Notices by That Would Be Telling (thatwouldbetelling@shitposter.world)

@Humpleupagus @NotoriousDOG @JedDrudge @AsukaNeko @LordOfTheKangs Except you can't say who will be "they" going forward. Israel is very clear about wanting regime change, and has made a point about keeping Khamenei alive only so he can surrender, to the point of bombing the far northeastern city he's said to have holed up in.

Also, "hit" is hardly "sunk." We've had ships get hit with sailor deaths without going completely ape-shit against the perps. So imagine for example a small enough hit to get us to use some of our MOPs....

@AsukaNeko @Humpleupagus @NotoriousDOG @JedDrudge @LordOfTheKangs Or you'd end up in a brig on the ship!!! :cirnoHelp:

You need to outline out a conspiracy to do this that's plausible. For example, I don't see Trump going for it. Nor much of the US Navy which needs those men, carrier wings, and all sorts of other goodies that will be removed from the Nimitz and put on other ships, like CIWSes.

I think you need to outline a scenario where such a need and such a risk makes sense. Yes, Israel could really use some B-2 roaming the Iranian night skies with fifteen thousand ton GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), but as it is and is going Iran isn't going to be threatening them with a nuclear weapon for the foreseeable future.

The biggest dangers are empty magazines so they can't stop barrages, and the long drawn out type of war we've discussed. What would the US bring to the table to help that? If you say troops on the ground in Iran I'm going to laugh many times over, starting with the logistics to get N divisions to Iran.

@Humpleupagus @NotoriousDOG @JedDrudge @LordOfTheKangs Not if a bottleneck in transporter-launchers (to use the correct term) keeps getting tighter as Israel keeps busting them.

Here, are you taking pre-war strategy, or what they can do going forward?

History also doesn't support public opinion being a deciding factor ... except there's another gambit, not firing hundreds a day (but less than a hundred/hundred relevant in a single wave) but enough the populace will want to hang out in or near shelters and bomb rooms, the nation is pretty much at a halt right now.

That was the big concern made manifest in 2006, and the effective destruction of Hezbollah which was supposed to shield Iran (with lots of much shorter range missiles) literally started the clock ticking per Netanyahu and common sense.

@Quentel @Humpleupagus @NotoriousDOG @transgrammaractivist @JedDrudge @AsukaNeko @Diogenese_Shiplap @LordOfTheKangs Except of course Israel bought seven 707s and turned them into faux-KC-135s, also have seven C-130H tankers.

We've already got a THAAD battery there getting combat tested (sounds like it's roughly in the Arrow-2 class). And they're not lacking for PGMs to use one each to bust a single missile launcher, with or without missiles.

@LordOfTheKangs @Humpleupagus @NotoriousDOG @JedDrudge If so, why have they never launched more than around a hundred at a time?

The obvious wayfor Iran to get a lot of stuff through ABM defenses is to saturate the latter.

@LordOfTheKangs @Humpleupagus @JedDrudge @NotoriousDOG I've been coming across an explanation for why Iran, which claimed to have zillions of missiles that can hit Israel from its own soil, has singularly failed to saturate the deployed ABM systems defending Israel.

To make what that means clear, if you can handle say one hundred relevant incoming warheads in a single wave (no need to protect most of the Negev for example, although you've got to have capability to make that determination), if you face five hundred most will get through.

There's a big bottleneck, launchers. That is, from bunkers etc. missiles are loaded, moved out and launched out in the open. Today the IDF claims they've destroyed over 120, they've shown us lots of precision guided examples, and they believe that's about a third of them.

Come to think of it, the bigger bottleneck for my saturation metric in the current context is the loading process, which is going to be limited by mundane things like handling equipment, and entrances/exits.

And the cat and mouse tension between getting a lot of those launchers out in the open at a single time, and the certainty this will eventually be noticed and the IAF will bag a bunch before you can launch. Like, at some point they switch to guns ... or maybe they're already using them, but aren't releasing footage of that except for drones to not give away details that might be used to shoot down their planes when they get up close and personal.

