I'm reminded of an article a while back talking about how the change from sodium streetlights to LED streetlights had a whole lot of unforeseen effects on animals, people's sleep patterns, driver awareness and visibility, etc. due to color changes. There was a comment on the article from an old civil engineer saying "no, these were not unforeseen, we actually did the research back in the day to figure out what color the street lights should be, that's why they were the color they were."
That doesn't seem right to me. Sodium (and mercury) vapor lamps are the color they are due to physics, and were chosen because they're very efficient (and long lasting). Low-pressure sodium is the best and worst of these; essentially monochromatic but fantastic efficiency. Their only advantage, color-wise, is that the light can be filtered out easily (they used to be widely used in San Jose because Lick Observatory could filter out the 589 nm light).
The monochromatic light emitted from sodium lamps is also close to the peak sensitivity of the human eye. Colours are not distinguishable, but contrast is much enhanced compared to “cooler” light sources.
*edit: but it’s the overwhelmingly larger lifespan (20-30k hrs) that led to the wide adoption as streetlights. And I guess, the same is true for the change to led today, because of less power consumption.
It's not especially close to the peak sensitivity of the human eye (in either bright or dim conditions), but that's entirely okay. The goal should be to not affect people's level of dark adaptation.
If you use shorter ("bluer") wavelengths, as happens with white LEDs which consist of a blue LED + phosphor, it causes people's eyes to become bright adapted and effective night vision is ruined, causing people to have much worse vision in the shadows.
Also, if you use bluer light, the lights themselves cause dramatically more glare in peripheral vision, because the shorter-wavelength-sensitive "S" cone cells and rod cells are mostly absent from the fovea (center of the retina), and prevalent in the outer areas of the retina. This is why LED headlamps on cars are so obnoxious for drivers going the opposite direction.
Also, the LEDs clobber people's circadian rhythms and are extremely disruptive to wildlife.
Finally, the light pollution caused by the LEDs is much worse for seeing the stars, which is maybe not as important as the other harms, but still kind of sad.
> It's not especially close to the peak sensitivity
The sensitivity at sodium light is above 75% of the peak human vision (photopic) sensitivity.
This is a very small difference in light sensitivity. For example in the case of many sources of red light or blue light the sensitivity can be 5 to 10 times lower than the peak sensitivity.
Moreover, a perfect source of white light cannot achieve a better sensitivity than around 37%, i.e. less than half of the efficiency of an ideal source of monochromatic light at the sodium emission line.
Therefore the fact that currently LED lamps and low-pressure sodium lamps have about the same energy efficiency is caused by the LED lamps having a higher photonic efficiency and a lower threshold voltage (caused by a P-N junction voltage instead of the ionization potential of sodium), which compensate the disadvantage of using white light. A monochromatic LED lamp with the same color as the sodium lamps could have an energy efficiency at least double over the white LED lamps.
Red light would be even better for affecting the dark adaptation, but it has other disadvantages, like much worse energetic efficiency and lower visual resolution.
Yellow light a.k.a. amber light around the sodium emission line is a good compromise between energy efficiency, visual resolution and dark adaptation.
That's not necessarily a downside for traffic safety, though. Though I imagine someone must have studied the effects of various wavelengths on drivers...
There are 2 kinds of sodium lamps, low-pressure and high-pressure.
The low-pressure lamps emit monochromatic light and they have not only the advantage of long life but they are also the only other source of light that matches the energy efficiency of converting electrical energy to light of the LED lamps.
So replacing low-pressure lamps with LED lamps does not produce any significant economic effects, it was justified only by the supposed advantage of enabling color vision.
However in many places high-pressure sodium lamps have been preferred, which have a wider spectrum, so they allow some very poor color discrimination. The high-pressure lamps have a lower efficiency than LED lamps, so replacing them was justified by energy savings.
Outdoors at night, I prefer the monochromatic low-pressure sodium lamps, but sadly LED lamps have replaced them in most places.
In my area and esp. in the countryside they have green led lighting on various roads as an innovation, with the reasoning that is both least disturbing to wildlife, and best for human vision to see sharply. The light color takes some getting used to, but I am quite a fan of it. Esp. when cycling at home at night through the fields it makes things seem extra serene and peaceful.
Sodium lamps were deemed dangerous for driving” because they made it difficult for drivers to distinguish shapes, since they were different from day shapes. A kid in bright 1980ies colors (Little Red Hood) would look black under those lights.
LED was presented as a sharp improvement because of the large spectrum of white light.
