SatanicNotMessianic @ SatanicNotMessianic @lemmy.ml

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930

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2 yr. ago

Honestly, it’s even stupider than that. Everyone who works for me or that o work with is a professional making 6 figures, ranging into the mid-six range. They’re great at their jobs, and prior to Covid we had all kinds of flexibility for who worked where. Now it’s a one size fits all, and I’d honestly be shocked if the company wasn’t losing more money in policing and attrition than it was gaining in some hypothetical bonus of being in the office.

They don’t. It would just be a very bad look for Hamas. They’d just have no reason to kill him, or even to do the exchange.

It sounds like I’m being facetious but I am not. They’re not holding the hostages for ransom. They’re holding them for a prisoner exchange, I presume. However, I think the time for that kind of deal making is over for now. I think the Israeli government is going to destroy Hamas.

The only negotiation o could see happening - and I haven’t even seen anyone suggest this - would be the Palestinian Authority or another group to broker a surrender of Hamas leadership. I don’t think that’s going to happen either.

I anticipate Israel makes a ground incursion while continuing airstrikes, 10k or more Palestinians killed, and Mossad and Shin Bet go gloves off in assassinating Hamas leadership and allies. I think they’re going to get a lot of leniency and possibly cooperation from the international community, including some Arab states.

This was a 9/11 for Israel, and I think they’re going to be permitted a disproportionate response.

I don’t directly deal with China, but I do know that it’s pretty much the only place where you can say “I need a factory with 20k people manufacturing a million of these widgets per month,” and it just gets done. There’s obviously all kinds of bad baggage that goes along with that, and yes it’s perhaps ironic that a “communist” country is the go-to place for labor exploitation, but that’s how it is right now.

China may have been guilty of enthusiastic over-investment that got ahead of where their market actually was in areas like real estate. That’s again ironic because that’s exactly one of the weaknesses of market systems.

In the other hand it’s not really ironic because China is actually the apotheosis of state capitalism.

That’s really what I’m saying, though. There is no WWI scenario here. Neither Russia nor China will risk war with the US over Palestine. There’s no motivation and they have no national interest in doing so. They certainly do not have a mutual defense agreement with Hamas.

If Iran were still in the throes of civil disorder, they might want to amp things up to distract their populace and dramatically increase supplies to Hezbollah. As it stands, I think they probably still will. If they do it too much though, they do risk an escalation by Israel (ie an air raid or two against targets in Iran as well as Lebanon) to which they will not be able to respond.

No nation, except the Palestinians, is going to go to war with Israel and the US for the sake of the Palestinians. And as we are seeing, the Palestinians are poorly positioned to do so.

I read an article at least 35-40 years ago that the Palestinians would be better off throwing lemons rather than rocks at the Israel’s troops. There’s no Palestinian Martin Luther King or Gandhi, who by their own fortitude lays bare the morals of the situation.

Great! Most people feel the same way!

The problem is that most of us who go into scientific research involving human subjects have about a decade’s worth of increasingly specialized education on a specific subject, have worked in a junior capacity in study design, execution, and analysis, and were generally not billionaires trying to become the first trillionaire.

There’s a reason why academic research works the way it does - because we learned the hard way.

The Tuskegee experiment carried out by the US Public Health Service and the CDC was a program in which black American males were deliberately infected with syphilis and left untreated, so that researchers could watch the profession of the disease. The program didn’t officially end until 1972. Just yesterday I read a news story about a doctor successfully being sued for giving prisoners, without their consent, high doses of Ivermectin to treat Covid, going off of his intuition and the idea that he was qualified to do medical research.

When I was doing this kind of work, I had to go through something called a Human Studies Board. Every university has one. The HSB is a team of senior researchers which will review your proposal to make sure what you’re asking to do is both justified and does no harm to your subjects. If they say “no,” you’re going back to the drawing board. I have had PhD students whose thesis research had to go through multiple revisions because the HSB felt that they weren’t properly controlling for potential harm. Bit there were not billions of dollars on the line, and I didn’t have billions in personal wealth and the ability to influence the HSB.

Another example: About ten or so years ago, Facebook decided to run an experiment in which they promoted sad news stories to some people, and happy news stories to others. They then followed up on those individuals’ posts to see if the former group became noticeably depressed. They did. Facebook did this without the users’ consent, and didn’t make provisions for followup with any human subjects who did become depressed. Some of their subjects may have committed acts of violence or self-harm because of pre-existing psychological states. They have no idea. They just came up with the hypothesis that sad news might make people sad, and ran with it. It was unethical. I do not believe they faced any consequences other than the researchers and the company being universally berated in the academic community.

