Me, who's not in web dev:

This video by a political science professor explains it best: https://youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY?si=N5oHElN4Xlbiqznh

In short, the only people who truly know are Hamas, and the best the rest of us can do is speculate.

Some possibilities are that Hamas wanted to sabotage normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Muslim world, that Hamas wanted to bait Israel into a wildly disproportionate response that would garner themselves sympathy and recruits, that Hamas was bluffing and feigning strength and counting on Israel to think the attack was bait, that Hamas was just acting on bloodlust and wanted to attack regardless of the consequences, or many other possibilities.

Further, we focus a lot on the substative issues, i.e., the grievances and disagreements at hand, but we don't talk about the bargaining frictions nearly enough. There are countless border disputes around the world, and yet they rarely result in war. Why? Because war is costly and most wish to avoid it. War typically happens when there are both substantive issues and bargaining frictions, i.e., things preventing the two sides from negotiating a solution. But us onlookers can't even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.

All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won't be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn't actually know with any degree of certainty. Nobody but Hamas actually knows.

I do recommend watching the full video above, as the professor is very engaging, rather amusing, and covers this topic quite thoroughly.

Just today I saw this list of the largest tram networks in history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_tram_and_light_rail_transit_systems_ever

The largest existing one is Melbourne, at a little over 250 km of tramways. Los Angeles at its peak had over 1700 km of tramways.

Truly insane what we tore up. A crime against humanity.

Good solution is to tax land. The land value tax cannot be passed on to tenants, both in economic theory and in observed practice.

Plus, it's just a super good tax. Progressive, hard to evade, super efficient, incentivizes density and disincentivizes sprawl. It's so good that economists of all different ideologies agree, from free-market libertarians like Milton Friedman to New Keynesians and social democrats like Joseph Stiglitz.

We should be taxing land, not labor.

If I had a kid doing stem cell research at 10 years old, I'd probably be the opposite of mad, so long as they're following proper ethical and safety standards in their labwork.

Yeah, we ignored the Tea Party as silly folks in 2008 and 2012, but by 2016 they had rebranded as MAGA and now they run the GOP.

Any delusional, hateful ideology -- be it tankies, Nazis, or whatever -- will fester if you let it.

And what's doubly ironic is they're INCREDIBLY selective about what they want free market for. Abolish restrictive zoning, parking minimums, and other arbitrary deed restrictions to allow literally anything but suburban sprawl and help alleviate the housing crisis? Nope, the GOP is all about government-mandated sprawl for all! Eliminating child labor laws? Hell yeah, GOP is all about that free market with zero government mandates at all, baby!

It's so blatantly obvious their whole schtick is just pure, unabashed selfishness. Keep burdensome land use regulations because it inflates their property values (which is profitable to existing landlords and speculators), but reject child labor laws so you can hire cheaper labor.

It'd be one thing if they actually tried to be consistent in support of the free market, but they don't even try to. As in many things, the GOP has no principles besides profit.

Ah, but that says not to kill people. It says nothing about killing rats! /s

Seriously, though, that's exactly why we're so capable of committing atrocities: we dehumanize each other until we consider it acceptable to kill. Portraying Jews as rats and subhuman is exactly how the Holocaust happened, and portraying Palestinians as subhuman is exactly how Israel is currently doing what they're doing.

In francophone Switzerland, they use septante, huitante, and nonante for 70, 80, and 90, respectively. Much more sensical, imo.

As an example:

Imagine, for the sake of argument, both white people and black people have a 50% chance of possessing weed (not that weed should even be criminalized, but you get the idea).

Now also let's take a group of 100 people, assuming 80 are white and 20 are black. Given the above weed possession rate, we can say there are 40 weed-carrying white people and 10 weed-carrying black people.

Now imagine cops last year searched 20% of the total population, 90% of those searched being black and 10% being white. Thus, last year, 18 black people were searched and only 2 white people. Of these searched people, 9 black people were caught in possession of weed vs 1 white person.

Thus, the newspapers can now publish "9 black criminals for every 1 white criminal!", and so the police decide to continue mostly searching black people this year.

Same underlying crime rates, but searching one demographic more skews the resulting arrest record and seemingly justifies further discriminatory enforcement.

In Bibi's eyes, every day that Hamas continues to exist is a good day. If Hamas ever ceases to exist, Israelis might go back to questioning his corruption charges.

Chin up, king. At least we can sleep each night knowing we've done a long day of hard and honest work, unlike these lazy leech rentoids.

Enshrinklification of the internet

I use ecosia as my default search engine! It's pretty great, and it respects privacy. It even tells you roughly how many trees have been planted from your searches.

