aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
2d ago
On that note, given that the primary justification for the creation of Israel was the holocaust, we may as well shut the entire enterprise down
It's pretty surprising that the justification for the creation of Israel came decades after many jews had already moved to that region for a national project.
aqouta
3d ago
Those are the events that preceded the transfer. The transfer itself was relatively peaceful and successfully ended these hostilities. If there are population transfers in the west bank in 2030 then it would be dishonest to cite the deaths in the Gaza war as being caused by the population transfer.
aqouta
3d ago
This is more similar to the hazy borders of Texas before it was inducted as a state in the US than Mexico trying to pull this on already established US territory. In fact the parallels are myriad and early mexico really did get screwed out of their territory after losing a war, remember the Alamo, to the American settlers. Imagine if now centuries later Mexico continued to dispute the territory and launched regular unguided rocket attacks at San Antonio. The mandate Palestine area was not a state before the fall of the Ottoman empire and had no real borders. After the fall the territory was rightfully British clay and the mandate policy gave the immigrant Jews a right to attempt to establish a state there. Was there lots of shenanigans coming from both of the budding nations? Absolutely, there were among the early Texans as well. Really the more I think of it Texas really is a pretty good analogy for Israeli history before around like 1960.
aqouta
3d ago
I agree it's a millstone but it's far from the source of all their problems which seem more centrally to be located in the surrounding population which has a persistent belief that if they just keep fighting eventually they will drive the Jews to the sea and have the whole of the region as a Palestinian state and is thus unwilling to continence any kind of long term peace that forecloses on that possibility.
The haven't needed Syria to agree to them having the Golan Heights for example. Maintaining this quasi sovereignty indefinitely is the source of essentially all their problems both internal and external.
If they enunciated some border, say a modest expansion over the green line to encompass the majority of the settlements clustered along that line then what are their policing positions in the west bank? The fear is that pulling out without a Palestinian partner would lead to a repeat of their pull out form gaza and that the west bank would immediately become a staging ground for attacks on Israel which would eventually trigger an invasion and we'd be back to square one.
aqouta
3d ago
For about as central an example as there could be Israel already executed a population transfer of their settlements in gaza, in your formulation would you refer to that as an ethnic cleansing? Perhaps but it does seem like this is a weaponization of the term to slime non-central examples with greater atrocities. Other exchanges include the Greco-Bulgarian, Greco-Turkish and Cyprus exchanges.
aqouta
3d ago
There is no realistic two state solution that does not involve ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Jews both. The remaining areas allotted and allowed to Palestinians are so marginal and split up by settlers that there is no contiguous state possible without expelling large numbers of Jews. Otherwise a Palestinian state is unworkable and unviable, certainly not prosperous.
The term for this when it's done as a deal and mutually agreed upon is population transfers and has been done successfully in the past in other contexts. Realistically there would be a Gaza and separate west bank state. The west bank would ideally just have jewish citizens if they don't want to transfer back to Israel although in practice I expect most of them to.
I agree that an enduring peace would require abandoning the settlements outside of the ones on the current 67 borders. But I will also point out that what you demand was on offer in 47 and rather than accept them the surrounding Arabs went to war with Israel and lost. It's kind of rich to attempt decades of war to deny an offered border, lose repeatedly, and then demand the original offer anyways. The Palestinians themselves have made no such offer and give every indication of denying one if it was offered without an "unlimited right of return" or a "just settlement of the right of return" which has never been defined and acts as a poison pill that sounds OK to the west but could easily expand to mean enough refugees are shipped into Israel proper to effectively make Israel a Muslim majority.
aqouta
3d ago
It was those abuses plus finally having a place to go that emptied out the rest of the middle east. My point was to explain why Israelis would be unwilling to make themselves a minority in a single Palestinian state.
They lived in those areas as a persecuted minorities under, ironically given the current accusations, appartide conditions. Subjected to additional taxes, exclusion from official positions, lesser status under the law and the occasional pogrom. There are some few contested incidents like the 1950s Baghdad bombings but many many more straightforward incidents like the Egyptian denationalization and mass asset seizures of jews across the region. The idea that the push factors compelling jews to move to Israel from the middle east were largely fabricated is ahistorical. Certainly Israel wanted to entice jews to move there and sure up their numbers but the woes of the jews across the region were very real.
aqouta
4d ago
If the Palestinians can give up on the pipe dream of driving the jews into the sea then a two or three state solution where both peoples prosper is totally possible. It's essentially the direction Trump's plan pushes things. What you're asking for is a near equivalent to demands all non-native americans leave turtle island and go back to the countries of their ethnic origin, justice by some tortured ethic but simply not going to happen and the sooner the fantasy is dispensed with the sooner real solutions can be tried.
I'm sorry, the Israelis are not going to lay down and let themselves all be killed or expelled from what they believe to be their homeland. If your plan is for them to do that then you need to come up with another plan.
aqouta
4d ago
the just punishment for Israel's actions is that they must annex all of Gaza and the West Bank, make everyone living there full citizens of Israel and provide them with the same access to resources as they do to any other Israeli citizen right now.
