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  • 2026 Iran War

    2026 Iran War
    2026/03/10
    This week we talk about Khamenei, Trump, and Netanyahu.We also discuss Venezuela, Cuba, and cartels.Recommended Book: Plagues upon the Earth by Kyle HarperTranscriptAli Hosseini Khamenei was an opposition politician in the lead-up to the Iranian Revolution that, in 1979, resulted in the overthrow of the Shah—the country’s generally Western government-approved royal leader—and installed the Islamic Republic, an extremely conservative Shia government that took the reins of Iran following the Shah’s toppling.Khamenei was Iran’s third president, post-Shah, and he was president during the Iran-Iraq War from 1981-1989, during which the Supreme Leader of Iran, the head of the country, Ruhollah Khomeini sought the overthrow of then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Khomeini died the same year the war ended, 1989, and Khamenei was elected to the role of Supreme Leader by the country’s Assembly of Experts, which is responsible for determining such roles.The new Supreme Leader Khamenei was reportedly initially concerned that he wasn’t suitable for the role, as his predecessor was a Grand Ayatollah of the faith, while he was just a mid-rank cleric, but the constitution of Iran was amended so that higher religious office was no longer required in a Supreme Leader, and in short order Khamenei moved to expound upon Iran’s non-military nuclear program, to expand the use and reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in-country and throughout the region, and he doubled-down on supporting regional proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, incorporating them into the so-called Axis of Resistance that stands against Western interests in the region—the specifics of which have varied over the decades, but which currently includes the aforementioned Hezbollah and Houthis, alongside smaller groups in neighboring countries, like Shiite militias in Bahrain, and forces that operate in other regional spheres of influence, like North Korea, Venezuela, and at times, portions of the Syrian government.Khamenei also reinforced the Iranian government’s power over pretty much every aspect of state function, disempowering political opponents, cracking down on anyone who doesn’t toe a very conservative extremist line—women showing their hair in public, for instance, have been black-bagged and sometimes killed while in custody—and thoroughly entangled the functions of state with the Iranian military, consolidating essentially all power under his office, Supreme Leader, while violently cracking down on anyone who opposed his doing whatever he pleased, as was the case with a wave of late-2025, early 2026 protests across the country, during which Iranian government forces massacred civilians, killing somewhere between 3,000 and 35,000 people, depending on whose numbers you believe.What I’d like to talk about today is a new war with Iran, kicked off by attacks on the country from Israel and the United States that led with the killing of Khamenei and a bunch of his higher-up officers, how this conflict is spreading across the region and concerns about that spreading, and what might happen next.—On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched a wave of joint air attacks against Iran, hitting mostly military and government sites across the country. One of the targets was Khamenei’s compound, and his presence there, above-ground, which was unusual for him, as he spent most of his time deep underground in difficult-to-hit bunkers, alongside a bunch of government and military higher-ups, may have been the rationale for launching all of these attacks on that day, as the attackers were able to kill him and five other top-level Iranian leaders, who he was meeting with, at the same time.This wave of attacks followed the largest military buildup of US forces in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq back in 2003, and while military and government targets were prioritized, that initial wave also demolished a lot of civilian structures, including schools, hospitals, and the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, leading to a whole lot of civilian casualties and fatalities, as well.In response, Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, and at US bases throughout the region—these bases located in otherwise uninvolved countries, including Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Iranian missiles and drones also hit non-military targets, and in some cases maybe accidentally hit civilian infrastructure, in Azerbaijan, and Oman, alongside a British military base on the island of Cyprus.The Iranian president apologized in early March for his country’s lashing out at pretty much everyone, saying that there were miscommunications within the Iranian military, and that Iran wouldn’t hit anyone else, including countries with US bases, so long as US attacks didn’t originate from those bases.Despite that apology, though, Iranian missiles and drones continued ...
