functor
10mo ago
The US is swimming in debt, is deeply divided and is being overtaken by China. The US is far less ahead than it was 50 years ago. Most of the countries in the region trade more with China than the US. The US portion of global GDP, population and military might is in decline. This is an awful time to get involved in forever wars containing direct ethnic cleansing over a tiny strip of desert.
Creating a giant refugee crisis on the border of Europe while impacting a bunch of countries in the middle east by engaging in mass ethnic cleansing is the worst PR imaginable.
functor
10mo ago
A lot of the people panicing aren't concerned about bribes and corruption being unconvered. There are plenty of people panicing over that but they are fewer than the number of people freaking out online and those who actually risk having crimes uncovered are probably less vocal. The big fuss is about the recession that is about to hit upper middle class people who only are employable in the public sector. They react in horror seeing George town pol sci graduates being tossed out and told to "learn to code". The Chief diversity officer, or the person with a cushy high status USAID job that allows them to fly business class to Tanzania twice a year doesn't want to learn about all the new exciting opportunities in nursing. This can be compared to the freakout over lots of PMCs being tossed out of twitter. Those people aren't supposed to be treated like factory workers who get laid off.
With 4 years of Trump we could really see a 10-20% reduction in public sector cushy PMC jobs. That is a sizeable downshift in employment equivalent to a proper recession. I would be freaking out as well if I thought it was realistic that there would be a 20% reduction in employment in my field over the course of the next four years.
functor
10mo ago
American consumers get to buy cheap foreign stuff
Which disincentivizes buying American. America deindustrializes and you end up with well payed service workers who are chronically broke.
A strong dollar doesn't particularly impact insurance or real estate.
It does, most of the world is doing business in American treasuries and the American financial system becomes the global money hub. The dollar system allows the US financial markets to swell out of proportion. It wouldn't be possible for the US to have this much money printing without hyper inflation if it wasn't for the petrodollar.
functor
10mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
The US prints money and exports the inflation. The US biggest export product is the dollar, something the US makes for free. The US economy is awash with dollars making real estate and other assets extremely expensive while the dollar is still pricey making the US expensive to manufacture in.
The US has the housing prices of a country that prints wildly while having the currency cost of a country like Switzerland.
Jarvis pull up the gazan death toll in the latest war
Lower than what the Vietnamese, Algerians or Afghans paid.
I again remind you that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza,
So they took all the land except for a tiny sliver with minimal natural resources and no connection to the west bank and then put it under blockade.
As simple as that, yet you only apply the standard one way.
Because there is absolutely no reason for the IDF to be there. The idea that a God gave them the land in exchange for parts of babies penises is absurd as a legal argument. The Palestinians did not start the fight, people who managed to get all of Eastern Europe to hate them and then decided to move to Palestine started the conflict.
functor
10mo ago
The current arrangement is fundamentally broken. The US has the dollar as the reserve currency, making the dollar too expensive. This is great for the American finance, real estate and insurance industry that require little labour and are capital intensive. The US as a reserve currency means that the world is subsidizing the financial markets in the US.
This means that the US becomes an incredibly expensive country to do business in. The working poor in the US are well paid. They are just living in a financialized economy with high costs. With an overvalued dollar, real estate in the US is way too expensive which means that American workers have to be well paid. All that money sloshing around the American financial system keeps medical insurance expensive.
This worked in 1960 when the US was so technologically superior that much of the world ended up selling bananas and clothes to the US for dollars that then were used to buy overpriced industrial products from the US. As the world has caught up, much of the US has gotten shafted. They have high costs of living while struggling to compete with cheap foreign products in a globalized economy under pax Americana.
Trump wants to keep the US dollar dominance while having a more normal internal market by having tariffs. Prices will be high within the US while Americans will continue to be relatively rich while going abroad.
