Not only that, the tabletification of education has actually been shown (via standardized testing) to make our kids dumber. This is the first time a new generation has scored worse than their parents. Technology has its place, we need to pick and choose where.
I just went to Zion last week. There was an hour long wait to get on the shuttles due to crowds. The River Walk trail to the Narrows was so congested you would bump into people. The Emerald pools was packed with people despite being a 500’ climb. It’s a very popular park during spring break.
Zion backcountry isnt in the canyon though. Its nice, but not nearly as scenic as the canyon. If you want the unique canyon experience theres no way to get it without the crowds.
> The backcountry is just as beautiful
Just not true. There are 10,000 sq miles in utah alone that are just as nice as the non canyon part of zion. The canyon is unique.
You're wrong. The Subway, Orderville, and Mystery Canyon are all slot/narrow canyons and you won't find crowds remotely comparable to the shuttle stops. You can get the unique canyon experience without the crowds.
I visited Zion a fair bit when I had pretty regular business travel to Vegas. Probably wouldn't go back today. The shuttle is something of a nightmare if you don't pay to stay in the park and I think my favorite hike is still closed due to rockfall.
Scheduled encrypted back up of git repos via ssh/rsync to a simple server from a macOS workstation. I’m tired of the complexity to host a simple private git repo. Using this suite of scripts, I’ve been able to incrementally backup an encrypted copy of my private git repos to rsync.net (but it could be configured to be any ssh host with rsync capability).
TBF, Iran is saying an exorbitant price right now, but in reality they will need to balance their price with demand to bring in the maximum possible revenue. The toll may work out in the long run.
Very Large Crude Carriers carry ~2 million barrels of oil. Ultra Large Crude Carriers double that. If oil went down to $50/Bbl, that $2 million fee amounts to a ~2% tax per ship, given their cargo capacity. It's not particularly exorbitant, especially given that the entire reason they proposed this toll was to fund their rebuilding efforts (Americans and Israelis did a lot of damage that's been under-reported and ignored)
This conflict has been an interesting case of watching mass hysteria interact with propaganda in the newform, rapid pace of media that exists in the internet age. The amount of wild conjecture, speculation, misinformation is the most extreme I've ever seen it, eclipsing even the 6 months of nonsense that was spurred on by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The 2% is the camel's nose. They are establishing that they tax the Strait traffic and there is no longer freedom of navigation. Once it is a done deal, the deal will be altered...
AFAIK they only let two ships pass before closing it again due to Israeli strikes on Lebanon, so in effect the strait is still closed and likely to remain so.
I think the price can only increase. There is not much competition for Hormuz. If it is exorbitant now, it can only be more expensive later on. The demand for oil is not going to go down drastically for quite a few years.
If there was another route, the oil would have found the way.
In time pipelines can be made, no? 2 million per ship already gives a lot of room for exorbitant infrastructure projects to break even in the medium term
Pipelines take years, even decades, at least here in Canada. You'd be surprised at how many billions of dollars and person-years of labour you need to get the thing turned on.
Pipelines are incredibly vulnerable to being taken offline by an inexpensive long-range strike. You can't just put them in the middle of a war zone, especially when we (the US) have targeted that same type of infrastructure first.
Pipelines are usually buried under the ground. Pumping statins could be protected by short range SAM systems. An undegraund pipeline can be destroyed by a heavy glide bomd (not an option for Iran) but should be relatively safe from shahed drones. Iran's ballistic rockets are not precise enough to hit a pipeline wihtout spending multiple rockets (in which case it would be cheaper to repair the pipeline than to produce all these rockets).
sure, as the oil wells and the pumping stations and everything not underground, but right now there's not even an option to try. (also loss of a pipe section compared to the loss of a tanker is much better economically, easy to replace, not to mention that there's no loss of life, so ultimately it can bear more risk even if there's an active conflict.)
None of those have near the capacity to replace what was flowing through the Straight and will not replace the Straight for a long time. That's the whole problem.
If there were viable alternatives to the Straight, the US would have attacked Iran decades ago. Every US administration has had people in the wings desperate to "Fix" the Iran situation, but only Trump was stupid enough to try it.
Meanwhile, the actual production is meaningfully damaged, and for at least a couple years.
The problem is the fee has nothing material to do with the straight itself. There are no maintenance costs for the open sea. Coordination is also not a big concern, you can tell because previously ships were able to pass without incident and coordinate among themselves.
