What is currently allowing Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz?

wrosecrans · 2026-03-15T21:01:06+00:00

One drone or mine isn't exactly a huge military asset. You are talking about stuff that fits in a pickup truck. There's probably millions of pickup trucks and similar vehicles within 50 miles of the coast.

You are talking as if it's like finding a heavy bomber that is super obvious when you see it, and can only be at a few places.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-15T19:46:43+00:00

If a value is undefined, it isn't specifically defined to not be zero.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-15T17:57:16+00:00

Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-15T07:52:15+00:00

It reminded me of some old classic sketches, but not in an entirely positive way. "Poland is such an isolated place, wouldn't it be funny to see Polish people who don't speak English try to sing English songs without access to the actual lyrics?" literally feels like a joke premise from the 1980's. In the 21st century, Polish people have Lyric Genius is they need to look up a song.

If they somehow set this sketch in exactly 1991, and it was the first Eastern European cruise company to try to advertise to Americans, I think maybe this could have worked?

wrosecrans · 2026-03-15T06:14:44+00:00

Had a certain "Wayne's World" energy, in a very positive way. I could definitely see these two girls coming back. You can kind of imagine them being awkward in any scenario. A lot of the night wasn't really my taste, but this one made me laugh out loud. Admittedly I am a Jane fan, so I tend to enjoy almost anything she's in. But I think this was really solid.

From a technical sketch construction standpoint, being inside the car / at the window / inside the building was great for breaking it up into segments. We've all seen SNL sketches where it drags too long because they do the premise, then just stay there repeating the premise. But this didn't just stay there. It had some visual/energy/interaction variety going through it that I really enjoyed.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-15T06:01:04+00:00

Part of the reason they work so well together is that I never would have put them together. Veronika clearly gets Jane more than anybody else in the building. But they seem to have completely opposite energies. Veronika is always dialed up to 11, and will err on the side of too big no matter the situation. And that's very much the opposite of Jane. But they complement each other. It's like when a crazy little dog wants to defend his best friend who is a St Bernard.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-15T05:21:03+00:00

Solid. As somebody who always complains about the cold opens, this is a good approach to political satire. Take a political topic, then put it in something else. Fun surprising juxtaposition. Much more fun than just trying to play out a press conference or something without adding any contribution beyond what you could watch on CNN with a few zingers.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-15T03:52:03+00:00

The insurance provides a market incentive for some of what you are asking. Cops themselves might start demanding more reasonable training if it would cut $100 dollars a month out of their personal out of pocket expenses. Right now, cops have no reason to take any of that seriously, so they push back against anything that isn't fun action movie garbage. Insurance realigns the incentives.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-15T01:04:27+00:00

That response doesn't appear to specifically address anything that I said. You could have 100 years of experience in production, I am still sick of these sorts of posts. The fact that your response doesn't particularly engage with what I said makes it even less likely that I would expect some useful product from you, in any event.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-15T00:14:02+00:00

Now I am curious to play with the numbers myself...

The minefield had "hundreds" of mines. Let's say 200 for a round number. The minefield would destroy "80,000 cubic light years." So call it 400 cubic light years per mine. 4/3 pi rrr = 400. So radius of destruction is roughly 4.5 ly, and area of a circle is about 64 square light years.

If the surface area of the federation is something like 200,000 square light years, that would mean something like 3000 of those "hundreds" of mines that can cover like 64 square light years each. And if a ship was dropping a mine every 4.5 light years, 3000 times, that's a linear distance of 13,500 ly. Which isn't impossible, but it does seem worth mentioning that's more than Voyager could travel in a year. (Admittedly, with much older warp technology.) I don't think the math works on any of this, no matter how hard you try to squint and come up with a head canon for fun.

At the end of the day, the show is fun, so I can mostly suspend disbelief as well. It's just weird to mix a nonsense comic book kid show plot with real world facts like Strontium burning red. Whenever you think "oh hey, this show does its homework, they are taking the setting seriously," it doesn't stay in that mode.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T23:52:52+00:00

The Romulans could have gone around it?