The sodium lamps are in fact safer for driving, because they preserve drivers' night vision, which improves visibility into the shadows, and because they cause less glare.
What they aren't good for is LED manufacturers' bottom line, and the lighting industry spent a lot of lobbying money to entice friendly politicians to heavily subsidize them with public infrastructure budgets, with those subsidies then misleadingly sold to the public as "efficient" and "environmentally friendly".
They're also not very good for reading the newspaper or doing critical color analysis. Thankfully such tasks do not need to be done at night in the middle of the street.
That would make sense. Otherwise I have no idea how people wouldn't have noticed how much more difficult it makes seeing anything outside of the sharp cutoff of the light cone (or, of course, for the person being dazzled on the other side).
The power savings are minor btweeen LED and low presssure sodium lamps. The LED streetlights emit light along the full spectrum, the sodium lamps only at 589 nm. The LEDs are more controllable so smart dimming ( when there are no cars) is a perceived advantage.
Sodium (and mercury) vapor lamps may be the color they are due to physics, but you don't have to put Na or Hg in those tubes. I don't know but Li, K, Rb, Cs should, Mg, Ca, Sr, Ba probably also work, but nobody make lamps with those elements.
There are 4 important properties for the substance used in a gas-discharge lamp.
1. For a sufficient gas pressure in the lamp, the substance must be either a gas or a metal with low boiling temperature, so that it will be vaporized by an electrical discharge.
2. The gas must not react chemically with the enclosure and with the electrodes, which prevents the use of most gases except noble gases and metallic vapors. Except for noble gases and metallic vapors, the lamps using other substances must not have electrodes, so they need a more complex and less efficient electronic system for producing a high-frequency AC discharge, e.g. using a magnetron from microwave ovens.
3. The ionization potential must be low for a good energy efficiency. Alkaline metals have low ionization potentials and low boiling temperatures, so they are better than noble gases and other metals.
4. The color of the light must be one where the sensitivity and the visual acuity are high. This narrows the choice to yellow light, i.e. to sodium, between the alkaline metals.
The lamps that use alkaline metal vapor instead of a noble gas have better energy efficiency, because of a lower ionization potential, which leads to a lower voltage drop on the lamp. Therefore they have been preferred for lighting instead of neon lamps and the like.
Among alkaline metals, sodium is the cheapest, so it was a logical choice.
However, the fact that it produces light of a suitable color was a happy coincidence. If sodium had produced violet light, like potassium, and potassium had produced yellow light, potassium would have been chosen for lamps.
So among the criteria for choosing sodium for lamps, the color of the light was as important as cost, ionization potential and vapor pressure.
Two things can be true. And often that's precisely when we lose out with modern engineering that is much more single-minded.
> Their only advantage...
How are you coming to this conclusion?! Their warmer has very meaningful effects on processing, attention and other visual effects as is the point of the discussion in the first place. It's not clear what makes you so sure that color differentiation is essential and the other effects are irrelevant.
No I absolutely don't know what matters. But it seems neither do you.
...And the old Engineer was just saying that that was the area on the spectrum they aimed for, so they found a light that emitted in that wavelength that could be technically implemented and scaled.
Way better work than whoever it is handling this LED nonsense. Why we can't find a diode that we can use to simulate the old spectra would be a fun research project.
We of course can make LEDs of more or less any color. The current white LEDs are high-power blue LEDs that are covered by various phosphors to give a mix of colors for "full spectrum" illumination. Different color temperatures are produced by different mixes of phosphors. This is pretty similar to how the traditional luminescent (mercury vapor-based) lamps worked.
But different phosphors have different efficiency and price. LED lamps were first introduced for interior lighting, where sun-like spectrum is welcome. Such LEDs were produced en masse and relatively cheaply. So street lighting naturally used them, because municipalities usually look for the cheapest viable option.
We likely could produce high-power narrow-spectrum orange LEDs if there was a large market for the economies of scale to kick in. You can buy deep orange LED lamps today (look for color temperature 1800K or 1600K, "amber"), but they are more expensive, because they are niche.
> Different color temperatures are produced by different mixes of phosphors.
We can make LED light appear to be any given colour by mixing multiple LEDs. But mixed colour isn't the same as pure colour, made from a single spectra of light. Nor is it the same as true broad spectrum light - like we get from black-body radiation like the sun, or a tungsten bulb.
Its hard to tell the difference just by looking at a light. But different kinds of lights - even lights which look the same colour - will change what objects actually look like. And they probably have different effects on our sleep cycle and our low light vision. I was in a room once lit only by sodium vapour lights. The lights were yellow, but everything in the room (including me) appeared to be in greyscale. It was uncanny.