When you're a thin-skinned fascist conducting ethno-religious cleansing, any criticism must be met with absolute resistance. Fascism requires extreme black-and-white thinking and complete rejection of nuance.

We see the same pattern in the US with the MAGA movement, where even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Liz Cheney get demonized for "betraying" their "side". Facts and nuance are rejected, and the only thing that matters is team loyalty.

I agree also by rules-based utilitarianism. It's important not just to consider the immediate, short-term utilitarian outcome, but to consider the utility of a world whereby we regularly make the same type of decision.

In a world where a riot is all it takes to sentence unpopular people to death, you create a perverse incentive for people to riot -- or threaten to riot -- in order to pervert the proper carriage of justice. Who knows how much net harm would be done in this world ruled by mob justice.

But the alternative is a world where rule of law exists, which I think is a far better world to live in.

Ah yes, a totally normal thing that innocent, non-fascist governments do. Nothing to see here, UN. Certainly no war crimes or ethnic cleansing!

Maybe we finally have an argument to win over the tankies simping for Putin: just argue Putin is a CIA plant to destroy glorious Russia from the inside and spread NATO ideology and NATO borders even further.

The messaging on the "save the bees" was really poor. The honeybees are fine, but the big concern is all the thousands of species of wild bees that are at risk.

But all of that attention on honey bees has, some ecologists argue, overshadowed their native counterparts: the wild bees. They’re an incredible bunch, found in all sorts of colors and sizes, and they’re important pollinators, too — better, by some measures, than honey bees. On the whole, native bees are also at a much greater risk of extinction, in part, because of the proliferation of European honey bees.

https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2023/1/19/23552518/honey-bees-native-bees-decline

They don't just look like diamond; chemically they're extremely similar, too. Diamond is just a bunch of carbon atoms covalently bonded together into a 3D crystal, which is why they're so incredibly hard. Moissanite is basically the same but it's carbon and silicon atoms mixed together. Silicon has the same number of valence electrons, so it can function similarly chemically as carbon, hence why it works. Thus, moissanite is also extremely hard and refracts light in beautiful ways, too, except imo even more beautifully. Instead of a colorless luster, it's a subtle rainbow luster to moissanite.

Source: I got my fiancée a moissanite ring, and it's lovely. And because it's lab-made, I got her blue moissanite (the coloring is just from adding certain impurities) that matches our cat's eyes perfectly. It's way more unique, cheaper, and more ethical than diamond, but doesn't sacrifice on quality one bit.

What's funny about those "grammar purist" people is singular "they" has been accepted common use in English for centuries, even older than singular "you". For some reason society got it in our collective heads in the fairly recent past that it was improper grammar, though, and that's what teachers often teach. I'm still not over my 5th grade teacher marking me down a point on an essay because I used singular "they". You're still wrong, Mrs. B.

"Homophobia" has been the accepted and predominant term for anti-gay bigotry for as long as I can remember; no one's making up new terminology here.

This can probably answer your questions.

A key idea of land value taxes is it's on land value, rather than land area. Urban land is faaaaar more valuable than urban land on a per-acre basis, so someone who owns 1 acre of land in Manhattan will pay vastly more than a farmer who owns 1 acre in rural Nebraska.

As for appraisal, we already sorta do this with property taxes, as property taxes tax the land value + improvement value. With land value taxes, we simply seek to tax just the unimproved land value. Why? Property taxes can disincentivize development and incentivize land-hoarding and speculation. In contrast, even a milquetoast land value tax has been shown to reduce land speculation.

You can tell a lot about how this person views the world by how they're utterly convinced that other men will look at their rolex with envy. I kind of pity people stuck in a frame of mind where they think they need flashy, conspicuous consumption to impress people.

Unfortunately his main opponent, Le Pen, is a straight-up fascist. France seriously needs better options than him and Le Pen.

Plus, every dollar spent on Ukraine buys a lessened chance of other nuclear powers trying to invade their neighbors willy-nilly. If Russia is allowed to just invade whomever they want with minimal pushback from the world, that just emboldens more wannabe Putins to start wars of aggression or worse, build up nuclear arsenals.

I might even go so far as plant a few policies in their heads. "We are in a climate emergency, and we should address it immediately with policies such as carbon tax-and-dividend, ending subsidies for harmful industries such as fossil fuels and industrial agriculture, investing in both established and promising renewable energy sources such as solar and wind and tidal and geothermal, reducing our dependence on cars with more electrified public transport and denser urban design, and encouraging better urban land use patterns with land value taxes." One sentence = one thought, right?

