quiet_NaN
2mo ago
As others have pointed out, the way to stop a bad guy with a drone is a good guy with a drone.
I think disposable anti-quadcopter devices could be manufactured fairly cheaply.
One idea would be to use a hobbyist rocket motor with a camera, some steering and electronics and a small payload to build a tracking missile.
Or you could have a light quadcopter with 5 minute battery and a small payload, which could likely be faster than most quadcopters with larger battery sizes and which carry militarily relevant stuff.
Then if more expensive quadcopters wants to stay competitive in conflicts where both sides have similar resources, they would have to find a way to become immune to such cheap methods to attack drones. Or you could end up with a situation where each side deploys zillions of cheap disposable drones.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
The tweet cited (and echoed) by the Guardian is literally
One million Teamsters endorse Kamala Harris
77% of the teamsters unions (weighted by members) would be fair.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Remember how previously, 58% of polled teamster union members had favored Trump?
Well, it turns out that the Harris campaign managed to convince almost 77% of the union members:
A million of the 1.3 million members of the Teamsters union have now endorsed Harris, according to Harris spokesperson Lauren Hitt, despite the union’s executive board’s decision not to endorse a candidate for the first time in decades yesterday.
Of course, this is very likely not what happened. What likely happened is that subsections of the teamster union which represent a total of 1M members have endorsed Harris.
There are spins, and there are lies. This seems to be an outright lie. If you make a claim about a decision being made by n people, this means that there were n instances of a person making that decision. In reality, you have a decision made by a handful of people on behalf of 1M people. Even if Union membership contains a terrible clause where members grant their leadership to endorse candidates on their personal behalf (as in Leader: "Union Member J. Random has decided to endorse candidate X"), that arrangement would be so surprising that it should not be reported as "1M union members decided to endorse X". Then preferred phrasing given what we know of the polling tendencies would be "Union members who claim to speak for 1M members have endorsed X".
The alternative is to classify sentences like "In 1939, 80 million Germans decided to have the Wehrmacht invade Poland" as true. With this interpretation, the Nuremberg trials would have had a lot more defendants.
And for the Guardian it was not enough to uncritically repeat the claim by the Harris campaign, they even had to top it with that highly misleading statement that the union bosses had previously decided not to endorse a candidate. In that context, this would be parsed as "Despite being favored by 77% of the union members, Kamala Harris, champion of the people was not endorsed by evil MAGA-favoring union bosses who are out of touch with their base."
From what I have read on the motte, the better paraphrasing of the situation would be: "Due to a majority of their base favoring Trump, Democrat-leaning union executives declined to endorse any candidate rather than having to follow their members into endorsing Trump. Later, subgroups of the union representing 77% of the members decided to endorse Trump, likely contrary to the majority opinion of their bases."
I would not vote for Trump if I was an US citizen, but I find this behavior by the Harris campaign and the media disgusting.
Of course, that leaning on on the union bosses and then telling the lie about 1M endorsements is very unlikely to even matter at all. The only people who might care are the 14M union members, perhaps 10% of the voters. About 13M of them will not care very much whom some other union endorses. The 1.3M teamsters who might care a bit more will have a much clearer picture what is happening between base and leadership than I could ever have from the far side of the pond. "Hey, Bob, Joe, listen up. Our Union just decided that we and 999997 other Teamsters are in fact endorsing Harris, so take off your MAGA caps and vote for her."
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I am a bit amazed by Italians and French, there, with crime rates 4.75 and 5.91 times the German citizens ones.
From a US perspective, we are all close neighbors, it would be like if people from Utah committed crimes in California at five times the rate of the natives.
France is a close economic ally and Germany has a few big joint ventures with them, so I would expect most of the French in Germany are not drug mules or the like. Heck, they are more over-represented than Russians.
For immigrants from European countries much poorer than Germany, my priors would be that higher prosperity attracts a lot of small-time criminals. Breaking and entering is likely more lucrative in Germany than in Romania. I would also assume that Switzerland has more small-time German criminals than their native base rate for exactly the same reasons.
