Blondə

This is the effect of having an authoritarian in charge. The propaganda that gets produced is done to convey a sense of power of the person/party, its popularity, and the scale of the internal and external “enemy threat.”

I think a lot of people have their fingers crossed on this one.

I really think there are two different aspects to the classification of the threat. It’s actually pretty analogous to the Afghanistan War.

First, neither Al Quaeda nor Hamas represent an existential threat to their opponents. The US hasn’t really faced a believable existential threat since the collapse of the USSR, Israel hasn’t really faced one since the 80s. Countries in Eastern Europe face an existential threat from Russia. And so on. Killing 1200 (or 3000) people, no matter how brutally or unjustified or evil it seems, it does not threaten to destroy the state of Israel. It is, of course, now an existential threat to Netanyahu, which is one reason why it’s being pursued with such enthusiasm.

The second aspect builds from the first and questions whether the solution pursued by Israel (and the US) were both efficient (ie proportional to the threat so as not to divert attention and resources from other threats) and effective. They have to be expected to achieve specific and measurable goals and timelines.

The ability to pull off an Oct 7th might have been equally well but more efficiently and effectively with intelligence and commando units, and Israel would have been given free rein by most of the planet to do so.

Hamas never posed an existential threat to Israel.

I’m just hoping to live to see the tell all book about the rise and fall of Elon Musk. I’m wondering if we will find out more about the China deals, the deals with federal, state, and international governments, what he knew about the state of development from FSD to vehicles versus what he said, and so on.

This is something that the CIA actively engages in. It’s not quite at the covfefe level of “we meant to get caught,” but they do occasionally put out the word that they like it when they’re perceived as ham-fisted bunglers as it makes it easier to get away with stuff.

I’m pretty sure there would need to be an argument made that this is a federal issue. This isn’t something like voting rights, which is potentially a constitutional issue.

Trust me when I say I am not a fan of SCOTUS, and I supported candidates who said they’d appoint additional justices (to a total of 13, for instance) to rebalance the courts. I just don’t think they can take every case, especially those like this one.

If you mean SCOTUS, I am not sure they have jurisdiction.

That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

Syncs can be really weird. I have an account on another instance which constantly runs far behind .world. I’ve made double edits only to have the last one take.

No, because he’s actually quite mad and belongs nowhere near any kind of power. I can see his conspiracy theories appealing to the Q type, but most of them are going to go for Trump. He’s polling this highly because he’s an unknown. As more people start paying attention to who he actually is, he will be the Herman Cain of the race.

The Kids Who Lived.

There’s a tsunami of layoffs in the gaming community, and in tech in general. A lot of the time, it’s entirely unjustified as the positions being laid off are often quickly put on the market again, and it’s usually not the top engineering talent (the most expensive) because they’re harder to replace. It’s often focused on lower tier jobs/support teams, and the cost of re-filling a position (sourcing, interviewing, hiring, training) would far offset any kind of salary reduction. It’s like the tech management version of a Michael Scott vasectomy.

I wish someone would compile a list of companies acting in extraordinary bad faith so I could consider that when making purchase decisions.

I do this for a living. Seasonality as a generic term refers to temporally periodic signals but can even be extended to talk about non-temporal aspects of a signal. The same math used in areas like econometrics to remove periodicity in annual data can be applied to multiple domains. The main motivation to removing or isolating periodicity is to allow for investigation into the underlying phenomena, or to allow the investigation of the sources of periodicity independently of other drivers. In every case, though, seasonality is an acceptable term in everything I’ve written, read, and worked on.

This is seasonality.

Seasonality is a characteristic of a time series and refers to periodic and generally regular and predictable changes that occur over a year.

To make it more generic, drop the “over a year” and just refer to the periodic signal over time idea. You can find additional signals by how you bin the data, eg monthly or day of week.

This is known as the Whorfian Hypothesis, aka Sapir-Whorf theory. In generalized-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy terms, the idea is that language constrains thought. It’s one of those ideas that we can perceive as intuitively correct but that does not stand up to experiment.

There are, for example, languages that don’t have words differentiating green and blue, and others whose counting numbers don’t include specific words for numbers larger than two. Some languages have no words for cardinal directions but use terms like “mountain-way” and “ocean-way.”

Experiments do seem to support a weak version of Whorf - people from cultures with “missing” words can differentiate between green and blue for instance, but it seems to take a bit longer. There’s also a paper indicating that people who don’t use cardinal coordinates have a better innate sense of orientation when, eg, walking corridors in an enclosed building.

I’d personally fall between the weak and strong position because I do not believe in free will and do believe that semantics are a significant driver of behavior, but that’s a step beyond where most of the current research is. There’s research into free will, but none that I’m aware of that pulls in cognitive semantics as a driver.

I’ve never been out in Russia, but I know we’re persecuted there. Same for Poland. I’ve never been out in Uganda (I haven’t been there yet), and although I’ve been to India the social circles I moved in meant I didn’t encounter anything like what the community members find there.

What I find curious is that Americans use this as a lash particularly against Islam, while at the same time a large part of their population not only supports LGBT-phobic legislation in the US, but also the evangelical community that actively lobbies for the death penalty for being LGBT in Africa. I can sympathize with the plight of Russians under the violent and murderous dictatorship of Putin without saying that the average Russian is correct on their opinion about the LGBT community. If Russia were to invade Uganda and kill 50k civilians, there would be an outcry against it and anyone who said “But they hate The Gays” would hopefully be ushered peacefully out of the room, as the two are orthogonal.

Is Israel killing 40-50k people to secure gay rights in Gaza? Or have they been supporting Hamas because it allowed them to avoid a two state solution?

Trust me - we are not strangers to the idea that other oppressed communities have parts that are still prejudiced against us. That neither justifies genocide nor does it relieve us as individuals from acknowledging such extreme moral wrongdoing. If an unarmed person shot by police turned out to have opposed marriage equality, that doesn’t excuse the moral requirement to oppose that action.

So unless you think that anti-LGBT legislation and violence justifies terrorist activity including the slaughter of civilians within the US (it does not), I respectfully suggest you review your premises.

Do Americans hate us? The only people I’ve been verbally and physically assaulted by have been Americans.

So are you saying that Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians aren’t transphobic, or that we should go Gaza on Texas?

It strikes me as exactly the kind of engineering call that Elon has tended to make, time after time. With zero training in an area, he gets a solution in his head crufted up from some set of pre-existing notions or points of view and then pushes to have them implemented. He will also go on to fire anyone who disagrees with him. I spoke with an engineer who worked on the gull wing doors, which the team had objected to, and not only did he force them through, he burst in on one of the finalization meetings where they had finally reached a design consensus and insisted they change the hinge. Given similar reports on his behavior regarding other products (including especially twitter), I have no reason to disbelieve this person.