We are researching brain implants. That’s already underway in universities around the world. Elon wants to move fast and break things to make it go faster, but in this case the “things” are people.

So you have Elon, who is legendary in the industry for thinking he’s very much smarter than he is and pushing his experts into screwing things up. You have his vast wealth as well as a drive to create more wealth (academic researchers very rarely grow wealthy from their discoveries and rarely have wealth as a driving factor).

We are already doing what you’re asking for. I have a colleague at one of the top US university that’s specifically researching telomere repair and other aspects of DNA-focused methods to prevent some of the effects of aging, and I’ve personally done modeling on the molecular biology associated with deregulation and cancer in grad school.

We would be better off if the government would just take Elon’s money and use it to fund actual scientific research.

Mushrooms = The Last Among Us

Under what plausible scenario do you think WWIII happens here, of all places?

There are zero world powers that would go to war for the Palestinians over this. Russia has its hands more than full and has zero to gain in any case. China has no interest in the region except to expand its role as an international power by acting as a peace broker. The US is obviously going to take the side of Israel, as are the major European powers to a greater or lesser extent. And so on.

That leave regional powers. The only regional power that has indicated any interest whatsoever is Iran. Neither Lebanon nor Syria can be considered regional powers at this point, and Egypt and Saudis Arabia will both ultimately side with the US/Israel.

So we are left with Iran. Irans physical separation from Israel and the lack of support from the nations between them means they have two choices. They can attack by air/sea, or they can ramp up their supply and support for terrorist networks.

The former would very possibly result it the destruction of Iran. Iran has no allies that would be willing to go to war with the US in order to protect it. The Iranian navy, such that it is, would be a non-factor, and ground forces wouldn’t be able to leave Iranian territory. It would be an air war with the Iranian Air Force and air defenses up against a more advanced and better supplied Israeli and potentially US air/naval attack. The goal would be something like “degradation of armed forces and command and control” but would include attacks on infrastructure.

If Iran cranks on the terrorist network supplies and intel, it is 100% guaranteed they’re going to get an Israeli (without the US) response, which might include the destruction of Iranian military and political assets.

I don’t see any upside for Iran besides saber-rattling and maybe a perfunctory thing with Hezbollah to keep the hand in the game.

The comparative death rates between Russia and the US have literally nothing to do with the facts under discussion, which is whether a given 65 year old person’s death should be done considered because of a population - level statistical characteristic. What are you on about?

Nothing that you observed does anything but reinforce the point that expected-time-of-remaining life on a cohort basis including wealth and privilege is the only way to make an accurate judgement as to the expectations involved in a given death.

Gentlefolk, I give you Stede Bonnet, Gentleman Pirate and apparent vampire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stede_Bonnet

Well, you have to factor the guy’ s class into it, not just his age.

The problem with the “avg age at time of death” is that it picks up thinks like infant mortality (1.7% in 2002 and 2.9% in 1979). You also have to look at the contribution of wealth and class.

Even there, the better metric for a person might be “expected years of life remaining.” Since someone who is 65 didn’t die in infancy and wasn’t killed as a teen, all of those factors (which drag life expectancy down) can be ignored. If you’re still talking populations and cohorts, you’re still factoring in things like poverty and access to healthcare, but it might give a better understanding of the statistical probability of a person to die of natural causes in a hotel at that age.

The texture, contrast, and colors on this are amazing!

Can I ask what you did in (no pun intended) post processing to get that effect?

Because breaking an explicit law isn’t “exercising your rights.” It’s specifically and literally not a right.

If voice-replicating deep fake AI cannot do this for us, then I believe it has no purpose and we should burn it all down.

Also Garak singing Aaron Burr’s part:

Talk less

Smile more

Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for

You wanna get ahead?

Fools who run their mouths off wind up dead

I could see that as a conversation with Bashir.

I agree with all of this. The only thing I’d add is that there’s a high possibility of a ground incursion to ensure the destruction of the tunnels.

Given Hamas has no real relevant air defense, they’re just going to use bunker buster type munitions to collapse the tunnels (and the buildings that have entry points). At that point, they can send in ground units to finish. Hamas also has no ground-fighting capability versus armor or artillery, and will be relegated to house-to-house against an enemy that can just call in an artillery or air strike. Hamas also has no path of resupply. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point.

