Common sense not to do if you expect to keep your job.

I don't know what these folk expected, but some protesters are actually willing to sacrifice a lot as part of their protests. If they knew the cost of their protest I have some respect for that.

The problem is that there's currently a lot of Palestinians currently living on that land that Israel.

The best defended borders are border without enemies on the other side.

Israel's issue isn't that they need to take all the land "from the river to the sea" in order to have a defensible state. The issue is the conquest of land is really tempting (precisely the reason it's illegal) and Israel has found itself occupying a lot of land that a portion of their population really wants to keep.

The Settlers have figured out that all they need to do is establish a Settlement, grow it big enough, and it's no longer politically viable for a future government to dismantle it, better yet if the current government supports the plan.

Put those Settlements in the right place and a contiguous Palestinian state is no longer possible meaning an ethnically cleansed* Greater Israel is the inevitable endgame.

* Israel has an Arab minority with whom they get along with reasonably well, but I don't see non-citizen Palestinians being able to join that club.

Lots of the Netherlands sits below sea level.

So why should we be concerned even slightly about cities subsiding when we already can easily deal with places that exist many meters below sea level?

You really think they care that much about that tiny bit of cash?

The real reason is that the Feds (and legislators) are cluing into how powerful AI and analytics are and they're scared over what China is doing with the giant masses of data it's collecting from TikTok.

What kinda stuff goes viral? How does info spread through networks? What's spreading right now? Legislator X is authoring a bill that touches our interests, what do we know about that legislator in specific?

For a country looking to meddle in Western politics, as China definitely is, a dataset like TikTok is an extremely powerful tool.

If you were fighting a war against a technologically superior opponent I'm pretty sure you'd do all those things as well with the possible exception of recruiting children.

And it's a little unclear how widespread that is, certainly, children wanting to join the fight happens in every big conflict. The question is are they being actively recruited or just not turned away.

It's true Hamas's charter calls for the destruction of Israel, but I don't think Likud's is much better.

Not saying that Hamas isn't a horrific organization, but Palestinians are being systematically repressed and forced off of their land. Really nasty extremists are a very predictable outcome of that process.

CNN, New York Times, The Times of Israel, etc, etc.

There's other factors to consider as well:

- Israel (Natanyahu) deliberately allowed Qatar to smuggle cash into Gaza in order to keep Hamas strong. Not strong enough to carry out the Oct 7th attack, but strong enough to keep lobbing rockets and form a suitable villain.

- Israel has been blocking basic aid such as food from getting into Gaza. Deliberate famine is hardly "upholding the rules of war".

- What do you think "operational security" in Gaza is? A permanent Israeli army presence with the steady flow of casualties on both sides that entails?

Those dead Palestinian civilians are actually part of Hamas's plan.

The old equation was that Arab states would normalize ties with Israel when the Palestinian issue was settled, then in 2017 a normalization process without the Palestinians was started. This would obviously remove a lot of leverage from the Palestinians.

A major objective of the October 7th attack was to was to create a disproportionate Israeli response that would inflame the Arab world and stop the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab states. Given how the war has gone with even Western partners starting to turn on Israel I'd say Hamas is probably saying "mission accomplished".

The site is a money pit doomed to failure, but if you're somehow looking for a way to justify the stock price I think you need to do something like video.

Even if Truth Social became the last alt-right Twitter clone standing it would still be a crappy business because it would be a tiny user base with toxic content that mainstream advertisers avoid.

But video ads go for higher rates and no one has really broken through as the alt-right YouTube. So maybe there's a shot at decent revenue before he blows through all the cash.

I mean it should still be a penny stock, but with video maybe it's worth 2c instead of 1c.

FTA:

Nahalat Shimon is trying to seize the property under an Israeli law allowing Jews to reclaim properties that were Jewish before Israel was established in 1948. Jordan controlled the area between 1948 and the 1967 war.

So Palestinians can't return to properties they fled in 1948, but some long dormant title here suddenly takes precedence over the Palestinian ownership.

So right of conquest?

It seems like you don't have much cause to complain about Hamas attacking Israel or is only one side allowed to win land in a war (btw, no one is).

This is going no where. I encourage you to imagine the narrative from the Palestinian side, I don't think your arguments are as compelling as you think they are.