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    17 分
  • Killer Robots and Mass Surveillance

    Killer Robots and Mass Surveillance
    2026/03/03
    This week we talk about Anthropic, the Department of Defense, and OpenAI.We also discuss red lines, contracts, and lethal autonomous systems.Recommended Book: Empire of AI by Karen HaoTranscriptLethal autonomous weapons, often called lethal autonomous systems, autonomous weapons systems, or just ‘killer robots,’ are military hardware that can operate independent of human control, searching for and engaging with targets based on their programming and thus not needing a human being to point it at things or pull the trigger.The specific nature and capabilities of these devices vary substantially from context to content, and even between scholars writing on the subject, but in general these are systems—be they aerial drones, heavy gun emplacements, some kind of mobile rocket launcher, or a human- or dog-shaped robot—that are capable of carrying out tasks and achieving goals without needing constant attention from a human operator.That’s a stark contrast with drones that require either a human controlled or what’s called a human-in-the-loop in order to make decisions. Some drones and other robots and weapons require full hands-on control, with a human steering them, pointing their weapons, and pulling the trigger, while others are semi-autonomous in that they can be told to patrol a given area and look for specific things, but then they reach out to a human-in-the-loop to make final decisions about whatever they want to do, including and especially weapon-related things; a human has to be the one to drop the bomb or fire the gun in most cases, today.Fully autonomous weapon systems, without a human in the loop, are far less common at this point, in part because it’s difficult to create a system so capable that it doesn’t require human intervention at times, but also because it’s truly dangerous to create such a device.Modern artificial intelligence systems are incredibly powerful, but they still make mistakes, and just as an LLM-based chatbot might muddle its words or add extra fingers to a made-up person in an image it generates, or a step further, might fabricate research referenced in a paper it produces, an AI-controlled weapon system might see targets where there are no targets, or might flag a friendly, someone on its side, or a peaceful, noncombatant human, as a target. And if there’s no human-in-the-loop to check the AI’s understanding and correct it, that could mean a lot of non-targets being treated like targets, their lives ended by killer robots that gun them down or launch a missile at their home.On a larger scale, AI systems controlling arrays of weapons, or even entire militaries, becoming strategic commanders, could wipe out all human life by sparking a nuclear war.A recent study conducted at King’s College London found that in simulated crises, across 21 scenarios, AI systems which thought they had control of nation-state-scale militaries opted for nuclear signaling, escalation, and tactical nuclear weapon use 95% of the time, never once across all simulations choosing to use one of the eight de-escalatory options that were made available to them.All of which suggests to the researchers behind this study that the norm, approaching the level of taboo, associated with nuclear weapons use globally since WWII, among humans at least, may not have carried over to these AI systems, and full-blown nuclear conflict may thus become more likely under AI-driven military conditions.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent confrontation between one AI company—Anthropic—and its client, the US Department of Defense, and the seeming implications of both this conflict, and what happened as a result.—In late-2024, the US Department of Defense—which by the way is still the official title, despite the President calling it the Department of War, since only Congress can change its name—the US DoD partnered with Anthropic to get a version of its Claude LLM-based AI model that could be used by the Pentagon.Anthropic worked with Palantir, which is a data-aggregation and surveillance company, basically, run by Peter Thiel and very favored by this administration, and Amazon Web Services, to make that Claude-for-the-US-military relationship happen, those interconnections allowing this version of the model to be used for classified missions.Anthropic received a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense in mid-2025, as did a slew of other US-based AI companies, including Google, xAI, and OpenAI. But while the Pentagon has been funding a bunch of US-based AI companies for this utility, only Claude was reportedly used during the early 2026 raid on Venezuela, during which now-former Venezuelan President Maduro was taken by US forces.Word on the street is that Claude is the only model that the Pentagon has found truly useful for these sorts of operations, though publicly they’re saying that investments in all of these models have borne fruit, at least to some degree.So ...