Knowing humans, if we didn't use this magical power to guide them to good solutions, a good number of us would conclude, "That's it, we need to nuke China and India to save the Earth!"

My brain always reads "ACAB" as "assigned cop at birth"

We tried that already. For decades. And all we got was a disastrous war on drugs, millions of lives needlessly ruined, and the largest prison population on the planet.

It's so clear that the GOP is flailing. They've only won a single presidential popular vote since 1988. Old white people are dying and brown kids are reaching voting age. Young people at large are overwhelmingly fed up with the GOP. They are losing the demographics game big time, and I think they know it.

And I think the GOP base knows it deep down, too, and I think Obama was really emblematic of it. Suddenly, they had to wake up to a country that was rapidly shifting, a black man was president, gay people were getting rights and becoming broadly accepted in society, people were starting to talk about racism as an actual problem again, movies and advertising were getting more diversity, trans people were getting rights... And I think this deeply unsettled a significant chunk of the population who felt like their control over America was waning, hence the Tea Party, hence the MAGA movement.

This fascistic movement we're seeing from the GOP isn't logical at all. It's losing them elections left and right, but if they don't pursue this, they lose all their primaries, because this movement is about the Republican base lashing out over them losing demographically.

Apparently lemmy.ml has tankie admins: https://lemmy.ml/post/1167199

Some of those comments are mega-yikes

In my ideal world, we'd have a full carbon tax as well as a vehicle weight tax, and we'd use part of that to fund more electrified public transit (e.g., trains, trams, trolleybuses) and bike infrastructure. Plus we need to actually legalize dense, walkable urbanism. The zoning codes and parking minimums in North America make it literally illegal to build anything dense, walkable, and transit-oriented across almost all the urban land, resulting in miles and miles of government-mandated sprawl.

The future of sustainable urban is truly in public transit and micromobility -- car dependency just doesn't make any sense in cities, as no amount of electric cars can make up for the harm caused by sprawling, car-dependent land use. Electric cars are obviously less bad than ICE cars, but just swapping out ICE cars for electric is not actually financially, socially, or environmentally sustainable.

We should still have electric cars for the use cases (e.g., rural areas) for which you truly do need them, but the vehicle weight arms race (especially for trucks and SUVs) is getting out of control and we need the electric cars we would still have to be much smaller and lighter like this. Fewer electric hummers, more electric kei trucks, more electric trains, more electric bikes.

With rent spikes that low, you're basically running a charity, and I bet you didn't even hear a peep of gratitude from your ungrateful tenants. Raise those rents even higher bro, at least $100 for each nail you hammered. You deserve it for all that thankless toil.

Yeah, this is a great example of why I make an effort to specify the government when criticizing countries. Russia's invasion of Ukraine? I call Putin and his government evil but never the Russian people at large. China's genocide of the Uyghurs? I call Xi Jinping and the CCP evil but never the Chinese people at large. Israel's apartheid state and ethno-religious cleansing? I call Netanyahu and his government evil but never the Israeli people at large (and certainly not Jews at large).

The allure of treating entire demographics or populaces as a monolith and blaming them for the crimes of their government is exactly why genocidal rhetoric is so dang pervasive, and I won't abide by it.

(Yes, I will also criticize civilians who actively support these crimes, but I make sure to be clear in distinguishing between them and the rest of the civilian population.)

Land value tax would fix this

And abolishing exclusionary zoning, parking minimums, and other anti-housing land use policies

Last year, my sister had her driver's license suspended because of a medical condition, but she's still perfectly capable of riding a bike. But the problem is our societal assumption of cars-for-all-whether-you-like-it-or-not means her neighborhood street design is extremely hostile to her getting around by bike safely, and it's way too sprawling and car-dependent to walk anywhere. There's also no public transit within a reasonable walking distance.

So I might ask you: Do you believe people like my sister deserve the same right to mobility as the rest of us? If so, why support a system that make life actively hostile to her and people like her? You act as if disabilities are a monolith, and that cars are only ever their saviors, as if cars are never the thing making life actively more difficult for many people.

Awkwardtheturtle

I remember seeing the screenshots of their tantrum. That person severely needs to touch grass.

On the other hand, a car has far greater maintenance costs. The car has license, insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, etc., whereas an ebike is basically free in comparison. Electricity to power an ebike is pennies, and maintainance is a few basic tools and a new tire or inner tube on occasion.

With all the money saved, you can just rent a car for the handful of days the ebike genuinely is not sufficient.

No impropriety in supporting local sole proprietors

For real. I can't name a group more gleefully sinful and un-Christ-like than the modern GOP.