For the rest of the world the deal is awful, we will have to sell products to the US in order to get dollars and then pay a 25% tariff in the products we buy. So if we want to buy oil we have to sell 100 dollars worth of goods to get 80 dollars of money post tariffs that the Americans just print so we can get our oil.
functor
10mo ago
Why should they lay flat and accept defeat? They were pushed into a tiny area after their villages were destroyed and many of their kin were killed. They are put in a small camp with awful natural resources and have constantly been attacked by the Israelis who have bombed them repeatedly since start. Israel started the war when they attacked the Al Aqsa mosque and had already taken thousands of Palestinian hostages.
If you don't want to get smoked while crying in a bathroom in an IDF outpost don't move to Palestine and don't join the IDF. They have no reason to be there and have only themselves to blame for the constant headache which they will face.
functor
10mo ago
The area is majority Palestinian. You can't have an area where the majority of people are second class citizens in their own home and nobody except Israel wants a massive refugee crisis. This is question for the people who thought building a jewish state in a densely populate area to answer.
functor
10mo ago
There is absolutely no reason for the rest of the world to want or support a Palestinian refugee crisis. Neo con wars end up with migration crises and these need to be stopped. No more mass movements of arabs.
functor
10mo ago
If you ran the IDF, how would you fight Hamas in a chivalrous manner?
First off, occupying a large population that fundamentally doesn't have anything to gain from the current setup is futile. Trying to force the Palestinians to accept only having a tiny fraction of the land with an awful arrangement won't work. The only times counter insurgency has worked, it has been with political concessions.
functor
10mo ago
First off the British military wasn't incompetent enough to get pwnd that hard. The Israelis were defending military outposts with hundreds of soldiers and got owned by men in sandals running over an open field. Of the 797 civilian casualties a large portion was killed by Israel blasting the area and preferring to kill civilians rather than letting them be taken prisoners. That is a civilian to military casualty rate well below two civilians killed by Hamas for every IDF soldier.
functor
10mo ago
14 deaths in Northern Ireland becomes so famous people know the story 53 years later. Israel kills hundreds of people a year during a peaceful year and tens of thousands during the war. The Gazan war had as many dead in a month as the troubles had in 30 years. It was about 360x more bloody.
functor
10mo ago
First, unlike other colonial powers the people making the decisions have no where else to go.
If Americans are so adamant about a jewish state they should give them a small plot of land. Jews have managed 2000 years without a state so it would hardly be anything new. A large portion of jews lived in the middle east without a jewish state for the past 2000 years. A jewish population in an Ottoman style empire would be return to normalacy.
and their military ability to defend themselves they fully expect a return to periodic pogroms and expulsions
Jews require constant conflict with everyone around them in order to maintain group cohesion. If they didn't want to be disliked a good start would be to stop killing large numbers of civilians. The cause of antisemitism is the type of behaviour Ben Gvir and his likes are engaging in.
Second, Israel has the full backing of the USA
Along with Vietnam and Afghanistan? Evangelical Christians who honestly believe Jesus will return if the foreskins in exchange for Israel deal is upheld is shrinking. The fact that the Jewish community is deeply antagonistic towards the Christian groups that support them doesn't help.
functor
10mo ago
Compare the British in Northern Ireland with the videos of IDF soldiers larping biblical genocides. The British stabilized northern ireland and effectively pacified it. They were not mass killing tens of thousands of civilians in a year, and Belfast isn't a smoking heap of rubble. Israeli politicians openly talk about moving large numbers of Palestinians to Europe and other countries in the middle east while blowing up all civilian infrastructure. The level of brutality is unusually high and gets a level of support from the leadership that is unprecedented.
functor
10mo ago
It is a genocide. First off 80% of the population of Gaza are there because they or their ancestors were forced into Gaza and have been locked in Gaza ever since.
Israel has denied them food, bombed them at an astounding rate and murdered tens of thousands of people. Judaism is a religion which holidays are celebrations of Bronze age genocides of neighbouring tribes and that rhetoric has been used liberally during the war. While Israeli soldiers have been committing war crimes on an industrial scale they haven't been shy about referencing their historic genoicides.
