Why would the Taliban want to shoot down a plane? They’re not terrorists like IS or Al-Qaeda and they’re not antsy enough to shoot down a plane first and think later like Iran are, nor is it an active warzone… They just want to commit human rights violations in peace and shooting down a plane is a golden ticket to foreign intervention.

Green is actual data, white is straight lines connecting the green, but they don’t have data.

The cut across Northern Iran is just a straight line, but they will have stayed north of the border.

There’s a difference between libertarians and republicans looking to make more money. Most of the supposedly anti-taxation anti-regulation billionaires just want less tax for them and fewer regulations for their business; everyone else and especially imported products can be taxed more to give the billionaire’s company more subsidies, and regulations to prevent competitors from growing or starting up is even more welcome. Even when it comes to personal freedoms, they don’t care and will gladly support the government in reducing those freedoms if it earns them some sway.

This all goes directly against the libertarian principles of government non-intervention in the free market and people’s personal lives, both of which are vastly more important than just reducing taxes, which supposedly comes as a side effect later (even if in reality taxes would probably stay the same as you’d need to provide more assistance to low income people)

This isn’t to say that more principled libertarians are necessarily noble or right or whatever compared to people who just want lower taxes, just that saying it’s about reducing taxes and giving power to corporations is buying in to the direction that corporations are trying to move the ideology in

Be generally aligned with the right

It’s gotta be authoritarian right though… I can’t see a pro-immigration, pro-choice, pro-gun, anti-tariff, anti-corruption (generally pro-freedom, that thing republicans pretend to like) libertarian getting anywhere with trump, it wouldn’t surprise me if a tankie got along better given they’re into most of the things trump likes

Planes don’t fly great circle routes though, there’s overfly fees, weather, mountains, ETOPS and just plain politics… This route looks ordinary compared to some international routes, eg Helsinki to Singapore where you dodge Russia and Ukraine for politics, taking you way below the great circle route, then Turkey for overfly fees and Iran for politics, taking you almost back up to the great circle route, before dipping down again to avoid the Himalayas

Google haven’t so much been destroyed by their own technology as hustlers have learnt to game it. Search as a whole has become worse as a whole as a result which is one reason people are looking to LLMs more as unreliable as they are, as they’re easier and way better than mfa/seo content

Of all the people who deserve money, corrupt politicians and lobbyists are the only two groups who deserve it less than people like musk

I personally haven’t bought anything from Amazon for years now (or really anywhere online, I think maybe 8 things in the past year?), issue is even within the last week I’ve spent hundreds if not thousands on AWS through work… Sure it’s not me paying, but it’s also pretty hard for me to not to given they have such a monopoly