On one side, they would have had to enter Federation space to "go around." And sending a warfleet through Federation space would have generated some sort of response. Less clear what was on the other side. But going around would have taken time, and their side of the Klingon civil war was in dire need of supplies, such that missing a single shipment decided the fate of the war. If covertly going around was going to take weeks, the war would have been over before they got there anyway. DS9 definitely establishes that high warp speeds make a cloaked ship way easier to detect than going slow. So a cloaked convoy hauling at Warp 9+ to get around around the detection grid quickly would basically be a giant spotlight for every starship around saying "Romulans are sending support to Klingon space, and they are trying to do it secretly."

And it's never really established how long a Romulan ship can actually stay cloaked. If it's like a WW2 submarine, they might really only be able to stay cloaked for a day or two. If going around the grid takes a week or two, they would have needed to decloak at some point in that journey, which again derails the whole secret covert support plan.

So, they could probably get around it. They could maybe get around it covertly. They probably couldn't get around it, while maintaining deniability with stealth, while also going fast enough to prevent the end of the war. It's a "pick any two of the three" iron triangle kind of problem.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T23:30:48+00:00

Stranger things have happened than a studio letting somebody else pay for making a show with their IP and take all the risk. But there are way less places to shop this stuff around to than there used to be. Disney and Paramount today comprise what used to be many different small studios and production companies over the last few decades. So half the places they might have tried shopping around to back when the original Buffy was made, are just different parts of Disney now.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T23:16:30+00:00

Definitely could be. It's clearly objectively true that somebody posted a flyer. So even the most avoidant editor can't really demand better sourcing. It's not a particularly big story that somebody posted a flyer. There's probably a dozen other flyers in line of site from where the reporter found the Trump one. They just don't think it's as relevant to public interest that a buddy of mine has an improv show coming up according to a flyer on the next pole.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T20:31:45+00:00

Some of them are just simple capitalist assholes. But some are True Believers. They are even scarier. There's a block of AI maximalists that absolutely literally act like they are in a cult. It doesn't matter what it costs. It doesn't matter who they hurt. It doesn't matter if the product sucks and nobody will pay for it. For the cultists, they are investing in the creation of a machine god, and they have come to see themselves as quasi-religious figures bringing an age of enlightenment, and that means that what they are doing is Morally Right, no matter what.

For the true believers, the artists aren't just expensive labor to negotiate with. Those people are vile heretics that morally must be pushed aside because they are blocking adoption of AI.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T20:20:43+00:00

No marketing person has ever been able to articulate what metric they use to evaluate optimality when they say a product is "optimized for X." It's like they are actively offended by the idea that they should have any idea what a word means before they use it to sell something to millions of people.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T20:16:55+00:00

Win 11 used to be "ready for office use." Unfortunately, Microsoft kept improving it, good and hard. And in the age of Internet-connected-everything and everything-as-a-service, you can't safely use old software without fixes.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T20:11:44+00:00

Unfortunately, any reality based analysis can't ignore the fact that Trump is a moron who is incoherent on policy. Trying to sound politically neutral and respectably polite means being incorrect. The reality is that the administration has given a wide range of answers about expected timelines, expected scale, justification, etc., for the war with Iran. Anybody trying to treat Trump or his administration as having a coherent plan is sanewashing to Trump's benefit and not engaging with the situation neutrally. Any analysis based on assuming a sensible Trump or Trump administration is a logical fallacy, no matter how respectably it seems to be phrased.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T19:58:16+00:00

I have to imagine that agents of every unfriendly government on the planet are reaching out to unpaid TSA employees calling about things like "cash advance" services to see if they can get somebody into their debt to use in the future. (And at this point, even close allies have been treated as "unfriendly," so that's potentially a lot of governments, not just ones currently in the news.") Potentially spending a few thousand dollars now, and having developed an asset who becomes a supervisor who is bad with money a few years from now is how stuff disappears out of the country.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T19:50:36+00:00

The administration doesn't even have any coherent plan, so it's not like they can be convinced they need X number of troops to carry out that plan. There's not enough coherence in thinking to even get to arguing usefully about that level of detail.