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    16 分
  • Tariff Ruling

    Tariff Ruling
    2026/02/24
    This week we talk about Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court, and negotiating leverage.We also discuss trade wars, Greenland, and the IEEPA.Recommended Book: Smoke and Ashes by Amitav GhoshTranscriptI’ve spoken on this show before about tariffs and about US President Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs as an underpinning of his trade policy. Last October, back in 2025 I did an episode on tariff leverage and why the concept of an ongoing trade war is so appealing to Trump—it basically gives him a large whammy on anyone he enters negotiations with, because the US market is massive and everyone wants access to it, and tariffs allow him to bring the hammer down on anyone he doesn’t like, or who doesn’t kowtow in what he deems to be an appropriate manner.So he can slap a large tariff on steel or pharmaceuticals or cars from whichever country he likes just before he enters negotiations with that country, and then those negotiations open with him in an advantageous spot: they have to give him things just to get those tariffs to go away—they have to negotiate just to get things back to square one.That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. What we talked about a bit back in October is TACO theory, TACO standing for Trump Always Chickens Out—the idea is that other world leaders had gotten wise to Trump’s strategy, which hasn’t changed since his first administration, and he has mostly been a doubling-down on that one, primary approach, to the point that they can step into these negotiations, come up with something to give him that allows him to claim that he’s won, to make it look like he negotiated well, and then they get things back down to a more reasonable level; maybe not square one, but not anything world-ending, and not anything they weren’t prepared and happy to give up.In some cases, though, instead of kowtowing in this way so that Trump can claim a victory, whether or not a victory was actually tallied, some countries and industries and the businesses that make up those industries have simply packed up their ball and gone home.China has long served as a counterbalance to the US in terms of being a desirable market and a hugely influential player across basically every aspect of geopolitics and the global economy, and this oppositional, antagonistic approach to trade has made the US less appealing as a trade partner, and China more appealing in comparison.So some of these entities have negotiated to a level where they could still ship their stuff to the US and US citizens would still be willing to pay what amounts to an extra tax on all these goods, because that’s how tariffs work, that fee is paid by the consumers, not by the businesses or the origin countries, but others have given up and redirected their goods to other places. And while that’s a big lift sometimes, the persistence of this aggression and antagonism has made it a worthwhile investment for many of these entities, because the US has become so unpredictable and unreliable that it’s just not worth the headache anymore.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent Supreme Court decision related to Trump’s tariffs, and what looks likely to happen next, in the wake of that ruling.—Ever since Trump stepped back into office for his second term, in January of 2025, he has aggressively instilled new and ever-growing tariffs on basically everyone, but on some of the US’s most important trade partners, like Mexico and Canada, in particular.These tariffs have varied and compounded, and they’ve applied to strategic goods that many US presidents have tried to hobble in various ways, favoring US-made versions of steel and microchips, for instance, so that local makers of these things have an advantage over their foreign-made alternatives, or have a more balanced shot against alternatives made in parts of the world where labor is cheaper and standards are different.But this new wave of tariffs were broad based, hitting everyone to some degree, and that pain was often taken away, at least a little, after leaders kowtowed, at times even giving him literal gold-plated gifts in order to curry favor, and/or funneling money into his family’s private companies and other interests, allowing him to use these tariffs as leverage for personal gain, not just national advantage, in other cases giving him what at least looked outwardly to be a negotiating win.Things spiraled pretty quickly by mid-2025, when China pushed back against these tariffs, adding their own reciprocal tariffs on US goods, and at one point extra duties on Chinese imports coming into the US hit 145%.Shortly thereafter, though, and here we see that TACO acronym proving true, once again, Trump agreed to slash these tariffs for 90 days, and around the same time, in May of 2025, a federal appeals court temporarily reinstated some of Trump’s largest-scale tariffs after a lower court ruled that they couldn’t persist.The remainder of 2025 was a story of Trump ...
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    13 分
  • Ring and Flock

    Ring and Flock
    2026/02/17
    This week we talk about mass surveillance, smart doorbells, and the Patriot Stack.We also discuss Amazon, Alexa, and the Super Bowl.Recommended Book: Red Moon by Benjamin PercyTranscriptIn 2002, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the US government created a new agency—the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operating under the auspices of the US Department of Homeland Security, which was also formed that year for the same general reason, to defend against 9/11-style attacks in the future.As with a whole lot of what was done in the years following the 9/11 attacks, a lot of what this agency, and its larger department did could be construed as a sort of overcompensation by a government and a people who were reeling from the first real, large-scale attack within their borders from a foreign entity in a very long time. It was a horrific event, everyone felt very vulnerable and scared, and consequently the US government could do a lot of things that typically would not have had the public’s support, like rewiring how airports and flying works in the country, creating all sorts of new hurdles and imposing layers of what’s often called security theater, to make people feel safe.While the TSA was meant to handle things on the front-lines of air transportation, though, X-raying and patting-down and creating a significant new friction for everyone wanting to get on a plane, ICE was meant to address another purported issue: that of people coming into the US from elsewhere, illegally, and then sticking around long