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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • She skipped Netanyahu’s speech in protest and called for an end to the war afterwards.

    “The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent,” Harris said.

    The reports [from Israeli media] appear to reflect worries among Netanyahu’s inner circle that the emergence of Harris as the presumptive Democrat presidential candidate might herald a tougher US line on the conduct of Israel’s war with Hamas.

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/politics/harris-netanyahu-israel-hamas-ceasefire/index.html?cid=ios_app

    I’m not in any way arguing that she’s doing everything right on this issue. I think she should go more strongly, although I can also acknowledge that someone at this level is walking a tightrope.

    However, if anything, her choice to skip the speech in protest associates her with the protest going on outside, and so she went out of her way to separate herself from the actions at the protest that went too far.

    You can argue over whether or not some protesters did go too far, or what else she could say and do that would actually help and be effective, I’m just asking for people to strive for accuracy when making claims. This is an important election, in which I genuinely believe that Harris winning the election will lead to a better outcome for Palestinians than any other outcome. I want to be vigilant about what she says but I also don’t want to look for some excuse to paint her with the same brush as everyone else and write her off.



  • I just watched the video and it didn’t say she denounced the protesters, it said she was one of the officials who strongly condemned the graffiti, flag burning, and raising the Palestinian flag. Specifically those actions. Not the protesters themselves or the fact that they were protesting at all.

    If your statement was based on that segment alone, then I would say you mischaracterized the situation in a way that makes Harris come off worse.



  • While I agree that it would certainly be ideal if a speed limiter could account for the context that the car is in, you’ve missed a lot in drawing your conclusion that it would be useless without being able to do that.

    Hitting a pedestrian is not the only type of accident. If you rear end a car going 25 mph at 70mph it is not a guaranteed death sentence for all. Especially if the driver brakes, which some do not, but some will. And this is ignoring cases where there isn’t a tremendous mismatch in speed. Like, even if it reduced residential deaths by 0% but it reduced overall deaths looking at all situations, it would be a net gain with literally nothing lost. We are looking at the aggregate here. So, it isn’t relevant if you think of one specific situation where you believe 70mph isn’t better than 90mph or whatever number.

    Reaction time and braking distance are affected by speed. In some cases, the person going 70 might be able to slow down enough to have the collision be non-fatal. Reaction time goes down and braking distance goes up as speed increases. If a speed limiter gives just enough time to occasionally make an accident non-fatal, then in the aggregate you have fewer fatal accidents.

    In fact, taking braking distance into account, I don’t think you can even say that over the millions of miles driven, that a speed maxed at 70mph isn’t going to, occasionally, lead to a situation in a residential area where someone was able to just get out of the way in time because the car covered 30% less distance between the time the pedestrian reacted and the time the car reached that spot (or an even larger difference if the driver noticed and braked at some point as well). But again, it doesn’t matter if it’s few to none in this specific scenario, because a speed limiter of 70 will certainly reduce fatalities overall.




  • Instead of store hours like this:

    • Monday 6:00-18:00
    • Tuesday 6:00-18:00
    • Wednesday 8:00-18:00
    • Thursday 6:00-18:00
    • Friday 6:00-18:00

    We can have store hours like this:

    • Sunday 22:00-Monday 10:00
    • Monday 22:00-Tuesday 10:00
    • Wednesday 0:00-10:00
    • Wednesday 22:00-Thursday 10:00
    • Thursday 22:00- Friday 10:00

    Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.

    And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.

    It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.

    It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.

    Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.