A general caveat with police statistics is that they generally tell you about the activities of the police, not the criminals. Especially with crimes where no party has an incentive to report them, like the drug trade, police reports are only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to know how much people are using, analyzing the wastewater is much more reliable. Murder is a good tracer, by comparison, because most murders get detected (unless they get misclassified as a natural death or stuck at the level of disappearance because no corpse surfaces) and solved.
Another caveat is that while offenses against the foreigners' law (which Germans can mostly not commit) are excluded, that law might still be the initial reason for investigation of non-EU nationals.
Oh, and the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault. Of course, IT-shy justice system is likely utterly incapable of aggregating the convictions for crimes committed in 2015 by nationality.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
There is a case to be made that few if any people treat anything Trump says as being on simulacrum level 1. This may be the typical mind fallacy, but if Trump makes noises which sound like a factual statement of the world (i.e. level 1, 'Haitians are eating our pets'), I just don't parse it that way. Likely it is not even level 2 ('I want you to believe that they are eating pets (irrespective if it is true) so that you will vote for me') because that would assume that a significant fraction of listeners will mistake it for a level 1 statement. It is either level 3 ('I am anti-immigrant. Nobody is as anti-immigrant as me!') or level 4 ('I make sounds which I think will help me get elected').
If I am running through the streets saying "The sky is green, plants are orange, Elvis is alive, I am Elvis, 4 is prime, ...", then I an telling a lot of lies, but I will not deceive anyone, because most people will conclude 'based on past statements, that person is so unreliable a source of information that I should not update on their claims'.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
So we are talking about mitigation of effects, not getting rid of GHG, I guess?
I have not done the math, but I can see that kind of money building a lot of dams to counter rising see levels. I don't really see how it is enough to combat the expected heat waves, though. It will not buy half of Africa air conditioning for their homes.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think that any method of warfare comes down to statistics. Just about any attack has a risk of collateral damage.
For some attacks (such as targeting a wedding reception with a hellfire missile, which I am generally against), you know the exact amount of dead civilians beforehand. For some, you only have an estimate of the distribution beforehand.
I would argue that the correct thing to worry about is the expected count of civilians killed (or QALY lost, if you are into that). 'The pager blows up a crowded gas station' is on the far tail, high body count but also unlikely.
It helps that the pagers were extraordinary weak explosives, not enough to kill the person holding them in their hands in most cases. If instead they had the deadliness of a fragmentation grenade, obliterating any unarmored target within a six meter radius, then the calculation would be quite different.
The context of the attack is that the IDF is fighting Hezbollah's sister organisation Hamas in Gaza, and the collateral damage there is abysmal (because IDF killing Palestinian kids are a great outcome for Hamas). In one case the IDF killed a high-ranking Hamas commander and 50 bystanders in a refugee camp (which was a bad call to make, IMO).
I will assume that out of the nine killed by the pagers, only the girl is an obvious civilian -- if there were more dead kids, Hezbollah would be sure to tell the world. Likely they were the intended targets. Let us say that the tail risks of vehicular accidents and causing larger explosions amount to another expected civilian death.
An enemy:civilian ratio of 4:1 is not bad for an enemy who is likely to fight an asymmetrical style of war a la Hamas. It is sad that civilians were killed and injured, but if you need to kill your enemies, you can do a lot worse.
Of course, one can debate if Hezbollah needs killing, or if they were in the middle of deradicalization, building hospitals and slowly forgetting that there was something about destroying Israel in their mission statement. Extrapolating from Hamas, I think it is likely they need killing, though.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think that tackling climate change is hard because it is a massively collective action problem.
The payoff matrix of anyone likely to drown when the ocean level rises basically does not depend on how much CO2 she emits, only how much CO2 the rest of the world emits. Thus, even she does not have skin in the game in the sense that she will personally benefit from any choices she makes regarding limiting her CO2 emissions. She will drown or not depending on the actions the rest of the world take, but her own consumption choices only influence how much she has to pay for her car.
