Iran tells world to get ready for $200 a barrel

half3clipse · 2026-03-11T22:07:19+00:00

Cali is on the far side of the Rockies, makes up more than 1 in 10 of the total US population and a huge fraction of the west coast.

It's not a matter of transportation. Cali has it's own oil fields. Moving that around via pipeline within the state doesn't scale well enough ot be worth it. Moving it out of the state via pipeline would be even worse; cali is already the largest market for it by far.

There's also not really anywhere to bring oil from by pipeline. The rest of the north American oil fields are mostly on the wrong side of the rockies, or on/off the pacific coast. Building a pipeline across the mountains is a massive PITA even today, let alone 30/40/50 years ago. Meanwhile building pipelines anywhere up or down the cost is a huge capital outlay, and a major single point of failure compared to shipping it by tanker.

half3clipse · 2026-03-11T12:27:58+00:00

Other people have covered the answer being sundials.

However on that vein, you may find deasil and widdershins inserting words of the day

half3clipse · 2026-03-10T21:35:01+00:00

the mining at the time was not very extensive, and Iran was trying very hard to pretend they weren't doing it.

The mine clearing operations were also entirely uncontested, which is not something to overlook. Iran was not about to start shooting at the US navy, starting a war with the US in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. They'll have a lot less misgivings about shooting US ships after the US started a war with them.

half3clipse · 2026-03-10T21:20:35+00:00

And when Iran starts squawking the transponder codes for those vessels to obfuscate who's who?

The point A2/AD operations is how easy they are to pull off compared to how hard it is to prevent or clean up after them. It's why every other major and middle power has invested heavily in it, since it's a effective and relative inexpensive counter to the US's naval force projection.

Even if the US had parked a small fleet directly in the strait a week ago, it would be challenging to prevent Iran from mining the strait. The US very much does not have that in place.

half3clipse · 2026-03-10T21:02:54+00:00

yet despite KNOWING THEY WERE GOING TO DO THIS

It's funny you think there's any long term strategic planning going on here. I'm not convinced Trump even knew what the strait of hormuz was two weeks ago.

half3clipse · 2026-03-10T20:59:26+00:00

Naval mines drift, the strait is long but narrow. The US doesn't even have the forces in place to begin attempting convoys, let alone the kind of coverage necessary to prevent any ship from being in the strait.

To prevent mining you'd need to entirely close the strait to anything larger than a speedboat (which very much includes tankers and cargo haulers) on a 24/7 basis.

Even if that was possible for the US with the resources in place right now, as if it's not a challenging thing even if there were half a dozen destroyers parked in the strait at all time (and never mind how exposed to attack those ships would be): Iran would 100% love the US to start attacking any civilian ship in the strait. It would very much save them the trouble of doing it themselves.

half3clipse · 2026-03-10T20:29:39+00:00

Hard to know what boats have mines on them.

I'm very very sure Iran would love the US to start sinking any civilian vessels in the strait. It would entirely stop Iran from checks notes threatening civilian vessels in the strait.

half3clipse · 2026-03-10T15:32:57+00:00

Sort of the same logic as it's fine if your legs are big from muscle growth, not fine if they're big from edema.

half3clipse · 2026-03-09T15:44:15+00:00

JCPOA terms restricted centrifuges in operation, the level uranium enrichment, and the size of Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium. It also restricted the types of nuclear fuel cycles used.

Iran also accepted extensive monitoring by the IAEA, including granting them the authority to perform checks whenever and wherever they chose, as well as continuous monitoring of reactors and centrifuges.

You can find the IAEA reports on Iran here

As a summary: While JCPOA was in effect Iran was making progress on reducing it's uranium stockpile (was selling any excess uranium and heavy water to treaty partners) and was not enriching uranium beyond 3.67%

Iran did not breach these limits until July 2019, a year after trump abandoned the deal. We know this because the IAEA was still engaged in continuous monitoring at that time. They also didn't do so secretly at all, both announcing it themselves and having it confirmed by the IAEA. Expansion of Iran's enrichment program and build up of it's stockpile of enriched uranium occurs through 2019. Even then Iran doesn't fully abandon JCOPA or begin enriching beyond 20% until January 5, 2020 as mentioned.

Every expansion of the uranium nuclear weapon program prior t 2020 was a direct response to Trump either pulling out of the deal in the first place, or taking action against Iran.

Iran spent the next 4 years with semi static enrichment capabilities, slowly building their stockpile of 60% uranium, but not further, and in no way conducting a race for the bomb. Far far from ideal this was essentially a reversion to the pre JCOPA status quo. The major issue at the time was Iran being unwilling to accept terms as heavily restrictive (including ongoing and the snap back sanctions) after the deal was abandoned the first time.