Also assume the usual Third and Muslim world efficiently problems, and the command and control attacks on who were suppose to be orchestrating all this.

For this to be true you have to assume the previous direct from Iran attacks when the IDF wasn't freely roaming across Western Iran to Tehran were somewhat pro-forma performative, replies to small-ish Israeli attacks rather than a start of a war like the one we're seeing now. That is, the bombing of its Syrian embassy in April 2024, and the assassination on Iranian soil of a Hamas leader in October 2024.

Don't trust any media, lesson N:

"Guilt by Algorithm: Woman Wrongly Accused of Shoplifting Due to Facial Recognition Error"

This headline and the first four paragraphs are lies, for you then get to the bit where the facial recognition was complete accurate, it was something or someone who erroneously put into the system that she'd shoplifted £10 of "toiler rolls" she'd actually paid for and could prove.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2025/06/16/guilt-by-algorithm-woman-wrongly-accused-of-shoplifting-due-to-facial-recognition-error/

@Humpleupagus @Tony @ins0mniak @mitchconner I have seen the first page of one recently appeals court document that started out saying "TROs and preliminary injunctions are basically the same thing," so....

@Humpleupagus @Tony @ins0mniak @mitchconner Disagree in part: immediate granting of ex parte TROs which technically can't be appealed is very much a trope of our current regime of Inferior Court Supremacy.

Also beware of an instant appeal to the Ninth Circus Circuit. The ACLU did that in an illegals case after giving the Texas district judge 42 minutes to rule (and got swatted down, then the Supreme Court both granted it and chastised the inferior judges; look for Judge Ho's "not a Denny's" scathing towards the Supreme Court order for lots more).

One thing any legal mind with a clue will be thinking about is that Trump can instantly trump this legal action with the Insurrection Act. In fact, from the 1994 timing of 10 U.S. Code § 12406 after G. H. W. Bush's invocation of the former for the 1992 Rodney King riots, I'm pretty sure it was passed (and by Democrats) to give a president a less powerful tool if needed.

@sicp @redstarfish Rust has "a toolchain that is near impossible to bootstrap on commodity hardware, built with a terribly slow and hungry compiler, as opposed to one that anyone can build and use himself."

Is Rust really that bad? Did some checking just now, and tool chain bootstrapping seems modest by today's standards, like maybe around 2 GB of RAM and 10-15 GB of storage, although productive development assumes a total of 16 GB of RAM. But plenty of people get by with careful tuning for somewhat less.

Higher level question: is Rust especially post-Mozilla support really that competitive? And for things we really care about? As in, there are lots of alternatives if you want memory safety but don't have to go that low level.

@sj_zero "and Elon gets to look to his primary market of EV customers like he's sticking it to orange man"

That fails as long as X is still "NAZI SPEECH 24X7!!!" Plus he can't undo his DOGE accomplishments like terminating the USAID grifting, regime change, etc. etc., and DOGE continues their work without him in his usual set things up and let them work for a while style.

USAID is a big one, and one they're ramping up the pressure on by claiming it's already killed 300K people/children, and that Musk will in due course exceed the body count of Lenin, Mao, or Stalin ... or maybe all combined.

Doesn't have to change your thesis, though, that's sunk costs for Musk, whereas the new stuff for Trump we're theorizing is of great value. Especially in adding pressure to get with the rescission bills.

But the surface appearance ... none of this is out of character for either, and the financial ruin of the US is as I keep pointing out an existential threat to Musk's Mar's ambitions. For that matter, he had no choice but to enter the political arena sooner or later so SpaceX won't be stolen from him.

@Aether @sickburnbro I don't think "Tech companies make money through stock market speculating" is a good representation at all; first they have to get public listed, after all, though an IPO or nowadays also SPACs which are held in ill-repute, I'm not even sure they earn investment banks much money.

"The kikes in silicon valley" are C level finaicial types at best, after the US finished destroying the venture capital business model with SarBox. So there aren't many new ones.