enough to cause trouble. More specifically, ICE was meant to help improve public safety by strictly enforcing at times lax immigration laws, by tracking down and expelling illegal immigrants from the country; the theory being that some would-be terrorists may have snuck into the US and might be getting ready to kill US citizens from within our own borders.There’s not a lot of evidence to support that assertion—the vast majority of terrorism that happens in the US is conducted by citizens, mostly those adhering to a far-right or other extremist ideologies. But that hasn’t moved the needle on public perception of the issue, which still predominantly leans toward stricter border controls and more assiduous moderation of non-citizens within US borders—for all sorts of reasons, not just security ones.What I’d like to talk about today is an offshoot of the war on terror and this vigilance about immigrants in the US, and how during the second Trump administration, tech companies have been entangling themselves with immigration-enforcement agencies like ICE to create sophisticated surveillance networks.—In mid-July of 2025, the US Department of Defense signed one of its largest contracts in its history with a tech company called Palantir Technologies. Palantir was founded and is run by billionaire Peter Thiel, who among other things is generally considered to be the reason JD Vance was chosen to be Trump’s second-term Vice President. He’s also generally considered to be one of, if not the main figure behind the so-called Patriot Tech movement, which consists of companies like SpaceX, Anduril, and OpenAI, all of which are connected by a web of funding arms and people who have cross-pollinated between major US tech companies and US agencies, in many cases stepping into government positions that put them in charge of the regulatory bodies that set the rules for the industries in which they worked.As a consequence of this setup and this cross-pollination, the US government now has a bunch of contracts with these entities, which has been good for the companies’ bottom lines and led to reduced government regulations, and in exchange the companies are increasingly cozy with the government and its many agencies, toeing the line more than they would have previously, and offering a lot more cooperation and collaboration with the government, as well.This is especially true when it comes to data collection and surveillance, and a great deal of that sort of information and media is funneled into entities like Palantir, which aggregate and crunch it for meaning, and then send predictions and assumptions, and make services like facial-recognition technologies predicated on their vast database, available to police and ICE agents, among others such entities.There has been increasingly stiff pushback against this melding of the tech world with the government—which has always been there to some degree, but which has become even more entwined than usual, of late—and that pushback is international, even long-time allies like Canada and the EU making moves to develop their own replacements for Amazon and Google and OpenAI due to these issues, and the heightened unpredictability and chaos of the US in recent years, but it’s also evident within the US, due in part to Trump’s moves while in office, but also the on-the-ground realities ...
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    17 分
  • Grok's Scandals

    Grok's Scandals
    2026/02/10
    This week we talk about OpenAI, nudify apps, and CSAM.We also discuss Elon Musk, SpaceX, and humanistic technology.Recommended Book: Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith ButlerTranscriptxAI is an American corporation that was founded in mid-2023 by Elon Musk, ostensibly in response to several things happening in the world and in the technology industry in particular.According to Musk, a “politically correct” artificial intelligence, especially a truly powerful, even generally intelligent one, which would be human or super-human-scale capable, would be dangerous, leading to systems like HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. He intended, in contrast, to create what he called a “maximally truth-seeking” AI that would be better at everything, including math and reasoning, than existing, competing models from the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.The development of xAI was also seemingly a response to the direction of OpenAI in particular, as OpenAI was originally founded in 2015 as a non-profit by many of the people who now run OpenAI and competing models by competing companies, and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk were the co-chairs of the non-profit.Back then, Musk and Altman both said that their AI priorities revolved around the many safety issues associated with artificial general intelligence, including potentially existential ones. They wanted the development of AI to take a humanistic trajectory, and were keen to ensure that these systems aren’t hoarded by just a few elites and don’t make the continued development and existence of human civilization impossible.Many of those highfalutin ambitions seemed to either be backburnered or removed from OpenAI’s guiding tenets wholesale when the company experienced surprising success from its first publicly deployed ChatGPT model back in late-2022.That was the moment that most people first experienced large-language model-based AI tools, and it completely upended the tech industry in relatively short order. OpenAI had already started the process of shifting from a vanilla non-profit into a capped for-profit company in 2019, which limited profits to 100-times any investments it received, partly in order to attract more talent that would otherwise be unlikely to leave their comparably cushy jobs at the likes of Google and Facebook for the compensation a non-profit would be able to offer.OpenAI began partnering with Microsoft that same year, 2019, and that seemed to set them up for the staggering growth they experienced post-ChatGPT release.Part of Musk’s stated rationale for investing so heavily in xAI is that he provided tens of millions of dollars in seed funding to the still non-profit OpenAI between 2015 and 2018. He filed a lawsuits against the company after its transition, and when it started to become successful, post-ChatGPT, especially between 2024 and 2026, and has demanded more than $100 billion in compensation for that early investment. He also attempted to take over OpenAI in early 2025, launching a hostile bid with other investors to nab OpenAI for just under $100 billion. xAI, in other words, is meant to counter OpenAI and what it’s become.All of which could be seen as a genuine desire to keep OpenAI functioning as a non-profit arbiter of AGI development, serving as a lab and thinktank that would develop the guardrails necessary to keep these increasingly powerful and ubiquitous tools under control and working for the benefit of humanity, rather than against it.What’s happened since, within Musk’s own companies, would seem to call that assertion into question, though. