livus @ livus @kbin.social

If you like international and eclectic news, come and join me at [@worldwit

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2 yr. ago

Worth noting that for the UN to declare famine:

• at least 20% of the adults have to be experiencing severe hunger and
• at least 30% of the children have muscle wasting and/or stunted growth.

This. Also I'm pretty sure they were trained on the turnitin.com corpus so they waffle a lot. They're incapable of making a point without sounding like someone who loves the sound of their own voice.

I wonder if there are already hybrids that steal and rephrase other comments using GenAI i

Have to be. There were rephrase bots before LLMs even, they just changed a few key words like "argument" would become "fight".

Whoever made them would definitely think of this.

let us not forget

I was specifically explaining to that person why the international community is not able to intervene via the UN.

Hamas leadership is shitty too, I agree, but in factual terms it simply lacks the power to singlehandedly prevent an international intervention.

Guy in the front with a cane is a snappy dresser.

That one looks a lot more normal but... why does it look like I can see the tree through its head???

Okay you got me. I finally gave SCMP a click. But it was worth it!

Ha ha ha no.

You're probably thinking about the time he had a disagreement with the Chief Rabbi. That got resolved.

His conservative opponent in the mayoral race tried to parlay that into a thing though.

Nice one!

That's true of March, but if you look at the big picture the US always vetos on the side of Israel's political interests (until the most recent one, which Israel didn't obey anyway). This was going on long before the current genocide.

The US has recently been trying to lobby the ICC on behalf of Israel (neither country are member states). Its support is a big part of why we can't just step in and start enforcing international law eg the Geneva Conventions.

Heh. Most English-speaking countries spell cheque this way.

Thanks, beautiful photo.

I'd forgotten how Metal the cicadas look over there.

Ours all just look like this so pictures like yours look like some kind of Undead version or something to me, with its crazy red eyes.

Thanks for the apology, it's all good. Glad I can stop avoiding replying to you in my threads.

I am really bad at not backspacing over the pre-populated tag though. Doesn't help that I interact a fair bit with people from Mastodon on here and they tend to use it. Also kbin thread displays can be confusing so the tags help me keep track of the conversation in big threads.

So, yeah I'll try to not tag you but if I ever do start annoying you, do block me.

France ended up occupied by Germany in WW2 with the deeply unpopular Vichy govt.

Gaza is in the position of an occupied territory.

The US blocks most UN resolutions about Gaza.

Meanwhile Gaza itself has at this point lost 60% of its buildings (75% in Gaza city) and has reached famine conditions in the north.

To be actually declared a famine, an area needs 20% of its people to be starving and 30% of its children to show visible signs like muscle wasting.

They are in no condition to hold a free and fair election right now. They need urgent help.

The UN can't step in.

The US protects Israel from UN intervention.

The people of Gaza haven't been able to have an election for about 18 years because of conditions there.

Netanyahu's faction in Israel initially helped Hamas because they wanted to "divide and conquer" so that the Palestinians didn't have one government and couldn't negotiate a two state solution.

Are you sure? I'd expect the number applying to the US would be hundreds of times higher than the number applying to New Zealand.

I don't especially love or hate Biden btw, I mean I can't stand US foriegn policy on the Gaza Genocide but it's not like their other mainstream politicians wouldn't have done more or less the same. It's a real pity the US hadn't been able to elect someone like Bernie Sanders.

I agree he specifically called out Japan to contrast with the US because its immigration was weaker.

people deciding to come to your country isn't proportional to your population

Are you saying fewer people decide to come to the US than to those other countries?

Seems unlikely. Pretty sure the US could let in a lot more immigrants if it wanted to.

The US has been wavering between 16% and 15% for about a decade which is when I started taking an interest in this stuff. It's a fairly steady state.

My country has risen from 25% to 27% first generation migrants in that timeframe.

Per capita is a much more useful for comparing effects on total workforce etc.

It's not necessarily good or bad per se. I think there are so many variables at play, everything from type of migration, underlying birth rate of host country through to effect on housing stock and whether taxes and infrastructure can keep pace.

But yeah Biden's speech was just strange given that context.

In terms of raw numbers thee US has a huge population so it has more of everything, whether that's immigrants or murderers or doctors or pedophiles.

In perms of the percentage of its population tho, 15% is somewhere in the middle of the pack, well behind countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland etc.

Boasting that you have more immigration than random countries like Japan is just odd.

He's also cherry picking data. It's a weird flex.

The proportion of immigrants in the US isn't exactly high compared to somewhere like Canada.