Doing all the other things deemed more high- priority by the business (like meeting SOC-2 audit requirements; answering field questions about network architecture because people don’t read documents; scaling subsystems for customer-specific demos; yadda yadda). I would bet good money the IT people had a ticket saying we need to test the backups regularly that kept getting deprioritized.
And, yes, it's a really neat stove... for wealthy people. At an installed cost of ~$8k (more if you're having to replace a standalone oven/cooktop since you need the stand for it), it's competing with lower-end Viking gas ranges that include an oven, and those have an extensive service network that Impulse doesn't (yet) have.
Unless you believe there needs to be a plan for CA to secede in the future and thus it needs to be self-sufficient, why does manufacturing need to be in CA? As you stated, the Impulse stove makes heavy use of outsourced manufacturing to other parties; as long as those parties are within the US (which I'm not claiming they are, but there are states like TX that are far less concerned about environmental impact than CA is and thus could pick up any such slack), why is there a security concern here?
As for the economic concern, it seems like this is backwards: I'd argue it's the HCOL that drives industry with the need for low-wage labor away to non-CA locations. There's nothing stopping non-polluting corporations from working and hiring large numbers of people in CA.
Your advice there is really valuable. Thanks for providing it. I've always wondered how to post-process my night images, and this is a really good guide for that.
It’s interesting that people pay close attention to one-size-fits all number (regardless of the pros and cons of the methodology used to derive said number). I find RT really useful for collating the reviews from “top” reviewers in one place: over the years, I know how my interests align with the tastes of particular reviewers, and I don’t have to look in multiple places to get a snapshot view of their opinions.
Given that it costs NN ~$5 to manufacture, and it's an effective drug that's an also-ran in the market, why still charge such a huge markup? NN should be selling it for $35-$50/month and buy the market share while feverishly working on a multi-GLP1 replacement.
What is your source to justify your claim (stated as a fact) that Hamas is diverting supplies and then selling them? Here [1] is a recent article in the NYT this week quoting two unnamed Israeli military officials saying Israel has found no proof of this claim despite Israeli officials repeatedly stating otherwise, and that the UN had been largely successful (via UNRWA) in feeding the Gazan population.
Thank you for your opinion (stated as a fact, I'll add) that Israel doesn't occupy Gaza. Can you please state your source for this belief?
To state why I believe Israel is occupying Gaza, I'll point out that Israel’s continued status as an occupying power has been affirmed repeatedly by the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and human rights groups. Do you believe all of these entities are incorrect?
I think the best thing you can say is that Hamas has a non-military arm that has provided enough social services that Gaza didn't collapse in economic ruin over the last two decades. The much more obvious thing to say is that Hamas has run a nihilistic campaign largely focused on the murder of Israeli civilians, and that they are Islamist in nature (and thus opposed to secular democracy). (I'll add my personal opinion that I hope many of them burn in hell for the calamity they've brought on Gaza.)
You (a) did not respond to my question and (b) now stated a claim that I'm arguing for confirmation bias without articulating an argument backing this new claim.
I would love to understand what you mean by my lack of understanding of Israeli perspectives. I talk to Israelis regularly. What perspectives do you believe I'm missing? If you're think I don't care about the safety and wellbeing of Israelis (and, to be specific, Israeli Jews), you'd be incorrect. I believe in Israel being a strong and prosperous state. If you think that means I should blindly ignore the fact that Israeli polls show that the Israeli public is unconcerned about the fate of Palestinians in Gaza and that this consequently leads me to believe Israelis are shortsightedly reducing their own security in the long term, then I wouldn't be able to agree with you. If you think I should similarly ignore that - under Bibi and Likud - Israel has deliberately acted against US policy to encourage the formation of a Palestinian state, and has created a defacto one-state reality which again reduces the security of the Israeli state, I wouldn't be able to agree with you either.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Note that to meet this definition, the following conditions must be met (among others):
1. Intent to destroy must be present.
2. The intent must be to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.
3. The destruction can be serious bodily or mental harm, or it can mean creating conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of the group in whole or in part.
