This is ethnic cleansing dressed up in the clothes of protecting civilians.
If they leave, they will never be allowed back to their homeland. If they don’t leave, they must be legitimate targets for bombing.
It is important to recognize that this is going to happen regardless of if it is right or not. Palestine is probably going to cease to exist in the coming months. The leaders of the western world have decided to back Israel in this conflict… This doesn’t mean it’s right. We should absolutely call it out… But this is happening.
Now we have to decide if we let the civilians live or die.
In all honesty is would be best if one side left. That would be the only way to really move forward from this and put fighting and death behind everyone. In a few decades the people who fled would have found new homes and to their children and grand children that would be thoer home land
Yup, no peoples have ever demanded to return to their homeland after more than a few decades. There are absolutely no famous cultural disporas that have ever happened.
Regardless of your opinion on any other aspect of it, the one currently holding the ground with armed force typically has the better claim since they can enforce it.
Yes? It’s been Palestinians for a very long time. It was the British colony of Palestine from 1920 to 1948, when it was established as the Jewish ethno-state of Israel. They gave no fucks that a non-Jewish population already lived there.
It’s not about being cold, the workers that are working in coal are not at fault. Imagine you being a mid thirties guy in Indonesia, when you were in early twenties looking for a career in a couple try with sever lack of jobs that pay high enough to sustain a life that allows you to own a house and a car near some urban area, when world is still warming up to the idea of Global warming, you will take the coal mining job because it pays well, allows your kids to study in English medium schools. Allows you to save to send them to university. They are only trying to get what a lot of people in developed have taken it for granted. And it’s a legitimate problem on how to re-employ people from early retirement of coal plants.
$9 billion for 125k borrowers is $72000 per borrower
Would be nice if they would vanish the 40k in loans I have that I’ve been paying on since the Obama years. I’ve paid in far beyond the total amount I ever borrowed, while the compound interest just added it all back over the years. Progress has been very slow for me to pay that off, started payments with about 50k loans, after being ballooned up from the original principal from several years of economic hardship forbearance where the interest still gets capitalized.
It’s one of the new major programs from the Department of Education and can help a lot with reducing repayments while eventually being eligible for full forgiveness.
That’s nice for those who it can help, but I don’t really need help making the payments. I’m just fed up with having to pay them at all since I’ve already paid back much more than I ever borrowed.
Biden’s new SAVE plan is set up so that any interest not covered by your IDR payment is not capitalized. It would probably also be worth your while to look into the forgiveness plans and terms because you might be able to reduce how much you owe based on previous payments.
I filled out the application and both the payment and interest doubled for me, not sure where is the benefit here. Hell, maybe I lucked out with my 30 year loan
If the cuts are deep, they could hamper Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s project to build augmented and virtual reality products enabling access to a set of immersive virtual
VR is interesting to me. I have zero desire for a facebook product, I don’t care how good it is.
Zuckerberg has to realize he, as the messenger, is poisoning the future he wants to exist.
Unfortunately, Oculus was started by a Maga head so… I’m not sure who is worse. Probably the Maga head but Zuckerberg sold privacy data to Cambridge analytica.
Yeah, I’m still using my Quest 2, but I’m sure in time there’ll be a really good offer from someone else, and I would buy that. I’m really interested in what Valve might have to offer soon
I was bummed that they bought oculus, but now they’ve advanced the tech so much and made it so clear to the market that people want unrestricted vr that I’m hoping the whole debacle jumpstarts a stream deck equivalent, just a headset with decent tech running on open source software or minimally restricted software that just works.
That’s why the oculus was so good, they just released it it developers play with it, no logins, no required software environments, just creative fun
I’m with you. I want Meta to keep heavily developing in the VR and AR space, but not so I can buy products from them. I just want the increase in new products and innovation from other companies that would come with that development.
Yea, exactly. I searched around a little and it looks like that’s actually working out, there’s some tiny companies offering 4K VR glasses for 500 bucks now; it’s not exactly an open environment again like in the heyday, but at least it isn’t tethered to a massive data mining corporation.
I’m not sure if there are open environment alternatives. Actually, I didn’t even know 4K had gotten so cheap already, It was encouraging to hear about all the little companies making new goggles.
I loved using the, I think it was 1080p Oculus DK2 for watching movies and playing games, so I can’t wait to be blown away by one of these 4K kits just a few years later.
I think an open alternative would become more likely as VR becomes more adopted. While I don’t like Meta, they are doing a good job at increasing adoptions, and that’s something that I’m certainly happy about.
