> The blood of the Palestinian civilians that Hamas waged war from behind is absolutely on Hamas's hands.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Thousands of Palestinians children are dead, and for every single one, Israel could have chosen not to kill them, and the decision to do so is on them.
They had no choice. If you're Natanyahu on October 8, 2023, and the reports of the Hamas massacres on civilians come in, there is almost no leeway for reacting in a way differently than how the Israeli government and the IDF reacted. What I've heard from "pro-Palestine" (= pro Hamas) supporters as alternatives so far was utterly unconvincing, basically variations of the following:
- The "Israel should disband itself" reply: Give in to terrorists' demands, give them their country, and humbly negotiated for a freeing of the hostages without any military response. Hamas remains in charge as military dictatorship of Gaza.
- The military genius reply: I would have sent only special forces to Gaza to go after the Hamas leadership and free all hostages. No civilians would have been harmed and all collateral damage is avoided.
Neither of these are even remotely realistic. What was ordered and how events unfolded was more or less like any other country would have reacted. Two goals: #1 Destroy Hamas, #2 Free the hostages.
The problem right now with the hostage deal is that it leaves Hamas in charge. That's a huge problem.
They had a choice every single time they dropped a bomb! In fact, "the IDF is the most moral army in the world" supporters would like us to believe that very often, they chose not to.
If they want credit for the ones not dropped, they need to take responsibility for the ones they did. Not really that hard!
This is important because "it's all on Hamas's hands" is really just a refusal to engage with the ethical questions at all. Folks could (and clearly would!) say that, whether one child is killed, or a million. It's just a question of when it becomes untenable to brush the question away.
The idea that "this is more or less like any other country would have reacted" is the same trap; this makes Israel no worse or better than any other country, and conveniently means we don't have to ask ourselves about the morality of it all.
> If you're Natanyahu on October 8, 2023, and the reports of the Hamas massacres on civilians come in, there is almost no leeway for reacting in a way differently than how the Israeli government and the IDF reacted.
Any lack of political leeway to react differently is squarely within Israel's ethical score card. I.e. "Israel as an entity is not responsible for its choices because the entities constituent parts forced those choices" is reductive.
> The problem right now with the hostage deal is that it leaves Hamas in charge. That's a huge problem.
That this is the current outcome is maybe an indication that your framework of the three possible options (what Israel did + two strawmen) is lacking.
That's why when referring to the price people generally don't talk about sales, but about the "floor price", that is, actual committed listings that someone is willing to sell for.
The floor price can be a dubious measure of value for many NFTs, since there are few buyers, but for highly liquid collections like the Penguins, there are corresponding standing "offers" that owners can sell into any time they want, therefore creating a spread between listings and bids.
> The U.S. Constitution provides rights for citizens to have free speech — not non-citizens.
This is basically untrue. At times, the court has applied different standards to speech by residents, but this does not mean that they would allow the government to apply any kind of limit on their speech, or indeed, more than very narrow ones.
In addition, the first amendment also covers the right to receive information.
Foreign ownership rules are not the same thing as the EU banning RT through legal means, or Israel shutting down Al-Jazeera and instituting internet blocks. You will notice that RT is not blocked in the US, nor is any other foreign media company.
I believe RT actually is blocked from operating broadcast or radio services in America (although not cable services, since those are exempt — only free-to-air broadcast coverage is included in the legal restrictions), which is why it never operated free-to-air broadcast or radio services in the U.S., unlike in other countries.
It's not really a big deal if someone sneaks on board, therefore, no reason to burden millions of flyers every day with additional checks. Also, you may well not have ID on you. Maybe you don't like to carry it. Maybe you forgot your wallet. Maybe you don't even have one. Who cares?
Most companies tell you the name of the tickets you purchase must absolutely match the name on your ID, so no you can't just not carry it if you are flying.
So it really depends on airlines AND departure/destination laws. Like if you are flying in or out of Spain, I am 100% positive you need your ID.
It's actually somewhat similar in Germany. You need a Ehefähigkeitszeugnis, essentially that document proving that you are not married yet. You would have needed to get this from the US.
Because most countries don't have that sort of document (including the US), you then instead need to apply to your local Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) for an exemption.
All the way, any foreign government documents need to be notorized by the German embassy in that country.
Virtually all common law countries provide this easily, and civil law countries provide a slightly different worded document of similar usage, i.e. a certificate of being eligible to marry under your country law. In most cases they are treated as equal once you have them, although the procedures and conditions vary.
No, I had to do this when I moved to Europe with my non-married fiancee.
Some states can give you a statement saying "This person never has gotten married in our state", but they cannot pull the records of every state. In fact, the state that I was living in could not even do that -- only individual counties could pull records saying "This person did not have a wedding within this county". There are no central records.
When I tried to use that as a record of non-marriage, it was not accepted for the above reasons. My fiancee and I needed to give a signed oath to a notary that we were not married, and take that document to the state's office to be apostilled.
