Faced with a choice of either paying godaddy €37.87 in a few weeks or getting a bit of money for the domain, I've decided to let https://sowhereto.today go.

Godaddy sent me an email saying there's an interested buyer who'd like to know my price. I've no idea what a site that gets hardly any traffic and earns nothing from Google's malvertising is worth, so said $100 and am awaiting the response.

I've found the process of building an automated site that use openweather and openmap, along with "curling" event information from various online ticket sellers educational. Signing up for Google Ads was a really dumb idea. In exchange for fractions of cents (which never gets paid anyway), Google proceeded to completely enshitify my site to the point where it's unuseable.

I've no idea what the new owner intends to do with the site, or willing to pay $100. It's academic sine I'm not going to renew the domain name anyhow. I'll probably keep the listings going one of my other hobby sites, probably https://joeblog.co.za, another site I've let Google destroy so should just let it run ad free.

The thing with web publishing is it costs nothing, but also makes nothing courtesy of Google who have made an already broken market worse with AI.

I was trying to figure out why Putin would want his idiot minion Krasnov to attack Iran, but it's gradually starting to make sense what with the spike in the oil price and Krasnov removing sanctions on Russia.

https://www.tradewindsnews.com/tankers/us-lifts-ban-on-russian-shadow-fleet-ships-to-india-in-stop-gap-move/2-1-1955762?zephr_sso_ott=tFI0qc

The contemporary Iranian tragedy is all due to a really dumb decision in 1953 by the then respective leaders of the US and UK, Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, to order their spy agencies to orchestrate a regime change.

The democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, got ousted by what MI6 called Operation Boot and the CIA called Operation Ajax. Why? Because Iran's government wanted to audit BP's books. Not having thought through their regime change further than taking bribes from an oil corporation, Eisenhower and Churchill thought reinstating the shah would do the trick, but it transpired Iranians preferred Ayatollahs to pedo monarchs. So here we are today.

I got all this history from Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads which I read a while back. I'm busy reading Stephen Platt's Imperial Twilight about the "Opium War" which is a real eye opener for me. In the swan song of Queen Victoria's empire, the British government decided to orchestrate a regime change in China on behalf of its drug dealers. Until I read this book, I knew very little about this fascinating story.

While this has become "hidden history" in our anglophone world, in Chinese culture this ushered in "Century of Humiliation" which it only recently started to recover from. A problem with China re-emerging as the global superpower is it hasn't forgiven the west for the Opium wars. Scary times.