Israel is not alone in the region anymore. The middle east is bipolar now, and Israel is well established in the anti-Iran coalition. I wouldn’t call this “stabilizing”, but if the actual fighting is contained to Israel, Iran, and Iranian proxies, that is good for the rest of the anti-Iran coalition.

Sucks for Israel, but when your political leadership is fighting with military leadership because the latter is not sufficiently hawkish, I don’t think “stability” is the policy objective said leadership is actually pursuing.

No. There haven’t been any real birds since the US government exterminated them in the 60s. Any “bird” you see today is a surveillance drone.

All models are wrong, but some are useful. Thinking of evolved features as having a purpose is wrong, but it is also incredibly useful.

Why do we have eyes? In some sense, there is no reason, just a sequence of random coincidences, combined with a slightly non-randon bias refered to as “survival of the fittest” (itself an incorrect model).

However, saying that we have eyes to see has incredible explanatory power, which makes it a useful model. Just like Newton’s law of Universal gravity. We’ve known it that is wrong for a century at this point, but most of the time still talk as if it’s true, because it is useful.

It’s common enough that my State’s toll provider has had a banner on their front page about it for months https://www.driveezmd.com/

If you want to file a complaint, the Internet crime control center is asking for information on these scams specifically https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2024/PSA240412

CPI does weight items by based on spending patterns (although the details of how to determine this weight are complicated and the main reason there are multiple inflation indecises).

The 2022 CPI has a 0.178% contribution from the price of milk, and a 45.065% contribution from the price of Housing. Housing itself is subdived into several subcategories. Notably, neither the purchase price of a house nor the typical mortgage are included. Instead, homeowners cost of shelter is covered by “owner’s equivelent rent” which attempts to answer what the owner would be paying if they had to rent the house they are living in.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2023.htm

There is a solution to this: homestead exemption. A lot of states already implement implement this with their normal property tax. If a property is your primary residence, then the tax you pay on it cannot increase by more than x% a year. Some states also give preferential tax treatment to senior’s primary residence. Their is no reason we couldn’t implement these same breaks on a LVT.

We’ll support you a bit less … after our elections are over and we can support you without any domestic consequence.

Remember the airdrops and logistics piers that the Biden admit spent months touting as the US’s solution to the humanitarian crises, and we just need to give them time to be implemented. Then, when they didn’t work (as anyone who was paying attention knew would happen, because they were fundamentally stupid ideas from the start), the admin quietly rolled them back without much fanfare.

This is at least slightly better in that it is in principle and actually good idea. But the Biden admin has no credibility for actually following through. The state department will release a public report saying that Israel is in compliance and military aid will continue uninterrupted; regardless of the facts on the ground.

By the time voters can see for sure that this was a lie, the election will have ended.

I bought in 2022 and can’t imagine having that much interaction with a mortgage broker. My interaction consisted of giving them my information. Getting pre approved for a stupidly large mortgage (about twice what I could afford). Then, when I found a place to buy, they punched in the address for the “virtual appraisal” and approved the loan.

Part of plausible deniability is that it has to be plausible. There has been no plausible argument presented that Israel did not do the pager and walkie talkie attack. For that matter, there hasn’t even been a denial about it.

Trump is an existential threat to Iran. Iran is in a regional cold[0] war with Israel. Israel’s ability to wage this war is largely dependent on US support; both in terms of raw military assistance, and in the US providing diplomatic and economic cover for Israel.

While the US had not applied nearly as much moderating pressure on Israel as I would have liked, it has still provided some. Israeli prime minister Netenyahu, in contrast, has been angling for a direct confrontation with Iran for decades now. Given the past 11 months, there are serious forces, both in Israeli politics, Iranian politics, and the inertia of war, pushing in that direction.

Trump is aligned with Netenyahu on this point, and would push him towards a direct confrontation with Iran. By all indications, Harris is not. This dynamic was made clear to Iran when the Democratic administration signed the Iran nuclear deal (against Israeli opposition), from which the US under Trump proceeded to unilaterally withdraw from.

[0] Cold might be a bit of an understatement after the last 11 months. However, apart from a brief tit-for-tat exchange, the fighting has stayed confined to Israel and Iranian proxies.