Yep, wired VR it is then for the time being. Because of a recent leak there’s speculation that Valve are releasing some new VR headset, also the fact that they updated the SteamVR UI to feel more “Steam Deck” is good evidence, I guess we’ll wait and see…
There's that, yes, but downside for me is that Valve doesn't release hardware officially in my country and it always gets inflated by middlemen when it goes on sale here. So the value on offer goes down by quite a bit.
This is the core problem. The overlap between people who use facebook and people who are interested in VR is not very big. Most people on facebook just want to see pictures of their grandchildren and are hardly the kinds of people who would be early adopters of technologies like this. VR enthusiasts on the other hand simply have no interest in whatever kinds of shit Zuckerberg has to offer. Some might hold their noses and try it anyway, but you’re just making your potential userbase smaller and smaller.
This idiotic “metaverse” thing has always been a hilarious joke and is doomed to fail. This has been obvious ever since it was announced. Zuckerberg got lucky with facebook turning out to be a great way to creep on^W^W keep in touch with friends and other contacts. He’s not a visionary and doesn’t have a clue how to build a new thing people want from scratch. But he thinks he does cause he got lucky with facebook.
I worked at a university years ago and saw some VR prototypes for things like medical/surgical training, remote interaction (remote surgery, hazmat, etc) and other things. Very cool uses of the technology where it makes a lot of sense.
Seeing the VR used there the way it was makes me completely uninterested in using it for any sort of social/personal use any time soon. VR clearly has a lot of niche applications, but not as a general social/entertainment platform.
It sucks, because I’ve listened to a ton of interviews with him discussing VR/AR and I actually think he is super interested in the tech and is doing pretty incredible stuff in the space. But the blatant disregard for people’s personal privacy and Facebook/Social Media’s destructive history prevents me from trusting Meta in this area and many others. What’s sad is that Zuck actually is pretty damn smart, and I think he’s one of the few billionaires that really understands tech. They’ve been open sourcing things and just getting better overall in a lot of ways but at the end of the day the trust isn’t there.
I loved the CV1 oculus. The moment Facebook integration started happening I noped the fuck out of there. Also can’t stand overly proprietary environments. Acquiescence to researchers like yann lecun would be the only reason I don’t absolutely detest meta at this point.
It would have been less bitter if they hadn’t promised that Facebook would never be required or integrated at the time Facebook bought them… just before they made it an integrated requirement.
At least they reversed it, but they probably still waited for most people to give in and make a Facebook account. I still log in with an Oculus account.
While this is true, it was not in consideration during my purchase. I was not as informed at the time. I’ll wait for a time when there is a good competitor for untethered VR, that is also an appreciable difference to upgrade.
Same. I even tried it and it’s really cool, and at that price point I would… but meta. I even heard at one point they forced you to log in with your facebook account to use it. Wtf? I don’t even have one. So basically I’ll wait for the valve index 2.0. VR is not mature yet and they all have quirks and trade offs.
Then perhaps they shouldn’t have accepted it and striked as planned? The fact that it wasn’t “enough” for the workers isn’t on the POTUS and doesn’t negate his actions.
They kind of kick-started this years huge labor push. Sure, it was bubbling up for a while before the rail unions decided to take action but they were the first “big” players to threaten a strike in a while. It’s easy to say that from the sidelines after the fact but they were being vilified by national media 24/7 for weeks, getting a bunch of pressure from Congress and being threatened to have the book thrown at them if they decided to strike. They were early to the party and didn’t have all of it’s completely understandable.
It’s also completely valid to criticize Biden for not doing enough when it really mattered, he could’ve put more pressure on Congress, he could’ve visited the workers and given his approval. He’s clearly capable of these things when it suits his interests, why didn’t he do any of that for the rail unions? Surely they could’ve used the help. Why was “working in the background” good enough for them but all of a sudden it’s insufficient for the UAW?
The labor movement is a positive feedback loop of direct action. I’m still contending with the fact that I’m a major player in the labor movement within tech, but I can trace the labor action of the last few months directly to CODE-CWA forming to help organize Google workers in 2020. Labor action fuels labor action. The ABK Workers Alliance were inspired by Paizo, who inspired Vodeo Workers United, who inspired ABKWA members to unionize at Raven into GWA, who inspired more tech unions to form, who inspired SBWU to perform militant labor actions, who inspired WGA and SAG-AFTRA (they work in the games industry).