This is part of the reason why LED lights are still looked down on by a lot of old school photographers and film makers. Skin doesn't look as good under cheap LED lights.
For light with a narrow spectrum, it is possible to make LEDs that emit that light with high-efficiency, for any color inside 2 ranges, one from near infrared to yellow (corresponding to semiconductor phosphides and arsenides) and one from blue to near ultraviolet (corresponding to semiconductor nitrides).
Only green LEDs have worse efficiency, because they must be made with semiconductors for which optimum efficiency is attained at either lower or higher light frequencies.
Lamps using high-efficiency amber LEDs with about the same color with sodium lamps could be made at an energetic efficiency at least double to that of white LED lamps.
The double factor comes from the visual sensitivity being double for the light at sodium color than for ideal white light.
In reality the energetic efficiency of such LED lamps should be more than double, because they do not have losses caused by conversion through fluorescence.
seafoam green choice was also influenced by eye rest studies... since our eyes are most sensitive to middle wavelengths. just keep the room dimmer without losing detail. It reduces fatigue for operators on long shifts.
When I was an medical intern back in the day and worked 24 hour shifts every third day, I bought a roll of thick black vinyl and taped it to the window frame. 0.0 light got through.
I think we've learned a couple of times that lighting placement, temperature, and shadow-casting are not ideal [0]. Also some of the newer lighting does actually fade to a different color [1] so it's not just the base temperature of the new lights.
I miss the aesthetics of the support for the street light themselves too. In Spain they used to be curved with a 'crown' shaped top, looking 'classical' and less hard for the brain as straight lines make the brain really tired. We are used to fractal and curved designs from nature, not to fake perspective points in every city full of straight lines.
These could just reuse the current LED lamps by just redesigning the socket. Altough the materials should be changed as the old ones (I think they were ceramic and/or concrete?) could cause serious harms if they felt over random people walking around. And, yes, they can even break concrete pavement like nothing.
I remember hearing a falling lamp+case near my home and upon falling to the sidewalk it sounded like a bomb, I am no kidding, even the floor vibrated and the windows nearly crashed. These things were really sturdy, either concrete or cement. I would love the same design but in magnesium, which can be lighter and maybe as durable, altough I know ceramic/concrete can withstand anything.
Another effect observed with LED street lights, especially in my area, is that many have shifted from white light to purple as a widespread manufacturing flaw causes their phosphor coating to fail.
The purple lights evoke a vaporwave/synthwave aesthetic like I'm in a bad 80s scifi movie. Unintentionally appropriate given the general state of things.
I'm sure tons of people along the way "noticed" but if you're selling LEDs or you're paid by the LED people to create marketing to convince people that LEDs are gonna save the planet, you're not gonna bring that up.
IDK if you've noticed but we are all lighting our house with bulbs that use 1/10th the amount of electricity as incandescents did. I like the color spectrum of a real lightbulb better, too, but not enough to pay 10x in power. I make up for it by using all kinds of random bulbs all over the place so that the aggregate light in the room fills more of the spectrum than if I coordinated them all to be the same.
Did you try using high CRI LEDs with color remperature of 2700K–3000K? When I switched from halogen to LED I did just that and the difference is not noticeable, you'll have the same yellowish tint and very natural looking colours. Even with expensive bulbs, extra longevity covers for higher cost.
Many complain about this, because they have been fooled into buying low-quality lamps, with bad cooling or bad electronic components.
I have many Philips LED lamps bought some 10 to 15 years ago, which were put in Edison sockets for incandescent lamps, and none of them has become defective during all these years.
However, even at that time, it was not their cheapest model, but one that was claimed to be long-life and I believe that later they have discontinued that model in favor of cheaper lamps.
I have no idea which vendor of LED lamps might sell good LED lamps today, because I never had to search for replacements. I assume that good LED lamps must still be available, but one must not impulse buy them, but one must check carefully the specifications of the lamps and the credibility of the vendor, before making a purchase decision.
2700 is really cool. To the GP, if you're looking for something more like daylight but not noticeably yellow, try 3600k or thereabouts.
The actual temperature of the sun is over 5000k (yes, the k in lightbulb temperature corresponds to the Kelvin scale of temperature) but after being scattered by our atmosphere it appears cooler. And where did all that extra light go? It was scattered around, making the sky blue!
Thanks, that's great to know! However, I also had to remove the high-CRI lights from some lamps because I found that they disturb my sleep if I have them on in the hours before bedtime.