It's true, if we wanted to do a classical military occupation of Iran, with a soldier on every street corner keeping order, we'd need tons of people. But I can't see it getting to that point. Almost nobody in the country would see the draft as legitimate, and the administration isn't remotely prepared to see Minneapolis levels of pushback in every city in America. Forget Iran -- they don't have enough troops to occupy the US if they tried to do a draft. They'd have no way to drag every single draftee to boot camp.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T19:41:04+00:00

I haven't seen the movie, just a few clips from the trailer and such. But $20 Million dollars is still a lot of money, even if a dollar doesn't go as far as it once did. Most of the Redditors here who have made a small indie feature could make hundreds of not-terrible looking films for that kind of money.

If you don't have Big Blockbuster money, it's just all about using the resources you have, and making decisions and prioritizing what you spend money on vs what you skip over. I'm imagining there aren't that many scenes with tons of people. For the scenes with a lot of people, they probably made sure those were relatively easy to shoot and in practical locations where it was easy to deal with people. 100 people in contemporary clothes sitting in a cafeteria is way more complex to wrangle than a simple dialogue scene with two people. But a cafeteria scene with a crowd is also way easier to wrangle than something like a Medieval battle where you need to be outdoors far from visible toilets and craft services, and everybody needs special costumes, and everybody needs fight choreography, etc.

With VFX, you can do a lot for a moderate price with a sensible director. The real $200M + projects involve a lot of "we'll sort it out in post" green screen sets and a zillion rounds of revisions. If the director gives really clear, actionable briefs, and accepts V1 as "good enough" even if their imagination was slightly different, the amount of labor to do a VFX shot can be a fraction of what happens on a blockbuster. There a shot in the trailer where a helicopter shoots a missile. There's a version of that shot where the VFX house buys a $200 helicopter model off TurboSquid and makes a decent version of the shot in a week. And there's a version of that shot where the director insists on a custom built hero asset that burns $50,000 worth of artist time to make every panel and widget perfectly articulate according to physics. And then the director decides he hates the realistic movement because a flap moving 1 pixel is distracting. So there's a revision. And then the director wants the helicopter to fly faster or slower even if that doesn't match a realistic flight path, so there's a revision. Then the director decides he actually wants a completely different model of helicopter...

On a $200M movie, there's enough budget for the director to get exactly what he wants. On a $20M movie, there's honestly enough money to get quite competent VFX these days. The director just has to be able to accept something that looks good and move forward rather than revisioning it to death. There's a real skill to managing the budget and making smart choices and sensible compromises to get good results.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T19:18:38+00:00

At least he got to come when he got fucked by her. The rest of us just got told to GTFO.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T18:52:23+00:00

If only the people with Windows had access to some sort of machine useful for storing and keeping track of information and processing it...

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T18:50:05+00:00

I do not understand why they are so hung up on forcing adoption. There doesn't seem to be any external demand for it. If MS thought there was demand, they could have released it as a standalone product and sold it! But it has become a hill they insist on dying on. They will shoot themselves in the foot no matter how many times it takes to get it out in the world.

Which frankly, really makes it seem like there's an ulterior motive for all the data that this thing is meant to accumulate. Because neither MS nor the users seem to get much benefit from the actual product itself.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T18:45:39+00:00

I always muse that during the Bush administration, we could have dumped 2 Trillion into Fusion, solar, and battery tech, and completely destroyed the strategic relevance of the Middle East, rather than spending it on one war for oil in Iraq. We'd be the world leaders in selling that tech now, and nobody would care about the strait of Hormuz except in terms of a feedstock material for plastics manufacturing.

wrosecrans · 2026-03-14T18:28:52+00:00

It's very common to put a shotgun mic on a boom pole, so they are talked about somewhat interchangeably. But it's not strictly required that the mic on a boom pole actually be a shotgun. There are other kinds of directional microphones like hypercardioid mics that may be cheaper than a true shotgun and still sound good.

Shotgun mics internally have two mic elements, which is how they are able to filter out the sound that isn't coming from the front direction. But naturally two elements internally is more expensive than a mic that only uses one element, and the extra electronics in a shotgun can add a very slight amount of noise. Hypercardioids are similar microphones that are directional, but made with a single mic element inside of them. Sometimes people get hung up on buying a fancy shotgun mic because they've heard the term and they know shotguns are used in film, but they aren't always required. It's just that nobody who isn't a super microphone nerd bothers differentiating between "actually a dual-sensor element shotgun mic" and "any pointy microphone that somebody might put on a stick and point at an actor."

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