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today: xAI, its chatbot Grok, and a tidal wave of abusive content it has created that’s led to lawsuits and bans from government entities around the world.—In November of 2023, an LLM-based chatbot called Grok, which is comparable in many ways to OpenAI’s LLM-based chabot, ChatGPT, was launched by Musk’s company xAI.Similar to ChatGPT, Grok is accessible by apps on Apple and Android devices, and can also be accessed on the web. Part of what makes its distinct, though, is that it’s also built into X, the social network formerly called Twitter which Musk purchased in late-2022. On X, Grok operates similar to a normal account, but one that other users can interact with, asking Grok about the legitimacy of things posted on the service, asking it normal chat-botty questions, and asking it to produce AI-generated media.Grok’s specific stances and biases have varied quite a lot since it was released, and in many cases it has defaulted to the data- and fact-based leanings of other chatbots: it will generally tell you what the Mayo clinic and other authorities say about vaccines and diseases, for instance, and will generally reference well-regarded news entities like the Associated Press when asked about international military conflicts.Musk’s increasingly strong political stances, which have trended...
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    16 分
  • Mother of All Deals

    Mother of All Deals
    2026/02/03
    This week we talk about the European Union, India, and tariffs.We also discuss trade barriers, free trade, and dumping.Recommended Book: The Kill Chain by Christian BroseTranscriptA free trade agreement, sometimes called a free trade treaty, is a law that reduces the cost and regulatory burden of trading between two or more states.There are many theories as to the ideal way to do international trade, with some economists and politicians positing that complete free and open trade is the way to go, because it allows goods and services to cross borders completely unencumbered, which in turn allows businesses in different countries to really lean into whatever they’re good at, selling their cars to countries that are less good at making cars, while that recipient country produces soy beans or computer chips or whatever they’re good at making, and sending those in the other direction, likewise unburdened by stiff tariffs or regulatory hurdles. Each country can thus produce the best product cheapest and sell it to the market where their products are in high-demand, while they, in turn, benefit from the same when it comes to other products and services.This theory leans on the idea that everyone is better off when everyone does what they’re best at, rather than trying to do everything—specialization. But those who oppose this conception of international trade argue that this creates and reinforces asymmetries between different nations and businesses: a country that’s really good at producing soybeans may be at a substantial disadvantage if the country that makes cars ever decides to go to war, because they won’t have the existing infrastructure to build tanks or drones or whatever else, while the country that specializes in computer chips might hold all the cards when it comes to generating economic pressure against its enemies or would-be enemies, because such chips are in everything these days, from military hardware to kitchen appliances.This also creates potential frailties for countries that specialize in, say, buggy whips, only to have a new technology like the automobile come around and put a significant chunk of their total economy out of business.This theory may also leave local businesses that don’t lean into a regional strength kind of in the lurch. If a country with a decent-sized automobile industry decides leaves their borders completely open to international competition, there’s a chance that could light a fire under those local producers, forcing them to become more competitive, but there’s also a chance it could collapse the market for local offerings—their cars might no longer be desirable, because the international stuff flooding across the borders from a nation that has heavily prioritized making cars are just so much better and cheaper, whether naturally or artificially, because of subsidies by that foreign government meant to help them take out international competition.This is why most nations have all sorts of tariffs, regulations, and other trade barriers erected between them and their trading partners, and why those trade barriers are ultra-specific, different for every single possible trade partner. The goal is to make international options less appealing by making them more expensive, or making it trickier for foreign competition to smoothly and quickly get their products on your shelves, while still making those things available in a volume that aligns with local consumer demands. And then ideally making it easier and cheaper for your stuff to get on their shelves.The negotiation of all this is massively complicated because Country A might want to favor their soybean farmers, who are an important voting bloc, and Country B might want to do the same for their car industry, because tax income from that industry is vital, and these two governments will thus do what they can to ensure their favored local industries and businesses have the biggest leg-up possible in as many foreign markets as possible, without giving away so much to their trade partners that they create worse situations for other industries and businesses (and the people who run them) on the home-front, as a consequence.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent, massive and potentially quite vital trade deal that was struck in early 2026, and what it might mean for global trade.—At the tail-end of January 2026, the European Commission announced that they had struck what they called “the mother of all deals” with India, this deal the culmination of two decades worth of negotiation, its tenets impacting about 2 billion people and around a quarter of the world’s total GDP.The agreement, as is the case with most such agreements, is fairly complex. But in essence it reduces or eliminates tariffs on 96.6% of all EU goods exported to India, which means about 4 billion euros of annual duties that would have otherwise been paid on European products in India will disappear—a savings for Indian...