I think that for some topics, it is very hard to find a person who has something riding on the outcome which is proportional to what society has riding on the outcome. Climate change is one such topic. Geostrategic matters are another, perhaps. You have a bunch of military leaders who recommend this or that action, buy an aircraft carrier, invade Russia in the winter, get out of Afghanistan, whatever. Their pensions do not depend on how well their country does with their advice. In fact, their personal interests may lie diametrically opposed to that of their country sometimes: large scale conflict is generally bad for the general population and has bad outcomes for at least half of the countries who engage in it, but for general it can be their chance to shine. Of course, the incentive of a grunt who does not want to die in some ditch is also sometimes misaligned to the incentives of a country.
We could mitigate 90% of the negative effects of climate change in the next decade
"Could" can mean a lot of different things.
For example, we could likely put a 100 people on Mars within a decade (if we made that the global focus of our economy to the detriment of every other goal).
Or NATO could invade and occupy Switzerland (i.e. it is technically possible but nobody has any incentive to do it).
Or we could build a Tesla with six instead of four wheels (if we pay Musk a few billions, he will likely design a prototype for us).
Or I could pass you the salt over the table (i.e. just ask and I will do it, no trouble for me).
Where on this spectrum do you think 'mitigate 90% of the negative effects of climate change' falls?
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think one key fact is that the central example of a human-extincted species is some bug living only on one type of tree in the rain forest, and the central type of domesticated species is perhaps the goat, whose precursor today lives in a region from the south of Turkey to Pakistan. Or take the genus Oryza from which rice was derived is found in Africa, Asia, South America, Australia.
Classical targets for domestication are generalists who thrive under a wide variety of conditions. Of course, for luxury food we might domesticate less resilient plants such as cocoa (which was doing ok in South America but can not really claim being native on multiple continents) or spices or drugs.
The other thing is that we don't have a long memory. I am sure that there are some wild species which the Romans found so tasty that they ate them to extinction, but 2000 years on, hardly anyone ever complains about not being able to eat them. As you say, capitalism goes on, and if I can't buy the tastiest bananas any more, I sure want the next tastiest.
In general, I would say that there is a big difference accidentally between extincting a domestic species through monoculture+infection and the typical 'depraved-heart' extinction of a wild species through loss of habitat. I am sure that the former can happen to specific cultivars, but are unlikely to affect the important staples where we have some diversity. I place the odds of a virus which wipes out all domestic rice plants at even lower odds than a virus which wipes out all the humans.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
If I had to hide an electronically ignited bomb in a battery, I would try to set it up so that a short ignites a primer which will ignite the explosive. Fill an electrical fuse with a primer which is volatile enough that the molten wire sets it off, perhaps?
The alternatives being that you have three leads on your battery (e.g. +, -, boom, where connecting boom with + will cause the explosion.), which is much more noticeable, or having another component which serves as a primer on the PCB near that battery. Of course, 'shorten the battery when receiving a particular message' is not a standard feature of most pagers, so you have to modify or swap the PCB anyhow, and putting the electronic ignition in there might be easier.
I concede that just because a battery is not rigged to explode on short it might still explode in other conditions.
Agreed that most of the fun 'send real time GPS coordinates every ten seconds' options are off the table.
OTOH, with a capacitor, the pager could still send out a short, triangulate-able burst when it receives a certain message.
I was kind of assuming the pagers were coming with their own lithium batteries, which would be a pain to replace. Someone here claimed the devices were in use for months before exploding. I would think that most of the devices would no longer be running with their original (rechargeable, presumably) battery at that point.
Edit: The Guardian says (or implies) that it was an Apollo AR924 pager powered by a 90g Li battery. This is roughly similar to the ~115g battery found in Nokia phones from ca. 2000 and should easily be powerful enough to do the odd transmission.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I still think that overall, mentioning the cat eating thing was a mistake by Trump, because it allowed the Democrats to reframe the debate in a way which is very advantageous for them.