Israel has shown that it is incapable of of taking an area the size of a city against an enemy with no logistics. The war started with Israeli soldiers crying in a bathroom of a well fortified position while getting smoked by men in sandals, and ended with Israelis being unable to fight. Israel has ended up deeply divided and is in a permanent state of crisis. Israels situation today is similar to the situation of French Algeria in the 50s or Vietnam in the 60s. They have a population that hates them and the cost of containing it is too great. Israel isn't a sustainable state and the Arabs know that they can outlast them as long as they sustain the pressure.
the complete inability of the western civilian , and by extension politician, to understand what war actually is
Europeans have fought battles on battle fields for thousands of years with a strong aversion to harming civilians, punishing prisoners and acting in a non-chivalrous manor. The cowardly and brutal fighting style has once again reminded Europeans why the jewish mindset is fundamentally incompatible with the western mindset and how the Semitic/MENA culture simply is not anything we want to deal with. Israel's popularity has plummeted in the west, especially among younger people who consume their news through social media, which is less controlled by the ADL. The same Jewish institutions who attack westerners for the slightest ethnocentrism have the chutzpah to try to justify bombing the Christians in the middle east so they can build summer homes on the west bank.
functor
10mo ago
To what extent is the recessed jaw epidemic genetic and to what extent is it environmental?
beautiful buildings can be simple
Most old buildings were not palaces with intricate marble an complex art. Most old buildings were fairly simple boxes with good proportions that fit into their surroundings. In the photo above every building is a box. Yet tourists flock to the street and the property prices have soared through the roof. Arguably they are simpler than a lot of glass and steel designs.
Modernism's problem is that each building is trying to be a monument standing out instead of fitting into an urban landscape. The buildings try to stand out by having unnatural facades and flawed proportions. Fixing these issues isn't that complex. A brick, stone, or wood building can be a beautiful box without complicated construction.
functor
10mo ago
The idea of having lots of kids while living with low status breaks down when you realize that the women who agrees to this will most likely be fat and below average Iq. The dating market is a status game and with birth control people can afford to trade time for more status. Men can spend years going to grad schools, traveling, saving for an impressive condo etc while building their career to move up the stack of profiles on tinder.
Dropping out of the status game at 21 years old to marry a woman who is happy to have 5 kids in a three bedroom house, never travel and live a low status life means your kids would be dead if we had natural selection. The exception is men who have such high status that they have won the statusgame at age 21.
functor
10mo ago
There is also no requirement for them to be in China. The deepseek serverfarm could be anywhere in the world. It could also be distributed with a bunch of smaller clusters. The model can be trained on regular gaming GPUs. It would be more expensive but the sums are absolute peanuts for a state actor.
functor
10mo ago
I am surprised that nobody has filled the niche that facebook is useful for, keeping track of distant acquaintances. Facebook was decent in 2010 when it let users keep track of their second cousin's graduation and high school classmate's new house. There should still be a market for a listing of life events for people on the periphery of your life. Linkedin has weirdly enough partially filled the role but there is no true platform for this.
functor
10mo ago
Nuclear isn't that expensive. France managed to build a majority nuclear grid that has been safe and stable for decades while maintaining sensible electrical prices. The price comes from building one of a kind reactors by companies with little experience while contending with insane levels of regulation.
functor
10mo ago
The electrical grid needs baseload power. In this graph green represents wind production in Sweden each day. A serverhall or steel mill has a fairly constant consumption rate. During During various Dunkelflautes the wind power production has dropped to low single digit percentages of installed capacity.
Some countries like Norway and Iceland are blessed with boundless cheap baseload power from hydro and geothermal. The rest of us need to create it. Nuclear is reliable, not dependent on weather and provides a stable and green electrical grid. There wasn't a single hour in which Germany's electrical grid was greener than France's last year. France bet on nuclear, Germany on fossil fuels with wind when the weather is good.
Too much focus is spent on electricity production and not enough on the grid. A nuclear powerplant 50 km from a city requires a 50 km cable that is operating at an average of 90-95% capacity. Windpower requires multiple power lines that can be a thousand km long to connect the city to various different wind parks, where it might be windy at different times. This is not green, cheap or efficient.
Why? what exactly does forever wars in the middle east and refugee crises deliver to the US? What is legitimate about an Israeli claim to Gaza?
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