You seem to be making the assumption that "app" means "sellable product", rather than "one off that works for me". It doesn't.

When everyone is able to make their own one off prototype in 30 minutes, no one will pay for the thing that took someone 6 months.

whatever you prototype - the one who built it in 6 month will have economy of scale to make it cheaper than your diy solution, and because they serve many customers and developed it for 6 months - their product will be 100x better than the one you diy

there is very very rare use case when diy makes sense. in 99% of cases its just a toy that feels nice as you kinda did it. but if you factor in the time etc it is always costs 100x more than $5/month you could usually buy

With that logic LEGO sets and Salesforce subscriptions should be virtually free due to their economy of scale

Based on your earlier comment and your last paragraph, your impression of AI vibe coding ability is at least a year out of date.

In late 2024 it might have taken 6 months. Today, two weeks, maybe 3.

> 2. You can spend time choosing the professor and the topic before going all in

To a point. If you stray too far from your personal interest, you increase the risk of burnout.

It's the same freelance advertisers who optimistically refer to themselves as "influencers".

Certainly not. Some propaganda is made up, some just highlights some convenient truth.

Trouble is it's hard to tell the difference.

Eh. Most nice power strips are also surge protectors.

The current Middle East situation dates back to at least the second millenium BCE.

Obviously the recent immigrants are recent. Anything that is recent is recent.

Was there a time in the last several thousand years when there was not a "significant amount of recent X immigrants"?

No there was not. The whole region is layers upon layers upon layers of waves of immigration of different groups.

No it dates to the late 1800s with the creation of Zionism. It's important that we stay rooted in history and not religious mythology.

The Middle East had plenty of wars, religious violence, etc long before the late 1800s. The Crusades are not religious mythology. The Mongols are not religious mythology. The Rashidun Caliphate was not religious mythology. These are just three entries in a very long list of non-peaceful power shifts in the Levant.

None of that has anything to do with "Israel", which is a creation of Zionism, again from the late 1800s.

Sure. We're both right.

You said: "$group has been meddling in the Middle East since $group was created"

I said: "groups have been meddling in the Middle East for millenia."

You disagreed, apparently because you're choosing to define "the current situation" as "Zionists meddling in the Middle East" so I suppose you're tautologically correct that the "current situation" has been around as long as they have.

Humanity has had wars since homo sapiens evolved (and prior) that doesn't remove all context and morality (viewed through any lens).

You're saying the same thing.

Saying "the situation with the Zionists has existed as long as Zionism has existed" is the same as saying "the situation with Homo sapiens has existed as long as Homo sapiens has".

In your world view is it possible for empires to fall?

If so, why do you think this is not relevant to this particular empire at this particular time?

Obviously. All empires either have fallen or will fall.

That doesn't mean all extant empires are currently actively falling, and soon, will have fallen.

The US is less divided now than it was during the Civil War, which it survived. Why would it be more likely to fall now than then?

Certainly it's possible that could happen to us. If it does I fully expect to have elections throughout the process.

We have the highest concentration of weapons per capita in the world and a deeply ingrained expectation of voting. In a very dark humor sort of way it would be absolutely hilarious if someone was stupid enough to attempt to intervene in the process.

We might go down in flames but you can be absolutely certain we'll have collectively agreed to light them ourselves.

Things are absolutely different, but there is no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections.

> no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections

Sure, but there's mechanism in real life that allows cancelling elections like sending your newly funded ICE goons to polling places. Ideally everyone follows the constitution but in reality (even looking at past administrations) there's nothing stopping the executive from taking an action and saying "oops guess we'll let the courts figure it out!"

I agree. Stability of a system is not so much about whether there is some mechanism or force that wants to push it away from equilibrium (because there probably is some such perturber outside of a perfectly controlled environment), but stability is more about whether there exists a stabilizing mechanism to bring the system back toward equilibrium after it starts to deviate.

Yes, of course they are different. We're not embroiled in an active Civil War with tens of thousands dead and a third of the country having seceded. Most things are different from that.

Fascist Italy also held "elections", like China and Russia do today. "Elections" is not a magic concept.

Free elections, on the other hand...

Sure, but we're discussing what you said:

> Why worry about how the midterms, if you can create a situation where elections cannot be held at all...

The two concepts are not exclusive. You could have "elections" but with heavy ICE presence at the polls "to guarantee security", effectively ensuring only the "right kind of people" will vote. That's not free elections.

That's fine. You didn't say "free elections", you said "elections not held at all". There's a difference.

The US held elections during the Civil War.

There is no crisis that would create a situation where elections "cannot be held".

That is to say, if the current admin attempts to suspend elections, the legality of that and the magnitude of the reaction will be the same, crisis or no.

Some of the states held presidential elections, not all, but the winners write history so it worked out fine in that case.

Every non-Confederate state held elections. Two recaptured Confederate states (TN and LA) held elections. The only states which did not are the ones that had seceded, and thus were not US states at the time.

That's not precedent for the federal government declining to hold elections in any way.

Please explain how saying "there is no crisis which could justify suspending elections" downplays anything the current admin is doing.

How are they downplaying it? Trump can try all he wants, but there is no mechanism in the constitution that allows him to do that. He wasn't successful in 2020 and he won't be successful this time.

The GOP won't even kill the fillibuster in the senate because they know change is coming.

Like a lot of things, little about this war is purely bad or purely good.

If the Iranian regime were over thrown, that would be good for basically the whole world except the people actually operating the regime. So, if the war ends without that happening, then that's at least partly a bad thing mixed in with the good of, y'know, not having a war anymore.

> Realistically, it takes Russia to supply 10 high precision drones per day to keep up the fear with pinprick operations.

Considering Iran supplies Russia with a lot of its high precision drones, I don't think it even takes this. Iran can do it all on their own.

Russia no longer buys Iranian drones. Russia tied up with Iran to setup drone manufacturing in Russia instead, so that both can benefit ( https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/08/europe/russia-drone-facto... ).