You're saying they trying to trick A level "kikes in New York" ... I don't think that's happening, except for routine very small asset allocations that go to VCs on the off chance they'll invest in a real unicorn. Which does happen, but as the name suggests, very rarely, and there the money is going to be pass through minus paltry fees because the total amounts are so low.

For the stock market, said latter kikes just arrange the above going public events, they make fees, but they don't put their own money into it unless they think it'll make them money ... which as A level types they're possibly better at judging, except NY financial types of all races generally don't understand tech companies.

@sickburnbro @lethn @Aether You're assuming the people cut are actually the lowest performing, it's political so that's often not true.

I've been in a big companies decline and fall where they were just cutting to survive, and in an essential for the company's survival product project, where they made a point of firing the best guy, all but explicitly telling us that was to prove no one was safe (the company of course died).

And how many cycles before the employee's #1 focus is on surviving next year's cuts? At the highest level, they sabotage other projects like Microsoft's Kin, a billion wasted along with massive brand damage including it's nascent cloud offerings.

At all levels, you can never assemble a team of top rankers, because at least one will be fired every year. At the low level, managers will go as far as hiring people they plan to quickly fire, just to protect the ones they need to keep. Amazon's now the paradigm of the latter.

@sickburnbro @lethn @Aether "GE once made a ton of things, but then spun most of them off."

GE's business model was to be #1 in any given field, and if they failed that, like with computers in the 1960s, they spun it off (there to Honeywell, which doomed Multics).

Then they were seduced by financialization, eventually made a horrible acquisition, and are selling off a great deal of stuff to try to survive, which many think is impossible.

In between, Jack Welch ruined the corporate culture with stack ranking, that is, firing ~10% of the "lowest ranking" employees every year. See Microsoft under Ballmer for a better known example of that and its consequences.

@Elliptica @abgreport Except it's almost certainly complete bullshit.

You can run the numbers, but if you think two economic sectors governed entirely or almost so by monopsony (single buyer) government purchases are axiomatically high profit, you're claiming extreme corruption on the part of said governments. Which is possible but you need to make a case for it.

See also the maxim that "there is no value in a second best military."

I've also been noting lately most of the money is in weapons development. Buying, it depends, but munitions stockpiling and maintenance get short shrift. For example ~447 Challenger II tanks were built by the U.K., some for export. In that nation, though, about twenty five are operational. USNavy ships are notoriously under-maintained.

For munitions, just a few anecdotes are the USNavy ending MK48 torpedo production "twenty years ago" with a current inventory of ~1300. We're manufacturing something like twelve of the most advanced version of the SM-6 a year if memory serves ... and we've used up a great deal of our missiles in the ludicrous prior to Trump Operation "Prosperity Garden" against the Houthis. (On the other hand, guns against drones worked well.)

General TL;DR: the USNavy's contribution to a potential defense of Taiwan will be very limited with nearly empty magazines.

As for pharma per the pictured meme, that's so ludicrous the author is a propagandist or pig ignorant. Small-ish portion of US healthcare spending (like 7%??), and as drug development got a lot harder as the low hanging fruit was picked, most drugs are now generic. And much if nor most made by the PRC at least for precursors and APIs, and India for final production. Doesn't mean they won't hit it out of the ballpark occasionally, like the new weight loss drug class, but....

And, again, government want to spend as little as possible on them. including the US, but it's extreme elsewhere, which is the basis of Trump's recent actions. Socialism as usual turns out to be a bad idea.

@teto @Fullmetal2255 Tells us something that the pajeets who now run Microsoft, and Windows in particular without any humans testing the experience, feel its perfectly fine to hire webshits to do fundamental GUI stuff. Charles Petzold might as well be like Hindi is to us.

@sickburnbro @Elliptica "If a judge doesn't follow the rules, what good are they?"

Indeed, but that doesn't say deleting the entire institution is a good idea.

Even the "pure one-man fiat dictatorship" suggested by @TrevorGoodchild for anything larger than a village is going to have to delegate judicial power so he won't have all his consumed by all the cases that arise.