I live in a 240-volt country, though, and I've never seen a dimmer switch here.
I do not like 2700 K to 3000 K lamps, which are obviously yellowish and regardless how high their CRI may be they distort the colors of clothes or any other objects.
I also do not like the bluish cheap 6500 K lamps.
I consider optimum the 4000 K lamps. This appear white with only a very-slightly yellowish hue, which allows the perception of the natural colors of most objects, but it still provides a warmer sensation than a strictly neutral white color (i.e. one around 5500 K).
The really awesome thing about the 1/10 power consumption is that the existing circuits/wiring/sockets now suddenly support 10x the light without burning down your house. I'm a sucker for well lit space and these lights are just heaven for me.
For indoor lighting, LED lamps are indeed the right solution.
I have also been using for more than a decade 13 W LED lamps that produce the same luminous flux as the 100-W incandescent lamps or the 23-W compact fluorescent lamps used in the past.
However, the requirements for an outdoor night lamp are very different. Low-pressure sodium lamps have about the same energy efficiency and lifetime as LED lamps, so those are not arguments for replacing them. The only thing that matters is whether you prefer yellow light or white light in a night environment. I definitely prefer yellow light, for reasons already mentioned by others, i.e. much less interference with night vision, sky light, nocturnal animals, or with my street-directed windows at home.
If energy efficiency would really matter, one could produce monochromatic amber LED lamps with efficiencies at least double over the current white LED lamps.
Depending on where you live the heating might be nice.
In the US people use roughly 10 000 kwh per year.
Say we have a 40 watt bulb, say it burns on average 5 hours per day or 200 wh. In 365 days that would be 72 kwh which at 16 cents per kwh is $11.52 or 0.73% of the annual power consumption.
Say one uses 5 light bulbs. Something around $57.60. Say leds use only 25% of the power = $14.40 for $43.2 saved.
The problem is we went from a market that consisted of cheapo/good bulbs at various brightness levels to a market where Walmart and Home Depot have like 60 linear feet of bulbs.
There’s no standards and people are clueless and confused. There are awesome LEDs, but more often you see have harsh, terrible light.
Cluing in is really easy. Look for "CRI ≥ 90", or at least "full-spectrum" for the lamps that are easy on the eyes. Pick 2700K for softly lit spaces, 4000-4500K for brightly lit spaces.
How many life forms do we have to kill before cost savings aren't worth it?
Besides, we can have LEDs in better spectrums for under 1/5th the costs of incandescents. We just hired stingy motherfuckers and don't care about the repercussions of our decisions.
I question the cost/energy savings. Seems to me for the most part any efficiency gains are being spent on making everything 5x as bright and expansive.
I hate incandescents and am glad they're gone. People chronically under light their homes at the best of times.
My whole house is neutral white LEDs except the bathrooms where we go to cool white to make it easier to clean and be sure it's clean (even if it's not spotless, there's a huge psychological benefit to not feeling like dim light is masking even more grime).
Oddly enough I'm otherwise pretty light sensitive - my current office at work has been a nightmare of trying to manage glare from badly places overheads and windows.
Going from 500w for my living room to 80w also helps a lot (and way more light and a lot less heat).
High-quality white LED lamps are indeed optimal for indoor lighting.
That does not make them the best choice for outdoor night lighting.
The replacement of the outdoor lighting appears to have been motivated in most cases by the desire to divert taxpayer funds towards the private companies selling such lamps, instead of by any technical reasons.
Those LED people marketed themselves out of a job, then. I repaced one (1) broken light bulb over the past 10 years, as opposed to 5 a year before switching to LEDs.
I wouldn’t change it for the world. I grew up in Minneapolis and moved to Seattle, so I went in a single night from sodium lights everywhere in a 500 mile radius to LED. It feels safer (subjective), more pleasant to perform tasks in, and less depressing. I should note I care 0% what the animals think of the whole affair.
This is especially important at high latitudes where for months of the year the street lights provide more illumination than the sun for most working people.
It’s not eliminating section 230 entirely, it’s eliminating it for algorithmically promoted content. If you have a site that has user content and you present that content in a neutral fashion, section 230 applies. If you pick and choose what content to present to users (manually or by algorithm), you’re no longer a neutral platform, and shouldn’t be getting the benefit of 230.
I understand that. My point is that this would mean algorithmic feeds can only contain vapid, pointless content with no liability concerns. To me, it doesn't improve the world to require that Instagram and Youtube exclusively serve slop, even if that might cause some number of people to abandon them for non-algorithmic platforms with better content.
