🚨 Do you understand what Iran just did..
they didn't go after a military base or a warship.. they put out a hit list of 18 American companies.. Nvidia.. Apple.. Microsoft.. Google.. Tesla.. Meta.. Boeing.. JP Morgan.. starting April 1st..
Iran just threatened the stock market..
those 18 companies represent over $15 trillion in market cap.. more than the GDP of every country on earth except the US and China..
Iran just figured out something that nobody in Washington wants to admit.. you don't need to beat America's military.. you just need to scare its investors.. one cyberattack on Nvidia's supply chain and the entire AI industry goes dark.. one hit on Boeing and every airline in the world is grounded for weeks..
in 2020 Iranian hackers breached dozens of US companies and government agencies.. in 2022 they hit Albania so hard the entire government went offline for days.. a NATO country.. taken down by Iran's cyber unit..
and now they're telling you exactly who's next.. with a date.. April 1st..
the scariest part is the companies on this list have more power over your daily life than the government that's supposed to protect them.. and there's no missile defence system for a zero-day exploit.
Iraq in 1991 negotiated a ceasefire.
Saddam Hussein pulled back from Kuwait.
The stated objective of the coalition was achieved.
The UN mandate was fulfilled.
The war was over.
Twelve years of the most comprehensive sanctions regime ever imposed on a country followed.
Five hundred thousand Iraqi children died.
Not from bombs.
From the sanctions.
From the inability to import medicine.
From the destruction of water treatment infrastructure.
From the systematic economic strangulation of a country that had agreed to the terms it was given.
Madeleine Albright was asked in 1996 whether the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it.
She said: "We think the price is worth it."
On camera.
With her name attached.
Then in 2003, after twelve years of compliance with weapons inspection regimes, after twelve years of sanctions, after twelve years of no-fly zones enforced by American and British aircraft over sovereign Iraqi territory:
They invaded anyway.
There were no weapons of mass destruction.
They knew there were no weapons of mass destruction.
The sanctions had worked.
The inspections had worked.
The compliance had worked.
They invaded anyway.
Because the compliance was never the point.
The compliance was the process by which Iraq was weakened enough to be finished.
Negotiations. Compliance. Sanctions. Inspection regimes. Another decade of negotiations. Invasion.
This is the sequence.
This is what "negotiations" produced for Iraq.
Half a million dead children as the price of the ceasefire.
Two million dead as the price of the invasion.
A country that has not recovered twenty years later.
This is the table they invite you to.
People on Instagram are enjoying sunsets, vacations, destination weddings.
People on X are posting like we’re in the final chapters before civilization collapses.
Same world. Different timelines.
Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway.
Run the math on why.
A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes.
The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit.
Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance.
Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error.
67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results.
Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.
I’ve been trying to get into that Dinosaur doc on Netflix and my brain just can’t wrap my head around the timing. What you mean it rained for a million years? What you mean the first dinosaur was the size of a pigeon for millions of years?
Candace Owens: "I urge you, all of you Christian Zionists, sign up for the military today. Please stop tweeting, stop screaming about Tucker Carlson. You have something much more important to do. There's a Messianic mission right now. Go to Iran. Go remove the thousands of dead innocent Palestinian children from beneath the rubble in Gaza so that Trump can build his hotel. I want you guys to be the change that you wish to see in the world."
It doesn’t matter whether Khamenei is dead or not. What matters is how insane it is to live in an era where one country can assassinate the heads of other states with total international impunity. The fact that this precedent is now fully normalized is fucking nuts.