.
If Beijing’s AI pitch centers on universal access and cost-effectiveness, then Chinese AI firms do not need the latest chips to win the global AI race. They also don’t need the expensive US-run infrastructure. If you watch Chinese AI adoption closely, they already want as many Chinese people as possible to be able to build and try with AI, whereas for most Americans, US models for productive use are already too expensive.
Kimi K2.6 sits within touching distance of Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 while costing about $4 per mil output tokens. That is six to eight times cheaper than cutting-edge US models. If you run hundreds of agents, that’s a significant opportunity to get the same work done for a lot less.
Even early adopters like Singapore, ditching US models, the government kicked Zuckerberg in the nuts and went for Qwen instead to build its sovereign AI models.
To understand why the US is at a severe disadvantage in this race, you need to understand China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI entails Chinese firms delivering fully financed infrastructure projects in a bid to lock third countries into China’s economic orbit. They use the same approach for their open source ai models, but this time the infrastructure is both invisible and free.
No need to build power plants or buy /build ports. AI dependency is invisible to both policymakers and the population, limiting pushback. No pesky activists in Germany nagging about China buying parts of ports. No African nutbags questioning why the humble Xi is building hospitals in areas Chinese mining companies take things out of the ground for pennies on the dollar.
China is going for a marathon here while the US tries to push their ai tech by sheer force into the throats of the world. As soon as Chinese ai models have become global standards, it’s game over for us ai companies. And China is way better at this game than the US. They have proven this over and over again in the past 50 years.
I recommend reading the China Standards 2035 strategy to get a better understanding of their approach and how smart this is.
AI is not as revolutionary as you think in terms of our experiences with previous technological advances in terms of trade and economics.
Western economies are locked into U.S. models, while China runs on Chinese ones. It’s the age-old game. But the real war of the AI race will be fought in the global south.
I will give you three examples.
Can you really imagine, if you look at what AI needs to cost to make a profit, that even at the current prices, US models and infrastructure, which are heavily subsidised already, being used in cost-sensitive countries? I am not talking about coders, think really big here for a second.
Secondly, US ai models are trained on Western data. How do you expect them to grasp local contexts in the Southern Hemisphere? Chinese open-source models, on the other hand, can be downloaded and finetuned with country-specific data.
Want an example? Check out AfriqueQwen-14B, which is adapted to the top twenty African languages.
So I think this author is wrong. The ai race to be won is not hardware or cloud infrastructure, my money is on it will be a contest to decide which models and standards become the default infrastructure in countries that are up for grabs.
China neither needs the best models nor does it need the best cloud infrastructure, it just, like so often, only needs to be affordable and good enough to become the default choice in emerging markets.
The right choice would be for everyone to step off the gas pedal and think about whether we are willing to become China in order to beat China. Our ancestors worked really hard to get us here, our rights, our ways of life, culture, all the blood, sweat, and tears.
AI better be worth it in the long run for all of humanity if we go back to survival of the fittest. Because that is what it will take to beat China at their game.
> While most of the US AI sphere will collapse under the pressure of making profits
I think deep down, sama knows this and that's why he's pushing for "Universal Basic Compute", which really means forcing every US citizen to become an OpenAI subscriber.
The Americans still have plenty of options, but none of them are good in a long-term strategic sense. The US military needs to plan beyond the four to eight years of a sitting president.
I think what will happen after this war is that we will see the Gulf states taking away projection power from the US military, which will also significantly lower the chances of a more and more unhinged Israel projecting power into the other Gulf states.
Also, Iran did not even play its best cards yet.
That the leadership of Iran, who is still a murderuous regime, seems to be the more sane party in terms of answering aggression with "adequate measures" while mostly trying to prevent civilian loss of life is absolutely mind-blowing for me.
It’s like a rabid dog (US) hunting a fox (Iran) and now the dog got its head stuck in a hole and gets bitten in the nose once in a while until it learns its lesson.
What is way more important than oil and the Strait of Hormuz in this conflict is actually (drinking)water.
The Gulf region, with its desert climate, is among the most water-scarce in the world. The six states, which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, use desalination to provide water to a combined 62 million people.