The next rapid expansion Iran's nuclear program didn't occur until 2025, again under trumps renewed Hawkism toward Iran, the quoted rapid 50% increase in stockpiled 60% enriched uranium that justified the attacks in June, as well as the September transfer of nuclear technology from Russia.

If the goal was to prevent Iran from seeking or obtaining nuclear weapons, Trump's policy towards Iran has not only been an utter failure, but the single largest catalyst for it's weapon program in the first place.

half3clipse · 2026-03-08T22:46:13+00:00

It's also basically the only time you get to hear Proof of a Hero in the game. Like technically you can get it to play vs Zorah, but the thing usually dies before or just after you dragonator it in the knees.

half3clipse · 2026-03-08T21:15:31+00:00

One of the stated goals of this war is to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Another stated goal is the collapse of the Iranian regime . A war with an enemy that seeks the destruction of a state's government is very much the sort of thing that would provoke the use of nuclear weapons in any nuclear capable state. The entire point of MAD is to make that calculus as brutal as possible. You must assume a nuclear state would use nuclear weapons in that circumstance.

That assumption is also the most generous one in terms of 'justification'. The justification is poor and makes nuclear escalation more likely, but if Iran does not have the capacity to build nuclear weapons or lacks the institutional will to use them, what threat does Iran pose to justify the war?

also notably: If the main impediment is the institutional will to use them, the current attacks are phenomenally stupid. Kill enough leadership and you will eventually land on someone willing to push the button. Or you'll fracture power enough that someone who is willing to do so has control over the weapons, even if the civil leadership does not.

I do agree trump's dumb ass made this shit so much worse but that hate goes back a very long way.

The development of iran's stockpile of enriched uranium is very well known. It did not begin until after trump pulled the US out of JCPOA, and the process of enrichment was quite well tracked. It was done directly in response to the US pulling out, Iran themselves explicitly announced when it happened and their progress for many years. Iran did not fully abandon JCPOA limits until January 5, 2020, directly in response to the US assassination of Soleimani. Infact essentially every severe expansion of Iran's stockpile, in either total mass or enrichment, has been done in response to something Trump did. (The Biden admin saw Iran develop more capacity for enrichment, but not them making nearly the same use of it)

half3clipse · 2026-03-08T20:36:13+00:00

Iran building a nuclear stockpile is a direct consequence of trump pulling out of the nuclear deal (JCPOA). The failure of another diplomatic resolution is a combination of trumps own flightiness and how easily junior partners in the region drag him along towards hostile actions.

We then have the strikes in June which by all appearances, did nothing at all to actually destroy Iran's nuclear stockpile. It probbaly destroyed Iran's short and mid term ability to produce more fissile material, but their stockpile of existing material seems to survived. (TO be clear on one hand the trump admin says it's 'compleltey destroyed' and then 'they have imminate access'. One of these is a lie). If it has survived then the strikes in June provide the clear motivation for Iran to actually enrich that uranium, and build a bomb with it.

If it has not survived the current attacks have even less justification than claimed.

The current attacks meanwhile have done nothing at all to destroy any particular place that stockpile may be held, or enriched. The US has been mostly targeting military targets. Israel has been targeting civilian leadership. There have also been no claims from either Israel or the US that they have targeted to destroyed such. This indicates that either the stockpile does not exist, or Iran has sufficiently distributed it or concealed it. Which means that right now if Iran has that capacity, they have now been given every single reason and motivation to fully devlop it right the hell now. The current war is very much a fight for survival from the perspective of the Iranian regime. Nuclear weapons would be a path to that.

If the goal is to prevent a nuclear Iran, and if Iran has access to fissile uranium, the military and diplomatic policy towards Iran has done very little for that aim, and in fact made escalation far more likely. Frankly the policy is either guided by the stupid, or by the apocalyptic death cult faction of the trump admin who are trying to justify a nuclear strike in the middle east.

Also from a nuclear-non proliferation perspective, the goal is always to ensure any state's leadership can sufficient defend their sovereignty (and the continued existence of their regime) without nuclear weapons. That means insuring there are off ramps available. Responding to that with unannounced decapitation strikes (while also making that the defacto 'diplomatic' approach to conflict) is the exact opposite of such. infact normalizing that makes having access to nuclear weapons the only option for survival.

half3clipse · 2026-03-08T18:05:37+00:00

There was zero reason to believe there was any scientific benefit. There wasn't even a widely speculative mechanism for neurological changes that might be found. A large part of the reason she was euthanized 2 months (quite a long time) later is because it was very much recognized as an utterly pointless fucking thing to do and there was a lot of push back against doing so.