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    15 分
  • TikTok Deal

    TikTok Deal
    2026/01/27
    This week we talk about social networks, propaganda, and Oracle.We also discuss foreign adversaries, ByteDance, and X.Recommended Book: Rewiring Democracy by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. SandersTranscriptIn 2021, TikTok, a short-form video platform that’s ostensibly also a social network, though which leans heavily toward consuming content over socializing, was ranked the most popular website by internet services company Cloudflare, beating out all the other big tech players, including search engine juggernaut, Google.It was a neck and neck sort of thing, with Google taking the lead some days that year, but 2021 was definitely TikTok’s time to shine, as it was already popular with young people and was starting to become popular with the general public, of all ages and across a huge swathe of the planet. It even beat Facebook as the most popular social media website that year, despite, again, being mostly about consuming content rather than interacting—that was actually a prime motivator for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to redirect its own apps in a similar direction, shifting its focus from communication and interaction between users toward the creation of binge-able content, and feeding users more of that content in a feed optimized for time-losing levels of consumption.2021 was also the first full year that TikTok was coming under scrutiny from the US government. In the preceding year, 2020, then first-term president Donald Trump said he was considering banning the app because it was becoming so popular, with young people in particular, and because it was owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance it represented a potential national security threat.So the idea was that because Chinese companies are forced, by their very nature, to do what the Chinese government tells them—that’s just how things work over there—and to do so on the down-low if that’s what the governments demands, and to lie about having to do what the government tells them to do, if the government tells them to thus lie, it doesn’t matter that ByteDance’s leadership swore up and down to the world that the company will never use its popularity, and the data it soaks up from all its users as a result of that popularity, to help the Chinese government, the Chinese military, or Chinese intelligence services.It of course will have to do that, and if it doesn’t, its leaders could be black-bagged and disappeared in the night—because again, that’s just how things work over there. So the Trump administration decided to make TikTok a sort of bogeyman, representing Chinese companies in general, and to some degree the presence of China in the US and throughout the Western world, and said, nope, we’re not gonna let this thing continue to operate over here.It’s worth remembering, too, that by 2021 the world was enmeshed in the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China, and which Trump and his administration were ardently attempting to tie to the Chinese government—calling Covid the Chinese Flu, and even worse things, as part of that effort.So this move against TikTok and its parent company, while based on genuine concerns about the ownership of the company and how and where the data being collected by said company is handled, it should also be seen as a political maneuver, allowing Trump, during the 2020 election run-up, to look like he was taking a big stand against a big foreign threat, China.What I’d like to talk about today is a deal that was proposed way back then by the Trump administration, as a potential way out for TikTok and ByteDance, allowing it to continue operating in the US despite threats to shut it down, now that said deal, or a version of it, seems to have finally come to fruition—and what we know about the shape of the resulting new, US-based version of TikTok.—On January 18, 2025, TikTok stopped worked in the US. It voluntarily suspended all services in the country in the lead-up to the implementation of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which was passed by the US congress and signed into law by then-president Joe Biden in April of 2024. This law gave social networking services controlled by ‘foreign adversaries’ 270 days, with the possibility of a 90-day extension, to divest themselves so that they’re no longer considered foreign adversary-owned.This law was almost exclusively aimed at TikTok, and the idea was that TikTok, in the US, would no longer be able to legally function following that deadline if it was still owned by China, which for the purposes of this law has been labeled a foreign adversary.ByteDance could keep TikTok in the US going if it sold a majority, controlling stake of its US-based assets to non-adversary owners, but otherwise it would have to shut down.Interestingly, though Trump was the original source of concerns about TikTok and its Chinese ownership during his first administration, when he stepped back into ...
