Curious to see what the economics of starship will shake out to be

This only works if the bridge is financed as an NFT

Wow that’s terrible design

That’s a good video

Israel does this all the time. Prisoner / hostage swap is pretty much standard operating procedure. It’s why Hamas took hostages in the first place. Israel already traded back 240 Palestinian prisoners during the first truce back in November.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israeli–Palestinian_prisoner_exchange

What’s going on now is negotiations. How many prisoners, exactly which ones, etc. The specific prisoners is likely the more salient point because Israel has effectively an inexhaustible source of Palestinian prisoners. It’s a renewable resource. Meanwhile Hamas needs decades to plan a border raid so it can get a few hundred hostages to trade away.

Good job imagining a version that could go 3D

Yeah it’s pretty neat. You can also imagine a version that goes 3D, maybe replicating uneven ground or stairs.

That’s pretty cool. No AI needed!

Great song!

Cool video

I can understand this idea of anti Zionism from before the state of Israel existed. There were options at that time about how to do things. But now we’re here some 70 years later and we have millions of Jews that have been born and grown up in a Jewish state for generations. So in the context of today’s reality, I’m trying to understand what does anti Zionism mean?

Like does it mean that Israel should continue to exist, but not explicitly be a Jewish state? Or maybe some other change to how it’s administered? Or it should not exist at all? If it shouldn’t exist, then what about the millions of Jews that live there? It’s not clear to me what anti Zionism means today.

What does anti Zionism mean?

The article does a decent job of going into some of the nuance about the different ways the apartheid label might or might not fit things that are thing on. But in the end who cares if we can fit a class of actions into the apartheid label?

Why don’t we just look at the actual actions that are taking place and discuss them for what they are. If Israel levels half of Gaza in intense bombing campaigns that kill tens of thousands of people, then we can see that and discuss what to do about it. Who cares if it doesn’t fit the apartheid label.

I see similar arguments every day now where people are arguing if it’s genocide or ethnic cleansing or apartheid or whatever. What does it change if you’re able to cognitively classify a set of actions with the correct label?

Maybe if you justify your favorite label then you can condemn Israel/Hamas harder, but this doesn’t actually change anything and it doesn’t lead to greater understanding. I’d actually argue that settling on your preferred label actually leads to less understanding. That’s because once you’ve categorized something to your satisfaction, you tend to become more blind to contradictory evidence.

For example, let’s say we all agree that Israel is an “apartheid state”. That label comes with a lot of baggage that’s going to color our views of future actions. We might miss out on changes in Israeli laws or courts or political leadership that contradicts the apartheid label.

Better instead to try and see things clearly as they are instead of trying to force labels onto things. This takes more effort because labels serve as cognitive shortcuts, but the result is a better understanding of what’s actually going on.

That seems like a really low number. According to the article it’s almost half the number of people from a few years ago. And even that seems low considering there should be something like >60 million Russians in the ROC.

1.4 million people is less than 2% of the total number of Russian Orthodox Christians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Russia

After the 10/7 Hamas attack, one of the biggest fears that Israel had was that Hezbollah would join and attack Israel from Lebanon. Hezbollah is one of the most serious existential threats to Israel, so it became a priority to prevent them from joining the war with Hamas.

That meant stepped up rocket and drone attacks that was intended to signal strength and serve as a warning to Hezbollah. Of course Hezbollah did the exact same thing with rocket and artillery strikes against Israeli targets, also intending to signal strength. These cross border attacks basically started up immediately after 10/7 by both sides.

The attacks have escalated slightly over time, but have not escalated into full out war. Neither side really wants to go to war right now. Israel is focused with its war in Gaza and wants to keep Hezbollah from joining. Meanwhile it’s the perfect opportunity for Hezbollah to attack while Israel’s attention is split, however that has to be balanced by the fact the vast majority of Lebanese people oppose going to war because it would devastate their country that’s already in the midst of a many-years long economic, political and social crisis. So Hezbollah is effectively prevented from joining the war with Israel by internal Lebanese issues.

Most likely the border attacks will continue as they are without escalating into an all out war that neither side is really prepared for. Unfortunately the immediate result is that entire communities on both sides of the border have become internally displaced. The article mentions ~100,000 Lebanese have fled their homes in the border region. The numbers I’ve seen for Israel are also >100,000 people evacuated from their communities near the border.

I’m sure that’s a part of what’s going on, but to claim that “this is all about oil” is highly reductive. There are many different entities involved with competing interests.

I would love that. I personally love riding high speed rail. The problem is that it’s too damn expensive to build in the USA. The cost : benefit ratio just doesn’t pencil out.

Even the profitable Acela line barely qualifies as high speed rail because they can’t handle upgrading all the rail and dealing with legacy infrastructure issues.

It would be amazing if they could fix that and extend it down the coast to Miami. It would be amazing if they could build a high speed rail line from NY to SF. I would totally ride that. Unfortunately I just don’t think it’s ever going to happen.

Oops I dropped the laptop.

Oops the hackers encrypted all my data in a ransomware attack.

Oops my credit card expired, so my cloud storage didn’t renew.

Oops I forgot the password to my encrypted thumb drive.

Oops I lost my micro SD card.

Oops I dropped my phone in the toilet.

Oops my photo hosting company went out of business 6 months ago and I forgot to download my photos.

Yes that makes an transcontinental high speed rail very impractical.

It’s fun to think about this stuff, but like the YouTube comments discuss, this is not going to be a practical solution. The cost:benefit ratio just isn’t there.

My personal opinion is that continued electrification of existing transport modalities is probably going to be the defining feature of future transportation developments for the next century. The biggest issue is battery energy density, but I’d be shocked if things like solid state batteries didn’t start coming online within the next decade or two. There’s just so much investment going on here right now.

So obviously things like electric cars and buses on existing roadways is going to continue growing. Full self driving will eventually occur. Convoys of high speed electric vehicles traveling down highways will basically do everything that high speed rail is supposed to do, but without the need to build high speed rail. Like by the time a transcontinental high speed rail system would be built (50 years?) It would be obsolete.

That’s not even taking into account how the enormous investment and innovation fueled by the electric car/truck/bus industry is also going to enable electric airplanes. Being able to fly a couple dozen people to local air strips a couple hundred miles apart will be a true transportation revolution. You’ll be able to connect up all these regional locations without any significant infrastructure and at aircraft speeds and for relatively low cost.

High speed rail is amazing for high density locations like Europe, Japan and China. But for the USA it’s a much tougher sell. And with upcoming developments in electric vehicles it’s likely to be obsolete by the time you finish building it. It’s sort of like trying to convince a big African country with poor telecom infrastructure to build out a national network of expensive high speed fiber optic cables instead of going for something like wireless cell towers or just switching to satellite constellations like Starlink in another decade.