• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle


  • I will admit that I am not totally aware of the value of the land of the West Bank vs Gaza. But from what I’ve been reading and watching these few months on the history of the conflict, it seems that at some point the PLO stopped being violent after the second Infatada and Hamas took over Gaza and pushed them out to the West Bank. And ever since then the West Bank has been slowly carved up more and more by Jewish settlements, effectively making the Palestinian land in the WB never able to be contiguous, and thus making it impossible for there to be a Palestinian state to be formed there.

    So if the WB land is valuable to the Israelis, I cannot see how Gaza wouldn’t be even more valuable. As Gaza has access to the sea, and there’s all the recently found offshore gas fields that would fall into Gaza’s EEZ if it ever were to be recognized as the Palestinian state.

    So I don’t get why they’d disengage and leave Gaza alone when it’s valuable land, but they will also for obvious reasons never stop the blockade of Gaza. As an outsider that leans to the left, it seems like Gaza is purposefully put into the state that it’s in, to keep a threat around, so the conservatives running Israel can stay in power.



  • My buddy works there now, as the audiobook company he worked for got acquired by them.

    You would be shocked how stupid and manual the content acquisition process is. Book publishers might as well still be operating back in the 90s, it’s all phone calls and spreadsheets attached to the emails and manual FTP uploads.

    If the music business is anything like the audiobook business they likely need so many non IT just to keep the machine fed with content.








  • I think the public perception would sway considerably when weapon grade material is no longer a possibly byproduct

    This is unfortunately something that a layperson who’s unfamiliar with the tech will always have a hard time understanding. I don’t think any reactor built in the US for power generation could ever be used to make weapons grade plutonium. From what I’ve read we only build light water reactors here, which aren’t good for such things. But how many regular folks take the time to learn about all the different types of reactors and how they work and what they’re good for? I only did it because the history of nuclear tech intrigues me.

    and the worst case scenario drops from a quarantine zone several square miles to power plant just going into lockdown for a few weeks

    Similar to above. These new reactors coming online are Gen III reactors, and have passive cooling features, so Fukushima-like events shouldn’t be able to happen anymore. But again, few people I think take the time to learn about this stuff at all.

    It doesn’t help either that regulatory capture has caused old Gen II designs without the passive cooling backups continue to get their licenses extended. Accidents will continue to be bad until we retire the ancient reactors, and start replacing the with new ones that have the benefit of half a century of operational experience and manufacturing advancements to inform their designs to be safer.


  • I have had them for well over a decade now after yeeting US Bank to the curb. Their customer service is top notch, there’s never been any fuckery whatsoever with my multiple checking accts, and the $10/month reimbursement of out-of-network ATM fees is solid.

    I was even able to get someone on the phone when I was in the middle of a casino at 1AM at a bachelor party, to get them to temporarily raise my ATM daily limit so I could continue the party. They would have to do something terribly egregious to get me to leave.