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ArbitraryValue

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ArbitraryValue ,

This move keeps the U.S. out of the conflict

I’m not sure why you think so. The US usually treats freedom of the seas as a pretty big deal. I don’t think that there will be violent retaliation solely for seizing this ship, but I do expect American naval patrols in the region with authorization to fire on Iranians that try something like this again.

ArbitraryValue ,

I think it’s the other way around - the US is having a hard time suppressing the Houthis because there’s nothing in Yemen that’s worth blowing up other than the missile launchers themselves, which are mobile and easy to hide. Iran, on the other hand, has lots of valuable infrastructure.

ArbitraryValue ,

If you had the choice, would you choose to be that buff if it meant also being that hairy?

ArbitraryValue ,

Places with traditions of mummification have dry climates in which bodies may mummify naturally, so it’s not something the people just came up with out of nowhere.

ArbitraryValue ,

calls himself a predator

van isn’t windowless

I can’t even.

ArbitraryValue ,

If Tourette’s involves a compulsion to say socially inappropriate things, what happens if those things don’t turn out to be socially inappropriate? Does the compulsion switch to something else? Does it fade?

ArbitraryValue ,

Strong black tea with a wedge of lemon (but I messed up my teeth so now lemon would make them very sensitive).

ArbitraryValue , (edited )

Hah, I always knew my political beliefs were proof of my genetic superiority.

But seriously, this isn’t necessarily saying what some people assume it’s saying. I don’t have much confidence in “controlling for socioeconomic variables” so I think membership in an intellectual class and therefore adherence to the beliefs common among that class may be the explanation for this phenomenon (rather than “smart people can figure out what the right answer to politics is”).

Edit: I’ve thought about it and I think it’s unfair for me to cast doubt on the study’s controls without listing specific objections. I withdraw my comment, at least until I have time to read the full study carefully.

ArbitraryValue ,

So today I drove five hours to see the eclipse, had a tire blow out, didn’t see the eclipse because of thick clouds, and got stuck in traffic for hours on the way back. (I’m still not home.) But at least I haven’t been shot by maniac, yet.

ArbitraryValue ,

Did you know that turtles scream when they, uh, copulate? Imagine how loud a dinosaur would have been.

ArbitraryValue , (edited )

As the article states, a war with Iran would not be good for anyone but it would be worse for Iran than for the USA. If the USA and Iran were purely rational agents, the USA would push back against Iranian influence and Iran would back down - its options would be to lose without a fight or to lose even more if it fought a war.

Of course in the real world rulers are often irrational, or more concerned about domestic affairs than foreign ones. (Maybe it’s better to rule an Iran battered by war than to be overthrown in an Iran that passively accepts containment.) Even rational rulers can miscalculate or underestimate their enemies.

Still, I think much of Iran’s recent success in growing its influence is due to a lack of political will in the USA for any sort of foreign intervention after Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than to a deliberate decision that allowing Iran to expand its influence is in America’s best interests.

ArbitraryValue ,

I don’t necessarily disagree with you, although I think Iran has a lot more ambition to expand its sphere of influence than the other Middle Eastern theocracies do and this would naturally bring it into conflict with the USA even if there wasn’t a historic enmity between the two countries. (Consider Russia as an example of a country that the USA had no particular hostility towards, despite the Cold War, but now actively opposes due to its ambitions.)

ArbitraryValue ,

I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Biden Demands Immediate Gaza Cease-Fire in Call With Israel’s Netanyahu (www.wsj.com)

He also called on Israel to take immediate steps “to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers” and “made clear that U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps,” according to the White House statement....

ArbitraryValue ,

I don’t think the title is accurate. I don’t have access to the full text of the WSJ article, but according to the Guardian

He underscored that an immediate ceasefire is essential to stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and protect innocent civilians, and he urged the prime minister to empower his negotiators to conclude a deal without delay to bring the hostages home.

Unless I’m missing something, Biden is not demanding a unilateral Israeli cease-fire. The cease-fire is still conditional on the release of the hostages.

ArbitraryValue ,

Given the context of a certain other person accused of financial crimes… Average real-estate over-valuation fan vs. average tax-evasion enjoyer.

ArbitraryValue ,

I’m pretty sure Putin also thinks that Ukraine had nothing to do with it.