If they’re playing it smart, Israel wil let the ICRC and other aid groups in as soon as they’ve cleared an area and it’s safe for NGOs to conduct aid.

The thing is that the people who make you sign the agreement want you to think it’s enforceable. It simply isn’t.

There was a case where the big Silicon Valley companies entered into a mutual agreement to not only have their employees sign non-competes, but colluded to not hire each other’s employees. They were sued and lost, and everyone working for them at the time got a check.

I’ve signed the NDAs that will get you an orange jumpsuit if you break them. Those are the ones written by places like the DoD. Some Trump lawyer saying you must cover up a crime because of a personal NDA you signed with him as President would have absolutely zero effect on my testifying, because it has no legal basis for enforcement.

I’m not saying that the desire for Palestinian autonomy is going to be ended. I’m saying that Hamas-the-organization is going to cease to be an effective factor in it. It will be replaced by another organization, or several. I could certainly see another intifada coming out of this.

But you can most certainly bomb (and buy) an idea out of existence. There was a time when there existed a pan-Arab movement. Partly post-colonial, partly anti-Israel, partly Third World-ism in reaction to the Cold War, it tried to unite the Arab world across the borders drawn by the colonialist countries.

It went down in flames due to

1. Their inability to do the one thing they set as their biggest goal, which was the military conquest of Israel.
2. US and USSR intelligence operations, diplomatic engagement, and economic and military cooperation
3. Internal factionalism and personal greed

That’s actually where politicized Islam has its roots - in the defeat of modern, semi-socialist Arab internationalism. Looking back, we would probably have been better off with the pan-Arab movement becoming an entity that could make peace with Israel (like Egypt did) than have political Islam replace what at the end of the day was basic national aspirations in the post-colonial period.

I’m not the other person, but I think you might be confusing the term “determinism.” I think you might also have a bit of an over-enthusiastic understanding of quantum mechanics, which is a very common problem when people have QM explained in lay person terms I’m not going to get into the QM stuff because I’m a biologist and not a physicist, and I think your world just became more interesting with your new information. I’d just say hold off on the conclusions until you read a bit more, and start sliding towards the actual science books rather than the pop science books as you get your feet under you. You’ll have a different appreciation once you can read an advanced undergraduate textbook on modern physics.

Determinism as used here means behavioral determinism. There is significant evidence that a large number of our actions and reactions aren’t thought through, but rather are “automatic” responses. In fact, some neuroimaging work on decision-making has indicated that we reach a conclusion and then reverse-justify it by thinking we’re thinking about it. My subconscious mind has already decided to buy the bagel, but my conscious mind is still talking itself into it.

Again, people can take that kind of thing to an unjustified extreme. I think free will exists in a limited sense, but that it is highly constrained. In this case (the original question, not the person to whom you’re replying) is using their own misunderstanding of behavioral determinism to excuse their misbehavior. It’s a self-indulgent philosophy that you can probably pick apart if you really wanted to spend the time and effort in making them meticulously explain every step and aspect of their position, but it’s probably easier to just drop the person or to deal with them while remembering they’re possibly clinically psychotic, but almost definitely at least an asshole.

Legally, no. You cannot use an NDA to force someone to help you cover your a crime. That’s illegal.

What it might do is get people to come forward, because the threat of the NDA was perceived as real.

Most noncompete agreements are also illegal and unenforceable but if people follow them without seeking advice, they’re doing what the employer intended them to do.

When I had to sign a non-compete as a requirement to accept a job I thought I wanted, my lawyer’s advice was to just sign it because it was completely unenforceable. He said to basically sign it and forget about it.

I’ve never understood how a Trump NDA as something agreed to by members of the US government would have any teeth whatsoever. Any NDA I signed as an employee of the government was between me and the government. I couldn’t imagine my manager making me sign one with him personally.

Generally speaking - and we’re getting a bit more theoretical here - you cannot lead an organization like Hamas remotely. There are people on the ground in country who have a level of … enthusiasm … that when combined with charisma and their carefully maintained support networks will dislocate persons who have the disadvantage of communication delay and not being in the room for the meeting, as it were. Someone particularly famous can pull it off for a time if they have trusted lieutenants, but it’s precarious.

I doubt that Osama was in active control of Al Qaeda from Pakistan. These aren’t organizations that send an email that cc’s your boss. These people will shoot you if they think you’re weak or ineffective.

I think that other states will step in, and I think Israel will step back and say “What the fuck did we do?”

But history doesn’t make me think that’s going to happen nearly soon enough.