For the GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia), most of their freshwater supply comes from a constellation of groundwater aquifers. Many of these, however, are severely over-exploited, depleted at rates far exceeding what nature can replenish. The total renewable surface and groundwater resources of the six GCC countries together amount to 7.21 billion cubic meters (m3) a year, less than the annual flow of the Potomac River for a population of 62 million.
Water managers generally consider that societies require 1700 m3 of renewable freshwater per person each year to meet their populations’ water needs, from drinking, cooking, and washing to the demands of agriculture and industry.
By this metric, the members of the GCC exhibit “absolute water scarcity.”
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Oman enjoys no more than 296 m3 per capita of annually available renewable freshwater resources, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia each possess only 75 m3 per capita per year, Qatar has 20 m3 per capita per year, while the UAE and Kuwait receive just 15 m3 and 4 m3, respectively.
From 1990 to 2022, annual desalinated water production soared by 314 percent across the GCC, rising from 1.4 to 5.9 billion m3. The six Gulf states now count some 3,401 operational desalination plants, comprising 19 percent of all desalination facilities worldwide.
Collectively, these plants can churn out 22.67 million m3 of desalinated water each day, enough to fill over 9,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, representing 33 percent of global daily production capacity.
For the GCC countries, extensive desalination systems constitute indispensable critical infrastructure.
Desalination fulfills 77.3 percent of total water demand in Qatar, 67.5 percent in Bahrain, 52.1 percent in the UAE, 42.2 percent in Kuwait, 31 percent in Oman, and 18.1 percent in Saudi Arabia. Desalination plants are especially important for meeting drinking water needs. Qatar derives 99 percent of its drinking water supplies from its network of desalination facilities, and Bahrain over 90 percent. For Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the figures are 90 percent, 86 percent, 70 percent, and 42 percent, respectively.
The GCC’s desalination plants are large, fixed, open-air industrial complexes. Mostly concentrated along the coast within 350 kilometers of the Islamic Republic. So well within Iran’s drone and precision ammunition’s striking range.
Desalination plants are also essentially linear facilities, meaning that the seawater-to-freshwater transformation takes place through an ordered sequence of stages. Damage to sensitive parts of the system, such as high-pressure pumps or membrane buildings, could disable production entirely.
So the real bargaining chip for Iran is not Oil. It’s water.
This scenario has unfolded before btw. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, Iraqi forces purposely destroyed most of Kuwait’s desalination capacity and dumped millions of barrels of oil into the northern Persian Gulf, jeopardizing water intakes for plants in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
After coalition forces retook the country, water shortages forced Kuwaiti authorities to cut household water services to four days a week while relying on contracted tanker ships and hundreds of tanker trucks to deliver bulk water for the population.
Article 54(2) of the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions expressly prohibits attacking or destroying “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as drinking water installations and supplies.”
But if the US keeps threatening Iran openly with annihilation/genocide, I think it’s reasonable that from an Iranian position, a retaliation strike will go on the desalination of the Gulf countries, which means millions of people will die and all ties to the US will be cut off as they are essentially responsible for this outcome.
You’d think the president wouldn’t be stupid enough to go through with his threats, but nobody thought he would be stupid enough to turn a beheading strike into a months-long war, plunging the whole world into chaos, and even if the Iranians gave up the nuclear material, the damage caused by the US Administration with allies and to the global world trade will outweigh Iran not having a nuclear weapon.
We see North Korea having nuclear weapons as well as a supreme leader, but you’d need to search long and hard to find a single serious expert who says they would use them in a first strike even against their direct neighbour, South Korea. They also more or less take the sanctions put on them without threatening everyone with nuclear annihilation.
Instead, their supreme leader used the killing of Khamenei senior to update the North Korean constitution to retaliate with a nuclear strike if he ever got assassinated by a third party. Something that wasn’t necessary in a pre-trump era.
This whole conflict is FUBAR and at the whim of a person that is known for not being able to admit defeat, we still frequently hear about the "stolen election".
Might be Checkmate in Iran.
But if the person starting the war doesn’t understand the rules of chess to begin with, what is the expected outcome here?
Man, I am glad the US didn’t get out of the WHO, and there is a sane and responsible HHS Secretary with RFK Jr., whose brain totally did not get eaten by a parasite.
