I wish I were more surprised. The truth is I’ve been watching executives take their own intelligence out of the equation for some time.

They’ll say “is there any data we can use to make this decision?” And there’s nothing wrong with that yet - more information is good.

But they’ll press and press. “How are we going to measure outcomes? We need to agree on metrics first. What’s our OKR for this?”

They need everything to be spelled out in black and white. Number go up or number go down. That way they don’t actually have to think.

I’ve worked under some really good leaders who could see three steps ahead and knew where we were trying to go. They didn’t need to lay down data gathering instrumentation before taking any single step. They didn’t just throw A/B tests at a wall to see what stuck. But those days are behind me.

Outsourcing the whole shit show to AI only makes sense once you’ve already abdicated all complex thought and judgment.

Just making sure. Cheers

Yeah I hope I made clear that while I know what they will say, I am not agreeing with it or justifying.

Their farcical claim has been pretty visible for a while now: they need not only the land they consider sacred and theirs but also a security buffer around it. If pressed, they will explain how a security buffer is not just an arbitrary distance of land but possession of key surrounding geographic positions. And that requires them to go all the way to THIS map.

Their acquisition of the Golan Heights set the template for this. Israel used to enjoy saying that they never started any of the conflicts, but even then they would admit that they annexed the Golan proactively because of its strategic positioning and key water sources in the area.

Clearly they won’t be talking about how they never started any of the conflicts anymore. They think they have more to gain than lose by letting that claim go.

Okay so if the friendly fire is a from an ally, you can throw that ally under the bus.

Would the same apply if it were American friendly fire? Does it still save face then?

I hope the article begins with a few reasons I should care.

Can you help men understand it? A friendly fire incident sounds a lot like incompetence. How does that play better than an actual combat death from fighting the enemy we went to fight?

I think you addressed who is better equipped to actually shoot down American planes - do you also have an opinion on whether the administration would prefer to credit friendly fire over enemy fire in order to save face? I’m really not sure it saves any face. And wouldn’t command want us to be outraged by the enemy killing our pilots?

Do y’all not write differently when you’re trying to be discreet on Blind?

I don’t think the US killing civilians drives Iranian rebels back into philosophical alignment with their government, but certainly it’s hard to get a protest together when the US is bombing.

Yes but it’s dumb as hell for a president to try to look cool as hell for the cameras before making a speech about a damn war he started.

It doesn’t even have to be per person. It can just be by time of day.

Let’s call it what it is: price discrimination.

Yeah that would turn it into more of a birthday problem.

It would also make it downright weird.

Yeah. We’re on a different topic now from “how do they know - no one asked me.”

I would hope they made this very anonymous to reduce any incentive to lie. But I am sure dudes even lie to themselves, so it is probably difficult to get good numbers. Maybe someone has studied how much people lie about this and they used that to adjust the estimates?

It might be that there is pun at all about them calling it Dachau and that was the point. Oh we can’t use this cheeky nickname anymore? Fine, we’ll just refer to it as Dachau. Ban that.

I have a cat that looks exactly like this and is exactly as dumb.

if my own government was conducting mass surveillance on me I would be particularly furious at the betrayal. But I would also not support it conducting surveillance on foreigners either.

So no one then. I’m not trying to pin you here, just explain why it did indeed sound an awful lot like you were saying that. Conducting no surveillance is pretty much not having any intelligence operations. Are they supposed to wait by the phone for tips? This is where I was coming from. If you tell me you meant something different, I believe you, but this is how I got you wrong, and why I disagree if you thought you said nothing even remotely close.

To grasp it intuitively, I think of it like this.

With the first person, you have 1/365 chance the birthday will be on any given day.

Each person you add to that adds not just another person but also another day that can be a match.

After two people, you still don’t have a match but now you have two days. The third person can match either of those. That’s a lower bar than person #2 had to meet.

By the time the 15th person walks in, the question is: “what are the odds that you share any of these 15 days as your birthday.” And remember, it’s not that that person’s odds are 50%. It’s everything from the original 1/365 chance on up to that fifteenth person, cumulatively, that has a 50% change of a hit.

See how this already sounds a little more likely than just narrowing in on the final final result of two people having the same birthday? The way the problem is phrased makes it sounds like more of a bullseye than it truly is.

So I think part of it is just difficult to grasp intuitively, but it’s also phrased deliberately to throw off your intuition.