This means that:
- people that believe that genocide must be about a race is misguided (it can be about a nationality, and Palestinians identify as a nationality that is recognized by over 75% of the countries in the UN);
- the fact that there are Palestinians elsewhere (the West Bank and Jordan, as two examples) isn't relevant to deciding whether this is a genocide (since genocide can be about destruction targeted at a part of a group); and,
- there are many examples of Israeli ministers and government personnel stating goals that sound genocidal, which people interpret to affirm intent.
IANAL, and genocide is a legal term, so I am not weighing in on this with a personal opinion, but it seems reasonable that laypeople, at least, can read that definition and reach the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. The fact that various genocide scholars (including Omer Bartov at Brown); the Lemkin Institute (named after the Lemkin who coined the term genocide); HRW; Amnesty; MSF; and other institutions have called this a genocide is also probably helping laypeople believe the claim.
Finally, there is not just a moral imperative but a legal requirement under the Geneva Convention to feed people. Article 55 states that an occupying power is responsible for this.
Have you considered that your framing exposes implicit bias? It breaks posts down in a binary (pro- or anti-Israel) formation. It’s not that simple.
One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians. It’s also reasonable at this point to believe that Israel - for the last year, at least - is pursuing military action without a strategic goal or a long-term plan other than “encouraging voluntary transfer” of the civilian population.
To you, does the above paragraph immediately strike you as pro- or anti-Israel?
> The US is responsible for more than 25% of the UN's funding and is ~5-6x more than other members of the Security Council [1]. This is disproportionate to its obligations or its population.
Fact. Another fact: this is a rounding error for the US government's budget. The total spend is under $15b. Government spending has been $5t to $7.5t in the last decade. Why is this particular spending line item of such interest to you? Do you truly see zero value derived from investment in the UN? Is that perhaps because you require some benefit to Americans from the investment? About 2/3rds of UN spending is on development and humanitarian assistance. Is helping the rest of the world raise the standard of living a laudable goal for the richest country in the world to contribute to or not, in your eyes?
> Countries are not friends. They are allies with shared interests. That means each country has to derive value from the alliances it participates in. These alliances are strategic. If the alliance does not bring value, the country could and should divest from them. These are foundational principles of statecraft.
Perhaps one root difference in belief is that I don't believe the UN is an alliance, and you do. It is a forum for countries that belong to different alliances to have a forum to talk to each other. It also is a forum to build temporary alliances for military intervention (e.g., Iraq War I) across such boundaries. The US failed miserably at building such a consenus for Iraq War II and has been
> If you believe the world is anything other than that then either you have been fooled by the super comfortable existence insulating you from most shocks that the US has provided, or you wish the world was like this.
Thank you. I understand your zero-sum argument and realpolitik in general, both from an academic and personal perspective. I grew up in a third-world country, so - perhaps, unlike you - I'm intimately familiar with the impact of Great Power games in the post-Cold War era. You are unfortunately correct; I wish that the US (my home for several decades now) tried harder to move away from such thinking and utilized the UN for more win-win scenarios, but we're moving away from such liberal thinking, and so my wish will probably remain unfulfilled.
The UN was founded in the shadow of WWII to prevent further global conflicts. It also established a global standard for human rights and to provide a forum to uphold international law. It has also taken on roles to provide development and humanitarian assistance.
Whether the UN works or not is largely dependent upon whether the five powers that granted themselves veto power (the P5: the US, the UK, France, China, and Russia) allow it to work. They are largely the source of its funding.
With that context in mind, it's difficult to understand your perspective. You've only thrown out your opinion instead of facts, and then - in a preemptive defensive posture - claim any criticism will be insults or ad hominem attacks.
You seem to believe the UN's job is to advance the US's agenda. (No, it isn't. It's there to allow a forum for diplomacy for all nations.) You also seem to believe that the UN is a bad investment. (That's a highly subjective perspective: what are your stated metrics for such a judgement on ROI?)
If you believe that the world is a better place with regional hegemons ruling their parts of the world with power as the only metric that matters, I'd suggest building yourself a time machine and going back to the end of the 19th century.
It is utterly weird to me that so many commenters here appreciate the Barbican's aesthetics. To me, it is an ugly eyesore that's a legacy of the brutalist wave of the mid-20th century. I lived close to it (in Islington) for many months, and avoided walking through it to get to the City (where I worked).
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/national-park-staff-n...