Actually, this is extortion. Meaning that it is done under threat of violence. Worse yet, the US military may end up enforcing this, and collecting on a share of the fees.
It won't take very long for Iran to recoup the damages. After that, why keep the fees going? Because it's free money, that's why.
The strange this is, if the US and Iran can partner on this, that would lead to a weird peace, because they both stand to benefit, meanwhile countries that depend on the straight (Korea, Japan, etc.) have to pay the bill.
> There are no maintenance costs for the open sea.
There are massive maintenance costs for the open sea with how we utilize it. Maritime security and policing, navigational infrastructure, weather reporting, radio repeaters, international bureaucracy, etc.
Global maritime trade is extremely costly. It's simply hidden behind opaque public spending on things you don't think about. In all likelihood it's a sunk cost that would ballpark around a few hundred billion dollars annually, invisible money spent just to keep things running at the scale and reliability that they do.
Now the maritime traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz may only partially overlap with this spending, but people greatly overestimate just how "cheap" maritime activity actually is.
I don't think this count as open sea. The rule is 12 miles from the coast (12 nautical miles btw, i don't know what it is in freedom units). i'm pretty sure the strait is narrower than that at the place where the toll is paid (if you count both side, i.e less than 24 miles Between Oman's peninsula i forgot the name of, and Hormuz/Qeshm islands).
So basically, Iran say "here, you have to pass through our or Oman's waters, we will let you, but please pay a toll for the derangement, that we will share with Oman."
not really; you would have to pay to run an oil pipeline through another country's territory even if that country wasn't bearing the cost of maintaining the oil pipeline
the strait isn't international waters -- it's part of Iran and Oman's territorial waters
For land pipelines thiere no eqauvalent of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea according to which both Oman and Iran should allow free passage of ships. And "normal" path lies on Oman's waters which dones't stop Iran from attacking ships there. The strait toll is a pure racketeering.
You make it sound that there are only two sides in this story.
Spain, Argentina, Kenya, Indonesia, Kuwait and countless other countries haven't bombed any civilian infrastructure either and yet they will be affected by the aggressive posture around international maritime traffic.
Are you expecting that Iran will not apply the fee to ships that sell oil Malesia or South Africa?
Their only defense against being bombed was using their geopolitical position to its advantage. Their own civilian infrastructure was bombed by the US-Israel axis, with the support of the Gulf states.
I fully expect Iran to apply fees on every ship going through, and they should.
Spain, Argentina, Kenya, Indonesia and countless other countries are paying for the aggressive and reckless actions of the US-Israel axis.
That's the situation of the country where I live btw. I don't blame Iran for using the weapons at their disposal for survival, I blame the rogue states that attacked Iran and forced their hand. Let's not forget that Iran could have done it at any time in the past decades, and showed restraint in doing so, even with all the sanctions and Israeli aggression.
I am afraid that soon, actual sea pirates, e.g. in Central and South America, Africa, etc. will start using naval mines in their regional seas, demanding crypto payment from passing ships.
If it was just to 'hide' payments then they could just use USD and using crypto would just be an improvement in convenience. A bigger reason is that they won't be indirectly attacked with monetary policy and that the acceptance of USD with entities willing to do business with them is probably low right now.
The person launching them sure does. This scenario reminds me of the time Russian hackers took over a US pipeline a couple years ago then immediately apologized saying they didn't want to cause a international incident and they would vet their targets better in the future. There are not many people who want that kind of heat. Like the first ayatollah is dead and the second is reportedly in a coma. The Iranian government is willing to pay that price and that's why they won. How many pirate leaders do you think are willing to pay their life so that their third of fourth successors can maybe collect a toll? Or how many are like Venezuela and you can kidnap one guy and the whole house folds.
This problem sounds like an excellent opportunity. We need a race to the bottom for hosting LLMs to democratize the tech and lower costs. I cheer on anyone who figures this out.
What if you could group multiple of them. Long queries run on the group that’s commonly doing those. Shorter queries que faster because they’ll execute faster.
Seems like the phone was using some internet access point hosted on the ship? In which case, the French naval IT services should ban certain risky services to soldiers.
You know what would be ground breaking from a company that prides itself on environmental sustainability? A replaceable battery. These headphones are all garbage once the lithium battery reaches end of life.
> AirPods Max battery replacement is available through Apple Support for $79, which often results in receiving a refurbished unit rather than a direct repair.
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