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    14 分
  • Iranian Protests

    Iranian Protests
    2026/01/20
    This week we talk about war, inflation, and currency devaluation.We also discuss tyrants, police violence, and social media threats.Recommended Book: Post-Growth Living by Kate SoperTranscriptBack in mid-June of 2025, a shooting war erupted between Iran and Israel, with Israeli military forces launching attacks against multiple Iranian military sites, alongside sites associated with its nuclear program and against individual Iranian military leaders.Iran responded to these strikes, which left a lot of infrastructural damage and several military leaders assassinated, with large waves of missiles and drones against both Israeli and allied military targets, and soon after, later the same month, both sides agreed on a ceasefire and that was that.Following that blip of a war, though, Iran’s economy suffered greatly. It already wasn’t doing well, in part due to the crippling sanctions enforced by the US government for years, but also because of persistent mismanagement by Iran’s ruling regime, and the resultant deterioration of local infrastructure, both physical and bureaucratic.Millions of people fled Iranian urban centers during the war with Israel, and while most of them returned when the ceasefire was brokered, the pace of life and other fundaments of these cities never got back up to where they were, before, as there have been fairly consistent blackouts that have kept people from being able to function as normal, and these outages have also kept businesses from getting back on their feet. That, in turn, has resulted in closures and firings and an overall reduction in economic activity.The general hamhandedness of the government has amplified these issues, and the countless other issues of trying to exist within a country that is being so persistently targeted—both in the sense of those crushing sanctions from the US, but also in the sense of being periodically struck by Israel—has dramatically increased uncertainty throughout Iran these past several years.Even before that brief war, Iran was already on the backfoot, having suffered the loss of their local proxies, including the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip—all of which have been either severely weakened by Israel in recent years, or functionally wiped out—and that in turn has more directly exposed them to meddling and attacks from their key opposition, which includes the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.That new vulnerability has put the Iranian government on high-alert, and the compounding effects of all that infrastructural damage, mismanagement, and the need to reallocate more resources to defense has left the country suffering very high levels of inflation, a severely devalued currency, regular blackouts, mass unemployment, a water shortage, and long-time repression from a government that is in many ways more paranoid and flailing than in any time in recent memory.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent wave of protests across Iran and why the US government is apparently considering taking action to support protestors against the Iranian government.—Iran has long suffered all sorts of issues, including regular efforts by ethnic secessionists to pull it apart into pieces they periodically occupy and want to govern, themselves, and concerns from citizens that the government spends a whole lot of their time and the nation’s resources enriching themselves, oppressing the citizenry, funding what seems to be a pointless nuclear program, and prioritizing their offensive efforts against Israel and their other regional enemies, often by arming and funding those aforementioned, now somewhat defunct proxy militias and militaries.On top of all that, as of October 2025, inflation in Iran had surged to 48.6% and the Iranian currency, the rial, dropped in value to 1.45 million per dollar. The government tried to artificially boost the value of the rial to 1.38 million per dollar in early January of 2026, but it dropped further, to 1.5 million per dollar a few days later, hitting a record low. This combined with that wild inflation rate, made the basic fundamentals of life, food, electricity, and so on, unaffordable, even for those who still had jobs, which was an ever-shrinking portion of the population.For context, the drop of the rial to a value of 1.38 million per dollar, the boosted value, represented a loss of about 40% of the rial’s value since June of 2025, just before that war with Israel, which is a staggering loss, as that means folk’s life savings lost that much in about half a year.When currency values and inflation hit that level of volatility, doing business becomes difficult. It often makes more sense to close up shop than to try to keep the doors open, because you don’t know if the price you charge for your product or service will make you a profit or not: there’s a chance you’ll sell things at a loss, because the value of the money you receive and ...
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