I'd argue that the invasion of Iraq benefited plenty of neoconservative aims:
1) eliminating a military threat to Saudi Arabia and Israel
2) placing hundreds of military outposts on Iran's doorstep
3) destabilizing Iran and Syria by empowering militant groups dormant under Saddam to re-arm and try to establish a Caliphate in Syria.
4) awarding trillions in no-bid contracts to Dick Cheney's Halliburton and a slew of arms manufacturers and private military contractors who could operate free of the burdensome rules of the Geneva Conventions. Halliburton received so much business that they moved their HQ to Dubai.
> There's considerable evidence and reason to believe Washington invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to supercharge opium production
There's a lot more evidence and reason to believe that the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 because the Bush Administration realized that, despite their initial inclinations, they couldn't sell a war on Iraq as a response to 9/11 without first making a visible effort that was more tangibly connected to the organization that actually carried out the attacks.
Indeed. I believe it is retribution for the Opium Wars. Sure the US isn't the UK, but it's the successor Anglo empire and is obstructing China's return to their rightful place as global hegemon.
I think Xi Jinping and his CPC wish to inflict a Century of Humiliation on the West, or at least on the members of the Eight-Nation Alliance. Russia and Hungary, beware.
Unfortunately this game only takes one willing participant. We'd better get our heads in the game and begin to play. And we need to prepare for a proper hot war, too, although that's already well understood and those preparations are already well underway.
I was into the whole research chemical thing from maybe 2005 to 2011. People on message boards were doing like $30k+ group buys to get Chinese labs to synthesize new stuff. It was a really interesting time with a lot of money to be made and new chemicals to experience. I started hearing horror stories about people ODing on fentanyl and fentanyl analogues in 2011ish from middle men mixing up orders and mislabeling chemicals. That sketched me out enough that I didn't want anything to do with it anymore. It was very easy to buy fentanyl straight from Chinese labs until at least 2013 but maybe even as late as 2015 or 16. Fentanyl was legal in China until US pressure to ban it and that's when they started sending precursors to Mexico.
You said: “There's considerable evidence and reason to believe Washington invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to supercharge opium production”, yet you provide nothing to back up your claim. It is not trolling to point that out.
Your link to some stats on levels of poppy production does not support your conspiracy theory.
Interestingly, Proton does a lot of what you're talking about: email hosting, password management, cloud storage, docs and spreadsheets. The only thing they don't have is their own browser.
Mozilla has plenty of engineers. I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which the engineers themselves are pushing for AI features. After all, they are working at a nonprofit organization for below-market wages, and will at some point need to brush up their resume for the next gig. Browser development is cool, but FAANG doesn't hire for browser dev, they hire for AI.
By working on AI-whatever, the engineers have a reason to stay at Mozilla, and will have a "desirable" skillset when they eventually leave. That's something a CEO would need to take into account.
> 15 years later and the iPad is still the only tablet anyone really talks about.
When was the last time anybody talked about the iPad outside of a product launch event? iPad sales are falling [0]. It, like every other type of tablet, is a glorified YouTube/Netflix player for most people. It doesn't do anything that you can't already do on an iPhone. Even on "pro" iPad apps like Final Cut, exports are cancelled if you so much as switch to another app during the process. It is in no way a MacOS device.
Ad blocking proliferates, yet Google continues to make more ad revenue than they did the year before. How does that happen?
It happens by improving margins by paying site owners less per ad than they did before. This resulted in mass-produced blogspam that site owners could jam more ads into to make up the loss in revenue. Google rewards these types of pages by upranking them in their search algorithm, then extinguishing them by summarizing the content in the search result ("zero-click searches"), thereby paying site owners nothing while profiting off the ads in the search result page.
This would have happened regardless of ad blocking, where they were already paying nothing to site owners due to zero impressions and clicks. Google is a publicly traded company, so the line needs to go up every quarter by any means necessary.
This is why banks have physical locations with live tellers. And also why I'll never open an account with a regulations-dodging "disruptor" banks where everything must be done through the app.
Apple's ad business is estimated to be at $6.5 billion annually as of 2024[0]. Since then, they've decided to bring ads to Apple Maps. And of course there was the infamous ad for some movie on Apple TV injected into Apple Wallet earlier this year.
Just because they're not Google's size doesn't mean they don't have people making product decisions that will eventually sacrifice privacy for profits.
It hurts my brain that people still parrot the fact that "Apple doesnt do ads". As you rightly point out, Ads for Apple is a multi-billion dollar business, bigger than many other ad networks, and ad exchanges.
The reality distortion field is strong, even with some HNers.
It's not that. Be as insulting as you wish, but this conversation shows that a significant number of folks simply can't understand any way to make money, except by harvesting and selling PiD.
Making and selling hardware is difficult. Really difficult, but some companies have been doing it successfully, throughout recorded history.
It's really strange to see it being dismissed as "impossible," nowadays.
Apple makes tons (read: billions of dollars) from ads. Hence, Apple is in the business of ads, have sales people working with advertisers to make targeting, personalization work.
I take no side in "ads are bad" argument, but you have to accept that Apple is in the ads business, whether you like ads or not.
Absolutely not. From almost day 1 Reddit has been plagued with jokey meme-speak, which is partially why specialist forums are still thriving (audio/video stuff, XDA-developers, European soccer teams, SomethingAwful boards and up until a few years ago, Notebook-Review).
Forums were still going strong a decade after the Internet went mainstream. They only started to fade after smartphones took off and many forums took years to introduce mobile themes. For sports teams however, forums never faded, there tens of millions of users on team-specific soccer forums for example.
That's a good point. I think a lot of forums were less vulnerable for a number of reasons. They typically don't have a large audience (not all, but most), which makes them less of a target. They're also organized around niche interests that don't intersect much with politics and cultural issues, off-topic forums aside. And they're probably more heavily moderated than social media and blog comments.
I think the general point stands when considering large-scale platforms.
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