The best argument I can find for it being a good move on Trumps part is not that he expects that some evidence will be found, but that he knows that 'Trump lies' is already common knowledge. The median Trump voter will not say "What? He lied on national TV? Now I can't vote for him". They know that he lies about everything from the size of his inauguration crowd to his affairs to random stuff he picked up on twitter or Fox News to (possibly) his golf scores. They vote for him regardless. Him being a liar is already priced in. Fighting Trump with fact checks is like trying to attack Lenin for not being very Christian.
So an easily disproved falsehood is him throwing a stick for the media to play fetch with, distracting them in a way unlikely to damage him.
Of course, the other side is also mostly post fact. Who cares if he is factually correct about the US having paid for gender transition surgery for some aliens, images of the Alien (1979) monsters in high heels are trending all over imgur not because Trump is wrong but because his point if found ridiculous.
I think the media on both sides is mostly preaching to the choir. While mobilizing the people firmly on your side is sound strategy, I think both sides fail to put themselves into the mind of a voter who is still uncertain which of the options is the lesser evil. That voter is likely not so strongly anti-trans that he would get enraged by the US paying for some transition surgery more than he would be by the US generally paying for health care. He also would not care that Trump is lying on TV.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
If it was true, then of course we have never denied it and you are racist for not respecting their cultural traditions. (OTOH, woke people really prefer dogs to pigs to some unreasonable degree, so perhaps it goes 'we have never denied it and anyway it is just a few isolated incidents and does not matter, why would you even talk about that anyhow')
That being said, I think it is very likely that it is either a complete fabrication or that it will never be proven beyond reasonable doubt. I just don't think that Trump operates the way that he would only make such an outrageous claim if he had ironclad proof, instead, he likely read the claim on twitter somewhere and that is close enough to the truth for him.
I think that the culture war playbook of the left here is solid. By focusing on one outrageous claim from Trump, they can reframe the whole discussion about what the benefits and downsides of suddenly having 20k refugees from the third world in your town, which is not an argument where the left is likely to win, into an argument if Haitians eat cats, which they can be reasonably certain to win.
You have to continually move up the housing ladder so that you can live only near people who can afford to do the same thing; this is the only way to ensure you live near pro-social people.
I think one of the key selling points of woke ideology over traditional left-wing ideologies is that it goes so well with economic inequality. A Marxist paying ten times the rent a member of the working class makes might have to face the cognitive dissonance of himself qualifying as an enemy of the working class.
In the woke mindset, economic disadvantage is an effect, not a cause. You are poor because you are black or female in a bigoted society, not because your parents were poor. (I guess if you are a poor white male, you are probably poor because you are either lazy or terrible racist and sexist.) This frees you to discriminate against poor people in a way which a traditional leftist would fine shameful. If you manage to keep the poor out of your neighborhood, you are basically all set, that black lawyer or immigrant doctor who can afford to live in your suburb are very unlikely to be involved in violent crime, hence any claims that a culture celebrating crime festers in any minorities are just racist libel.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Here is an article about dog torture in West Africa.
The first sentence of that article literally reads:
Countless Countries Worldwide that are involved in the Dog and Cat Meat Trade are also heavily involved in the Barbaric Demonic Voodoo Animal Sacrifices, where they are using various methods of torture such as Beating Hanging, Setting Fire to Animals whilst they are still alive, Mutilation, Stabbing ,Tearing Animals apart with their Bare Hands and Eating them while they are still Alive.
I would give you 20% odds that this is a parody site, with The random Capitalization Thing going On.
While I am hardly the expert, Haitian Vodou and West African Vudun have diverged a few 100 years ago. So even if the most common sacrifice in contemporary Vudun are in fact dogs (which I concede by no means), concluding from that fact that Haitian Vodou also sacrifices dogs is a bit like observing that contemporary Roman Catholic priests have a tendency to fuck altar boys at higher than base rate and conclude from that that that Calvinist pastor is the prime suspect in your child rape case. Or indeed concluding that your Haitian is, because Catholicism is also a key ingredient of Vodou.