Edit: I feel like downvotes are coming from my claim about being a major player in the labor movement. Without revealing who I am or where I work, my workplace will be the largest union in tech when we file, beating ZWU by approximately 160 people. I’m the lead organizer of this campaign, and we have approximately 40% card saturation (the campaign started very abnormally). There is almost 0% chance anyone has seen my name outside of my home town, except my labor actions have placed me on an obscure games media podcast talking about GDC, in a picture of a CWA newsletter, and I was quoted on an article from WSJ regarding my activism.
Criticism is totally fine and often deserved, I’m just saying using the rail strike (or any past Biden ball-drops) as a measuring stick for this one servers little purpose and detracts from the core issue. He should be held to task for those things when it comes election time, not fielding “but what about XYZ?” statements.
Launching an illegal strike is far different from launching a legally protected strike. They’d have to accept the possibility that everyone loses their jobs and some people might even get taken to court. Things just aren’t that bad yet.
Gotta give the president props for that, as well as democrats. Didn’t realize they got that through. I’d like them to keep pushing for a least 12 national sick days for all mid to major companies.
It would, absolutely, but it still means a whole lot.
It's a recognition by a slick, seasoned, career politician in the highest office in his country that the winds are shifting with respect to the labour movement.
Don't think of this as Biden expressing any deeply held belief. Don't think of anything he does in those terms. The Democrats in general, and Biden especially, are a mirror that reflects something meaningful about the socio-political environment. Just as Trump and the Republicans are.
He and his team believe that something in that environment has shifted, and that labour is poised to be ok the winning side of that shift.
Did he though? His Congress pushed through a bill with a smaller compensation package, 1(one) day of sick time, no removal of advance notice for sick time, none of the OT protections, and no acknowledgement of safety concerns.
Fuck you for assuming I’m any kind of liberal. Especially fuck you for insinuating I’m a Republican.
Regardless of the RLA holding a gun to their Union’s head, they did vote to approve the Senate’s contract. I’m personally very dissatisfied with the agreement, but ultimately, their union voted to ratify the agreement. As NPR notes, the deal falls significantly short of the goals rail workers were fighting for. They decided to accept it, in the face of a repeat of PATCO.
I got a bit upset about you saying I was fueling right-wing talking points, so my bad. I’ll always fight on the side of labor, even if the Republican party is trying to make them the ball in political games.
Personally I think it would have turned out much better for their union after even a day on strike, but I guess we’ll never know. My point is not “they didn’t get what they wanted but got something good”, it’s that the deal was forcibly imposed on them without any other options. I was not aware of the aftermath of the deal so I appreciate you highlighting it, but it still falls short in my eyes. Were I in their union, I’d be a minority opposed to the outcome. But that’s the thing, I’m just a guy on the Internet, not a member of IBEW, SMART-MD, or IBT (CWA guy in the tech industry, actually).
I trust you to do the right thing, I don’t need a screen shot. Thank you for putting up.
Err… what? I copied and pasted what I wrote before because it was a sufficient response to your comment.
You seem to have this weird idea that just because they accepted the deal, that it was a good deal. I said that’s not necessarily true. Then you replied saying “yes it is, they know more than you” which completely ignores my point, so I re-iterated it.
Lol, what? I’m countering the point that just because they’ve accepted it doesn’t mean it’s good.
Just because they are union workers doesn’t mean they weren’t taken advantage of.
What about this is so hard for you to understand?
You seem to think that any deal they would’ve taken is a good deal, because they know more about it than you do. That’s a classic appeal to authority, and it’s hilarious that you’re trying to defend it.
Wine cave warrior NAFO ghouls are already doing Adults In The Room armchair calculations about how these death treats will increase chances of a profitable victory for their corporate masters by .03216% and how it’s a heroic sacrifice that disposable Ukrainians must make to defend the land for future profitability.
SEOUL, Aug 3 (Reuters) - South Korean experts said on Thursday they would set up a committee to verify claims that a room temperature superconductor has been discovered, which has driven investor frenzy as well as peer skepticism since.
“There has been a lot of controversy over the authenticity of the reported results at home and abroad, and other claims are being added without being peer-reviewed,” the group said.
“Based on data from the two archived papers and the video made public, the materials … cannot be called room temperature superconductors at this point,” it added.
But the handful of materials discovered so far only exhibit superconductivity at extremely high temperatures and pressures, making them impractical for widespread use.
An index tracking Chinese superconductor-related stocks has surged since late July, when the South Korean researchers published their papers, rising as much as 22%, though it gave up a large chunk of those gains on Thursday.