Well, if they want a federal document that makes sense, and yeah I don't think the fed issues that, we're too stratified so there's no such thing as a federal marriage license afaik.
I think the real issue is that what they want is a document that the person is not married. A state document might work if states required and tracked documentation for out-of-state marriages of residents, and could confirm that the person was a resident who would be subject to that requirement and was not, per records, married, whereas what the documents offer is documentation that an event did not occur within the state, not the absence of the condition of being married.
I can't speak to whether that would qualify in Germany, but it seems like it'd be pretty easy to establish residency in some state for the explicit purposes of getting one of these if you were committed to this for some sort of scam or something.
I am seeing different things online about this, de.usembassy.gov says "no such government issued document exists in the United States", but maybe they are referring to the federal government.
In any case it say that since 2021 Germany will accept a sworn oath from US residents to declare their eligibility.
Yes, it is. Usually, a certificate that says, "No record of marriage of this person in this county". Though, there is still a step to apostille and translate it to German for German cities to use it.
- Countries with a link, but are cursive, generally provide the certificate in most cases (this seems to be broken, I see no cursive ones, but the UK is among this group, which one can see when opening the link; but that seems to be the minority).
- All others they seem to suggest need to go through the exemption process.
> On this issue in the group that complain about the cookie law there are some people who are very wrong on purpose because it's in their interest, and some people who are very wrong because they genuinely don't understand the position they're defending, complaining about being made aware of the fee, instead of the fees themselves or the fact that the companies hide them if not forced by law.
The reality is that I (and others who are complaining, as well as many who have resigned themselves to their fate) are happy to have a website "track me", certainly if the cost of non-tracking are having to click away an annoying popup, and think that people who compare a website wanting to know the number of their visitors to "hidden fees" are kind of being ridiculous.
"Number of visitors" does not constitute tracking. The tracking in question here is to discover who you are specifically and the absurd amount of detail about your online activities collected and shared with data brokers for aggregation and resale.
A few of these cookie prompts during the day and they'd be able to tell everything from where your kids go to school to the kind of prn you prefer to watch on weekdays and everything in between.
I used to work at an online video advertisement company, you'd be horrified how much information we tracked across all the ads, especially since the ad was played with a special media player "plugin" loaded inside the other media player.
This is how ad companies can sell premium views, don't show cosmetics to men, increase car related ads to people who has watched other car related ads and so on.
There's no such thing as server-side "private browsing".
> This is how ad companies can sell premium views, don't show cosmetics to men, increase car related ads to people who has watched other car related ads and so on.
It's really not. They already could do all that before cyberstalking was normalized. It's called content-based profiling, and it doesn't require any GDPR consent.
The ad companies wanted to aggregate information across multiple channels.
The example about "show more car ads to someone who watched other car ads"? It's not about showing car ad on a site whose content is about cars (or where the site owner decided they like that kind of thing).
It's about knowing you have wandered over to car comparison site recently so they can show you car advertisements when you look up sports news, show car-related merchandise when you're browsing some shopping site, show you insurance ads, etc.
Honestly I don't mind them collecting this data, what is really infuriating is the fact they won't share it with me. I would love to know what kind of porn I prefer on weekdays. I think they shouldn't be allowed to track anything with consent or without it unless they share all the data with the subject of spying.
And aside from that, I think it should be much more expensive to say sorry than ask for permission. In my world a firm like facebook should not have any right to exist, they earned it. Fine them to oblivion just like I would get a long time behind bars if I wouldn't do my taxes right.
I call BS. Give me your email password and your browser history and I'll share everything I learn about you with you. I'll also keep it and share it with whomever else I want to, but I'll definitely share it with you, too.
This is addressed in the article. They could track you, with your consent, in many different ways. The fact that they are choosing to force this cost upon you is what is ridiculous.
> The reality is that I (and others who are complaining, as well as many who have resigned themselves to their fate) are happy to have a website "track me", certainly if the cost of non-tracking are having to click away an annoying popup, and think that people who compare a website wanting to know the number of their visitors to "hidden fees" are kind of being ridiculous.
I agree that wanting to know the number of visitors is benign and it is not abuse.
But saying companies should be allowed to track me (for whatever purpose) across the web without my consent is also pretty ridiculous.
I've stopped going to Ars Technica exactly because their cookie pop-up lets me know that Condé Nast wants to share my data with at least (according to the popup) 159 partners.
They have so many "partners" that their cookie popup comes with a search bar.
56 of their "partners" want my precise geolocation data!
16 "partners" want to actively scan my device!
101 "partners" want to "match and combine data from other data sources" (I can't disable or object to this)
102 "partners" want to identify my device. I also can't object to this.
The only way I can really object is to close the tab, so that's what I do.
> people who compare a website wanting to know the number of their visitors to "hidden fees" are kind of being ridiculous
Is counting visitors all that sites are doing with tracking info?