From my understanding, the animals most likely to being sacrificed in Vodou are exactly the same animals which Americans put on their barbecue, and Wikipedia claims the same:
Species used for sacrifice include chickens, goats, and bulls, with pigs often favored for Petwo lwa.
I am not saying that Haitian Vodou does not have its problems, it certainly does not seem to be as capable of fostering the creation of a functional state as various branches of Christianity are, but blaming it for missing cats in a country where you can simply buy a more traditional sacrifice like a chicken for a few bucks seems implausible.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
This would mean that either, they decided not to act on the info they had before because: (1) They found the allegations not credible and were doubtful that they could make anything stick (2) They found them credible, but were uninterested in enforcing sex crime laws against a high profile target
Now, (2) would be in contradiction to how I would expect a blue tribe, political DA to act. Securing a criminal conviction in a high profile #MeToo case seems like the best strategy for reelection.
(1) might be credible if we were talking about Trump. The narrative 'since 2021, the blue tribe is panicking about Trump and brings any half-baked allegations to court' has at least some merits to it. But Combs is very much not Trump, and putting a few millions (??) in twitter is not Trump-running-for-president level of evil in the mind of the progressives.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
FWIW, I think that this definitely qualifies as MeToo. Powerful man, coercion, promise of advancement, all there. Much more severe than most such cases, imo.
Of course, the ASA (besides being a lex Trump) reads like a prime example of an ex post facto law, which Article one, sections 9 and 10 of the US constitution would prohibit.
But of course I am reading that all wrong. You see, the framers intent of these sections was clearly to only prohibit ex post facto laws concerning criminal cases resulting in criminal punishment, which is defined as narrowly as humanly thinkable. Having to register as a sex offender, being banned from owning firearms or even being locked up indefinitely are clearly not punishments, and having to pay money to some other party never is.
This goes hand in hand with the triple jeopardy for the same act practiced by the US. First we try you in state court. If you get acquitted in state court, we can still try you in federal court. If you also get acquitted there, we will still allow civil cases which might bankrupt you but will at least not send you to prison (unless you do not comply with the definitely-not-a-punishment regulatory prohibition to own firearms, for example).
In Germany, from my understanding, most criminal allegations go to court once only (not counting either side contesting the verdict). Generally, if you want to get damages from the defendant, you would become a joint plaintiff (Nebenklaeger). A civil court will generally be very reluctant to make a finding of fact that one party committed a criminal act in contradiction to the finding of fact of an earlier criminal trial. I also think the statue of limitations for claiming damages is the same as for the criminal act on which they are based, 'we convicted the arsonist but you can't have him pay for your house because the civil statue of limitations expired' would be silly.
--
However, here, the charges made against Combs are clearly criminal charges. I don't know how the law is in NY, so it could be that without the ASA, none of the women who alleged sex crimes would have seen a single penny from Combs, so their motivation would have been limited to sending a sex offender to jail, which is of course not as good a motivation for the painful act of going on the stand and detailing degrading sex acts as the prospect of earning a few millions in damages is.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think it is a cultural thing. Almost all of the members of all the political tribes (myself certainly included) are at most armchair activists who mostly post on social media. The people who are willing to use gun violence to further their political aims are always a tiny minority, but the size of that minority differs very much dependent on the tribe.
In a bizzaro world where Trump dropped out of the race and Adolf Hitler became the replacement candidate, the blue tribe would certainly feel that Hitler needs shooting. But the average coastal city-dweller who puts their pronouns on twitter is certainly not going to snipe Hitler. On the other hand, if parts of the red tribe feel that Hitler needs shooting (which they would), a small fraction of these actually have the capabilities to carry out a serious assassination attempt.
So if say 10% of the blue tribe think that the US would be better off if someone killed Trump, and if 1% (Lizardman constant and all that) of the red tribe also thought that, I would expect most serious attempts to come from from the people at least vaguely associated with the red tribe.
This is not universal, but specific to the US. Gun culture, 2nd amendment (violently resisting tyrants) and all that are very much red tribe coded. In post-war Germany, the highest profile assassinations (such as the RAF killing an AG) were carried out by left wing terrorists, who picked up gun handling skills over a few years in the underground.