Are you not aware that this has been the leftist demand the whole time? The problem is obvious. If Israel annexes the whole of mandate Palestine then the Jews will be a minority and swiftly have the mechanism of state turned on them. At best they would be Dhimmi in a shariah state subject to the abuses that have led to there being basically no jews anywhere else in the islamic world and with a reasonably high chance of being subject to massive pogroms that would make the holocaust seem loving by comparison.
laptop-class, bullshit email jobs these giant companies seem to employ in droves.
I hear this complaint a lot but I work in a microcosm of a corporate environment with around 200 employees that directs billions of dollars in spending that is almost entirely composed of "laptop class" people and while I understand the incredulousness of onlookers it's very hard to tell which of the email senders and data enterers could in actuality be replaced without catastrophic consequences. If this wasn't the case then some group or another would have already raided the department and gotten rid of all of them so that they could show 10% reduced costs on some corporate slide deck and ascend the payscale. These things are much more darwinian than outsiders believe.
This is very obvious with AI entering the picture and the various departments looking around at eachother with hunger in their eyes. Do we really need this many pricing analysts? Can our underwriting be done more efficiently? Surely we can get a closing document for a $150 million deal done in under a week of labor. I promise you that you are not the first person to wonder if some job really needs to exist. Someone with skin in the game is fighting ever budget season for that job to exist and there are real stakes.
The starbucks email job sounds so frivilous until a whole region of shops doesn't get their bean delivery and can't sell their most profitable drink for a week costing the company millions because some process wasn't followed properly.
aqouta
8d ago
I mean that feeling as a kid is the closest thing to being invited to join the Illuminati that any of us are likely to get.
Well you know, until the other big secret everyone pretends to believe, you know the one I'm talking about.
aqouta
10d ago
but I admit to being surprised by seeing the sheer volume of that here at the Motte.
You're just making stuff up dude.
aqouta
10d ago
I do think he's definitely a bell weather more than anything but a bell weather does show you which way the wind is blowing.
aqouta
11d ago
Ezra Klein has been making this point in his interviews recently although phrased more like "It doesn't matter what our policies are if people think we don't like them and I think we've been sending out the message that we don't like a lot of people". He seems to have been doing a lot of soul searching since the loss in 24.
aqouta
14d ago
There is in principle no more reason to associate ourselves with a group or "whole" based on skin color than there is to do so based on eye or hair color and in fact more reason to associate based on shared culture, resident city or voluntary associations. I don't even share a language with most of my ancestors. My nation is America, my people are Americans.
aqouta
15d ago
1c. Ergo, HBD substantially justifies White supremacy.
White supremacy is almost never so watered down as "the bell curve of whites is centered around halfway between the bell curve of black and asians on a plotting of many desirable measures." It's a belief that whites as a class as superior to other races as a class which requires an additional very important racial consciousness layer that is not necessarily present. That I'm closer to the center of a bellcurve of my race than my equally qualified colleague Milton is a curious bit of trivia that need not concern either of us.
A relatively recent, now well-established class of LLMs is the reasoning model. Early users found that prompts like “think step by step” improved results, and this was later formalized as chain-of-thought prompting. Modern training sometimes couples this with reinforcement learning that uses verifiable intermediate signals, alongside process supervision and verifier-based rewards. A full tour is outside our scope here (and outside my understanding), but the core idea is to reward not only final answers, but also the correctness of intermediate reasoning.
Is this what is going on? I had thought deep thinking had more to do with scaffolding built to continuously reprompt itself sometimes even using totally different specialized models for tasks.
Please do not train on this website’s data.
Speak for yourself, I want my output to be part of the machine god.
aqouta
15d ago
We don't have access to specific numbers. We know that GPT-3 cost somewhere around $5 million in compute to train and that openai's revenue in 2020 and 2021 while it and it's derivatives before 3.5 were their primary product that their revenue was $3.5 million and $28 million. As you get to the era of many competing models and then need to factor in what their actual margin on revenue is it becomes more muddled after that but their projected revenue for 2025 is $12 Billion and the trend looks exponential. Maybe adoption and usage falls off but the doom and gloom that they aren't finding buyers is just kind of nonsense.
aqouta
15d ago
I live in Australia where this framing is unambiguously true. They were directly involved in getting this turned into law, and the big businesses/firms you talk about here were fighting them every step of the way. This isn't really a topic for debate so much as a settled question in my home country, but I feel like pointing out that those firms fought against these changes every step of the way even when it turned out to be against their own self interest.
They were in many places proximal causes of course. I don't dispute what legislation was passed on behalf of which lobbies. My point is in the counterfactual world without unions we don't know that things wouldn't have shaken out the same or even better. It's not obvious to me that the stickiness of 40 hours a week being imposed by some laws is a good thing. I really don't think that if there were never unions we'd be working 11 hours a day 7 days a week right now.
