Thank you for writing that up! Much appreciated.

It’s tough because they are all very nuanced issues, every decision has trade offs, makes things better in one way worse than another.

This is one of the major truths of adulthood that keeps on coming up over and over again. The other is how do you know that some really knows what they say they know without investing time, money, and mental power into meeting them and knowing the basics of the subject all while being humble enough to know you don’t know shit about it.

I’d love to hear your top points of what actually needs to happen.

Pandas would have survived if their habitat continued to be stable. Human encroachment destabilized their habitat.

How our tech habits are causing our eyes to elongate, which causes myopia

If you do what Israel was doing, you’d need to scale it on per capita basis. So America is about 330 million and the population of Gaza is about 2.3 million. So the population of America is 140 times the size of Gaza. So 1232 or so 9/11’s.

Fresh pasta and dried pasta are two different ingredients that serve different purposes. It’s impossible to get a fresh pasta al dente and unlikely that most home chefs have an extruder to get round shapes. The tougher texture allows it to stand up against hearty sauces.

Fresh pasta, however, has it’s own merits such a delicate texture that pairs well with delicate sauces. That delicate, silky texture isn’t achievable with dried pasta which would become mushy when trying.

This is not about women being free to go shirtless which is fair, this about eyeballs and ads. This lazy sex work. This corporate giants profiteering. This about that corporate giants maintaining brand image control. Reducing it to a slogan is missing the rest of the picture.

Saw a typo on Nature’s blog today. Made my whole breakfast sad.

Sadly, they don’t link to the survey data. Nor does this data provide the number of respondents, how they reached them, and any of their methodology.

There’s a surprising amount of additional insight like 1 in 10 males agree, 1 in 9 moderates and Democrats, 1 in 8 Hispanics and Blacks agree, 1 in 7 urban people agree. It also stays when across income.

I don’t know where the education level stuff comes from that’s mentioned in the article.

That type of knee jerk conjecture is really weak. The data collected on shrinkage, as noted in the linked Reuter’s article, is noisy. You can’t differentiate lose due to theft or shipping mistakes or cliericsl error.

More importantly, and not mentioned directly in the boingboing article, was the cited number of rising organized theft was based upon an analyst from a security firm. The report was created in partnership with that firm. With the recent redaction, there is no mention of that firm.

I don’t know why they post the boingboing piece when it links to a much better Reuter’s article.

This comment is a hot mess of personal experience and fatalism wrapped in the vaneer of scientific authority. Chiropractor bad … Unless doctor say go. Then bad not bad anymore.

I think you’re absolutely correct here. I’ll point out that they are a luxury product and among the wealthy, highly popular. And while they don’t capture a large portion of the units sold, they capture a large portion of revenues. On top of that, Apple’s market share has grown by 1/3 year over year while cell phone sales were flat.

None of this changes anything and think Apple should comply, but I see why they might. I guess I don’t see a situation where they wouldn’t complain. These companies are so emotional.

You have shifted your argument. Before you said that the Gaza Health Ministry is not a reliable source. Now you say they are for the total figures killed. I never really had much more than that. Their methodology only supports that much of a conclusion. Still… that’s over 13,000 dead. We aren’t even talking about casualties, just the dead.

This is your post in which you linked to this CNN article. As for the other articles you provided, none were from intelligence agencies. They were all published by new outlets (surprisingly you sourced one from Al Jazeera) within seven days of the attack and none mention their data and methods for drawing this conclusion. Just that they are confident. Why is this enough for you?

I want to be clear here. I’m not saying that a rocket fired from Gaza by Palestinian militants didn’t hit the hospital. I’m saying that I need better evidence.
I’m also saying that the report from the Gaza Health Ministry at that time could very well be wrong. But not because of any agenda on their part but because their statement was made too close to the date of the incident without sufficient evidence to support their conclusion.

Hamas may have established the Gaza Health Ministry, but the personnel and systems were already in place when they worked for the Palestinian Ministry of Health. I got that from The Week’s article where they said “and many of the Gaza Health Ministry’s civil servants predate Gaza’s Hamas takeover.”

Reuters reports that there are 40,000 Hamas militants. Israel estimates fewer, and that about 4,000 have been killed in the fighting so far.

