Hours-long daylight firefight could be what happens when the enemy is closing in on the downed guy in daylight, and you can't wait. You have the fight you have to have, not the fight you would prefer to have.

Even if the mission was actually about HEU, I don't see why that would lead to the destruction of the aircraft. Why not just fly them out again? So I suspect that they really were stuck. If they were, they would be destroyed regardless of the purpose or mission, to avoid Iran gaining intel or materiel.

I won't comment on the rest. I will note, however, that if the airman was in Boyer-Ahmad, a US raid in Isfahan would be quite a diversion. I will also note that Trump barred the press right about then.

Value isn't a one-shot, though. Value sustained over time is what matters.

Well, if unmaintainable code gets in the way of the "sustained over time" part, then that is still a real problem.

Businesses no longer seem to care about "value sustained over time"

They only seem to operate as "extract as much value as possible in a short amount of time and exit with your bag", these days

I think it's more than that. It's a walled garden. If you want to leave go somewhere else, it's further away than just a tab. That increases stickiness.

For example, let's say I'm an airline. I don't want you in the browser, where you're going to have my competitors in the adjacent tabs. I want you in my app, where all you see is my version of the world. (I mean, yes, you can have multiple apps open, too, and switch between them. It's still a bit more friction than moving between tabs. Or maybe that's just my mental model, and young people see apps as just another kind of tab?)

It's not a military target. It's a very expensive target with ties to some people that might have some influence on the Trump administration.

Trump is threatening to destroy Iran's infrastructure. This is a counter-threat: "You've got infrastructure that we can destroy."

Let's say I bought a 100-ounce gold bar in 1965, when gold was $35/oz, for a total price of $3500. Let's say I sold it today at $4700/oz, for a total price of $470,000. That gives me a gain of $466,500.

And let's say that I regret it. I decide that I really want to hold some gold, so I take the $470,000 and buy another 100-ounce gold bar.

The situation was that I had a gold bar worth $470,000 with a taxable basis of $3500. Now the situation is that I have a gold bar worth $470,000 with a taxable basis of $470,000, and I owe the IRS taxes on $466,500 of capital gains.

TL;DR: Selling and re-buying the same asset gives you the accumulated gains, and resets the price basis.

"Debt monetization" and "seizing other countries' gold" are somewhat orthogonal.

If your neighbor was taking payday loans and pawning silverware, would you trust him to hold onto your jewelry?

Well I can't speak for all the people who own gold, but I expect the order of actions they'd generally prefer is move the gold to a vault somewhere they think is financially stable first and then engage in a relaxed debate about the merits of storing gold here or there second. It doesn't cost that much to move a bit of metal around.

If countries enter the lunatic phase of money printing you never quite know what they're going to do next. But it probably isn't going to be good for asset owners and it may well already be too late to get things out of well known vaults. Better to be a bit early.

Here's the problem with what you're saying. Mutual assured destruction (MAD) was insane, but it worked. We could trust it, because the Russians and Chinese didn't want to die any more than we did.

Iran is a regime with an ideology that embraces martyrdom. That invalidates all the assumptions of MAD, which is how people have had nuclear weapons and not used them for 80 years.

You seem to have confidence that that will work out well. (Or else you hold the US as being so evil that you don't care.) I disagree on both fronts.

Do you deny that the regime that runs Iran embraces Shia Islam? Or do you deny that Shia Islam embraces martyrdom?

Let's just say that the factual position for my claim seems stronger than yours.

As for which of us is spewing propaganda... I'll let the readers judge.

Yes, Shia Islam does not "embrace martyrdom" in that they do not want to live. I think they handle us murdering them en mass with the utmost grace, maybe that's where you are confused?

So, tell me about suicide bombers?

They may want to live, but at least some of them are much more willing to die - much more willing to choose to die - than most leaders of most countries.

The "suicide bombers" are people who had their families murdered by Zionists. A fully expected and understandable response to such a thing.

More fundamentally, in writing it out, I have to clarify my own thoughts. The worst problem with AI writing isn't that, as Xiaoher-C said, "AI copy reads like nobody home" (beautifully said), and so nobody reads it. The worst problem is that you don't have to clarify your own thoughts and ideas. There is a cost to you in that.

I go watch trains. I often wander around while I'm waiting for a train to show up. I think about things, pray, look around. Sometimes I bring a book to read.

I play ultimate frisbee. The read-and-react way you play that game was a nice reset from the push-my-brain-through-concrete-walls character of my work.

Before I retired, I started taking smoke breaks at work. I don't smoke, but if smokers can go outside for 15 minutes, so could I.