Literally every social media site I'm aware of has had, in varying strengths and at varying times, many still currently, a movement among users asking for a fucking chronological ordered feed. Just, what the fuck my friends are saying, in the reverse order that they said it, displayed in a list.
Not only is this seemingly the most desired feed among end users, it was also the default one. MySpace didn't have a choice in the matter, they had to show a chronological timeline, because they didn't have a machine-learning algorithm nor a way to make one. They could tweak it based on engagement metrics but on the whole, it was just here's what all your friends have posted, in reverse order, scroll away. And then eventually you'd hit the end where it's like "you're up to date" and then you go on with your fucking day.
But of course platforms hate that. They want you there, all day, scrolling through an infinite deluge of bullshit, amongst which they can park ads. And we know they hate this, because not only have platforms refused to bring back chronological feeds, they actively removed them if they existed at one time. Not only is this doable, it's the most efficient way that requires the least compute from their servers, but platforms reliably chose the inverse... because it makes them more money.
Also specifically on this:
> My point is that this would mean algorithmic feeds can only contain vapid, pointless content
The vast majority of these sites is vapid, pointless content RIGHT NOW, even if it attempts to convince you it isn't.
Literally every social media site I'm aware of has a chronological ordered feed of people you've chosen to follow. Facebook does, Instagram does, Youtube does. It's just not the homepage, and most people don't care enough about what feed they get to go navigate to it every time they open the app. Would it be nice to make them let you put it on the homepage? Sure, I'd support that.
The current state of affairs is that Youtube and Instagram have brought back fascism and the measles, so if the complaint here is "it's impossible to moderate algorithmic content at scale and so the platforms would become incredibly risk averse," I think I'd take that alternative. I also don't think effectively forcing a breakup of the current online media monopolies is a bad thing either - if you can't actually mitigate the damage of your platform because you're too big, then maybe you shouldn't be that big.
Your ability to evaluate whether the argument is correct is limited. In theory, the author and the correctness of the argument are unrelated; in practice, the degree of experience the author has with the topic they’re making an argument on does indeed have some correlation with the argument and should influence the attention you give to arguments, especially counterintuitive ones.
Even further, not everything is a math proof, where everything has been standardized and open (although understanding the proof is a whole other topic). Heck, take it one step lower - coding - and even though theoretically the source code is 100% transparent, still often times your claims are not reproducible because of environment. Now lower it one more to any kind of science where replication is expensive and/or hard, and then one step lower to personal experiences... And yeah, things can seem tough, can't it?
And even in the case of mathematics proofs, that tells you nothing about things such as: extendability, taste, where future direction should go, what this philosophically means, etc. Which we definitely do care about.
It's funny because the people throwing around fallacy accusations everywhere don't understand that they are semi selectively using fallacies alongside claiming universality while not actually practicing it (not that you have to, of course, I very much don't agree with that premise, but if you're the one saying it...)
Anyways. /rant, it's crazy how many people don't discuss these basic but subtle ideas. To be fair, I struggled with the same exact things when I was 15, and it doesn't seem like you get taught this kind of nuance until maybe the tail end of a rigorous bachelor's degree, though personally I only learned this stuff on my own through extensive trial and error and suffering.
The same way it’s always done: political organizing. Find groups that are working towards the world you want and start chipping in and getting involved. It takes time, there’s no magic wand, and we should’ve started 20 years ago, but none of that changes the answer: if you want the world to be different, get out there and start doing the work.
And, it has worked - it worked in the 30s to get the New Deal through and expand unions, it worked in the 60s to advance the environmental and civil rights agendas, it worked in the 80s to dismantle the New Deal, it worked in the 90s to promote gay rights, it worked in the 00s to make Christian Nationalism a national political force, it worked in the 10s to get a fascist elected and then re-elected, and god willing it’ll work in the 20s to get these fucks out of office again too.
Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building multiple products or companies to get it right
> With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress
Way too often that is used as an excuse for various forms of laziness; to not think about the things you can already know. And that lack of thinking repeats in an endless cycle when, after your trial and error, you don't use what you learned because "let's look forward not backward", "let's fail fast and often" and similar platitudes.
Catchy slogans and heartfelt desires are great but you gotta put the brains in it too.
Without commenting about the frequency of negligence myself, I suspect at least that you and GP are in agreement.
I doubt GP is suggesting ‘go ahead and be negligent to feedback and guardrails that let you course correct early.’