In a closing address to a Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg, he also said Putin had shown readiness to negotiate with Ukraine, and that "the other side" now needed to be persuaded.
"The President of Russia demonstrated that he is ready help us in the field of grain supply," Assoumani said. "Yes, this is important, but it may not be quite enough. We need to achieve a ceasefire."
He is acting like Putin's patsy here. The President of Rusia has caused this problem with his illegal war on Ukraine. Why should Ukraine accept a frozen conflict with Russia or accept Russian occupation of even an inch of their land? Why is he not demanding Russia, the aggressor, stop its illegal war and withdraw from Ukraine? Or demand Russia stop bmbing Odessa's ports and allow resumption of grain supply?
Why is he blaming the victimss of Putin's imperialism?
African countries in general doesn’t seem to have a grip on this conflict. I don’t know if they just don’t really have the right information, or don’t have the necessary experience with Putin.
One would think they would be against any type of imperialism and the taking of countries, but apparently it doesn’t upset them to see happen to others.
One can have objections but the reality is these countries rely on Ukraine/Russia's grain exports. So its a rock and a hard place. Realistically Ukraine ain't going to cut them off for these comments since it would be seen as a big dick move. Russia on the other hand, that is a toss up.
Nah, it’s just that blaming Russia gets them zero dollars while blaming Ukraine potentially gets them not zero dollars. Post colonial Africa has been provided so much international kool aid that not getting any gives them withdrawals. There is so much research around how providing aid to African nations is detrimental to their economy but is that goes against the interest of local politicians who use procurement of foreign aid as a measure of their performance in office.
I'll disagree here. IIRC, 3/4 African leaders refused to attend Putin's Russia-Africa summit, so it looks like only Putin's supporters travelled to St.Petersburg.
And those who had allied themselves closely with Russia still took the occasion to mark a disagreement with the war.
Sure, it could have been clearer in opposition to Russia's warfare, but that would also be extremely politically costly for them. The fact that they bring up the issue at all is great, even if they do so while trying not to lose their most powerful ally.
In the end, Putin wanted something and didn't get it because of the war.
They don’t care, they have no dog in this fight, both parties are too far away to be much of a threat, and many rely on Russian resources to help keep their populations in line, like wagner or russia arms.
The ideology looks much different from Africa, it’s just 2 groups of white people fighting over something irrelevant.
It’s just brinkmanship. They’re in a position to negotiate for more than they’re normally worth given the political climate/war. They’ll position towards that and then try to use it to negotiate a better deal with the west and take the best offer. Unfortunately best offer may be personally enriching not country enriching
I mean, having a hostage generally implies your intent is to hold that person captive in exchange for a demand being fulfilled, after which point you at least claim that you will release them. Presumably, Israel doesnt intend or claim that it will release those it has imprisoned even if it gets what it wants, so calling them hostages wouldnt really be accurate. One could call the people held by Hamas prisoners too I suppose, since that just implies them to be held against their will, but as they are explicitly being held in order to be used as a bargaining chip, calling them hostages adds more information about the situation than just calling them prisoners too would.
You make sense, and I sort of agree so I won’t downvote and just add my bit. The “prisoners” are definitely being used as negotiation leverage in every discussion with Hamas.
I know this goes against the grain of what is being portrayed but a prisoner is also someone who has done something wrong where a hostage is totally innocent
I agree there would be more innocent people than average in those prisons. I’m not under any illusion there aren’t some really awful people in there too.
Israel calls the system it uses to imprison people without trial or even charges “administrative detention”. It’s hostage taking under a sanitized name and in terms of #'s Israel is provably many times worse than already-terrible Hamas.
“Before October 7, the number of Palestinians held by Israel under administrative detention was already at a 20-year high. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, there were 1,310 Palestinians imprisoned without charge or trial at the end of September, including at least 146 minors. Since then, Israel has dramatically increased its use of administrative detention, pushing the number of detainees to over 2,000 within the first four weeks of the war. (That’s out of a total of roughly 7,000 Palestinian prisoners.)”
People are often imprisoned for no other reason than Israelis don’t like them. Sometimes it’s social media posts. The average length of detention without trial or charge is a year. So if an Israeli soldier doesn’t like you being free, you can lose a year of your life being abused in prison for no other reason. There is an appeals process, but a report showed appeals failed 98.8% of the time from 2015-17 and there were no successes at all in 2023. "The overall figure is outrageous,” Montell said. “This is a patently illegal practice. These people should be given a fair trial or released.”