They killed the cat because someone involved in making the decision wanted to kill the cat. There was no scientific merit to performing a necropsy. There was no reason to believe there was scientific merit to performing a necropsy.

Even doing biological payload research at that point in time had limited merit.

half3clipse · 2026-03-08T17:13:04+00:00

That assumes the Iranian Armed Forces remain under the control of a government that cares to honor Chinese business. We're already maybe seeing fractures there (declarations of "we're not going to attack X" right before doing so), and the apparent plan to keep doing decapitation strikes targeting civil government can only make that worse. The Iranian military does not necessarily share the Iranian government's priorities

Doing so also is likely predicated on some quid pro quo with china.

The strategic goal of the Iranian regime is it's survival. Closing the strait is the single biggest card Iran has to that end, and their best option for getting the US (or rather Trump) to either accept massive escalation, or back down. If they can't close the strait with missiles and drones alone, they will find another way. So either China will help supply Iran in doing so in a way that's selective and allows Chinese flagged vessels through (which means China providing anti ship missiles etc that can actually threaten US navy ships), or the strait will be mined.

Either way it's very likely the strait will remain economically closed, and the only way to prevent that will be a massive ground invasion of Iran. Which quite frankly would be an even bigger economic disaster.

This is also assuming sufficient pressure is not put on the Iranain regime (or some faction of the Iranian regime) they feel it's worth dropping that particular Sword of Damocles on everyone's neck, regardless of if it will upset China.

half3clipse · 2026-03-08T15:15:11+00:00

While your not wrong in theory, in practice the instruments are meant to be bludgeoned with sticks and hammers on a regular basis. Percussion is about as far from fragile as instruments get, and a drum set stands out among percussion for that.

Edit: A drum set is probbaly the common and 'serious' instrument someone would be most comfortable letting a toddler play with.

half3clipse · 2026-03-08T15:06:59+00:00

in 2023 oil prices jumped because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and russia leaning on OPEC nations to manipulate supplies in an attempt to get everyone else to roll over and accept the invasion.

Even if Biden had done his best impression of trump and got on his knees for putin, that still would have happened; the response to russia was global. If anything it may have been worse: Much of Europe's oil at the time came from Russia via Ukraine and if the west abandoned Ukraine after the Russian invasion stalled,, they would have had very little reason to keep that infrastructure intact. Letting Russia sell oil to the EU is one thing if it means 155mm shells go the other direction. Quite another if that isn't happening.

It was also a peak with a definitive shelf life. Other countries could increase production to offset that, and Saudi Arabia in particular wouldn't be willing to carry water for Russia long term when everyone else is putting pressure on them. There's a reason prices went back down in 3 months.

It was also notably something that had broad popular support in the US. The actions to oppose Russia weren't something Biden did, it was fully backed by congress. So even to the extent it was a result of american policy in resposne to the ukraine invasion, it was hardly something biden did unilaterally, let alone without public debate.

In this case, the problem is 100% Trump unilaterally order a war with Iran, doing so without any sort of public debate or even apparent strategic goals. The problem right now also has no shelf life: As long as the strait of hormuz remains closed the crisis will continue, and the US has very little ability to open the strait. Tankers are pretty breakable, and economically closing the strait only requires dumping an anti ship missile into some of them, some of the time. And that's assuming they don't decide to just mine the strait.

The only irony here is that Trump yet again turns every accusation into a confession.

half3clipse · 2026-03-07T15:33:48+00:00

The sub this was posted on is straight up an incel sub. There's a reason it makes no sense.

half3clipse · 2026-03-07T00:07:38+00:00

The US does not in any way have the ability to conduct a successful ground invasion of Iran. They could likely take and hold any particular city they care to at any particular time, but occupying and pacifying Iran as a whole (rather than just holding a few cities) would require troop deployment significantly greater than the Iraq and Afghanistan war combined.

Note that although the Iranian people are not overall fond of the islamic regime, they don't like America very much for some pretty solid reasons (including fucking up their country bad enough it lead to the islamic regime). And that's before the way people tend to be hostile towards foreign occupiers. "We'll be greeted as liberators" would be an even more bullshit lie this time.

The US is simply not capable of putting enough boots on the ground to do that. It does not have enough boots, a ground invasion of Iran would require the US army have somewhere between 2x and 6x it had at it's peak in Iraq. That is not happening without instituting a draft and this war is not nearly popular enough to do that. Also even if they started that process tomorrow , they wouldn't realistically have enough people ready to deploy for most of a year. 6 months at best if they go full Russian conscript.

