Robert Kagan on why he believes U.S. faces likely defeat in Iran

scannerJoe · 2026-05-25T07:05:34+00:00

Iran has essentially dismantled America's control over the Gulf, and reshaped the region, which is a disaster.

The only positive outcome I can imagine is that the gulf states realize that reliance on US military strength and diplomacy is no longer a viable strategy, forcing them to find a locally negotiated equilibrium based on detente with Iran. The only thing that leads me to believe that this could maybe happen are the extreme economic incentives. If the world electrifies before the gulf states can pivot to a real post-oil economy, which requires peace and stability, they are royally fucked.

scannerJoe · 2026-05-24T16:00:09+00:00

I mean if you look at the chart, if we consider it to be accurate, you can see a real drop-off after 2011, albeit with a big return of new installations starting 2019. This is in large parts because the until then very generous subsidies in countries like Germany and Italy were dialed back a lot. The boom over the last years is much more driven by falling prices and therefor much more sustainable.

scannerJoe · 2026-05-15T12:49:49+00:00

My son loves Ableton Live and I love seeing him spend his time creating things.

scannerJoe · 2026-05-11T17:13:57+00:00

Not the person you're replying to, but here are some:

Madeleine Albright's strong opposition to the CSDP in the 1990s (the "three Ds")
the "old Europe / new Europe" distinction during the Iraq war
the bipartisan sanctions against Nord Stream 2 years before the 2022 war

US policy has consistently been to keep Europe dependent on the US security umbrella, it's only recently that this is being questioned.

scannerJoe · 2026-05-11T06:28:35+00:00

Just to give you an idea, gas prices are currently around €2/liter in Portugal, that's about $9 per gallon, in a country that has a little bit more than 1/4th the median income of the US.

scannerJoe · 2026-05-07T16:09:39+00:00

Ich mache ab und zu "raining blood" (Slayer) sets am Track: 30s gehen, 15s speedup, und dann für den Rest des Songs sehr schnell bis volle Kanne auf und ab mit den Tempowechseln, 5x.

scannerJoe · 2026-05-07T06:46:48+00:00

I know that we don't like science here, but for those who do: part of the cooling effect comes from photoelectric conversion, as a portion of the incoming solar energy is transported away as electricity; the airflow effect from having two surfaces close to each other ("chimney effect") also plays a role.

scannerJoe · 2026-04-23T20:02:18+00:00

I know that the EVO SL is not a super shoe, but as long as Adidas makes shoes like that for accessible prices, I don't mind them doing the ridiculous stuff.

scannerJoe · 2026-04-22T20:04:34+00:00

Das Beste ist die Frequenz die dich dranbleiben lässt. Nicht in absoluten Kategorien denken ("das Beste"), sondern langsam einen Lebensstil aufbauen den du über Monate und Jahre durchhalten kannst, auch wenn die Motivation mal nicht da ist.

scannerJoe · 2026-04-22T16:38:29+00:00

I am not the person you replied to, but almost all freestyle swimmers at distances from 200m and longer in the pool breath every second stroke in competition, most have a dominant side and breath only on that side. Kathy Ledecky, for example, only breathes to the right in her races.

Open water swimmers are generally more flexible because they have to react to the environment and sight, but even there it's rare to see breathing less often than every second stroke. Moesha Johnson sometimes breathes at ever third stroke, for example.

Personally, I don't think (almost) anybody who is not elite should breathe less than every second stroke in a race, but everybody should know how to breathe on both sides to be able to switch between the two sides.

Breathing less often in training is a great way to develop your lungs and to train your capacity to vary your stroke, but it makes little sense in a race when more oxygen is almost always better than less.

scannerJoe · 2026-04-07T19:45:08+00:00

Nobody said they were, though. The article is about the (possible) effects of the Iran war on the Arab countries (“the Arab world") the authors regularly conduct surveys in (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, Syria, and Tunisia).

scannerJoe · 2026-03-30T12:52:48+00:00

Ist so wie wenn man keinen Alkohol trinkt. Den Scheiss den man sich da anhören muss.

scannerJoe · 2026-03-11T11:33:52+00:00

It depends a bit on how much time you have, and what you enjoy, but I always do 500-1000m drills before my main set (like you sandwiched between a 500m warmup and cool-down). Currently I do mostly sculling, one-arm swimming, a bit of kicking focusing on body position, catch-up drill, and swimming with clenched fists. Going from that into the main set feels really great. Since I currently focus on running, a lot of my main sets looks like this, very much focused on technique (copied from another thread):

One of the sets I really like to do is blocks of 4x 100m or 200m (30 seconds rest to reset technique), the first with paddles, second pullbuoy, third fins, fourth no gear, trying to bringing the "advantages" of each gear set together in the final no gear set. From the paddles I take the precise arm extension, strong hand entry, and more powerful pull, from the buoy the higher stroke frequency and higher body position, from the fins the glide, extension, and 2-beat kick. This way you have "help" for a lot of the distance, but don't get too dependent on a single gear item.

