2,870 karma · joined April 16, 2018
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted, but I really am curious. It's extremely uncommon for government bureaucracy to roll back regulations, and as far as I can tell from some Googling, the FAA has not done so. So what regulations are being weakened?
I reject just about all of the assertions in this post, but these straw-man questions are the most egregious.
How can anyone reasonably call the Israeli political situation "apartheid?" There are Arab parties in the Knesset, and Arab Israelis have full rights under the law. Apartheid South Africa rather famously did not allow the black population any representation at all in government. Perhaps by "apartheid," you mean that there is some sort of barrier between the Israeli side and the Gaza side. But having a border is not "apartheid," anymore than the US having a border with Mexico, or the UK having a border with the Republic of Ireland. In fact, since 2005, the Israelis have largely been absent from Gaza, only intervening to stop things like rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilians. Or maybe you mean that Israel's blockade of Gaza constitutes "apartheid," though this is really torturing the definition beyond recognition.
I am astonished you bring up ethnic cleansing, when all of the evidence points the opposite way: that Jewish people are victims of ethnic cleansing across the Islamic world, whereas the populations within Gaza and the Judea & Samaria area have grown extensively and currently have high growth rates. If you pick any country in the Islamic Middle East & North Africa, the Jewish population is currently near zero, down from tens- to hundreds-of-thousands a few decades ago. (It's almost as bad for Christians.) Asserting that "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of Israel is happening today (or ever!) is preposterous when literally all evidence contradicts it.
I actually think the "other options" are simple, though quite difficult in practice: Hamas & Fatah could put down their weapons, accept that the State of Israel has a right to exist and agree to control the radical elements within their populations. If that happened, you'd have a two-state solution in no time. The difficulty is that there is little political appetite for this in the Judea & Samaria area, and none in Gaza, so we're stuck in a stalemate.
How has Israel treated Yigal Amir? How has Hamas treated the 10/7 terrorists? How many Israelis support what Amir did? How many Gazans support the 10/7 terrorists?
Hamas, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have repeatedly rejected any two-state solution proposals. Hamas in particular has always resorted to terrorism. The appetite for a "two-state solution" seems much higher in Israel, even in the conservative communities, than it ever has been in the so-called Palestinian population.
According to Clausewitz, "war is the continuation of politics through other means." A state goes to war when it believes it can achieve a political objective through force that is infeasible through diplomacy, deterrence, soft power, intimidation, etc.
The US and Russia fighting directly would be quite dangerous due to the nuclear capabilities of each, so whatever political objectives America might wish to achieve through a hot war would be (quickly) overshadowed. Thus the US has revived its Cold War stance of supporting Russia's enemies without direct involvement.
Was someone forcing the grandparents to visit their infected grandchildren? In my own case, I didn't see my own grandmother for two years during COVID other than via Zoom/FaceTime. She has a history of bad lung infections, so none of us wanted to get her sick. This was despite her having four great-grandchildren and being a widow. When she finally got COVID this year for the first time, she developed some blood clots, but was able to pull through and now is back to great health.
I think the damage to children who were isolated from one another was much worse, and unlike the elderly, they couldn't really understand why we lived so unnaturally. If elderly people wanted to "just see their grandkids," they knew the risks and made a choice. Every death is sad, but I have a hard time thinking we should adopt harsh and even draconian measures just to protect those who ought to know better.
Again, IANAL. Just my opinion as a citizen, not legal advice. Seek competent legal advice before taking legal action.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adhesion_contract_(contract_...
Certainly aspects of the Industrial Revolution were quite damaging (albeit ultimately fixed by the law, regulation and, yes, organized labor), but the data doesn't seem to indicate that quality of life or life expectancy decreased. In areas that industrialized the earliest (Britain, the US, Western Europe), life expectancy increased dramatically following the IR, and only recently has it plateaued or even fallen. Leisure activity became a real thing for most people, when before the IR it was reserved only for the highest classes. E.g. organized and even professional sports became popular after the IR.
Compared to agricultural labor, which almost everyone did before the IR, including a large class of poor peasants, industrial work was often paid more and was more stable, and the labor restrictions weren't much different than what these societies had been used to.
