You're right, I underweighted that. The Abraham Accords logic sits underneath the whole US posture toward the UAE and I should have named it directly. The piece treats it as part of the "economic interests" frame but that's too abstract.
Concretely: the US has tied its Gulf diplomacy, arms sales, and regional security architecture to the normalization framework, and the UAE is the pivot. Calling out UAE arms transfers to the RSF would mean fracturing that, which nobody in Washington wants to do, Biden administration included.
On the second point I'd be more cautious. There were signals after the Iran escalation that Abu Dhabi was getting nervous about regional entanglement, and some reporting suggested a partial cooling on RSF support. But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed, and the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet. The incentive structure to keep hedging via Hemedti is still intact as long as the RSF controls Darfur and the gold flows.
Fair catch on the Accords piece though, that's a gap.
"But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed"
Sure, as I understand it, it is mainly structured around flights and spread out over several logistics lines and already partly shadowed by turned-off transponders and so on. Disturbances at sea are unlikely to affect this.
However, there has already been squawks from the UAE about having to turn to the renminbi to clear oil sales and the like. China is not particularly fond of the RSF and has had good relations with the sudanese state since the fifties. Choking the Hormuz is likely to make this relation and stability in Sudan even more important to China.
More medium term the UAE now has incentive to go look for partners besides the US and Israel. At the moment they try not to, but this is highly likely to change, especially since money is pouring out eastwards from the emirates and to win it back they would need friends that seem stable in the long term, like they did until their remote and nearby allies started beating on one of their largest neighbours.
"the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet"
That "yet" does a rather hefty deadlift. The UAE has begged the US to shield them from the ICC but as I understand it, it did not result in a clear and reliable response. Perhaps they count on the US to do for them what they've done for Israel, but since the US put all their efforts into protecting Israel during this latest iranian response and left their other allies in the region to help themselves, I kind of doubt that this can last.
Russia has an interest in the gold, but I don't think they care whether it comes to them from the RSF or the state, and they are more dependent on China than the UAE. In a pinch I'd wager they would support stability as long as the gold keeps flowing and China is happy.
Edit: Personally I believe the US to be so deficient in short-term memory that they can't manage the relations to other West Asia states than Israel with any form for strategic reliability. They might promise the UAE a dollar swap line, do a press conference about it, and then forget to actually open one, or give it to them and then a few weeks later pull the plug on it because budget reasons or whatever.
Your comment is heavily downvoted because, especially the first sentence, seems AI generated. Was this comment AI generated? HN is for human discussions
They finance projects with terms that drive business to Chinese companies. The Congo gets a highway. A Chinese construction company makes a buck. The financiers make a buck. Business relationships are created and the people who get the highway use that highway to import Chinese goods.
That's how it's supposed to work, when it works. I'm sure it's gotten better with time.
The congo is basically the worst possible example you could have found for this—china notoriously doesn't invest in local infrastructure. There are literally hundreds of better examples across africa and south and central america and central asia and southeast asia.
Clearly they don't. They don't tend to occupy other countries, not outside of immediate territorial claims like Tibet (if you think that constitutes an "other" country)
There's a difference between "sand" in the general, and sand suitable for construction purposes. There's sharp sand and soft sand, and you need sharp sand for e.g. concrete, else it will crack and rot.
There is manufactured sand, but obviously it's more expensive than good old extraction of river beds and beaches, which is scarce.
The study. It basically says that this is something one perhaps should consider in clinical settings and that the speed of fecal matter might be a worthwhile direction for future inquiry.
"Altogether, a better understanding of the complex, bidirectional interactions between the gut microbiota and transit time is required to better understand gut microbiome variations in health and disease."
It does not say 'this is a sign of health and that is not'.
"This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI."
I think it's a few things converging. One is that software developers have become more expensive for US corporations for several reasons and blaming layoffs on a third party is for some reason more palatable to a lot of people.
Another is that a lot of decision makers are pretty mediocre thinkers and know very little about the people they rule over, so they actually believe that machines will be able to automate what software developers do rather than what these decision makers do.
Then there's the ever-present allure of the promise that middle managers will somehow wrestle control over software crafts from the nerds, i.e. what has underpinned low-code business solutions for ages and always, always comes with very expensive consultants, commonly software developers, on the side.
The US does not set out to capture civilians, while the hamas does. It matters. All the rest of the comment makes no sense in light of that.
Also you omitted the part where I said I disagreed with what Israel did. But as a human I believe we are evil like that, and I am really sorry about it.
Israel didn't take responsibility for those until October 7th. Now clandestine operations happen all the time, like the Iranian bombing on Jewish center in Argentina in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing
While I understand why Israel would want to target Iranian nuclear scientists, I find it much harder to comprehend why Iran would go out of their way to bomb a Jewish community center in South America.
What editor you are using has no effect on things like copyright, while software that synthesises code might.
In commercial settings you are often required to label your produce and inform about things like 'Made in China' or possible adverse effects of consumption.
There are many techniques. You're most likely to come across things like declarative DSL:s and macros, then there are things like JAXB and similar tooling that generates code from data schemas, and some people script around data sources to glue boilerplate and so on.
Arguably snippet collections belong to this genre.
This might change due to the UAE not being very happy about the US dragging them into a regional war.
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