This feels like one of those rather rare projects that is both sailing pretty close to research, and also yielding industrially useful results -- I love it! Normally I'd expect to see something like this coming out of one of the big tech companies, where there are enough advertising megabucks to pay a small team to work on a project like this (providing someone can make the business case...). So I'm curious: what was the initial motivation for this work? Assuming this is not a passion project, who is funding it? How many person years of work has this involved? What is the end game?
“Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5 percent of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
“About three-quarters of Israeli
Jews thought that Israel's military planning should not take into account the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, or should do so only minimally, according to another recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem.”
The banality of evil on full display. These very same people will claim in the future that they were misled or did not understand the gravity of crimes being committed in Gaza and the West Bank.
Yes. The minimum rules we all must agree on have to be the basic human rights. And that means we can’t take all the civilians in Gaza hostage for Hamas. These are humans with hopes and dreams and friends and family, like you and like Israelis.
That Israel in particular would so easily forget about this is horrible.
> Why is that? What are we misunderstanding about their perspective that causes the expectation to be off?
There's a perfect explanation for this in Ten Steps of Genocide, which is taught by many Holocaust museums.
Instead of recognizing Palestinian humanity, Israelites (not all, but enough to gain control of their government) have allowed themselves to discriminate, dehumanize, and persecute them.
Granted, not doing so in a situation as fraught with hostility & danger as Israel's would have taken tremendous levels of moral courage, but if there's one ethnic group that we expected to be aware of the slippery slope of genocide, it's the jews.
There are ~2m Palestinians in Israel, making up about 21% percent of the population of Israel and Palestinians in Israel have had the right to vote since 1949.
According to my research, there are 10 Palestinians in the Knesset.
> According to my research, there are 10 Palestinians in the Knesset.
That's great, but it doesn't contradict my claim. After all, I didn't say "all Israelis". I said "enough Israelis to gain control of their government".
I said: "Instead of recognizing Palestinian humanity, Israelites (not all, but enough to gain control of their government) have allowed themselves to discriminate, dehumanize, and persecute them."
"Israelites dehumanize Palestinians" is an over-simplification of my statement.
So now when the targeted population is actually increasing, we can still call it a "genocide". And when there is no actual concentration camp we can say there is a "moral concentration camp". Stop getting your news from Al Jazeera, FFS.
> So now when the targeted population is actually increasing, we can still call it a "genocide".
Please show me where the targeted population is "increasing" over the last two years? is it because people from other areas are being forced to relocate and you guys call that a population increase?
Where should i get my news from? last I checked, 100+ journalists came out with a written statement about how higher ups at the BBC were preventing news critical of Israel from being broadcast on air. The concentration camp thing has been corroborated by several news sources including some from within Israel itself. Even CNN nowadays is starting to be critical of the genocide.
Do you have any standards at all for what the word genocide means? You want to get into the muck about whether the population has increased or decreased by some fractional or single digit percentages? All this demonstrates is that you want to twist the meaning of words to support whatever interpretation of events is in vogue with your tribe.
but I mean, you guys also call amnesty international, the ICC, the BBC and reality itself antisemetic so believe whatever you want. the only "tribe" I'm in is the one where indiscriminate killing of innocent people is wrong.
Where do you think these data are coming from? You think the UN and Amnesty International have census takers going tunnel to tunnel in Gaza?
Why don't you reveal your standard for what a "genocide" is without discrediting the actual ongoing genocides in other places? Israel has got to be the most incompetent prosecutor of genocide in history.
I imagined that, if nothing else, they'd have an interest in the next generation of Gazans not growing up with even more hatred towards Israel than the previous one. Which is kind of hard given the cruelty they are currently subjected to.
That is unless the plan is that there won't be a next generation of Gazans.
Yes, I'd expect that from compassionate human beings. Such beings can hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time: the hostages situation is incredibly tragic, and the suffering inflicted unto innocent people who had nothing to do with the hostage taking is also immensely tragic and inhuman.
Using the hostages as justification for collective punishment is exactly what Netanyahu's government want, it becomes easy to justify the abhorrent treatment of millions of people, repeating this is just ceding power to the worst elements of his government (Ben Gvir, etc.).
The hostages should be returned by Hamas, that shouldn't cost millions of people their families, homes, lives, it's collective punishment, it's genocide.
(I worked for Yelp for over eight years, knew large parts of the codebase, and never once saw any evidence that it was possible to pay to remove bad reviews.)
I also worked for Yelp as an eng, and I used to say the same thing until I personally had my negative review removed from a business page for a paying advertiser by the User Ops team
I’ve pondered the implications of running an ‘installation art’ project where a bunch of these are deployed around a city, with aggregated data visible over a web UI (assuming that this doesn’t violate any laws.) The aim would be to raise public awareness of pervasive surveillance, and perhaps catalyze changes to the law.
I'd be interested in seeing the buy vs. build analysis for this project. Are there any pre-existing projects that have similar features? And assuming that this project is used to process classified data, what impact does this have on the selection process? e.g. is it possible to use closed-source solutions?
A lot of this applies to good security teams as well :) For example, reaching out to offer consulting services at an early stage in projects, building goodwill by advising instead of mandating (where possible), and constantly communicating best practices.
In California, property taxes are usually only reassessed on sale. There is also an inflation linked increase, but it's capped at a maximum of 2%. So you can end up with people who have been living in houses for 20 or 30 years who are paying an order of magnitude less in property tax than if they'd just bought the same house today. This also means that if you buy a house in a down market then you're likely to save a lot in terms of property taxes. Disclaimer: I am not a tax adviser etc.
I'm guessing that the rules prohibit using some of the pedal power to charge a battery during the initial part of the run, and then using that stored energy to provide an additional speed boost :D
I don't see why not. The initial run is essentially the storing up of momentum. From that, running up a flywheel inside the bike is just storing the same energy in a different place.
It stretches the concept of "human powered". Why not just pedal while stationary to charge a battery (take as long as you like), and then ride the course with no additional expenditure of effort.
Well, the course is a 5mile run up to a 200m speed trap. So if you allow batteries/motors, you could just sit stationary somewhere in that 5 miles pedalling for a while, and then use electrical acceleration to get up to speed for the trap. You're not bringing any additional energy, but its clearly not in the spirit of the challenge.
This is approach is great for greenfield development, but when it comes to software maintenance I find myself having to think in terms of the target language so that I can formulate the right long-term solution for the codebase in question.
Yes, this is true. For maintenance projects I've noticed that before I can sketch things out I have to translate the existing codebase into the proper abstract domain but in my experience this is just an extra step and does not negate the general approach of thinking in a domain that is completely free of programming language related issues.