ArbitraryValue ,

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/3975568b-5861-4a56-909a-a083278bf28e.png

It’s show-accurate, for those wondering. At one point, Pinkie Pie makes a bunch of magical clones of herself, but they’re really annoying so her friend Twilight Sparkle pops them like balloons. It’s OK though, the original Pinkie Pie survives. (Probably.)

America’s Magical Thinking About Housing: The city of Austin built a lot of homes. Now rent is falling, and some people seem to think that’s a bad thing (www.theatlantic.com)

If you want to understand America’s strange relationship with housing in the 21st century, look at Austin, where no matter what happens to prices, someone’s always claiming that the sky is falling....

ArbitraryValue ,

Well, the relationship between the supply and the price of housing is complicated. I live in NYC, in a building which has over 700 units in it. The building takes up as much land as a single-family home does in a rural area. But of course living in this building is much more expensive than living in that single-family home, despite the fact that the building represents a much larger supply of housing.

I know your example says “exogenous” and I agree that technically increasing supply doesn’t directly lead to increasing prices, but in practice if I see a lot of new housing being built in an area, I would expect that housing prices in that area are going up. (Why build housing somewhere where it won’t be a good investment?)

ArbitraryValue ,

Well, not so much in the literal sense…

ArbitraryValue ,

I don’t see why this is so outrageous. Why should someone with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of assets receive free medical care?

ArbitraryValue ,

I am static_casting the nut_t*. Pray I don’t static_cast it any further.

ArbitraryValue ,

I don’t know about Oregon, but I see how most people ride their e-bikes here in NYC and it makes me suspect that most e-bike/car collisions are the e-bike’s fault.

ArbitraryValue ,

I sometimes wish my employer didn’t know that I can write Python code, so that I would never be assigned front-end work. I prefer to deal with programs that take lists of numbers and return lists of other numbers.

(I’m not as bad as one guy I used to work with, because at least I accept ASCII input. His backend code only took binary-encoded configuration files for no reason I can think of except maybe to punish anyone except himself who tried to use it.)

ArbitraryValue ,

Homer : [after hearing “Baby On Board” could be a hit] Wait’ll I tell Marge.

Nigel : Oh, yes. Bouffant Betty. Well, I would prefer we kept your marriage a secret. You see, a lot of women are going to want to have sex with you, and, uh, we want them to think they can.

Homer : Well, if I explain it to Marge that way, I’m sure she’ll understand.

[at the house, Marge cries into her pillow]

Homer : [trying to comfort her] Come on, honey. It’ll only be 'til we finish our tour of Sweden.

ArbitraryValue ,

Maybe I’m weird because anything over 20 FPS looks smooth to me (and I know it doesn’t to other people) but what’s the point of going over 60 FPS? Can anyone actually see the difference or is this just a matter of “bigger numbers must be better”?

ArbitraryValue ,

My problem is that when I search for something, I often want to find precisely the text that I’m searching for. Not just some of the words, not synonyms, and not random stuff with no apparent connection to it. Putting the search query in quotes doesn’t always help.

ArbitraryValue ,

Does Boeing’s behavior qualify as gross negligence? I think they would have to be knowingly selling defective airplanes, or at least knowingly disregarding proper procedure when building those airplanes.

I’m not sure Alaska Airlines was even negligent.

ArbitraryValue ,

How would they fight it if they had the money? Did they have a significant use case other than piracy?

ArbitraryValue ,

Does it matter? I suspect that if that’s what you did, you were one of very few people doing so, and the law doesn’t require the absence of any possible legitimate use. In this case, something is illegal if it

is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

has only limited commercially significant purpose or use

ArbitraryValue ,

It’s a use case, but I would argue that it’s not a significant use case.

Emulators are still legal in theory, but I doubt that it is in practice possible to make an emulator for a modern video game system without violating some other part of the law.

ArbitraryValue ,

Do large vehicles in other countries have lower grilles? If not, is it because only Americans like the way they look or is it due to different laws?

Conservative Christian women in red states are rising up to defend IVF (www.washingtonpost.com)

“They were attacking my faith. It bothered me to the core,” said Sara, a Southern Baptist who identifies as pro-life. “Because I had never viewed [IVF] as wrong, as anything other than beautiful and bringing another life into the world. … I’ve actually had a lot of friends pray for me and encourage me and help me along...

