𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

People are mostly water, no? Makes perfect sense then.

Sure, but a nuclear program is kinda hard to hide. Even spy sattelites will likely spot the signs, and good luck blocking those.

Espionage.

Pahlavi himself iirc never ruled and criticised his father who did, so not sure how correctly he can be characterized as an “autocrat”. He might well be genuine. But yes, it’s obvious that there’s foreign countries who’d much prefer him over the theocracy.

As far as I could tell the Shah guy isn’t actually intent on becoming a monarch (he was fairly critical of his dad) but wants to help Iran transition towards democracy. How he does that, no clue.

Still, apparently that guy is the dude most Iranians trust to take over. I say most, but it’s still barely 30% iirc; Iranians are pretty disillusioned with their (potential) leaders at the moment.

When the battery dies, the glasses continue to function as a traditional pair of single-vision specs, ensuring the wearer is never left in the dark or have safety compromised such as when driving or operating machinery.

In my head this works quite well as an animated short film.

Some of them are protesting for it, judging by the pro-shah chants. Not sure how widespread it is though.

GNU Taler’s documentation already covers KYC laws.

For exchanges, yes. For merchants, no.

They would only need to wait 2 weeks if they specifically want to be able to reverse a charge, but AFAIK a merchant can take possession of the money much earlier, and can still send a refund to a buyer’s Taler wallet at any time as a separate transaction.

Merchants can’t take possession of the funds, the exchange determines when the money is sent. After that, according to the docs a refund will trigger a 410 Gone status code.

https://docs.taler.net/core/api-merchant.html#obtaining-refunds

It seems there is a template to offer a refund, but the customer would have to go and “accept” the refund manually, which is poor UX compared to every other payment method out there where this happens automatically.

I’m not sure how that’s a problem specifically? Why does it matter if they gain a little interest on it on the time that they have it until the merchant exchanges their tokens for the money? Is that worse than the fees associated with Wero?

It means exchanges are financially incentivised to keep hold of the funds for as long as possible, delaying payments. In a world that’s rapidly moving towards instant payments (like Wero), this means transferring money will happen at a snails pace. You can configure the wire deadline, but given that shortening it makes the refund UX worse I’m not sure it’s ideal. It’s weird to have this be a tradeoff anyway.

If you have a more clear source, let me know.

Fees differ per country, it’s based on what the previous most popular payment method offered. In NL it’s cheaper because iDEAL is fairly cheap. But here’s a source on BE costs: https://www.ing.be/en/business/payments/wero/wero

0.3% per transaction under €33.33, and a flat €0.10 for transactions of €33.33 or more.

Basically you pay a percentage, but it’s capped at a maximum transaction amount. Far cheaper than creditcards at least.

Taler doesn’t offer consumer protection, and the anonymous aspect might sound nice but KYC laws prevent merchants from accepting it (and in a lot of cases, knowing who the customer is is quite helpful from a merchant perspective).

But the real killer to me seems to be this (from the Taler docs):

It is possible for the merchant to refund a contract order, for example if the contract cannot be fulfilled after all. Refunds are only possible after the customer paid and before the exchange has wired the payment to the merchant. Once the funds have been wired, refunds are no longer allowed by the Taler exchange.

This basically means your payment method is dead on conception. Online stores in the EU are required to offer no-questions-asked refunds within 2 weeks. This means a store has to wait 2 weeks at minimum before they get their money (modern payment methods are instant or next-day, 2 weeks is exceptionally long). That’s a massive dealbreaker. It also means exchanges can make tons of money by keeping the transferred funds in their account and collecting interest on it.

It also weirdly means that refunds aren’t possible once a transfer is settled. That’s a weirdly brief window imo.

It’s also quite funny to me that Taler claims to be immune to chargeback fraud, when it doesn’t offer chargebacks in the first place. Makes it easy, don’t it?

I don’t really see why a consumer or merchant would necessarily want to use this over other options. Perhaps a restaurant might, or some other store that sells things that are intended to be consumed immediately, or a service provided immediately (like a theme park or cinema). But even then there’s other, more widely available options instead.

Wero is in a completely different space, doing primarily ecom payments instead. Taler doesn’t do what Wero does any better (or in many cases, at all it seems).

China also knows that other countries don’t exactly share that perspective. And it certainly won’t persuade Trump to not continue his anti-China policies.

Which is the point, it’s rarely tried because it’s very risky and unlikely to succeed or achieve your goals. The US military however was capable enough.

How many other heads of state do you remember being kidnapped from their palace, like from anywhere?

Of course Venezuela is no China or Russia and doesn’t compare to the US military, but they did have fairly modern Russian-made AA installations, all of which were successfully disabled or destroyed. And again: zero casualties.

You expect the operation would be successful, sure. But not as perfectly executed as it was.

I did.

In a matter of hours the US kidnapped the president of Venezuela, from his house on an army base, taking zero casualties. I don’t think there’s many militaries around that can beat that. It’s not the same as capturing Putin or Xi, sure, but it’s no trifle either.

Entra is derived from the Latin intrare, meaning “to enter”, which makes sense for access management/id verification software tbh.

A random Xitter account crying foul isn’t a sign of widespread crisis of confidence. Only 6% of Republicans don’t approve of the Maduro kidnapping. His approval rating went up a bit since the kidnapping (38% -> 42%).

His base, by and large, support the warmongering.

I’m not so sure it does. China is openly arguing against Trumps logic here, and the US just did demonstrate their military is still highly effective. The US seventh fleet hasn’t moved away from Taiwan, and Trump is clearly signalling he intends to keep China down.

I’d argue Xi is not happy Trump decided to actually do something like this, because it increased the risk of his plans with Taiwan as well now that the US is openly hostile and MAGA cheers it on.

China needed him to keep up the whole peace pretense and for MAGA to stay on board with that. Now that that’s gone, Trump has cleared the way for more military intervention.

A global, world-ending nuclear war is still unlikely at this point.

There’s a fair few steps in between filled with horrors that we get to pass first. Such as when superpowers realise that since nobody can realistically use nukes, conventional warfare is back on the table (e.g. if China invades Taiwan and the US intervenes, will either side nuke the other’s population centers? Probably not).

Then follows the realisation that superpowers can use nuclear weapons in a conventional war, but in a more tactical way (as a little treat). Don’t bomb a city, bomb a navy, or an airfield or army base instead.

Global nuclear war would only happen if a nuclear state is threatened with total destruction. But fully destroying a state hasn’t been the playbook for some time now. Instead, take whatever peripheral stuff you want, and strategically weaken the enemy state in key areas (e.g. take out an important figurehead, like the US did with Maduro, or fund/arm insurgencies like in Syria). Let civil unrest then do the rest and topple the government for you. Then use diplomatic/economic/military pressure to sway the fledgling new government into your sphere of influence. With a bit of luck the country itself isn’t totally ravaged and can become profitable fairly soon.

Colombia, Cuba and Panama are much more likely to be on the chopping block soon.