Dominic

Just to list a few things, no it’s not a war crime to attack hospitals, if they are being used for military purposes. Same with schools, kindergartens, residential buildings, etc. The Geneva Conventions explicitly permit this in order to discourage the use of human shields, which they define as a war crime, because if one side does this all the time - and Hamas have openly celebrated the use of human shields - then this might motivate the enemy to assume that behind every group of civilians, there might be fighters. When North Korean soldiers fired at US soldiers out of crowds of refugees during the Korean War, this led to US soldiers driving refugees away with their guns and even killing a number of them, fearing to be ambushed. Fighters not wearing uniforms puts every fighting age male in the combat area at a risk - and guess what, Hamas only wears uniforms during parades, not in combat. Hamas have used human shields successfully to prevent Israel from performing attacks on weapons depots, rocket launch sites, command centers, etc. They were under the impression that they could attack from these positions, from behind civilians with impunity. If the other side doesn’t attack, that’s a win, the terrorists get to live for another day and can continue what they are doing. If Israel does attack and civilians die, this particular cell might lose a few fighters and equipment, but they can use the innocent civilians they put into the crossfire for propaganda against Israel, both domestically in order to recruit new fighters and internationally to put pressure on Israel. What should Israel do in this situation? Just eat the rockets? The Iron Dome is far from perfect and every alert means people only have seconds to interrupt whatever they are doing and rush to shelter. That’s no way to live. Meanwhile, in Gaza, there are no civilian bomb shelters, not even air raid sirens. Gaza is the only place since WW2 that attacked an enemy they know have air power, but provides no shelters nor warnings for civilians. Kind of odd, if you think about it.

Until reading your post and then doing more research, I fell for the "higher civilian casualty rate" headlines. I was aware that it is legal to strike a normally civilian location if it is being used for military purposes, but felt that the IDF was being unusually imprecise during this conflict.

It turns out that the headlines are very misleading. You can't compare a single conflict in a densely-populated urban area to the average of all 20th century conflicts (especially not when the government of said urban area uses human shields). The only really fair comparison points are previous Israeli conflicts in Gaza and a handful of battles against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The civilian casualty rate is about half of what we saw against ISIS.

Statistics on civilian casualties here

Seems like there are a number of issues with this.

1. Not defining "reliability challenge" in a meaningful way. (How many of these are problems that are expensive or time-consuming to repair? How expensive and how time-consuming? Are these problems that prevent the car from driving safely, or are they inconveniences that can be put off?)

2. Not controlling for manufacturer. (Toyota has long-been regarded as a reliable manufacturer, but they make 2 plug-in hybrids and 1 EV, all of which are new this year. Meanwhile, they offer about a dozen different traditional hybrids. I can believe that the Tesla Model 3 is less reliable than the Toyota Camry, but is a full-electric Hyundai Ioniq less reliable than a Hyundai Sonata?)

3. Including plug-in hybrids and full electric vehicles as one category. (Plug-in hybrids combine the old breakable parts such as transmissions with the new breakable parts such as lithium batteries. This is the trade-off that buyers make to get the efficiency of an electric vehicle at short ranges and the convenience of an ICE at long ranges.)

Important to note that this is a workaround. Solidarity strikes (which normally include general strikes) are illegal, but there's no law that prevents every union from happening to strike on their own behalf at the same time.

American unions are kneecapped by the government. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act made solidarity strikes (and several other forms of labor protest) illegal. It also opened the door for states to enact "right-to-work" laws.

This law is still standing in part because US courts have been anti-labor for their entire existence, aside from a brief period during FDR's administration.

He disputed several details of that article and added context that The New Yorker was aware of but chose to omit.

E.g. the article makes it sound like he fabricated the prom story, but all he changed was the day that he heard about it. The article also says that he invited the woman to his show and embarrassed her; however, he did not invite her and she enjoyed the show.

Subtract the “defense” costs that are paid for by other means in most of the world (healthcare, education, medical research), adjust the rest for purchasing power parity, and get back to me on that.

“Your hands don’t look right!”

• AI models in 2023

That 25.6 GB/s memory bandwidth is apparently the Switch’s bottleneck.

Pikmin 4 is built on Unreal Engine, so it’s already something of a unicorn in Nintendo’s library.

But those unions are negotiating against employers who have immense market power. State governments essentially have the last word on teachers' salaries, and a lot of the country has consolidated to the point where there are only 1-3 major hospital networks in any area.

Without the ability to switch employers for better pay, the unions are the only way that those professions have to improve their pay and working conditions. (This may explain why travel nurses get much better pay than most nurses.)

They stopped publishing youth unemployment because it was useless data, the job of the youth is to become educated, not to work in the economy. Having a low youth unemployment means your youth are either not getting educated, or are being forced to work during their education.

At least in the US, unemployment is almost always defined defined as people who want to work but can't find work. Students are generally excluded.

It was less than 2 months. Franken wasn’t sworn in until July and Kennedy died in August.

EDIT: it’s actually somewhere in the middle. Kennedy’s seat was held by Kirk, a Democratic appointee, from September through February 2010. However, I am fairly certain that Kennedy was basically unable to serve from March until his death in August.

Democrats basically had late September through early February to get anything done without a filibuster.