Hezbollah like most other similar organisations is not a primarily military organisation even though they are a paramilitary one. The vast majority of the members of Hezbollah have non-military roles of various kinds.
Civilians are shown to be in proximity of these devices when they are exploding. It appears that these devices were all triggered simultaneously, rather than waiting for individual targets to be isolated.
One reason is that Hezbollah is not a purely military organization, and has political, medical and educational arms. Another is that some of the reported casualties are the family of Hezbollah members.
What you're saying is true. Israeli citizens have had enough and demand a military solution. The fighting doctrine of Israel's adversaries is attacking and then running for the cover of the international community, but post October 7th that doesn't really work anymore with Israel.
De-escalation wouldn't solve the problem of an Islamic militia with the declared goal of destroying Israel and the military capabilities somewhere in the world top-20 armies sitting right on Israel's northern border. As far as Israel is concerned, Hezbollah needs to be removed and pushed back away. If this doesn't register with common sense alone, then this view is also backed by UN security council resolution 1701.
You're throwing "criminal" around without, I suspect, understanding the laws of warfare. Blowing enemy operatives isn't criminal (even if some civilians get hurt - within reason; here's the ratio of militants to civilians hurt is virtually unheard of, in a positive way). Bombing militants from above, whether by airplane or drone isn't criminal, and nothing in the laws of warfare claims you need to let the enemy an opportunity to strike back.
There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda. If an enemy had exploded small remote controlled bombs in American supermarkets and homes there is no question we would characterize it as a terrorist attack.
And my question stands, if this is legitimate warfare, why wouldn't Israel admit it carried out the attack? US does not hide that they eliminated Bin Laden. The answer is pretty obvious here.
Because that provides international legitimacy for retaliation by Hezbollah, even though everyone knows who did what. Same as the assassination of Ismail Hanyeh in Tehran.
As I understand it, people are saying that the most likely way that this was carried out was that a shipment of pagers where intercepted and modified. My concern is that part or all of the shipment might not go to Hezbollah. Perhaps the shipment gets rerouted to somewhere else due to supply chain issues. Perhaps only half of the shipment was intended for Hezbollah. Perhaps a postal worker steals a few and sells them on the black market. Perhaps Hezbollah decides they have more than they needs and does something with the rest. Perhaps part or all of the shipment gets delayed and is sitting in a post office when it goes off.
Basically: warfare via mail bomb seems like it might be irresponsible.
Maybe they don't? But they definitely have their own phone infrastructure, and since the switch to pagers was entirely about opsec, it would be very weird if they were dependent on civilian telecoms infrastructure for them.
No essentially about it. Hezbollah is part of the government, one of many political parties in Lebanon. Just like most of the other major political parties in Lebanon, they maintain their own militia separate from the Lebanese military.
I think this is something that many people may not grasp about Lebanon.
The "There's Your Problem" podcast did an episode on the fertilizer explosion that leveled Beirut's port in 2020. The amount of breakdown that had to occur for that outcome was both astonishing... And utterly predictable given Lebanon's governmental structure, which is barely functional. It's less a government and more a power detente that hard-codes sectarian differences in the culture into the power structure, like trying to build a government out of a band of feuding warlords with no particular underlying agreement amongst the warlords to leave each other alone. Among other things, this makes their foreign policy heterogeneous; a given faction can just wage war without the government's consent, and the government lacks top-level power to do anything about it.
(Ironically, one of the things that minimized the potential damage in the fertilizer blast is that much of the material had been stolen and shipped away before the explosion. Likely by actors with the tacit support of high-level government functionaries looking the other way and refusing to do enforcement).
That’s very very unlikely since the nuclear agreement fell through. As in they tried cooperation and got nothing in return last time. I assume everyone’s aware of what happened there right and why Iran probably won’t be cooperating any time soon?
Probably it's an off-P&L project of a bunch of unsupervised engineers tucked in a nondescript building in Sunnyvale which is losing money per unit (without even factoring in R&D costs) with no real way to profitability, or else they'd already DfM (Design for Manufacturing) it to death thus taking away any repairability.
Yep, they are probably selling these pretty close to the BOM cost without any real hope to amortize the R&D unless they were planning on selling a million of these.
My experience is that it’s very easy to expose kids to English in a non-English country - just let them consume all their entertainment (Netflix, games, books) in English right from the start. You don’t need to do anything special other than that.
Not realistic to maintain control past A unless you built a real rocketship. The board doesn’t usually want to run your company - they have enough other companies, some evidently better than yours as they don’t require this intervention.
Each round carves out 10+% for employee options, on top of 10-30+% to investors (Seed can be anywhere from 10-30%, Series A is typically 20% to just the lead, Series B 10%+).
Equity ownership and voting control are also different things. After the B you commonly have 2 investors and an independent director on the board, alongside 1-2 founders.
It can get much worse. Companies can have multiple “seed” rounds. It may not be doing well enough for a real “A” round. The naming of the rounds doesn’t matter. Valuation at each round does. If your valuation goes lower from one round to the next (“down round”) you’ll give up more equity, diluting everyone else faster.
