Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
It is standard practice in European soccer to segregate the home and away fans in different sections of the stadium. I never knew how they enforced it until now.
I tried getting into soccer a while back, but the culture difference between European and American sports fandom was a much larger barrier than anything happening on the field pitch.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
and/or that you are not a supporter of the Visiting Club.
Presumably OP will be watching as a neutral. Is, "I am from a different country and just want to watch the game," not enough proof that he won't be supporting the other team?
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Arguably true for Palestinian refugees as well. There was no way to tell ahead of time that the Arabs remaining in territory conquered in 1948 would (eventually) be granted full citizenship in the State of Israel, but that Arabs remaining in territory conquered in 1967 would live the rest of their lives under military occupation or blockaded rump states.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
You can describe any war refugee exodus like this. Most of Mariupol's population evacuated due to the war. Zelenskyy keeps talking about retaking Ukrainia territory. Does this mean that the refugees left on the promise that the Ukrainian army would kill all the Russians and then they'd go back?
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
It’s actually worse than that. There is no viable Palestinian state that consists of a tiny densely-populated coastal exclave, plus a much larger landlocked region with no navigable waterways.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
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I don’t think it would be kumbayh in the Middle East if Israel suddenly disappeared, but historically the most common political arrangement in the Arab world is for there to be a large caliphate or empire dominating the region. Geographically, Israel splits the Arab world in two, preventing such an entity from forming. It might be good for the current great powers to keep the Arabs from coalescing into a single world power, but it does increase regional instability.
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You’re right that Israel is not committing a genocide. I do think it’s apartheid though. Maybe apartheid is okay in certain circumstances (ending it didn’t work out particularly well for white South Africans), but this is not a political system that is typically tolerated in the civilized world. Something like the Gaza War would have happened if one of the apartheid-era bantustans had openly declared war on White South Africa.
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I think there is an option for South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation. It would be difficult after October 7 and the Gaza War, but I think it is still possible. Israelis don’t want to do this, for understandable reasons, but they could if they collectively wanted to.
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Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. He was killed by an Israeli for the explicit reason that he was willing to make peace with the Palestinians and hand over occupied land to them. This and the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre by Baruch Goldstein were massive escalations by Israeli extremists to torpedo the peace process.
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I was a lot more sympathetic to Israel as an ethnostate proof-of-concept before they dragged my country into a major war. There is a criticism of ethnonationalism that since every ethnic group considers itself God’s gift to humanity, ethnostates will be especially prone to lash-out and start wars when they don’t get the respect they think they deserve. Israel has spectacularly failed to disprove this criticism.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
$250 million to learn not to park warships in the Persian Gulf was money well spent.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Wait, Sarker, Shrike, and Shakes are three different people?
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
The Ultra-Orthodox are remarkably simple. They want to maximize the observance and study of Torah. Right now, they assess (correctly) that the State of Israel is capable of defending itself without Ultra-Orthodox soldiers. This means that Torah study and observance is maximized by staying in yeshiva and learning Torah all day. If the Ultra-Orthodox became such a large fraction of Israel’s population that the state needed them to serve in the IDF, then they would enlist/relent to conscription, because getting driven out of the Land of Israel is bad for Torah observance and study.
Venezuela signed law allowing privatization of oil companies
American oil companies are private, yes.
Political prisoners released
Oil company executives are political prisoners.
Foreign investment returning to Venezuela
Foreign investment in oil infrastructure.
Opposition leaders shown on TV again
The opposition loves oil companies.
Enemies of the state coming out of hiding
Oil companies are enemies of the state.
EDIT: A big difference between Venezuela and Iran is that capitalist “exploitation” of Venezuela’s resources will improve the lives of the people living there, but continuous US/Israeli air strikes and CIA/Mossad-backed civil unrest will not.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Another view is that given the conditions, this isn't really the Iran war, it's the Lebanon war and the Iran war is a sideshow and a distraction. The casualties are higher in Lebanon, there are troops on the ground in Lebanon, Israel is considering expanding its territory into Lebanon, occupation will inevitably result in settlements which will not be removed, etc. Perhaps the purpose of the Iran war never had anything to do with Iran herself, which is why the goals against Iran never seemed achievable, but were instead more local to protecting the Israeli homefront against Hezbollah. The USA distracts Iran and forces it to accept Hezbollah's defeat.
Wow, another Middle East war where the Israeli interests were real but the American interests were illusory.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
My modal guess is that Trump’s negotiations rhetoric is market manipulation to buy time. He’s hoping that a surprisingly easy ground victory on one or more gulf islands will either buy political will for a larger operation or convince the regime to surrender.
Of course, that is contingent on the ground operation going well.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Is this the greatest vaguepost in Twitter history?
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
What’s his X handle?
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
It's possible that this is a very specific failure; that arbitrary video generation has no meaningful commercial use cases, and very limited recreational use cases. I used Sora very briefly when it came out, and I found it quite limited, with the substantial cost preventing me from toying-around to figure out what works.
It's also possible that OpenAI is strapped for cash as the AI financial bubble approaches a tipping point. OpenAI's compute committments are based on forcasted exponential revenue growth. If growth is linear or only barely superlinear, then the whole thing falls apart, with everyone holding on as best they can until the next equity sale.
NVIDIA stock is flat over the last 18 months by the way.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
It’s important to keep in mind that a sizable plurality of the actual population of these countries is seething with rage that their own governments are Western puppets siding with Israel. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. Bahrain is a “constitutional” monarchy that needed Saudi troops to put down a popular uprising. Iraq is under the control of pro-Iran militias, partially because they are locally popular and partially because they defeated the previous ruler, literal ISIS. Egypt is once again a military dictatorship because for the two years we let them try democracy they elected an Islamist government (see also: Algeria).
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
If you define Hezbollah as, “the entire Shia population of Lebanon,” then probably not. If you define Hezbollah as, “people engaging in or directly supporting militant operations,” then yes, a whole lot of innocent people got exploding pagers.
I have no idea how this didn’t kill the export market for Israeli electronics. For all we know, Mossad has the capability to kill anyone anywhere in the world with an Israeli-made chip in their car at any time.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
One point I’ll make here is that the culture of occupational safety is a lot different now than it was back in the 80s during the Tanker War. A 1% chance of someone onboard dying is not an acceptable level of risk for a civilian-crewed merchant vessel in 2026.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I sort of feel like the same thing is happening with Clavicular. He looks like what dudes think women find attractive. Do women actually find him particularly attractive? I have no idea.
GothamChess gets a lot of shit for using clickbait titles instead of anything useful or informative, but he ought to get about ten times as much shit for it. Just relentless slash-and-burn farming of the commons.
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