There is certainly the possibility that some fringe left people decided to get really good at long distance shooting in 2020 for the specific purpose of murdering anyone who would in their eyes turn America into a fascist dictatorship. But that is a very lonely path, you would have to tell all your blue tribe friends "I practice rifle shooting because it is fun" which would be received about as well as "my hobby is tuning my diesel engine so that it emits as much smoke as possible". From the state's point of view, keeping tabs on a few blue tribe activists who own long arms is much easier than figuring out who among the zillions of rifle-owning red tribe activists is actually likely to climb on some roof and shoot a candidate and who is only cosplaying with their tactical vests.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Come on. Short the battery, see if the effect is just as bad as a normal battery. Use sympathetic detonation to test if it is explosive. Use mass spectroscopy to test the chemical composition.
Other than that, a pretty ballsy power move by Mossad, betting on Hezbollah being to stupid to check for explosives in other electronics after learning that explosives were hidden in some of them.
Then again, any senior commander who personally handles electronics within 24h after learning that some of them had a tendency to explode is simply to trusting to live.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I agree, the impact is mostly morale. Getting maimed by your pager is certainly not the most glorious kind of martyrdom.
Of course, I would also not oversell the psychological impact. The more senior commanders will simply keep some expendable kid nearby to handle their pager.
That is a very good point.
Mossad could certainly replace the circuit board with one which has an additional UMTS modem and a GPS tracker on it, but this would be rather trivial to detect once you open the device and compare it to the manufacturers PCB.
If you assume that Hezbollah is smart enough to do the that, but not smart/paranoid enough to short circuit one of the lithium batteries to verify that it will not cause a bigger fire or explosion than normal.
Of course, if I knew Mossad was after me, I would at least disassemble the PCB layer by layer, looking for any chips hidden within it, then open up any chips, compare the silicon to the original under a microscope, then worry about how programmable they are, then consider the possibility that Mossad would build custom chips which look identical to specs on the top layer and finally decide to find myself a job compatible with the continued existence of Israel so that I don't have to live a life full of well-justified paranoia. Thus I would make a terrible jihadist.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Originally, you used the term
fait accompli
with reference to Mariupol.
From my understanding, that term can be phrased as "done deal" and generally refers to a party accomplishing their objective before their opponent has time to react. A central case would be Crimea: from my understanding, it was occupied before Ukraine was even aware that it was under attack and could deploy military units. Rather than reinforcing their battling troops, they would have had to mount a completely new counterattack.
A city under siege is the opposite of a done deal. Attacking besiegers to break the siege goes all the way back to the dawn of warfare. If you besiege a NATO city for a few months, NATO will be under a lot more pressure to act than if you manage to take it overnight and cease hostilities.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Agreed. Even if they hide the explosive in the battery, using a sympathetic detonation one would still be able to find out if that battery was explosive.
Of course, next time, Mossad might not modify all of the pagers, but just 5%, so just testing a few is not enough to prove that the bunch is safe. So they either have to destroy 90% of the pagers they buy or live in fear that their pagers might explode in their face, perhaps not even granting you a martyr's death, but just maiming you for life.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Of course, the Guardian is not happy with this:
Reports continue to come in but, with at least nine dead and about 3,000 wounded in dozens, if not hundreds, of coordinated explosions the episode demonstrates a ruthless and indiscriminate desire to target Hezbollah.
I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here. Per Wikipedia, "From the inception of Hezbollah to the present, the elimination of the State of Israel has been one of Hezbollah's primary goals." Of course, the tactics employed by Hezbollah have included suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel.
I think that if you manage to kill your mortal enemies without turning their neighborhood into rubble, that is commendable. Of course a few civilians will also die in such attacks, but certainly a lower number than would in any conventional form of warfare.
Given that the pagers were meant as an alternative to a trackable cell phone which could attract Israeli missile strikes, it seems reasonable that the persons using them were mostly people who thought that they might become a target of such strikes otherwise, that is military personnel and especially leadership.
