dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
Pretty much everyone who works in quant finance occupies enough legal gray area to worry that they could all be shut down at any time and end up in court.
Can you elaborate on this? I know a bunch of people who work in quant finance and while it seems completely socially useless it also seems perfectly legally legitimate
Every trader makes mistakes: around trading on what turned out to be material non-public information, or discussing business on non-recorded channels, or their company learns they've been failing to record chats (or emails) for months without noticing before, or due to a glitch they accidentally sold a ton of shit short they didn't have the right to short, etc.
All of these things are technically illegal but if you immediately reach out to the SEC (or whomever) and fess up they'll probably just slap you on the wrist. But it's completely at their discretion and they might bring serious charges. Or threaten licenses. Or jail. It very much depends on your relationship with the regulator. Woe is you if the SEC discovers these problems before you've noticed yourself and fessed up.
Is this whole line of moral questioning useful? I consider it a given that the civilness is based on security, safety, abundance, lawfulness, peace and so on. Teasing out religious and cultural differences is a little interesting, though I think misses the point. It's fairly universal that stripping away these civilization cornernstones make people more savage.
The more interesting question is, is it ever possible for a 21st century civilization to collide with a 14th century one and for the 14th century one to be warmly embraced and adapted? And I say 14th century because I consider the currently problematic Islamic cultures of the world to be basically the Spanish inquisition with the sign flipped from Christian to Islam.
For a more extreme example, my mind immediately goes to European settlers meeting the already-here indigenous peoples of America. Despite the billions of words written about how harmoniously they must have existed in connection with the Earth and one another, I'm sure they were probably even more insane to deal with than the currently situated Hamas.
(Of course the native Americans didn't have adversaries of the European settlers hooking them up with modern assault weapons)
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
On the other hand... Japan surrendered to the US! How were the Japanese able to swallow their pride in the face of total nuclear annihilation and decide that bending their knee to the West and adopting all of their customs was better than going down in a blaze of glory? But yet the Palestinians find this utterly unthinkable?
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Any objective look at numbers tells us the story that jews in Israel have been massively overrepresenting the threat they face compared to any other integration issue facing the west.
Hamas's pathetic kd ratio isn't for lack of trying though, whereas I don't believe the dominant position in Israel is to kill as many Palestinians as possible. If Hamas got their hands on a nuclear weapon they would absolutely use it on Israel. That's the threat model.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
I'm trying to imagine how we'd behave if every Mexican was actually really angry about white settlement of the Americas. Lets say hostilities between Mexicans and the rest of the US never subsided, and Texas and California were disputed states with constant violent flare-ups. Life in Texas and California dragged behind quality of life in the rest of the US and Mexicans living in those territories were pretty miserable and Mexican terrorism and US heavy-handed response was a fact of life.
Peace proposals for Texas and Californian independence and full recognition are floated, but they keep getting derailed because of one core Mexican demand: they demand right of return for all Mexicans to anywhere in the US, because this was their ancestral homeland if you go far back enough. To put the numbers in Israel proportions, this would be up to 160 million Mexicans in the global diaspora potentially settling the entire US.
Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of how Texas and California were litigated, I don't see the US capitulating to terms like that. If Mexicans were engaging in cross-border terrorism against civilian targets I can see the chances going from vanishingly improbable to fucking never.
This seems to be the position Israel is in.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
On the other hand, Native American peoples (including, say, Mexicans?) have an ancestral claim to North America that goes back many thousands of years. Perhaps hundreds of thousands while USians barely have any by contrast.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
In general I’m no big believer in democracy. I think the solution, if the Israelis were to commit to the extreme casualties required, would be large scale indoctrination, a combination of extreme and Full Xinjiang (VoA propaganda edition).
I believe this would also be considered genocide.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Sorry, are you saying you set up iptables rules on your android phone to lock it down in case of malware/spyware/hacking?
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
If there are backdoors in Apple and Android phones, wouldn't they be ordered by the government and not be shared outside of intelligence agencies?
NSO, OTOH, appears to have developed remote hacking tech and is selling it far and wide, by contrast.
I see NSO as more of a play so that police departments and other minor state security services can try to phone hack too.
This is all assuming NSO isn't a cute little Mossad front, of course.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
The current border contention made it feel like an appropriate analogy.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Perhaps this is obvious, but that view actually makes me much less sympathetic to any grievances someone may have against the US.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
No, I meant if terrorists abroad are going to consider me, someone that was a teenager on 9/11, morally culpable for what the US government does and a valid target, that makes me much more war hawkish in general.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
But there's a reason none of those western democracies are in Israel's place, that reason has a lot to do with Israel's actions as a nation, and those actions do change what is reasonable for them to do, and who we should side with.