The problems with the IR were the edge cases, where these new machines could literally kill and maim people without a thought, something that was almost impossible in the agricultural fields. There was a new level of nuisance that arose from these industrial machines that spewed smoke and emitted stenches and were quite noisy. Further, the concentration of wealth that arose from economies of scale was a problem industrializing societies really had no idea how to tackle. I could go on. But I think the point is that in the average case, the IR was helpful on the whole.
What does NPR's "theory of government" have to do with anything?
> Single digit grants for non-profits are come and go.
Let me point out again the CPB allocates a relatively predictable (and monotonically increasing) budget of grants to local public broadcasting stations, and a certain percentage of those grants by law must be used to license NPR programming. CPB is funded by the federal government. It's simply not true that public radio stations and NPR are worrying whether the feds will fund them next year. If ~11% of federal funding is so irrelevant to NPR, why do they need it at all?
> The people who work there would make that argument independent of the source of funding and in fact are inspired by the degree to which their funding comes directly from their listeners.
Something like 87% of NPR listeners lean toward voting Democrat. If the argument is that they're satisfying their donors, then that suggest NPR is much more biased than if it was simply doing the duty of Congress, each house of which is approximately split in half between Republicans and Democrats.
> [T]his narrative is not even wrong. I mean that with all respect.
Thank you, I guess? Do you have any issues with the facts or inferences I actually pointed out in my argument? Did I cherry-pick some facts? Are there contrary facts which undermine my argument? Is there a flaw in my logic?
This seems excessively reductionist. An organized state, borders, a system for generating revenue, an armed force, and other infrastructure seems necessary for a proper country to exist. All of these militate against treating the country as merely a collection of people, or using the people as the fodder to "punish" the country.
It's completely true.[0] 1% of NPR's funding comes directly from the Treasury. Sure, not all of the funding comes directly from the government, but certainly enough to give NPR a financial incentive to preserve government revenue. Further, another ~10% comes indirectly through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is "non-governmental" but is Treasury-funded and administered by presidential appointees. CPB allocates grants to states & local stations, who use those grants in part to pay for NPR programming via fees. The law dictates that a certain percentage of CPB grants are allocated toward NPR's nationally-produced programming.
> And anyway the piece isn't "slanted." In contrast to e.g. the Bloomberg piece it makes clear this is a relatively minor international tax regime issue and some of the facts are disputed. The SC isn't going to weigh in on realized vs unrealized gains writ large. I mean, a bunch of them might be assholes and idiots but they aren't fools.
The Supreme Court is a trier of law, not facts, so factual disputes are irrelevant. Whatever unresolved factual disputes exist will be handled at the trial court level whichever way SCOTUS decides. That's just one example of the slant in the article.
The article clearly paints the Moores with a skeptical brush, both with the "disputed facts" canard and with editorializing. Sentences such as this are clearly telling me what to think rather than telling me what happened: "The Moores are portrayed as sympathetic plaintiffs in Supreme Court briefs and a video posted on the webpage of the anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute." How are they "portrayed" as "sympathetic" in briefs and in the video? Why would we ever expect plaintiffs not to be portrayed as such in their own briefs and public relations content? What purpose does this sentence serve, other than to have the reader draw a negative inference about the Moores?
The government's side of the the argument is given no such skepticism. A tax law professor and a GOP staffer who worked on the law each label a victory for the Moores as a "tsunami" and "enriched uranium," respectively, in the world of corporate tax law. NPR presents these without qualifications. These two experts constitute the vast majority of the expert opinion in the article; an expert favoring the Moores' interpretation is given a few sentences.
It ends with an accusation of hypocrisy against the US Chamber of Commerce: "As [GOP staffer] Callas caustically observes, for the chamber [US Chamber of Commerce] and other stakeholders years later "to discover constitutional concerns that they didn't raise before" strikes me as "opportunistic."" The law in question is 186 pages long. Isn't it possible - likely, even - that defects in the law exist which jeopardize the constitutionality of the law and, upon their discovery, groups which are organized against taxes might champion this position? I'm not sure how that counts as "opportunism," except insofar as the author is presenting a tendentious, slanted argument.
[0] https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/national-public-ra...