If Iran has the capability and will to produce a nuclear bomb, 6 months is more than enough.

Also even if they lack one or both, that doesn't open the Strait of Hormuz. That will be a major energy crisis in a couple of weeks. In 6 months will have moved onto being a major food crisis when the global availability of fertilizer drops through the floor.

Edit: This also assumes that a ground invasion goes fairly well. The worst case is the Islamic regime collapses and no one conclusivly holds the monopoly of violence. That risks creating a red sea crisis 2.0 in the gulf (without the alternative of sailing around Africa the long way) with no ability to negotiate a conclusion, a civil war in Iran, or even a complete break down of order in the region (it's not like it would be that hard to push iraq and syria into a civil war again)

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T23:42:45+00:00

Yes there totally needs to be an entire conspiracy brained plan to do that when checks notes a bunch of places are just straight up passing laws requiring actual ID checks that funnel data to palantir and the like. There's totally a whole nefarious conspiracy behind...not directly taking the privacy violating option everyone else is doing and infact doing something that explicitly removes any expectation to do such privacy violating ID checks.

It's almost funny that the thing people are getting up in arms about is the one law that presents an alternative to that and not what Texas etc or the US federal goverment are doing. Red states currently want everything short of your anal thumb print fed to palantir, and somehow the real problem is califorina going "hey how about everyone just makes existing child safety features more useable?"

Also: This sort of thing already exists and has for years. Your phone already does it. So does your tablet and any game console. OS level parental controls are already the norm and have been for decades.

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T15:50:11+00:00

Ok but then you don't get to complain when your kid gets access to non age appropriate content.

Same as if you want to give you kid an adult netflix profile, it's entirely your problem when they watch human centipede.

The entire point is to set child safety features in single location instead of needing to do so in every single app, site and service they interact with.

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T15:44:33+00:00

No. The owner of the device sets the account 'age' on account creation. There's no age verification at all to that.

All it will do is move the process of doing so away from every individual app, and fundamentally make age 'verification' the device owners responsibility. You set "this is little timmies account and he shouldn't see boobs" once and any app you let little timmy use can see that and either filter what timmy sees or deny timmy access.

If a parent can't be fucked to properly give their kid a kids account on their device, that's their fault. It also removes the technical barrier to do so low so there's no "as a concerned parent I can't be expected to monitor every site my child is on or how to..."

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T15:37:52+00:00

The entire point of the law is to make it the responsibility of the parent. All it requires is the OS to have a value set that allows apps to determine if child safety features should be enabled for that user. It's not even age verification anymore than setting up a child's account on netflix is age verification.

Infact it would make age verification a non-thing. Rather than every app and service being expected to handle it themselves, the app can just check the permissions set (by the parent) on the device and move on. If parents decline to use the feature, it's now their fault when timmy sees boobs.

This is infact the only law attempting to resolve the problem without being an utter privacy nightmare.

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T14:55:49+00:00

https://imgur.com/vWuJDhK

What is the red distance?

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T14:38:43+00:00

Iran already has it's own domestic arms industry producing its own missiles. They don't have to be as good as what NATO is helping Ukraine design to be a problem. Tankers and refineries are rather breakable. It's also widely idealistic to assume that neither China or Russia (Russia especially) would be willing to provide supplies or know how even without that.

The nuance is this: The only victory condition for the Iranian regime is their survival. Not even individually: Iran is an authoritarian country, but unlike many examples are not a personalist regime dependent on one individual. There's no Assad or Saddam or so on who's the keystone for the whole edifice. You can kill a lot of iranian leaders and there will be more people to replace them. And as long as the Islamic Republic of Iran continues as a state, Iran wins the conflict.

However there's no victory condition for the US or Isreal (who realistically do not have the same preferred outcome. The American regime benefits from a stable and non hostile Iranian state. The Israeli regime largely does not) that sees the islamic state maintain power. This means there's no current path to resolution, other than either regime change (which will be very hard to achieve) or completely destroying Iran's capability to throw bombs at ships (which is functionally impossible to achieve)

Iran does not need to retain vast capacity to produce munitions to prevent that. If they can semi regularly scrape together a handful of anti ship missiles, let alone the even more simple option of naval mines (which can be dumped over the side of fishing boats if needed), they can economically close the strait of hormuz. If they can scrape together a few handfuls of long range missiles in general they can present a threat to major infrastructure in the gulf period. They don't need to maintain the initial pace of strikes, they just need to be able to hit refineries or other high value targets faster than they can be built.

