When was that house built? What should the current owners do with it? If they sell, someone else needs to buy. Someone is going to be left holding the bag for a decision made decades ago.

And our current approach already indemnifies them, because their flood insurance is provided by the federal government as no private insurer will offer it. Then, when a flood hits, we all pay for it, along with the emergency response during and after the event.

The problem is that people cannot simply get out at scale. The homes themselves are not portable and represent a significant investment that most homeowners cannot afford to lose. An individual can sell, but that requires there being a buyer, so doesn’t actually solve the problem.

What is needed here is a government funded relocation program. The government buys houses in eligible areas at market rate (locked in at the time the program starts, as market rate should collapse to 0). Then, the government does nothing, and saves money from not needing to subsidize the insurance market, and need needing to spend as much on disaster response and relief. Given that the disaster relief savings is largely born by the federal government, this program should receive federal funding as well.

Official death tolls are always an undercount. Even after mundane disasters like hurricanes, the death toll gets revised up during the cleanup as more victims are discovered. The disaster in Gaza is still ongoing, so people have more important things to do than count the dead.

In addition to this, the Gaza Health Ministry has taken a deliberately conservative approach of only counting bodies that make it to a hospital and are clearly dead as a direct result of the conflict (e.g, not disease or famine).

The official death count is not a reflection of how many people are dying. It is a reflection of the Gaza Health Ministry’s capacity to count the dead.

Women’s skirts work just fine for men. You just need to translate between sizing scale, which is not that difficult (although it is annoying unless you are in person and can actually try things on).

Crop tops are much more difficult to buy, as a lot of those really look bad if you don’t have breasts.

I think of this as analogous to the movement to get women to wear pants. It’s not that we wanted them to present as masculine; it’s that we wanted pants to stop being masculine and start being just clothes. Basically all masculine coded attire became androgynous, but almost no feminine code attire did.

It’s not like skirts are inherently feminine either. There are plenty of examples across cultures and time of it being perfectly normal for men to wear them.

Just because you have been found guilty does not mean that you cannot subsequently have that finding overturned on appeal. Procedurally, there are a bunch of rules on how that happens; and death row inmates are given more appelet rights than those with life sentences. By having their sentences commuted to life, those would inmates may lose some of their extra appelet writes.

If all you have is a lease, then this is the sunk cost fallacy. Your paying the lease whether you use it or not, so that should not be a factor. Not using it is still cheaper as you do not have the overhead of keeping the space usable (electricity, janitors, etc), and eventually the lease will end. And, you might something else to do with the space that, while not worth the lease, still has non 0 value that you wouldn’t get if the space was being used for offices. Besides, at some point the lease would end.

Of course, if your board and executives have investments in commercial real estate, or industries that depend on it (restraunts in commercial areas, supplies of office grade toilet paper, etc), then they have a clear conflict of interest, and may want to sacrifice the interests of the one company to prop up their other investments. In theory, shareholders could sue over this. However, not only would this be very hard to prove, but almost all shareholders have the exact same conflict of interest.

You get this property in algrabraic structures called “wheels”. The simplest to understand wheel is probably the wheel of fractions, which is a slightly different way of defining fractions that allows division by 0.

The effect of this is to create 2 additional numbers: ∞ = z/0 for z != 0, ⊥, and ⊥ = 0/0.

Just add infinity gives you the real projective line (or Riemen Sphere if you are working with comples numbers). In this structure, 0 * ∞ is undefined, so is not quite what you want

⊥ (bottom) in a wheel can be thought as filling in for all remaining undefined results. In particular, any operation involving ⊥ results in ⊥. This includes the identity: 0 * ⊥ = ⊥.

As far as useful applications go, there are not many. The only time I’ve ever seen wheels come up when getting my math degree was just a mistake in defining fractions.

In computer science however, you do see something along these lines. The most common example is floating point numbers. These numbers often include ∞, -∞ and NaN, where NaN is essentially just ⊥. In particular, 0 * NaN = NaN, also 0 * ∞ = ⊥. The main benefit here is that arithmetic operations are always defined.

