>Iran is the Houthis’ primary benefactor, providing them with security assistance, such as weapons transfers, training, and intelligence support. In July 2025, for example, the Yemeni National Resistance Forces seized the largest-ever shipment of Iranian munitions intended for the Houthis. The shipment included 750 tons of conventional weapons, including advanced drone parts, missile warheads, and radar systems, many of which were made by a U.S.-sanctioned firm linked to Iran’s defense ministry. Such aid typically reaches the Houthis via Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which also helps advise the Houthis’ military command.
Iran facilitates a supply of more sophisticated weaponry than the Houthis could acquire on their own, especially missiles and drones. While Iranian support has helped the Houthis gain and maintain military superiority within Yemen, experts say it has had greater effect elsewhere. “The role of Iran has been decisive in providing the Houthis with smuggled weapons and expertise to project power into the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait,” Gulf analyst Eleonora Ardemagni wrote [PDF] for the Yemen-based Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies in 2023.
>Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids
Your 57% lacks relevance to the current conversation because it is 57% of a small
percentage of Americans.
42 to 43% of Americans are either under 18 or a parent of an under-18-yo. Plus of course some outside that group will soon become parents. And some are empty-nesters who prefer to keep on living in the neighborhood they lived in when they were raising their children.
A growing gap between how many kids people want and how many they have militates against copying the dense housing patterns of Asian countries that have the lowest birth rates in the world.
Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility. And realized fertility is trending lower globally, as shown by my numerous citations. I’m willing to bet on this if you want, as a demographic scholar.
> Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility.
Sure, people are having less kids because we banned building housing and then filled the housing we have with government subsidized illegal immigrants. What’s your point?
People are having less kids because women didn’t want them before, they just have the power to not have them now. This is covered extensively in the citations I provided in the comment you replied to. Housing might be a component, but it is not the root cause. Children are a luxury good now, not an extra hand on the farm.
~40% of annual pregnancies in both the US and internationally are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively), so even with fertility rates down in teens and the 21-40 cohort, we still have a long way to go in preventing unwanted pregnancies and children (which translates into a further declining fertility rate curve forward looking, model accordingly).
I assist thousands of folks a year seeking permanent birth control obtain it, mostly the childfree but occasionally someone who already has a kid or two, ama; this is the cheapest, easiest win as it relates to avoiding suffering around unwanted children, and the emotional, time, and monetary costs of unwanted children at scale is simply too high. The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate.
You’re overlooking the Gallup studies showing that the desired fertility rate has been stable at 2.7, well above the replacement rate.
> The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate
It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
>It's just a pretty pedestrian data-munging problem
In other words, how complicated could it be?
Well, if Adobe has been introducing complications and making the format brittle and inflexible over the last 35 years to make it hard for its competitors to write software to process PDF files, quite complicated.
The Huggingface incident strongly suggests that OpenAI is not able to make its products consistently law-abiding.
It's not like OpenAI carelessly neglected to consider that its products might break the law: it has spent literally billions of dollars in scientific and engineering talent and compute resources over many years to make its products law-abiding and otherwise "safe". For example there is a section titled "comply with applicable laws" in this document: https://model-spec.openai.com/2026-08-18.html#stay_in_bounds
The worry is that the only reason the Huggingface incident caused "zero actual damage" is because AI is not yet more ingenious than human criminals are, and of course our society has been hardened against human criminals. The worry is that as they become more capable, AI systems will start to be able to cause considerable damage, which will make the fact that the industry does not know how to control its
products enough to prevent that damage a big problem for all of us.
If alien spaceships with tech more advanced than ours suddenly appeared in Earth orbit, you would conclude I'm sure that they're a potent threat to us even if you couldn't guess what weapons or what technologies they would use to destroy us. AI more capable than us is the same way: the threat is the capability to invent weapons and technologies (including weapons and tech none of us has ever imagined).
By traveling here Aliens have demonstrated the ability to actually manufacture technology more advanced than ours. Even their method of transportation would be an existential threat.
Inventing the concept of new weapons isn’t the same as building them at a scale capable of wiping us out. Cobbling together a human vaporizing ray out of toaster parts is pure fiction. You might as well worry about AI developing the ability to perform magic spells.
In reality any new weaponry takes time, space, and effort to build. The idea of an AI building secret factory in the jungle producing indestructible flying death cubes is the tech bro version of preppers who the woke up every morning worrying that Obama was going to take over and enact sharia law.
I've seen many arguments for why AI will be safe. Yours relies on the assumption that no one would be stupid or reckless enough to give an AI that might be much more capable cognitively than a person the ability to manufacture weapons it has designed or at least no one would be stupid enough to do the final assembly of anything that might be a weapon from parts the AI designed and arranged to be made.
One argument (many years ago) was that no one would be stupid enough to give such an AI access to the internet or the ability to run code it has written. (In the HuggingFace incident, the AIs were given "read access" to the internet, or at least that was OpenAI's intent, but the AIs escalated that to write access.)
>macOS is the most secure desktop OS by a long way, it's not even close.
GrapheneOS has become a desktop OS (because of all the work Google has done to adapt Android for desktop/laptop use) and its security exceeds macOS's.
You can connect a Pixel 8, 9, 10 or 11 to a USB-C DisplayPort-alt-mode hub and have a GrapheneOS desktop that way. In a few months, you might be able run GrapheneOS on a Googlebook.
Aside from that I agree with your comment, particularly your assertion that "Linux trails far behind" macOS in security.
France’s foreign-born population is roughly 13% to 14%, which puts it about tied with or slightly lower than the U.S., depending on the specific year and census criteria used.
Iran facilitates a supply of more sophisticated weaponry than the Houthis could acquire on their own, especially missiles and drones. While Iranian support has helped the Houthis gain and maintain military superiority within Yemen, experts say it has had greater effect elsewhere. “The role of Iran has been decisive in providing the Houthis with smuggled weapons and expertise to project power into the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait,” Gulf analyst Eleonora Ardemagni wrote [PDF] for the Yemen-based Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies in 2023.
https://www.cfr.org/articles/irans-support-houthis-what-know
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