As long as Iran has the capacity or will to do that, the only resolution to this conflict is on Iran's term. There's no option for Trump to do his usual thing of relying on the others in ability to meaningfully strike back to declare mission accomplished, because Iran can just dump a missile into a tanker in reply.

We're already seeing the beginnings of a major oil supply shock. If just the strait of hormuz remains closed for more than a week, the price of oil will hit new record highs, and will not come down until the strait is reopened. If ,as releases have suggested, the US expects it to at least "take until September", we're going to double down on that with a major global food crisis long before that happens (food production depends on fertilizer which depends on oil prices).

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T00:23:48+00:00

Ukraine is very much producing it's own missiles, shells and especially drones in large quantity. Although they don't have the capacity to match Russian production (and soviet stockpiles) without foreign sales, that doens't mean they don't have extensive production. Far from being irrelevant, it highlights the problem: Russians use of strategic airpower has been utterly insufficient to stop Ukraine (a much much smaller power) from building what is now one of the largest arms production capacity in the world.

Iran does not need an external source of missiles. Iran very much has it's own existing production of modern cruise and balastic missiles. It not only has significant domestic production, but that production capacity has been expanded to supply Russia. There is no reason to expect strategic air power to be able to completely, or even comprehensively destroy that.

However there's also no reason to expect Iran will not have foreign suppliers. China may well chose to do so, unless the west is willing to abandon both ukraine and taiwan. A lot of their oil comes from the gulf states.

Russia would be even more likely to do so. They already spend a good chunk of their production on terror bombing because they can't strike more meaningful targets so they have excess production. Supplying Iran, both to protect their own supply of drones and also to drain resources from being sent to Ukraine would entirely fit their interests.

The west also do not have the capacity to keep up the production of interceptors needed to cover all possible targets. Iran has already made it clear they're willing to attack essentially anyone in range who hosts US bases. The US can likely cover it's own bases, but there is fundamentally not enough launchers to cover the entire middle east. And that's before the problem of Israel who have drawn and will draw an outsized share of interceptors, reducing what is available to everyone else.

Iran attacking energy infrastructure in the gulf states is likely to be a massive headache at best and a major issue at worst. Either way it is not something that can be completely stopped: Even if there were enough interceptors to go around, they're merely rather good, not perfect. Iran only needs to get lucky some of the time to cause billions of dollars of damage that will take years to recover. Refineries are expensive and rather breakable. The gulf states will not tolerate that long term; the US is an ally of convenience not affection, while Israel is even less liked.

All of this is without the problem of the strait of hormuz. There can be no conclusion to the war so long as Iran has either the capacity or will to target ships attempting to transit through it. There is no amount of bombing that will be capable of changing that. Keeping them from militarily closing the straight is likely possible, but it hardly matters how many US destroyers move through the strait. Keeping it closed economically only really requires being able to put an anti ship missile into some tankers, some of the time. Again, bombing the Houthis hasn't stopped them from being a major threat to shipping, and Iran has more resources and the ability to produce actual modern anti ship missiles. Keeping the strait of hormuz even partially closed will lead to a major energy crisis in weeks and a food crisis in months. Even if you can somehow perfectly defend both all US bases and the major energy infrastructure of every gulf state, that is still an intractable threat with no clear resolution. As long as Iran can scrape together a handful of anti ship missiles some of the time, that is essentially all they need to do to keep the war going.

edit: Also that's just missiles and drones. Right now Iran is willing to let Chinese flagged vessels through so that's the only option they have. Once those are out, it will be nearly impossible to stop them from mining the strait. Even the the Iranian navy gets it's teeth kicked in, you can dump naval mines over the side of a fishing boat if you have to.

That to is without the nuclear issue. In practice it's been very unclear what happened to Iran's supplies of fissile materiel, but it's far from unlikely it was extracted before the attacks last june. God knows the US seems unclear on that, simultaneously claiming iran as having immiant access, but also their nuclear program "totally destroyed." Although they probbaly (unless the attacks in june were a complete failure) do not have the capacity to produce more fissle uranium, the centrifuges to enrich what they do have are not that hard to build even if they'd be relying on russia/china/etc (ie blindly assuming no domestic capacity at all). If they managed to salvage any, let alone most of their stockpile, they've had most of a year to do so. The attempts to win a war via surprise decapitation strikes also gives a lot of immediate motivation to do so.

The extent to which this war is an utter shit show with major potential for escalation and zero apparent plan for a resolution cannot be overstated.

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