How is any of this less socially destructive than the mass immigration and outsourcing that big business and capital has wrought using their outsized influence?
I really don't think you can lay this down at the feet of capital like there wasn't, often left wing, ideological justification. The economic class lens can be useful and I don't totally reject it but you're just blind if you think this is primarily a capital vs labor interest thing.
It wasn't unions who sold your country's industrial base to the third world, and that was a far more destructive change to society than demanding higher wages for workers and safe working environment laws (as in no mandatory carcinogen exposure or dangerous equipment with no safety precautions).
Unions didn't have a choice outside of autarkic fantasies where we're all much poorer but at least we're wallowing in American made poverty. The advantage of being the only power not demolished by ww2 was always going to wear off.
It wasn't unions that blew up Nordstream and cut off Europe from cheap energy, and it wasn't unions demanding vast floods of foreign labour and immigrants to help devalue their bargaining ability compared to capital. To claim that unions are responsible for the EU's current ills I think you would need to bring a lot more evidence to bear - it seems transparently obvious that the PMC is in charge of the EU. Can you honestly look at EU policies and say they were implemented to help out workers and labour movements as opposed to capital or existing elites?
It doesn't seem like it's worked out well for the capital involved either. But you're dodging here, EU members are undeniably more unionized and populist left influenced. Where is the prosperity for the european? Why are their nation arguably handling mass immigration even worse? This was voted for, was it false conciousness?
Large corporations are far more successful at avoiding and minimising tax obligations than workers are.
This is both not true and irrelevant. Any income tax paid by an employee is indistinguishable from a tax on the company for its labor costs. Most employers even withhold the taxes making it even more obvious what's going on.
Why is there an expensive licensing scheme for food carts that essentially doubles the price of street food in exchange for letting a few people make large profits selling licenses and adding no value?
Funny you would ask. restaurant and supermarket unions (e.g., UNITE HERE, UFCW, RWDSU) lobbied to keep the cap tight, arguing unregulated street vendors steal sales from unionized workers with benefits, pensions, and higher wages. In 2021 comments on expanding permits, union reps explicitly opposed increases, claiming it would "hurt workers" by shifting business to non-union carts. No evidence they directly set fees, but their influence helped maintain the scarcity driving those costs. Recent reforms (e.g., 2021 law adding 4,000 permits over 10 years) faced pushback from them.
As for economists, I don't think I've ever seen them be correct on anything in my entire life, so proving them wrong isn't a particularly high bar.
They've been right repeatedly on rent control
aqouta
16d ago
Left wing populism gave us the 8 hour workday and 5 day workweek
I don't really buy this framing. I know unions love to claim credit for it and maybe they have some path dependent reason for why compensation grew in that particular shape rather than 9 hours and higher pay, but firms were always going to have to compete for labor as capital built up and this necessarily leads to higher compensation one way or the other.
And no one ever seems to talk about the other end of the ledger for these special interest lobby groups we call unions. They don't represent the interests of everyone, only their members and do so almost always at the cost of everyone else. They hollowed out the competitiveness of our auto industry and after doing so simply banned outside competition so they could collect rents from everyone who wants a car. Through the Jones act they've killed our ability to ship things between our ports effectively so despite having an incredible gift of natural waterways we send things over land inefficiently. They've prevented port automation raising the cost of all import and exports. The unions are one of several big factors in retarding out ability to build the housing and infrastructure we need as they lobby to pork up bills with guarantees to use over priced union labor in contracts.
Behold Europe and it's pathetic nongrowth for a vision of what a union dominated society looks like.
As for state owned businesses I don't think that you can really say they all perform poorly - there are plenty of them that do incredibly well. Singtel has done so well that it has actually bought and acquired a decent portion of the private cell companies in other countries, for instance.
I looked into this because I'm always curious for these examples and Singtel is just simply not a state run company. The government does own a lot of it's shares but this isn't really what people mean when they talk about state owned companies. This is literally just a publicly traded company that the state owns a lot of shares in and doesn't have any real impact on whether it would succeed or fail.
And as for Bezos, isn't a large portion of his workforce reliant on welfare to survive anyway? Amazon is the worst of all worlds - the public purse is subsidising all their expenses in exchange for no return at all.
There is no support the state can give to the people that can't be categorized indirectly as subsidizing employers. If you want to redistribute income to people who's labor isn't very valuable, and I do support doing this, then you're inescapably subsidizing the firms they are employed by, no way out of it. Hell same for the higher paid employees.
in exchange for no return at all.
you mean besides the tax revenue of course.
And all of this is just distribution blame for the past, take a look at Mamdani for a vision of what leftist populism actually looks like with Charlie brown lining up for the 80th attempt at kicking the football of rent control and subsidized housing in the hopes that this time they'll prove the economists wrong.
I've had a drink with @idio3 before, unless I'm misremembering which commie I've met before, so I can vouch for him being a real person.
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