ArbitraryValue ,

It doesn’t seem that inconsistent to me. Natural pregnancy often ends in spontaneous abortion (usually before the woman knows that she’s pregnant) but pro-life people aren’t against getting pregnant. I suppose that as long as the goal is to have a child, God makes sure no souls are harmed.

ArbitraryValue ,

Well, God has to draw the line somewhere. It would be weird if people who were going to live tragically short lives were instead born as soulless husks. The pro-life Christians defending IVF presumably think he draws the line at successful implantation.

(Also, can people not tell by my tone that I’m an atheist?)

ArbitraryValue ,

Cursed serif.

ArbitraryValue , (edited )

Not a lot of new information in this article. My summary is that there’s no way to verify either Israeli claims about the number of Hamas fighters killed or Hamas claims about the number of Palestinians killed. However, the two groups’ claims are mutually consistent, with Israel reporting approximately 10,000 Hamas fighters killed and Hamas reporting 30,000 Palestinians killed.

In December, [the IDF] described an assessment that it was killing two civilians for every Hamas fighter as “tremendously positive”, given the challenges it faced on the battlefield.

Of course, (30,000 - 10,000) to 10,000 is 2 to 1.

As Arete says in another comment, 2 to 1 is ordinary for urban warfare. It’s better than I expected, actually, given how heavily fortified Gaza is.

There’s an interesting blog post by a military historian here. In his words,

The IDF claims that they are killing one Hamas soldier for every two civilians they kill in Gaza, a ratio of 0.5, which their spokespeople have claimed is ‘unprecedented in the modern history of warfare,’ but which looking at the figures above is not actually a particularly scrupulous or discriminating ratio – though of course one may well argue the vast differences in circumstances. It is still both far from the best and far from the worst performance for armies operating in civilian spaces.

I’m not endorsing everything he says but I think he gives some good context on the topic of civilian deaths during urban warfare. (IMO he’s being somewhat uncharitable to Israel, given that Hamas spent billions of dollars fortifying Gaza in preparation for exactly this and also has an unusual incentive to have civilians on its own side die due to the role of international opinion in this war.)

ArbitraryValue , (edited )

If you accept the Hamas claim that

The Gaza authorities’ last demographic breakdown from 29 February indicated more than 70% of those killed had been women and children.

but you also think that Israel is getting its 2:1 value by counting corpses rather than by just making it up, that would imply that they’re counting all dead men (and 5% of dead women and children) as Hamas fighters.

However, given that approximately half of the population of Gaza is under 18, 70% would imply that over 93% of Palestinian casualties are civilians (based on the assumption that adult men make up 100% of Hamas fighters but only 25% of the civilian population). That’s 14 civilians killed for every fighter, more than twice as bad as the Russian siege of Mariupol. I don’t believe this because (1) it doesn’t correspond to the level of destruction we’re seeing, (2) I think Biden would act very differently if it were true, and (3) Hamas has a great deal of motivation to lie.

If Israel were killing literally everyone, women and children would be 75% of the dead. This is what Hamas is saying when they say “more than 70%”. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous but it’s what some people apparently believe and what the Western media reports uncritically.

Note that if if we accept the 2:1 casualty ratio Israel claims but believe they’re counting dead Hamas fighters completely accurately, that would mean 50% of casualties would be women and children and 17% of the casualties would be civilian men. If we think Israel is also exaggerating, then 7500 Hamas fighters killed, a 3:1 casualty ratio (pretty bad but not necessarily unjustifiable) would mean 56% of the casualties would be women and children and 19% would be civilian men. So I think the true fraction of women and children among the dead is somewhere between 50% and 56%.

EU watchdog wants new search and rescue rules after hundreds of migrants drown off Greece (apnews.com)

The European Union’s administrative watchdog called Wednesday for a change to Europe’s search and rescue rules following an inquiry into last year’s sinking of a rusty fishing boat, the Adriana, carrying hundreds of migrants while traveling from Libya to Italy....

ArbitraryValue ,

Did the Greek coast guard ignore reports of the boat sinking, or did they ignore the boat until they received reports of it sinking?