Incidentally, I was paranoid about this kind of front-running for years before I knew it had actually happened, and would just use whois from the terminal when searching for domain availability.
All we can go on is the credibility of IEA, which GP has argued – with citation – is wanting.
The number one argument against this kind of doomerism is that we don't know what we don't know. Natural CO2 capture is why we have an oxygen atmosphere in the first place. That process wouldn't necessarily work today due to funguses and so on, but perhaps some technological breakthrough (genetically engineered trees? dense organic materials? who knows?) could work as soon as it is discovered.
I can't help but think that since the knapsack problem is NP-complete, any attempt to fill the sack could subjectively appear "more random." Certainly the participants could use certain heuristics, but since in general there is no known way to systematically solve the problem, this study seems to enable some confirmation bias on the part of the experimenters.
Interesting. Since I've started using Nix for managing my environment & projects, it's the only thing that I'm confident will work. I have no idea how the RPM & DEB ecosystems, among others, work when random dependency breakage can happen all the time. This is extra true when building Docker images whose Dockerfile's second line is almost always `apt-get update && apt-get install [list-of-packages]`. I've had so many problems with that process over the years that I've wondered how anything worked at all. Nix was like some heavenly realm where I could be 99.9% confident the build would work every time.
I sort of regret that at times, because I think we could be just as productive (in terms of useful product) with many fewer LOC, but we are stuck with the constraints we live in.
OTOH, I've worked (incredibly frustrating) jobs where the infrastructure is dysfunctional such that the write-compile-test cycles are on the order of tens of minutes, and these have made my LOC/week plummet. In those cases, I've recommended to management that we fix the infrastructure to get down to sub-minute cycles (ideally a few seconds), but usually these have been shot down due to their extreme myopia.
[0]https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-760w,f...
EDIT: To be clear, I think the leaked call was authentic, but I don't think it's persuasive evidence because of its provenance. I fully think PIJ did this in support of Hamas, and then immediately blamed Israel to an enchanted Western press who can't see past an oppressor-oppressed narrative structure. But all of this is my opinion and not verifiable fact.
This is a false dichotomy. You can have breaking news that covers the verifiable facts (an explosion happened in Gaza near a hospital) without uncritically reporting salacious claims by extremely biased parties.
Imagine if on 9/11 the press had within minutes come out and said, "Twin tower attacks ordered by Saddam Hussein kill 20,000, intelligence sources say." That didn't happen because the press at the time exercised some caution, yet they still covered the event.
First, live footage from Al Jazeera at the time showed rockets firing from a location in Gaza toward Israel. One rocket appeared to malfunction in mid-air and within a few seconds, an explosion happened on the ground approximately where the hospital is. The lean-too shape of the hospital roof can even be seen in the light from the explosion.
Second, daytime footage after the explosion showed that the hospital was still standing, with burned out cars in the parking lot. Several palm trees nearby were standing and unscathed (it was hard to tell if there were even scorch marks). The parking lot had a small crater maybe a meter in diameter with very little penetration into the ground. Israel's weapons have much stronger explosives, which would likely have completely destroyed the parking lot and wreaked havoc on adjacent buildings.
IMO, those two pieces of evidence strongly indicate to me that the Palestinians fired this rocket and it accidentally caused an explosion in the hospital parking lot.
One confusing aspect of the story to me is the death toll given in a matter of minutes after the explosion. It seems extremely improbable to me that anyone could confidently say 500 people died so quickly unless they were spreading propaganda.
> They actually wrote "retribution". Sounds like an additional hint that outing might not be OK.
Charles C. Johnson has a very colorful history. Rep. Matt Gaetz (also in the news lately) invited him to the State of the Union in 2018 after which multiple outlets reported on Johnson's Holocaust denier past and his other activities.[0][1]
In my opinion, I wouldn't trust Johnson or let him know any real secrets – damaging or not – about me. I'm a bit surprised Thiel would trust him – seems like a blunder that he typically doesn't make.
The rest of the article is a hit piece with a bunch of guilt-by-association attacks against Thiel, but Johnson is curiously spared from having his past brought up.
[0] https://floridaphoenix.com/blog/matt-gaetz-once-again-hangs-...
[1]https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2018/02/09/spurned...