Plugging the Cynefin framework as a useful technique for practitioners here. It doesn’t have to be hard to choose whether or not rigorous planning is appropriate for the task at hand, versus probe-test-backtrack with tight iteration loops.
I see indecision and analysis paralysis far more. And yes, you do need to thing about things, but far too often I see people not do something because they're worried it's not optimal. But not doing something is far worse than doing something sub-optimally!
Iran did the same before the conflict in response to prior Israeli attacks - the two drone waves they sent that were intercepted were both demonstrations of capability, not actual attacks.
Unfortunately I’m not sure their current audience is gonna pick up the implied threat.
It's also a bit unreasonable to launch live munitions that have some 90% probability of being intercepted by a given system on a good day, while intending for "just a warning"
When they launched the drone strikes on Israel, they gave Israel and the US warning time so they could be intercepted. The second time, they gave them much less warning time.
The Iranians have a long history of negotiating loudly via their actions, which anyone who's spent any reasonable amount of time studying Iran knows and has seen in action. They're really not a mystery, they're very transparent, we just don't like what they're saying.
It’s more like if David and Goliath are in a standoff
David takes a small rock and whips it at a sensitive spot on Goliath’s ankles that most people don’t know about (Diego Garcia)
David knows Goliath will probably dodge it, and most likely kick it away given it’s importance, but there’s a point being made by shooting: if it hits then that’s a win, but if gets knocked down it’s a warning that they know where they need to hit for it to hurt
> The kids also weighed in on the debate around the extent of the ban. The two options bandied in Salem were a “bell-to-bell” policy or just inside classrooms. The latter would allow kids to use their phones during passing period and lunch. Several advocated for that change. That mirrored the debate within the Oregon legislature. It ultimately led to a stalemate and the need for Gov. Kotek’s executive ruling.
It sounds like the legislature broadly agreed on the ban, but couldn’t agree on a couple final details. Insofar as an executive is useful, that’s the case for it: calling the shot in the face of several good (or bad!) options but no clear winner.
There is a reason why no US president in the last 40 years has gone through with the fantasy of attacking Iran. When even George W. Bush decides against a war, it means something.
I think George himself is the reason we wound up in Iraq and not Iran. That cabinet was just itching to invade a country full of brown people and oil we could "liberate". Afghanistan obviously didn't scratch that itch and all those people, just by nature of what was going on in the world earlier in their careers, f-ing hated Iran. Buuut, Iran would've been a tough sell. Meanwhile, just over the border there's this other other country full of oil and brown people that's run by a guy the world already considers bad, the propaganda will be easier, the coalition that's keeping him under control is kinda falling apart so we can use the threat of regional destabilization and terrorism to get buy in, the Bush family regrets leaving him in power so any "out of band" advice he may seek is going to be favorable, etc, etc.
I will say this: a demonstrably better foreign policy to the good for the USA and everybody else is our own energy sufficiency trending into green energy.
Two, Israel and surrounding countries get they're act together themselves. Own you're own liberty. Like Aeschylus' Oresteia the furies are out of control.
Three, the general we in the US who voted for trump, the senate that approved the idiots running the executive branch, must move away from shadow boxing culture warfare. It's a waste. The dems lost twice to trump; they are out of touch. The current slate of Republicans are a sinister combination of wusses, liking trumps broader policies, but executing them so malignly and incompetently it's breaking into systemic destruction from law to prices. Im not a liberal; nobody is owning me with smart ass memes. We are simply failing each other while debt increases, our friends in the world are cold hearted to us (derservedly), while congress will not discharge its constitutional responsibilities.
I think im gonna volunteer to help with 2026 voting. Its our next shot at righting this rotten ship.
Of course, wanting to be technically correct: Iranians are Aryan (Iran is a variant spelling), and literally Caucasian (they live near the Caucasus on the Asian continent).
In other words, they're the prototype "White People", at least by claims - over and back. Not that that stops anyone anyway. Certainly doesn't stop people who merely claim to be Aryan :-P
To give an idea of how badly the Bush administration wanted to attack Iraq, Richard Clarke mentioned going into the White House situation room the day after 9/11 and seeing them talking about invading Iraq, and wondering how messed up your priorities had to be to be doing that.
Yeah it’s pretty obviously a stupid idea to attack one of the masters in drone warfare.
Iran mass produces drones and have optimized them for the modern battlefield in the Russian war against Ukraine.
You don’t win wars with jet aircraft anymore. You win them with (cheap, mass produced) drones. And the US only has expensive drones that can be manufactured at a low rate.
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