This sounds close.

I'm not sure what the debate seems to be about, it seems very hard to justify building settlements in someone else's territory.

So your claim is that Palestinians being expelled, officially and unofficially, from their homes and villages as the nearby Israeli Settlements expand isn't systematic? How is it anything other than "we have more guns and will take what we want"?

Like your insistence is that the settler builds on the exact same lot? That's a weirdly pedantic standard, though easily established by the annexation of East Jerusalem.

But pushing out the nearby Palestinians in the West Bank for being too close to your newly established Settlement, or to use the land for grazing is easily established by those links, and should satisfy any reasonable judge.

Not sure if you're being deliberately daft or not, but this pattern is very well established.

From the other side Israeli Jews have been constantly taking Palestinian land for over a century, and the backdrop of those "serious offers" was the consistent expansion of Settlements on Palestinian land. If you were the Palestinians, would you have trusted the Israeli's saying they were going to give back your land even as they built new houses on it?

I fully understand the historical aspirations (and need) for a Jewish homeland, even after the holocaust Jews spent years in refugee camps since they literally had nowhere to go.

But from the Palestinian side, invaders/colonizers came and took their land, when they predictably fought back the invaders took more, and now the invaders have established a long term pattern whereby the invader is regularly kicking Palestinians off of their land to build new Settlements.

Recall, the reason that Israeli security was so light around Gaza during the attack was the soldiers were relocated to the West Bank to contain unrest over expanded Settlement construction.

That pattern is going to create a lot of animosity.

I can only see three resolutions to the conflict.

First, is the two state solution. But that requires not only halting the construction of new Settlements and restrict or even freeze the expansion of existing ones for good. And you're probably not seeing the Palestinians trust it until you've maintained this for at least 10 years. That sounds extreme, but in reality it's just "stop taking other people's stuff".

Second, is what seems to be the current plan, keep expanding Settlements and pushing the Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas until you're literally left with just a couple Gaza like enclaves with all the Palestinians and then you want a few generations for emotions to die down (if you don't think of a way to literally push them into another country).

Third, Israel miscalculates in some serious way. For instance, they turn the Arab Israeli minority hostile and alienate too many Western allies, and suddenly moderate Jewish Israelis start leaving. If that keeps up people start getting scared and more folks start leaving, and at some point enough leave to top the balance and Hamas gets its wish and Israel ceases to exist.

Personally, my money is on Scenario #2 and that certainly seems to be the Israeli government's plan, unfortunately the path to that contains a potential detour to #3. This is why Hamas and Netanyahu so often find themselves objective allies. It's in both of their interests to keep the rockets flying in order to prevent any peace.

The moment renewables were able to do >100% someone was going to put out a story about it. Make sure people understand the context sure, but it's hardly a gotcha.

The chart only went to ~14:15 but renewables were 60% at 8am and peaked at 13:00 so I'd say they were above 60% for about 10 hours of the day.

But that's a fairly naive way to look at. The bulk of that is from solar, and clouds don't actually affect solar that much, making it super dependable. Double the solar installation and you've got a reliable 100% for those 10 hours.

Wind can maybe have some big deltas, but I'm guessing they're predictable. But the bulk is solar which is arguably more reliable than traditional sources (it's not like someone will have to take the sun offline for unplanned maintenance).

So you don't need much staffing during the day when it's not running, and zero fuel costs. And gas plants don't cost much to build either. Not to say it doesn't hurt their economics, but not to the extent that you suggest.

The big question is storage. Can you build enough storage to handle those 14 hours (depending on time of year) when solar output is way down? If so, you can go down to zero.

Agreed on Afghanistan and especially Iraq, though once the US destabilized the countries I think they both would have been better off re-stabilized before they left (arguably Iraq is fairly stable now).

Either way, the US incurred quite a cost in human life policing those countries, so I'm not certain robots would have made a big difference in the decision.

In any case it doesn't really matter. No one was too interested in militarizing small drones because they realized they would be more advantageous for terrorists than militaries. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and the respective militaries quickly developed military drones out of necessity.

Robot soldiers are coming, whether the US builds them or not, all it takes is a capable nation perceiving the need..