The latter wouldn’t surprise me in the context of how unpopular migrants are in Europe but the former would be heartless even by nativists standards.

ArbitraryValue ,

It sounds like Frontex was quite concerned about the condition of the boat but

Frontex had chosen not to exercise one autonomous power – to issue a mayday relay – on the grounds that the Adriana was not in “immediate danger” when initially sighted.

The Greek authorities then effectively prevented Frontex from continuing to monitor the boat, with the effect of delaying the rescue mission after the boat did sink, although no one was watching as the boat sank and refusing to respond. If this was intentional, then I assume it violated EU laws in a serious way, but Greece does have some plausible deniability.

The Greek ombudsman and the Greek naval court are separately investigating the actions of the coastguard, the latter having declined to initiate an internal investigation.

It doesn’t seem like Greece is particularly eager to resolve that ambiguity.

ArbitraryValue ,

Is this loss?

ArbitraryValue ,

This reminds me of the controversy around whether or not Trump was allowed to block people on Twitter when he was president. Some people were saying that as a public official, he had no right to do that. I don’t recall whether there was any authoritative legal decision about it one way or another…

I consider myself a free-speech absolutist. I think even terrible people saying terrible things have the right to express themselves. However, I think banning these people from city council meetings doesn’t infringe on their right to express themselves at all. They can still speak freely to anyone who wants to listen.

The city council meeting is for the benefit of the council members and they should be free to decide which speech is useful for them to hear and which isn’t. There’s no more reason for them to listen to everyone who wants to talk than there is for them to read letters from everyone who wants to write to them. (It would be silly to make them read every letter if they wanted to read any letter.)

The meeting does serve a secondary purpose of allowing participants to address each other rather than the council members, but this is IMO incidental and preventing it does not limit anyone’s freedom of expression - they can still talk in public if they want to.

Edit: accidentally deleted my own post.

ArbitraryValue ,

drive backwards

gas tank refills itself

Problem, oil companies?

ArbitraryValue ,

People only figured out the mechanics of plate tectonics relatively recently. However, they started noticing that the continents looked like they had fit together as soon as they had accurate maps to look at. In the late 1500’s

Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus … suggested that the Americas were “torn away from Europe and Africa … by earthquakes and floods” and went on to say: “The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].”

Wikipedia link.

A college is removing its vending machines after a student discovered they were using facial recognition technology (www.businessinsider.com)

A college is removing its vending machines after a student discovered they were using facial recognition technology::A photo shared on Reddit showed one of the vending machines with an error code suggesting it used facial recognition tech.

ArbitraryValue ,

Honestly, what’s the big deal? Your face is not secret and anyone who feels like it can photograph you while you’re out in public. Vending machines already know who you are if you use a credit card.

However, this is a good reminder to programmers: customers might sometimes see your error messages even if you didn’t intend them to. Don’t write anything Marketing wouldn’t like.

ArbitraryValue ,

no speech louder than this

It’s loud about the strength of this guy’s conviction but it provides no actual argument or information. I don’t think it’s cause to change one’s opinion about Biden’s foreign policy one way or another. In fact, I’d go further and say that it probably should be ignored as much as possible in order to avoid motivating other people to do the same thing.

ArbitraryValue ,

There’s a photo of this guy in the article. He looks white. Maybe the lighting in the photo is way off, but I have a hard time believing that they profiled him based on his appearance.

Edit: The photo in the article is a good representation of his appearance. Here’s another one.

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/e67f64c1-3a90-42f9-8640-5a6ccad97459.png

ArbitraryValue ,

He looks like he’s probably at least 25 but if I could get in trouble for being wrong, I think I would card him.

ArbitraryValue ,

Maybe, if he asked me why I wouldn’t sell him the spray paint without seeing his id. In that case, it would be an explanation of why the id-check policy exists, not an expression of my belief that he looked like a vandal. (Although by that point, I would suspect that he might be up to no good specifically because he was refusing to show me his ID.)

ArbitraryValue ,

I had a noticably receding hairline before I was 25. I’d sell to someone who looked old enough to be his dad without needing id, but if I could get in trouble for not carding someone I should have carded, I wouldn’t bet my job on the fact that he isn’t an older-looking 24.

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