I mean, is Stalin going to be presiding over every domestic dispute?? Yep, the USSR had a family court or civil/criminal courts that handled that end of things. And you need a judicial system to avoid "self help" and the resulting blood feuds.

Dictatorships also don't solve the succession problem, and that of course includes monarchies, there's even wars named after this like War of the Spanish Succession.

Perhaps take many steps back and assume any given "good" political system lasts only so long at maximum? Even those monarchies underwent various changes, right? Magna Carta for example.... Formal term limits for systems of government?????? :cirno_shrug:

@Elliptica @sickburnbro "Judicial review only works in a high trust society."

I'm sure that's true, but did we ever really have one? Concept established by fiat in the US in 1803 becoming part of our small c constitution, and was contentious pretty much since then??

Here we have a counter-revolution being Resisted by our Deep State. The Congress could fix this by jurisdiction stripping (the founders did not trust judges), but they're mostly of the Deep State. Or disestablishing much or all of the Federal judiciary below the Supreme Court. Or we could interpret Article III "good behavior" as not requiring an Article I impeachment to oust these judges. Etc.

"The purpose of a system is what it does."

Next, the deficit, but first someone in Instapundit comments credibly claimed compared to 2019 we're paying half a trillion more per year in interest on the Federal debt (see first link for some clues to that). Three ways out of that, I suppose at best we'll do all of them: inflation, economic growth, and lower interest rates. The latter is potentially explosive because "Biden" sold a lot of short term debt even when rates were very low.

OK, Miller says it's (very partisan I say) CBO math to count keeping the 2018 "tax cuts" increases the deficit. Here you must first remember the CBO does "static accounting," assumes tax rate cuts don't change behavior, in a tax regime which is very explicit about changing a lot of behavior.

So where are we on the Laffer Curve? Which is a very real thing, I watched my father's business behavior change a lot after Reagan's tax rate cuts took effect, and we curse Reagan for giving the Federal government a lot more money.

On the other hand, we have to see how the SALT debacle plays out, or if it's even "big money" in the scheme of things. State and Local Tax Deduction, Red state residents subsidize the Blue state ones by letting them deduct those from their Federal income.

I was amazed in 2017 when this was capped at ten thousand, but (thanks to comprehensive Democrat vote cheating) the House has a razor thing Republican majority and the BBB will be vetoed by the ten or so Blue state reps unless the limit is removed or significantly increased. But here you'll need to do the numbers, not to mention see how the sausage is further processed in the Senate.

The rest looks fine except for "The only funding in the bill is for the President’s border and defense priorities" and I wonder how that passes reconciliation rule muster ... but in any case we have to see how this plays out in the Senate anyway. Like, does the Senate Parliamentarian play ball? Does she want to keep her job?

The history is weird, one Robert Dove was fired twice from the position, to be replaced by the same Allen Frumin twice :cirnothinking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States#Recent_statistics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentarian_of_the_United_States_Senate

(((Stephen Miller))) makes some very important points about the Big Beautiful Bill in a long Xweet.

I'm still going over the details, but a yuge claim, which in an admission against interest is backed up by Wikipedia, is that reconciliation rules for what it calls "budget reconciliation" cannot touch discretionary spending. that is, what's in theory specifically appropriated each year, like for NASA.

Thus the vast majority of DOGE "cute" are not germane. Scare quotes because if you want the USAID 90% haircut to stand, in practice that must be in a rescission bill, another parliamentary maneuver to get around the Senate filibuster.

Per Wikipedia, "Budget reconciliation bills can deal with mandatory spending, revenue, and the federal debt limit" and Social Security which is part of the first cannot be touched.

Since mandatory spending defines it by things like "everyone 63 and older can get paid." DOGE cuts of for example people over 120 years old need no Congressional action.

Thus the focus on Medicaid, a Federal-state "partnership" which is deeply corrupt when states tax providers and get paid by the Feds for that.

https://x.com/StephenM/status/1926715409807397204

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_Congress)