They're not selling it to ad brokers, insurance companies, governments? They're not matching your name, address, and phone number with your web activity (including sexual interests, "anonymous" embarrassing stories, health concerns, etc)?
Well, different people want different things - I'd rather spend a millisecond to click 'refuse' rather than let them track me - out of spite if nothing else. Yes, cookie banners are annoying; the dark patterns within cookie banners (you need multiple clicks to get to the 'refuse' button while the 'accept' button is right there in your face) are even more so. But honestly - screw them.
> The reality is that I (and others who are complaining, as well as many who have resigned themselves to their fate) are happy to have a website "track me", certainly if the cost of non-tracking are having to click away an annoying popup
The you should doubly blame the companies, because that's what do not track was for, they're the one who decided to make it not work that way and instead being ignored and not considered a valid option for the law.
> think that people who compare a website wanting to know the number of their visitors to "hidden fees" are kind of being ridiculous.
You don't need a cookie for that, and what GDPR has told us is that we're not talking of that but about dozens or hundreds on every major sites so trying to frame it that way is disingenuous.
> The purpose of incarceration isn't to coddle murderers,
Unfortunatly in the real world your criminal justice ethics will have to accommodate crimes that are not murder, so you might need to think about some prisoners eventually getting released, who might then go on and do more criming.
> it's great if they change their life but ultimately it's to extract murderers from society
In that case, there is no need to make prisons particularly cruel. Cost can be debated, but surely as a society, we can put a value on humaneness. Even if not, if say I, a billionaire, wanted prisoners eat caviar every night and am willing to fund it, surely this should be allowed.
> I believe this is a clue to where the GP post is coming from: we can't, therefore the study must be flawed.
How so? They are clearly saying they expected this to be possible already, until this article claimed otherwise (by suggesting AI is contributing something new here).
They are saying that this result will not resolve the disputes, because it doesn't address the core thing in dispute: that there are meaningful differences that people actually care about. For example, maybe it is possible to tell the sex based on the shape of the brain. This doesn't mean that men and woman think differently, which is what people are actually arguing about. And the AI in this study can't proof that, because it doesn't give us any further insights into how cognition works.
This point strikes me as actually pretty mundane and obviously correct. The fact that 5 people immediately seem to have misunderstood it (as in, they are not responding to the argument) seems to tell us something about their priors instead.
>They are saying that this result will not resolve the disputes, because it doesn't address the core thing in dispute: that there are meaningful differences that people actually care about.
That's not their claim. Their claim is that there is some flaw ("confounding thing") in the study. They then go on to say that men and women's brains are "indistinguishable." Well, of course you will automatically assume there is a flaw if that is your belief.
> The entity selling them just takes payment via ethereum or other coins, but at best what they're storing on that chain is a pointer saying "oh yea, nytesky bought this thing that we store elsewhere".
The thing that I never understand when people make this complaint: Do you think my purchase of the "monkey picture" is now more real, because someone else paid for Ethereum nodes to physically store the bytes to it, instead of a link? Do I own it "more"? Does it have to be stored in a particular location within the Merkle tree? Can I upload it myself to make my ownership of my monkey more "real"?
What if I store it in the Arctic World Archive instead, does it now have more or less permanency than on the blockchain?
The line of critique inherently seems to make no sense; it's IMO a strong sign that it is fundamentally flawed.
I think the flaw is that you’re misunderstanding the critique.
If you’re OK with “ownership” being “I paid somebody to write down that I am the only person who owns this asset, and they won’t give it to anybody else”, you don’t need any blockchains. You can own the monkey picture in the same way that I own my domain name, or my RuneScape account. If OpenSea decides to change the deal, they can just do so, because while they’re using a blockchain, they are the sole entity that controls how it interacts with the Ethereum blockchain. So other than for the “NFT” hype, they may as well just run a MySQL DB with “item” and “owner” columns.
By contrast, the thing that Ethereum actually does, for better or worse, with on-chain contracts, is that the consensus of the chain is what counts. If you hold ETH according to the chain, it’s yours. The only way for another entity to take it away from you is to have your private key, or convince 51% of the participants to agree with them.
> If you hold ETH according to the chain, it’s yours.
So is my NFT! No one can take it away from me. There are a couple things that could happen:
- The artist can mint an additional copy; this could mean my own copy loses value, or it could mean the community doesn't care, and continues to value the original one. Similarly, the folks that issue some ERC-20 token can decide to issue a new one and abandon their old token. In fact, vitalik et al could advocate for a fork for ETH. This is just how the social layer works.
- The media file associated with the NFT could be lost or changed. This can be a problem, but can also be addressed (IPFS), and can also be art: https://publico.pob.studio/piano
Larva Labs, the pioneers behind Cryptopunks, didn't even bother to put a link into their NFT at the time: it literally is a item/owner table. They didn't forget the link, they correctly understood that what the token represents is defined at the social layer.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Thousands of Palestinians children are dead, and for every single one, Israel could have chosen not to kill them, and the decision to do so is on them.
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