Zeros

Music & Mockery:  Iran Made a Dis Track and I Feel Bad for Everyone The visuals are solid. The production is fine. And yet, I am somehow embarrassed on behalf of two countries simultaneously. Iran has been making music videos about Donald Trump . AI-generated, gangster-rap-inflected , Lego -populated music videos with tombstones and dripping blood and the word LOSER in capital letters as if they discovered the caps lock key at the same time they discovered Ableton . And here is my honest reaction: I am embarrassed . Not for Iran. Not exactly for Trump. For the whole situation , the way you're embarrassed when two people you know get into an argument at a wedding and they are both wrong but you can't leave because the car keys are in one of their pockets. The videos showed up in the American press mainly because Iran's embassy shared them on social media. Left to their own momentum, most would have dissolved quietly into the algorithm like a Jell-O salad ...

Iran Installs a Tollbooth at the Throat of the World's Oil Trade — and It Only Takes Bitcoin There is something almost elegant about it. After weeks of war , missile fire, and tankers sitting at anchor in the Persian Gulf with nowhere to go, Iran's solution to reopening the Strait of Hormuz was not a diplomatic handshake or a carefully worded joint communiqué. It was a payment portal. Iran has announced that ships wishing to pass through the strait during the ceasefire period will be required to pay the digital currency equivalent of $1 per barrel of oil aboard — and they will have only seconds to complete the transaction.  As Hamid Hosseini of Iran's Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters' Union explained to the Financial Times , once Iranian authorities complete their assessment of a vessel's cargo, ships are given a brief window to pay in Bitcoin — specifically chosen because it cannot be easily traced or confiscated under sanctions. ...