So what would you call it when people are violently taken form there home by an occupying force, are not charged with or convicted for any crime by a court of law and are not granted access to any legal representation?
Because that is what Israeli “Imprisonment” of Palestinians in the Westbank looks like. Oh and of course the women and children are raped and people are tortured.
Point 1 l: that is just semantics so not really relevant. Hamas could have easily said that they arrested the Israeli hostages for a crime and it wouldn’t have changed anything.
Point 2: I’m not sure that the Palestinians held without charge have any functional rights.
Point 3: That’s just an assumption on both sides of this conflict. Hamas do have access to medical professionals and it is in their best interest to keep the hostages alive. Obviously, Israel does also have access to medical professionals but I’m not sure that the Palestinians have free access to them either. I’d hope that Israel would give medical attention when it’s needed but I don’t know.
Point 4: That’s just rubbish as a general definition of prisoner around the world and the Palestinian prisoners are definitely being used in the negotiations.
The only person being dishonest here is you. The slaughtering of 1000 civilians at a music festival was abhorrent, and the slaughtering of 30,000 more civilians in response is 30x as abhorrent. Calling the capture and torture of individuals as “arrests” makes you no better than Cheney and Bush with their “enhanced interrogation” bullshit.
The Israelis held by Hamas have been given many more rights than the average Palestinian prisoner.
This is an outright lie, Palestinians are being amputated because of zipties to their limbs
Again, Israel has no interest in “rehabilitating” its hostages, whereas Hamas is specifically offering to release theirs.
At worst this is hostages on both sides. Your assessment only proves how much more hospitable Hamas have been to its captives than Israel, even at a time of war and famine brought on by Israel’s onslaught.
Israel forcibly dragged Palestinians out of their homes and took them to unknown locations. Arrested versus abducted is a distinction without a difference.
Israel isn’t rehabilitating anyone in West Bank or Gaza, they are keeping them in cramped rooms with no access to lawyers or families and are held months without charges.
Your comment just doesn’t reflect reality. Ben-Gvir invited reporters to see prisoners and bragged that he’s intentionally starving them in captivity as revenge for hostages.
Abduction and arrest are identical. An arrest is abduction by the state renamed to honor their monopoly of violence.
Prisoners and hostages have as much rights as the holding entity says they do.
This is you just guessing on how Hamas handles their prisoners. Also isn’t necessarily the same. I can tell you as a former Texas department of criminal justice officer that denying inmates medical checkups is common. Both officially and unofficially. There’s an inmate in solitary who hasn’t had a checkup hes been asking for for a year because no one who interacts with him bothers to actually do it. Go fuck yourself with that one
Loooooooool that’s fucking hilarious. Go to prison and experience your rehabilitation bitch
I mean why wouldn’t the cast of the Black Panther be mainly black? That’s just weird that you wouldn’t have it that way. Also Captain Marvel and Ms Marvel are both female characters I don’t know what this guy is after here. Why would he pick those examples?
They should do what the comics did when they were told there needed to be more white people in Black Panther and just have him start beating up the KKK.
Because whenever a movie or TV show or video game has anything except a cis hetero white man as the main character, people like this start screeching. They aren’t satisfied with having people that look like themselves represented in the vast majority of main characters. They view any time a character not matching the above description shows up in some kind of media as discrimination against themselves. Any slight reduction in privilage they mistake for real discrimination. They mask this by claiming they’re just concerned with the integrity of the art or some nonsense, especially the gamer gate type crowd.
Anytime a gay character or a female character or someone pops up they start yelling, “why does this character have to be gay? It must be lazy pandering at the expense of a good story.” To which I would pose the same question back to them. Any piece of media featuring a straight cis white man, why does the character have to be a straight white man? Must be lazy pandering at the expense of story.
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s more interesting to have a wide variety of characters and stories in media. Sometimes people are just gay, or are just straight, or just female, or just male. It might have a big impact in a story and it might not. It shouldn’t be “unless this is a story specifically about the gay/female/black experience the character must be straight/male/white by default.” If that is going to be part of that piece of media, great, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be depending on the story being told. You’ll never see this crowd upset with a straight white male character for these reasons though, very transparent.
Just ask where all their inclusive screeching was back when it was an all white male cast in everything. If they shut up back then they need to shut it now.
The rise in interest rates and the end of easy VC money has swung the dial back to: Companies actually need to generate profit and not just show user growth to be attractive to investors.
reuters.com
Top