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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • Then Putin should be very scared of that risk and withdraw immediately!

    He should, but he doesn’t appear to be. That puts the ball in everybody else’s court, unfair though it is.

    Or the Russian people should be scared of that and force him to withdraw.

    Who am I kidding, the Russian people can’t stand up to President Putin, they’re too busy listening to General Stolichnaya.

    A large number of Russians are trying to protest. They typically get killed or imprisoned. It’s hard to fault the remainder for not risking their lives for a probably fruitless attempt at dissent.






  • Agreed, but that’s not happening. It’s wild that the only possible options anybody sees right now are all-out war or Putin suddenly having a change of heart, and anybody who considers there might be other avenues to pursue is ridiculous.

    Fine, the war goes on, and we’ll see hundreds of thousands of people continue to die. Nothing else anybody in the entire world can do, it all rests on Putin changing his mind, and we’ll just have to wait it out. Sucks to suck for all of those people, their families, and their descendants who are going to grow up in a country that’s going to take generations to rebuild.


  • How Parking Garages Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

    How Public Parks Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

    How the Street Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

    How Literal Playgrounds Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

    Maybe if these things are happening everywhere, it’s not the app that’s the issue. This kind of talk opens us up to bans on Signal and similar apps, and that’s just unacceptable. Address the core issues in society, don’t try (and typically fail) to bandage it by taking away more and more of people’s rights and freedoms.



  • Wet-bulb weather is when, because of a combination of humidity and heat, you can’t naturally cool off with things like sweat.

    This isn’t quite right, even though the gist of it ends up being right. This is one of very few things I’m legitimately an expert in, so I don’t want to let it go uncorrected not because it makes a big difference, but because it just feels weird not to and maybe somebody will be interested.

    Dry bulb temperature is what you typically read when you’re looking at a thermometer. The bulb, the thing that’s checking the temperature, is literally dry. To get a wet bulb reading, you essentially put a wet sock around a thermometer (to get a “psychrometer”) and swing it around for a while, because you get a different reading when the water is evaporating off it. So when the air is fully saturated (100% humidity, standing in a cloud), your wet bulb and dry bulb readings will be the same. In all other cases, your wet bulb temperature will be lower.

    “Wet bulb weather” isn’t really a phrase people use. High wet bulb, high relative humidity, high absolute humidity - all the same thing (and in fact, if you have just one of those and the dry bulb temperature, you can calculate the others). They just measure how wet the air is in slightly different ways.




  • On first read, it gives an understanding that both sides are willing to approach a deal - but lack trust in the process and the mediators ability to coerce the other side to actually commit and follow through.

    I don’t think this is a bad reading of the article in vacuum, but I don’t think it’s a fair reading of the situation because AP intentionally or unintentionally has left quite a bit out. Hamas agreed to a US-backed ceasefire back in May that Israel refused. There was plenty of trust on both sides that they’d get what was in the deal, but Israel didn’t want that particular deal at that particular time.

    What’s happening now is Hamas wants Israel to remove their troops and generally stop killing Palestinians, in addition to the other parts of the deal. Israel refuses to put this in writing, saying they’ll stop killing people for now, but they’re going to leave troops behind to occupy the area - but eventually they’ll remove those troops. You’re right that Hamas doesn’t trust Israel’s going to remove those troops, and I think that’s entirely reasonable given how the “bridging proposal” is a variation of May’s proposal, but striking out things like withdrawing troops. Seems like if that’s those are the major changes they’re making to the written proposal, they probably don’t plan on following through.

    But it’s also entirely unreasonable for Israel to strike that in the first place. The Palestinians don’t want Israel to be an occupying force. There’s nothing they can do about the civilians continuing to settle and take their land, but at the very least they’re asking for the additional soldiers that have invaded the land in the last year to get out while they’re not actively killing Palestinians.

    On top of that, Israel’s occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor and Rafah crossing is in violation of the Camp David agreements with Egypt. It’s really difficult to trust you can make a deal with somebody who’s currently not following the agreement they have with your mediator.

    This is a helpful article that explains the original deal in more detail than most people want to know: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/6/text-of-the-ceasefire-proposal-approved-by-hamas