I can appreciate that the US is not Israel, but why aren't the actions of the Palestinians in the territories also a factor? If they had followed Gandhi (as mentioned elsewhere) they would have probably been a lot more successful and not suffered so much. And the physical and cultural destruction we carried out on Japan in WW2 which was surely far more outrageous was apparently very productive.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
So you guys do know all these Palestinians will end up in Europe, right?
So, nation states that want the EU to disintegrate will eagerly try to pick them up and put them on boats and send them to Europe, eh?
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
No, I am not moved by appeals to ancient history. That cycle has to end at some point, and the end of WW II seems like a good stopping point for that sort of shenanigan.
What does this mean? The Jews in 2023 should just pack up and leave Israel for other countries because WW2 was supposed to be the end of these shenanigans? Why can't you say this to Palestinians?
(I agree stuff like "it's time to be cruel" isn't a good look)
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
More concretely, my wager is they are asking civilians to clear out of North Gaza because they plan to occupy it and root out and destroy all of the tunnels and hopefully destroy supply caches and find hostages and treat everyone who gets in the way as Hamas. I expect they would leave when this mission is accomplished.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Good points, though, I suspect if Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and Vietnam bordered us the American people would experience far more collateral damage and the US military would behave quite monstrously. Perhaps some degree of civility depends on circumstance and context, as you say.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Even in the 70s the US was doing things in Vietnam that would be much more scandalous if it did today. There's been a lot of moral progress since the end of WW2 and I have trouble judging Israel's current population for things most of them had no hand in.
It sounds like your point boils down to: truly enlightened people would accept the sins of the past and surrender the place to the Palestinians and make a new life elsewhere. That sounds like a great standard but I don't think any people on Earth would rise to it.
(For a phantasmagoric twist, it would be nice if Palestinians were so touched by the offer that they offered to pack up instead and both sides had a eureka moment and moved towards a single state peace)
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Ozempic looks like it's the real deal. I don't put much stock in people who keep muttering under their breath about some hidden catch, as if the universe works that way. A cure for obesity, as well as seemingly effective
Ozempic is probably clearly an all cause mortality improvement for people with obesity, which is a huge win, though I think the cost-benefit is worse if you're taking it for non-health reasons since it does cause an apparent decrease in muscle mass and also elevated heart rate which... probably can't be good?
I think those are the catches.
I sure do hear a lot of muttering from naturally thin types about it though!
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
You can't talk like this and then pretend you're the civilized party here! Though of course, looking at the so-called developed nations, especially America, maybe they don't talk like this, but they sure behave like it, so maybe there actually are no or few civilizations around.
I agree it sounds menacing but I parse that as: the strong don't get surprised by a devastating terrorist attack Hamas has been planning for 2 and a half years almost in the open and then get sucked basically irrecoverably into an invasion of Gaza that causes enormous collateral damage on both sides that will skyrocket animosity and anger for decades to come.
They obviously failed at this "strong" ideal here but IMO, part of security and stability means convincing criminals and terrorists that it's futile to even try to do bad things.
I do think they goofed by not invading Gaza immediately, as if they were in hot pursuit. Perhaps intelligence suggested that they were walking into a huge trap.
Alternatively, I'd expect Israel to have antibodies to psychological warfare but I wonder if the 100+ hostages Hamas took is more leverage than we realize.
If the United States thinks that they don't, then why aren't we bombing them back to the stone age as part of the war on terror?
Are we planning to kill every Palestinian? If not, the survivors are going to have not warm feelings for Israel. What state will they live under? How will Israel deal with them?
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
This is basically all I seem to be hearing. Nobody knows what Israel should do (or rather: they have some sort of vague shopping list of 'hearts and minds' and 'developing Gaza'* with no idea how to make it happen in reality) but everyone apparently knows what it shouldn't do.
I basically go up to everyone condemning Israel and say "zap! you're now the PM of Israel. what's your next move?" and I generally get a range from "Israel should follow international law" (hand wave hand wave) with no specifics on how they protect their security and sovereignty doing that, all the way to something the Heath Ledger version of The Joker would say.
In pretty much every jurisdiction in the world there are rules on what you need to do to drive a car for hire and Uber frequently did not require drivers to follow every jurisdiction's rules to start driving. These jurisdictions had the option to shut Uber down for this but they either couldn't get their shit together, they looked the other way, or they did and it became a constant political issue they had to balance against how mad local taxi companies were.
In my town Uber was warned to stop or comply, they ignored the warning, the town fined them, and then Uber disappeared from town. Then the town council got shit for it for years before they changed taxi laws. Uber did some form of this everywhere. As much as I appreciate Uber and love the future we live in, this is a blatantly criminally minded business plan!
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