My main beef with Mossad would be purely operational -- nine killed, (one of whom seems to be a ten years old girl who was unlikely to belong to the higher echelons of Hezbollah leadership) with 3k wounded seems pretty inefficient. Of course, without knowing how these are counted (are most of them pager owners who survived, or is everyone who had ringing ears after hearing the blast counting as injured here), it is hard to say for certain. And I get that there were operational constraints -- if the pagers suddenly weighted as much as a 1995 phone, the terrorists would have become suspicious. But even if we are generous and say that the eight killed were all military commanders, and that another sixteen were permanently injured in a way which prevents them from continuing to destroy Israel, I don't think that the outcome is very impressive.
Of course, this is just an armchair analysis. Perhaps using the compromised pagers to keep tabs on Hezbollah would not have been worthwhile because they were scheduled to be swapped for fresh, uncompromised ones in a week. Perhaps using something deadlier than mere explosives was not politically feasible.
While I think Hamas and Hezbollah are quite similar in a lot of ways, I think I still have more understanding for the Hamas grunt than for the Hezbollah grunt. The former has been raised on Hamas propaganda in fucking Gaza, which is not known for its economic growth and upwards mobility. The latter is much more likely to have heard the opinion that destroying Israel is perhaps not the most important thing in life, and has a Lebanese passport which offers economic alternatives to 'become a jihadist, Iran pays well' of which Gazans could only dream.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
and makes it fait accompli - just like with Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast
Per Wikipedia, Mariupol was conquered by Russia in May 2022, months after the Putins special operation had been begun.
For NATO to be effective, it does not have to be 100% committed to starting WW3 over a few square miles. Instead, following the method EY outlines in planecrash, it would be sufficient to escalate with a probability which is high enough to make the expected value of the defection of your opponent negative. Even a low but finite probability of responding in a way which will eventually lead to nuclear escalation will be enough to outweigh the gain of a bit of territory.
I think that NATO reactions to an invocation of Article 5 would be quite different from Western reactions to the invasion of Ukraine for game theory reasons.
If a slice of Poland gets invaded, and the rest of NATO is like 'well, they have already ceded so much territory to Russia in '45, surely they can spare another 50 square kilometers', then NATO as a defensive pact is dead. There can be some discussion if present day Russia is a credible threat in the same way that the USSR at the height of the cold war was, but if it was, then the options would be simple. Either your soldiers now fight Russia in your neighbors territory, or they fight them in a year in your own country, or they end up fighting someone else for Russia in two years. So the least-bad option would be to support your allies in a conventional war.
Of course, there have been precious few large-scale conflicts between nuclear powers, so the likelihood of such conflicts staying conventional for long is unknown. But both sides would have an interest to cause attrition to their enemies nuclear capabilities, and at some point someone might decide that faced with the choice between losing the retaliatory capabilities of a missile sub or silo or escalating to a nuclear conflict, it is not in their interest to defer nuclear escalation any longer.
Reaching the threshold of signatures will likely just be enough to put the proposal on the ballot. The Italians still have to vote on it. Given that they have elected a far-right prime minister running on an anti-immigration platform, I think I know which way that vote would go.
Also, I don't think getting the citizenship after five years (subject to other conditions, such as being in the country legally and passing a language and civic knowledge test) is totally unreasonable. Few conflicts people flee are over within a decade. Deporting someone after seven years of residency seems much crueler than deporting them within six months of arriving. Perhaps best reason to deport long-term residents is them being involved in serious crime, but I think the number of migrants who start raping after peacefully working in a bakery for seven years is probably not all that high.
On the flip side, dealing with the foreigner's office is terrible even for the highly qualified workers Europe needs, I have colleagues who have been in that situation. Most bureaucracy is limited in its badness in that citizens will eventually complain to their elected officials. Not so for the foreigner's office. Canada offers naturalization after three years, the US after five, even Germany after eight years. If Italy only offers the citizenship after a decade, that will be a competitive disadvantage.
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