I have very course facial hair and switching to women’s razors pretty much solved my post-shave irritation problem. In order of quality for my face it goes: men’s disposable razor << safty razor < women’s disposable razor.

Because tensions between Hezbollah and Israel have been steadily rising since October 7th because of Hzebollah’s objection to how Israel is acting in Gaza. To be clear, prior to October 7th, tensions were already high enough that they would regularly lob bombs at each other. Today’s “escalated” tensions include northern Israel being evacuated due to threats from Hezbolla’s rocket attacks.

At this point, it is clear that the options available to Israel are to either withdraw from Gaza and hope Hezbolla stands down, or end up in a full war with Hezbolla. Historians will say that the war with Hezbolla started months ago, and this was just one attack among many.

But they didn’t because materials that explode like that simply aren’t used as batteries.

Further, software is not magic. In consumer electronics basic power management is done entirely by hardware. A hack cannot short out the battery, because the circuit to do that simply doesn’t exist. Maybe the hack could cause enough of a sustained power draw to overheat the battery and trigger a failure eventually, but that would still look quite different from what we saw.

To be clear, the target of the shooting was an unidentified individual, and a scoped rifle was found in the vicinity.

Maybe something else happened, but it looks like the secret service doing their job and stoppingva shooter before he was ready to take the shot.

Its not symbolism.

The reason people view Dax as a trans is that they were at times male and at times female. That is not symbolic of being trans, it is just being trans.

However, despite exploring what it means to be a trill passing through generations of hosts, the changing gender aspect of it never comes up. If Kurzon was a women, I doubt we would be talking about Dax as a trans stand-in, but I can’t think of a single plot point or character development that would meaningfully change.

Normally I’m a believer in death of the author, so I won’t be offended if anyone wants to completly ignore thus section, but in the DS9 documentary, they have a section on LGBT representation, and their big example for it was Jadzia. However, that was not for being trans, it was for being in a gay relationship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya8WTQc93yI&t=5467s

Don’t, Jadzia clearly appreciated it.

Trill’s relationships to their past hosts is complicated and never fully explored, but it is clearly established that the distance they create between their current host’s life and that of their past host is something that is enforced apon them by broader trill society.

Both Kurzon and Jadzia were, at least at times, clearly unhappy at the extent to which they had to distance themselves from their past life.

https://youtu.be/Qu-bP5367Yo?si=YNBFC_IUo7o7FpCd

The thing is, Trill are not trans. Dax didn’t go from being a man to a woman. Kurzon was always a man and Jadzia was always a women. And DS9 actually took this concept seriously on its own terms.

I can’t guarantee that none of those drivers were actually part of Hamas

We need to get passed the idea that the mere presence of a Hamas member justifies all military action. Assuming it is true, what were those Hamas members doing?

Throwing away the vaccines to use the marked car for transporting weapons and fighters? Valid military target (and a war crime)

Assisting in distributing polio vaccines? Not a valid target.

No good Sir, I’m on the level.

In the modern era, wars are rarely in the interest of either side. However, miscalculations happen, and the more you play at the edge of war, the more likely you are to fall over.

In April, Israel calculated that they could bomb an Iranian complex in Syria, targeting top Iranian officials without sparking a war. They were correct.

In response, Iran calculated that they could send 300 drones/missiles to Israel, and have enough be intercepted by air defense systems to avoid starting a war. They were correct.

Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire; each side calculating that each strike would not start a war. Thus far they have been correct.

For years, Hamas and Israel have been exchaning small attacks. Both sides correctly calculating that they could avoid a full war. Then, on October 7th, the IDF fucked up. A Hamas attack was far more successful than it had any bussiness being, and now both sides are 10 months into a war that hurts both of them.

A war with Hezbollah might not be inevitable, but the current level of conflict is not sustainable. Every day that it is not resolved is one more opportunity for miscalculation; and one more notch ticked on the escalatory ratchet.

The President’s role is largely ceremonial. The President consults party leaders to determine who they would support, then nominates that person. The nominee must then form a coalition that can get support from a majority of the Knesset.