I was walking to the grocery store when I saw a neighbour polishing his in front of his house. I said “Wow, a Cybertruck,” and he replied, “Cool, isn’t it?”
I said, “No, it’s a $120,000 go-kart made of scrap metal that will rust in a month.”
Deadliest other animal. There were 602 homicides in England and Wales in 2022/23.
The effectiveness of bans has always hinged on two factors:
For example, everyone knows that the odds of being caught speeding are pretty low, but if the punishment for speeding is ten years imprisonment, then very few people will risk speeding.
Similarly, even if the odds of getting caught violating this law is only 1%, if the punishment is banning the platform and shutting down the company along with a fine equal to a year’s worth of revenue, then companies will probably not want to risk it.
I think it’s also the case that it has a bigger impact on developing brains, who might be more easily addicted.
I don’t have any evidence for this, I’m just guessing here.
You’re probably right. At the same time, stability and the right environment for business can do wonders for a country’s economy. Just compare the dirt-poor China that Deng Xiaoping opened to global investment and the now-dominant regional superpower of today.
However, birth rates are more correlated to wealth, not to religion. Poorer people have more kids than wealthier people. Palestine is much poorer than Israel, partly because of the constant war and unrest there, as well as the lack of a strong state apparatus. This means nobody wants to invest money to start businesses and create good jobs Meanwhile, Israeli companies and people exploit this by hiring Palestinian workers at very low wages.
Palestine is also beholden to the monetary policy of Israel as they are forbidden by treaty from establishing a national currency. Thus, the currency of Palestine is largely the Israeli new shekel.
Once there is peace, there can be work to fix these problems and increase the living standards of Palestinians. Once that happens, history tells us that their birth rate will naturally decline.
Wow. Shocking.
Not going to lie, I thought it was fake news.
Hang on a minute—the population of Israel is some ten million but the population of Palestine is only some five and a half million. Israel is 74% Jewish and 18% Muslim. Palestine is 93% Muslim. The rest follow other religions or no religion (they are mostly Christians).
This seems to mean that there are 7 million Muslims and 7.5 million Jews. And these figures predate the Gaza war; no doubt the number of Muslims in Palestine has gone down, due to obvious reasons.
Well, we’ll see. The thing is that if the Palestinian Authority wants to be recognised as a state, it needs to act like a state and not like an ephemeral government-in-exile. Democratic governments can change through elections, but the state as an organisation is still there. The PA uses the name “State of Palestine” in its formal communications, so it needs to live up to that instead of acting like a ragtag band of desperados begging for whatever scraps of power Israel tosses to them.
Does the current government of the Palestinian Authority have the confidence of the people? Maybe. We don’t know. But I assume the answer is “no” until I am proven wrong. Fatah controls the PA but technically lost to Hamas in the 2006 election. Again, that was 18 years ago. A lot has changed since then! Hamas has turned Gaza into a shit hole. The pockets of the West Bank run by the PA at least are serviceable.
I’ve never heard of that. Do you have any further reading?
Netanyahu has not come up with any end plan for his Gaza war (because the whole thing is a ruse to keep him in office and out of jail at this point). It seems the Palestinians have so generously done so for him.
The logical end plan is probably a tenuous peace with Israel. The Palestinian Authority is smart they’ll either make peace with Hamas or betray them all and turn them over to the Hague. The former will stabilise the Palestinian state at the expense of risking another Israeli invasion. The latter will stabilise relations with Israel in exchange for potentially weakening the unity of Palestine. But the PA cannot keep their heads in the sand and ignore Hamas.
Elections must be held. The Palestinian Authority has no claim to any mandate from the Palestinian people. Their latest election was over 18 years ago. If they want international legitimacy then they will need to demonstrate they have the confidence of the Palestinian people.
With a strong PA, there are two logical endpoints—a two-state solution with strong cooperation between Palestine and Israel, perhaps even to the point where there can be freedom of movement between the two or even united citizenship; or a one-state solution with the entirety of Palestine being absorbed under the state apparatus of what is now Israel, forming a bi-religious or secular successor state (due to the new voting power of Palestinian citizens).
Nobody will be entirely happy and get everything they wanted in the end, nor will everyone think that the result was totally fair, but I think at some people, people get tired of endless war and become willing to compromise. This may not happen in our generation, but it eventually must.
I donate 12€ a year through OpenCollective. Donate here!. That’s 12€ more than any other social media site has ever gotten out of me. Donations also support mastodon.world.
If everyone donated 12€ a year then they’d be so flush with cash that it’d make the Wikimedia Foundation look broke.
I’m pretty sure most libraries also have that.
Yes, firing missiles at Tel Aviv would be a legitimate military tactic, as long as you’re actually aiming for military targets and not just shooting randomly.
This is like saying that the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker are in Berlin and questioning whethering bombing Berlin is a legitimate tactic. Of course it is. You just have to hit actual targets.
Israel definitely has the capability to hit targets with precision. They have the best weapons in the world, courtesy of the United States. But there’s been too many “oopsies, we obliterated the entire neighbourhood killing a thousand civilians” for it to be merely sloppy aim.
I don’t disagree.
Although I don’t deny that the Israeli military is generally quite reckless with civilian casualties (and this is probably purposeful to an extent), it’s also true that Hamas doesn’t exactly pick the most civilian-free areas to set up their base of operations either.
Like, if Hamas sets up shop in an orphanage with 100 kids inside, the IDF will bomb it to smithereens without second thought and kill all 100 just to get the 3 Hamas commanders inside, as long as none of those children were Israelis. That kind of scenario. The next day, Hamas blames Israel for killing 100 innocent children and Israel blames Hamas for endangering them in the first place.
So it’s not fair to finger only one side when both parties to this conflict are so unapologetically shit and treat the rules of war like an achievements list.
Right. Let’s check back in eighty years and see how many are alive then.
I believe “Earthling” is traditional.
Microsoft’s solution will be to remove the feature from Enterprise versions of Windows while keeping it around for the plebs using Pro and Home
Average German game title