I mean, there are only 300 or so cases recorded in history of the Andes hantavirus human-to-human transmission.
And Trump, the wise man he is, didn’t cut a single dollar on science, especially that of epidemiology and emerging priority pathogens.
You guys are lucky there were no passengers coming back to the US and that there is no global event like the soccer World Cup starting soon or the 250th anniversary of the United States.
I wouldn’t be worried too much, especially knowing how the president dealt with the coronavirus in his first term. They are just going to shine some light into your veins and/or inject disinfectants into you, and your suffering will be over in no time.
I wish my country had an administration that is this good at everything they do, but we wouldn’t know what to do with all those wins.
What's up with all the sarcasm in your comment? It makes it hard to tell when you're speaking the truth versus speaking in opposites. Why not just speak plainly, so people can understand you -- comprehension should be the first goal. You're trying to communicate a serious matter.
Imagine reading a medical abstract, like the one you linked, if it were written in your style of heavy sarcasm.
> They are just going to shine some light into your veins and/or inject disinfectants into you, and your suffering will be over in no time.
Those were Trump's proposed solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Their post is quite clear: the US has an utterly incompetent administration which is actively opposed to the best known method for preventing the spread of deadly viruses: vaccines. Funding for monitoring the spread of diseases has also been cut. The World Cup is a large event which will bring people from all over the world into the US and into close contact for multiple days, right as a new dangerous virus with a long incubation period has been detected spreading from person to person.
The post is unnecessarily political, and is written quite unclearly. The administration certainly will fund a new vaccine if the situation merits it.
The Covid mRNA vaccine, while lifesaving, is not without safety issues. It increases carditis risk substantially[1] (5x the baseline risk in males), and I personally experienced this effect for a month. It is best not to neglect such safety issues, ideally so they might be addressed in future protocols.
No vaccine is without safety issues. That's why so much research has been done to evaluate the safety issues. The consensus conclusion is the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks in this age group, including because the risk of myocarditis or pericarditis is higher for those who get COVID. For examples more recent than 2022:
"Although our meta-analysis revealed a higher risk than previously reported of myocarditis/pericarditis attributable to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (among adolescent and young adult men), this does not negate the recommendation of COVID-19 vaccination for this population. Our previous study showed that the benefit of receiving the BNT162b2 vaccine or the mRNA-1273 vaccine was much higher than the risk of the vaccination across all age group and sex.59 Though the AR of myocarditis was assumed to be 12.1 per 100 000 for the primary series of the mRNA-1273 vaccine in men aged 18-29 years for the original benefit-risk calculations, if we updated the AR to 22.26 (2.84 after first doses plus 20.0 after second doses) per 100 000 for the primary series for men aged 18-24 years, based on the results of this current systematic review with meta-analysis, the benefits of vaccination would still far outweigh the risks in this age group." - Epidemiologic Reviews, 2025, 47, (1), 1–11 https://doi.org/10.1093/epirev/mxae007 Advance access publication date: December 13, 2024
"Compared with unvaccinated groups or unvaccinated time periods, the highest attributable risk of myocarditis or pericarditis was observed after the second dose in boys aged 12-17 years (10.18 per 100 000 doses [95% CI, 0.50-19.87]) of the BNT162b2 vaccine and in young men aged 18-24 years (attributable risk, 20.02 per 100 000 doses [95% CI, 10.47-29.57]) for the mRNA-1273 vaccine ... Young people’s risk of developing myocarditis is higher and longer lasting after covid-19 infection than after vaccination against it, the largest study of its kind suggests ... Over a six month period the researchers estimated that covid-19 infection led to 2.24 extra cases of myocarditis or pericarditis per 100 000 children and young people. This compares with 0.85 extra cases of myocarditis or pericarditis per 100 000 children and young people in those who were vaccinated." - BMJ 2025; 391 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r2330 (Published 05 November 2025)
The head of the Department of Health is solidly opposed to the development of vaccines. And the COVID mRNA vaccine increases carditis risk less than getting COVID without having had the vaccine does, and decreases the risk of severe carditis if you get COVID after the vaccine. So that's not a great argument against it.
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