I’ve also seen an arbitrary precision fraction library that actually implemented something similar to the wheel of fractions described above (albeit with a distinction between positive and negative infinity). This would also give you 0 * ∞ = ⊥ and 0 * ⊥ = ⊥. Again, by adding ⊥ as a proper value, you could simplify the handling of some computations that might fail.

Renters are not that captive of customers. Once it becomes a common amenity, renters will start considering it as part of the rent when deciding where to live. Just like they do with utilities, garbage collection, and other amenities that landlords can charge for outside of base rent.

I think it’s even simpler than that. A lot of the people conflating anti-Israel sentiment with anti Jewish sentiment are ethno nationalists. On the Israeli side, those would be Jewish nationalists; but here in the US, the sentiment is disproportionately coming from Christian nationalists. Incidentally, these people also tend to be the same people who conflate anti-current-governing-coalition-and-policy-of-Isreal sentiment with anti Israel sentiment more generally, because that conflation is part of fascist ideology, and ethno nationalism tends to be a fascist ideology.

The reason we see pro-Zionist media ferment anti semitism is simply that the Zionist movement is ideologically aligned with most anti-semetic movements.

Most of the Golan Heights was occupied in 1967, and annexed in 1981 (in a move that most of the world still does not recognize as legitimate).

As far as I can tell, the settlements being discussed are still in that region, not the newly occupied region.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

Gaza’s Health Ministry casualty numbers have been stuck at around 40,000 for months. This is consistent, but not reliable. From the beginning, the GHM has only ever counted deaths directly attributable to the war who make it to a hospital (including those who are dead on arrival). Dead due to preventable caused like lack of food, water, sanitation, medicine or shelter? Not counted. Dead because a building blew up and your body is under a pile of rubble? Not counted unless someone dug up your body and took it to a hospital.

Even developed and functioning countries take a long time after “small” disasters to get an accurate count of the dead. The disaster in Gaza is still ongoing, and their capability to count the dead has been declining the entire time.

The GHM’s official numbers may be accurate for what they are. But what they are is a systemic undercount that is practically meaningless.

I suspect they are inclined to tell the Russians to kick rocks. However, they are going to need some foreign support. As long as they are on the US terror list, it will be very difficult for that help to come from any US aligned group.

Having said that, between the growing disagreement over Israel policy, the coming 4 years of a Trump administration, and the desire of a lot of European countries to resolve the Syrian Refugee crisis; I could see a lot of European countries going against the US on this one and helping the new Syrian government.

It is certainly possible to prove innocence in some cases; but those cases almost never make it to trial. Even if you think you could, you generally don’t want to tell the jury that, because it risks burden shifting

It depends on how you count. Jones is unlikely to ever pay the full value of his debts, so the value of the victims forgoing their portion should be discounted proportionally.

I would comment on how the calculation was actually done, but federal courts do not allow for public recordings, and this court does not appear to make it’s written orders public either.

Unfortunately, the GPL (and similar AGPL used by the software in question) is pretty toothless. If they wanted to spend the money to persue this in court, pretty much all they can get out of it is them coming into compliance with the license. If they are a great tech company that invested significant engineering effort to actually improve the software, that would be worth something.

However, I doubt that is the case. Whatever tweaks they made are likely not even worth the effort of reviewing, so even pursuing license compliance doesn’t have a real upside. This is why you rarely see GPL enforced.

Even your framing is giving Israel to much credit. Suppose everyone in that car was 100% a terrorist involved in the 10/7 attack.

You still do not get to target them while they are actively distributing humanitarian aid. Particularly if said distribution has been specifically coordinated with you (I haven’t seen specific reporting about this one, but in general the WCK deconflicts their movements with the IDF, for obvious reasons).

When even the official Israeli story is unconscionable, I don’t understand why we are even having a conversation about “if” they are committing war crimes

All indications are that he was still an active militant and a perfectly valid target for Israel to strike.

However, the Iraq war is over. Having that be the frame in which we find his death to be good news is nothing more than celebrating vengeance, and that is not a good thing.

deleted by creator