Your link doesn’t provide the Israelis estimate for Hamas fighters. Nor does it give the methodology for their determination if someone is Hamas fighter. If they are using the standard developed during the American invasion of Afghanistan, then it’s every male of a fighting age.

I’m familiar with your other posts. I have a tough time understanding why you wouldn’t link to the CNN reporting to start with if you’re trying to make a point about their “unreliable record”.

Again, I don’t think that CNN report alone is sufficient to refute their claims nor the refutation of the claim is enough to refute their long and well regarded record.

No reporting of attacks in progress should be “reliable”. It’s not a binary. It’s a body of evidence that grows over time and points towards a conclusion whose accuracy is determined through methodology. Good methods creates good data which creates accurate conclusions. The more agencies collecting and sharing data through high quality methods, result in a clearer picture.

I’m not saying they are trustworthy because there is no other source. I’m saying something that is quite opposite and nuanced to that.

1. Just because they are controlled by Hamas, that should not be dismissed.
2. Their organization is made up of front line doctors who have been organized longer than Hamas control.
3. They provide strong evidence for their claims.
4. While they may have been incorrect in some cases, their record appears to be far more correct than wrong.

The on the ground reporters lack organization that can provide comprehensive evidence and, as far as I’m aware, have provided direct evidence to counter their claims. This includes the CNN article that counters the Al-Shifa hospital bombing because their evidence is analysis of satellite photos. I don’t consider satellite photos alone to be as strong front line evidence. It supplement and clarify it, but not sufficient by itself. And as far as I’ve seen, I don’t know of any official report to support the CNN analysis.

As for intelligency agencies on the ground, do you have anything that supports this claim? And what is their bias?

You, for reasons I don’t understand, didn’t link to something that supports an unreliable record. Just to a tweet by the Reuter’s Jerusalem beareu chief pointing out that they are part of Hamas.

You should point out their unreliable record which in my opinion would be an examination of their lengthy history of providing numbers and not just being wrong about one here or there.

Ultimately, it’s should the numbers given by the GHM be trusted. The first article you provided give two different views.

The against side, as represented by the Reuter’s beareu chief, rightfully points out that they have a self interest in inflating their numbers.

The other side, as represented by the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, notes that their numbers have been trustworthy in the past and verified by their organization. Further, they provide detailed lists of the killed to support their numbers. Finally, their numbers have been used by others like the US to understand previous conflicts.

We should, as skeptical people, doubt them. But if people involved in the situation on the ground level are vouching for them, we shouldn’t fully discount them either. And the sad reality is, we have no alternative. No other organization is providing numbers. No other organization is on the ground. The lives lost are real and it’s sad.

Edit: The Week article also adds nuance to the Hamas control angle. And it’s not like the Week is some leftist rag.

The Gaza casualty numbers come mostly from doctors who diligently count every body brought into struggling hospitals, then send the numbers on to the Health Ministry for tabulation, The Associated Press explained regarding the accuracy of the death count. And while Hamas exerts control over the ministry, it’s partly funded and run by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — a key Hamas rival — and many of its civil servants predate Gaza’s Hamas takeover. The United Nations and other international institutions and experts “say the Gaza ministry has long made a good-faith effort to account for the dead under the most difficult conditions,” AP reported, and “in previous wars, the ministry’s counts have held up to U.N. scrutiny, independent investigations and even Israel’s tallies.”

I’m not sure if you’re arguing in good faith or not, but if you’re like me, this is a lot of new information. Maybe humble your responses.

I agree with your overall thesis but your characterizations of the three tyrants are casually backwards.

Mao was a leader of a militant group first. He won political power in that group and that group won a large following of people over several decades. His status as tyrant emerges from that history and cultivated in a desperate militaristic role which is already predisposed to authoritarian rule.

Hitler was similar, his authotarianism, is on display much earlier in the process, and part of his charismatic attraction. It was clear early on that Hitler was going to mow down anyone in his way. Still, he needed to acquire popular and then political power. He leveraged existing sentiment and thuggish groups such as the Freikorp.

Stalin was just a bureaucrat.
Just kidding. I know very little of Stalin’s rise to power except that it was internal to a party that already had seized power.