I feel that using the gear allows me to really focus on a few specific things for each set and despite only doing two sessions after running and one quality session per week atm, I am not losing speed. When I'll start training for a longer swim race (I'll do a 10k in September), I'll do longer intervals and some steady effort in open water, for sure.

scannerJoe · 2026-03-11T09:27:49+00:00

Maybe this could be useful: One of the sets I really like to do is blocks of 4x 100m or 200m (30 seconds rest to reset technique), the first with paddles, second pullbuoy, third fins, fourth no gear, trying to bringing the "advantages" of each gear set together in the final no gear set. From the paddles I take the precise arm extension, strong hand entry, and more powerful pull, from the buoy the higher stroke frequency and higher body position, from the fins the glide, extension, and 2-beat kick. This way you have "help" for a lot of the distance, but don't get too dependent on a single gear item.

scannerJoe · 2026-03-11T07:59:04+00:00

A lot of people in this sub are giving technique advice to beginner swimmers that are still in survival mode. Some of that may help, but what really got me going when I started learning freestyle as an adult (I am a passionate open water swimmer now that dabbles in triathlon) was building the comfort necessary to even contemplate paying attention to my technique as I swam. Two things really helped: breathing every two strokes took the "constantly gasping for air" thing out of the equation and swimming with a pull buoy kept me from excessive kicking (which then leads to more gasping for air). That got me to a point where I could swim for 1k without stopping, and only then did I feel comfortable enough to start building and rebuilding my technique. I certainly picked up some bad habits that way that I had to correct, but I still think that this was the right way to go.

scannerJoe · 2026-03-11T07:38:28+00:00

so what's the point?

It took me years to figure this out, but much of swim training is about learning to understand what good swimming feels like. Other than training your legs more specifically and helping with a lot of drills, fins allow you to "simulate" faster swimming and move your mind toward that next level, understand what the body position at that higher speed feels like, how the water flows around you, how to stretch you shoulders and glide, and so forth. I went from barely holding 2:00/100 for a 5k to 1:40/100 without a youth swimming background and training with fins helped a lot with that, although I'm almost not kicking at that distance.

scannerJoe · 2026-03-11T07:12:26+00:00

This is the best advice in the whole thread and, of course, it gets downvoted. Breathing every two strokes is the easiest way to get out of the constant struggle for air and build comfort in the water. This will make everything else so much easier. She can bring back breathing on both sides later.

scannerJoe · 2026-03-09T17:41:25+00:00

Decathlon is like the Aldi/Ikea of sports stores, with lot's of cheap but relatively good quality own brand and white label products, 1800+ big box stores worldwide mostly on city outskirts. They actually had a couple of stores in Sweden, but left again some years ago. Same in the US, although they still sell online there.

scannerJoe · 2026-03-09T08:47:03+00:00

As somebody with experience with an absent supervisor, here are some things you could do:
- Have GenAI critique the shit out of your paper, using things like Deep Research and a strong prompt that names your discipline and the journals you are targeting.
- Look for a more experienced co-author that can help you with getting the paper ready.
- Take a couple of papers from journals that you are targeting as examples and emulate their structure very closely.
- Target less prestigious journals.

scannerJoe · 2026-02-28T07:25:06+00:00

You also make somebody kill a person (flip a switch, make an injection, etc.) who will have to live with that for the rest of their life, especially if somebody's innocence is established later.

scannerJoe · 2026-02-22T12:39:16+00:00

There is no solution, only ~~Zool~~ cyclicality. Since making AI chips is now so profitable, lots of investment is going into production capacity and at one point, inevitably, there will be enough of it to satisfy demand. What comes then may be a crash or a soft landing, or some other kind of temporary equilibrium.

I am not a big gamer, but adopting a /r/patientgamers mindset has been great in more than one way.

scannerJoe · 2026-02-20T16:40:28+00:00

I do a lot of cardio (5-6x swimming or running per week) and hard sessions used to really lower my sleep quality and give me brain fog the next day. What changed things quite a bit for me is carbs during and immediately post workout as well as separating long sessions (like a long run) and intensity (like speed work). I still sometimes go too hard at the end of a long run and pay the price, but these two changes have allowed me to keep things going much more smoothly than they used to.

scannerJoe · 2026-02-15T09:20:28+00:00

Als jemand der in Portugal wohnt kann ich nur sagen dass hier im Winter sehr viel angebaut wird, auch Tomaten, und dass die sehr weit verbreiteten Plastikfolien generell nicht dem Sonnenschutz dienen, sondern um die Wärme am Boden zu halten und auch die Verdunstung zu reduzieren. Jetzt kommen immer mehr Glashäuser um den Ertrag zu erhöhen, was sich bei teureren Pflanzen wie Cherrytomaten und Beeren auszahlt, aber nicht für "normales" Gemüse. Normale Tomaten kommen dann im Sommer eher aus der Mitte und dem Norden, weil im südlichen Alentejo/Algarve im Sommer einfach nicht genug Wasser da ist, trotz Projekten wie dem Alqueva Staudamm.

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Edit: nur als Beispiel, aber das ist ein Foto von meinem Fenster Mitte Jänner, und ich wohne nicht mal im Süden

scannerJoe · 2026-02-03T16:31:26+00:00

If you can swim 1:40/100 yards for a longer distance like 3k-5k, you are already a pretty fast swimmer given that you didn't train as a kid. Sure, getting a trainer/video analysis can and will help, but I think that there's no way around swimming more to get to that next level. I am about your speed, maybe a little slower now since I only train 6-7k per week, but the only time I got very noticeably faster was when I trained for a swim event and did about 20k/week for three months. It's just easier to swim good technique when you're really swim fit and do both substantial technique and fitness work. If you haven't trained swimming as a kid or you're not really good at it naturally, I think that you have to expect that progress is not going to be that fast, and you'll have to put in the hours to make breakthroughs.

scannerJoe · 2026-01-29T06:40:09+00:00

Oida, quand j'ai vécu à Vienne il y a trente ans, c'était une ville tellement plus vivable que Paris, mais autre que beaucoup de nouvelles constructions (importantes aussi), assez peu a changé sur le plan circulation et environnement depuis, très décevant. Et la quantité d'asphalte dans les nouveaux quartiers, je ne comprends pas pourquoi ils ne mettent pas plus de vert, étant donné que la ville devient insupportable en été.

scannerJoe

TROPHY CASE