A previous post was "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day", so I'd guess it's about that. Destroying the entire power infrastructure of a large country like that would have a pretty catastrophic effect on civilians. So that seems worse enough, I seriously hope no nukes will be involved.
Yup. Remember the blowback from those videos showing potential double-taps on the alleged drug smuggling vessels in the Caribbean? That’s a clear violation of “hors de combat” as outlined on page 244 of DoD’s own Law of War Manual [1] because unlike Hegseth, I actually took the time to read it.
Hegseth came completely unhinged, going after Senator Mark Kelly’s retirement, etc.
Then a few weeks ago, Hegseth gave an interview where he literally argued that the United States doesn’t have to follow international law. He called the rules of engagement “stupid” and went on with a bunch of similar remarks.
It’s pretty clear that rather than trying to defend violations of international (and U.S.) law, the regime is now just saying they don’t have to follow them in the first place.
International law consists of treaties that have been bilaterally agreed to by several countries, in most cases including the US. Being treaties, they are US laws that are much more difficult for the US to amend than ordinary laws. US law/international law is a false distinction, when we speak of international law in the context of the US, we are generally referring specifically to treaties that the US is party to.
> it is selectively applied for national security.
This is true. The US gets creative when it wants to avoid adhering to the law. But international law is established through treaties, and the terms the US agrees to in treaties is US law.
This is true in this case, but in general complicated in the US. Since the executive branch is responsible for diplomacy, but only Congress can pass laws, there's a weird wiggle room where the Executive branch is completely on board with signing some treaty, but then when it comes time to actually implement it in any way that actually binds, Congress can refuse to do so.
It's one of the reasons why for a lot of the "everybody joins" treaties, a bunch of countries sign with a statement that they don't recognize the US as a signatory.
It is a can of worms indeed. Sadly, the President may be able to break the law without any repercussions. However, the same isn't true for the people under him.
I saw the observation elsewhere but the medium and long range drones seen in the Russian-Ukraine war at an industrial scale of production would be devastating. Along the lines of "Imagine 1M drones being launched in the opening salvo of a war. Every power substation, cellphone tower, gas station, water tower, oil pipeline etc. in a country could be targeted". It would indeed be civilization ending.
Trump isn't even pretending to have a consistent, plausible reason to attack Iran. He never even set an actual strategic goal beyond blowing stuff up. It doesn't really matter what the intelligence said, since it had nothing to do with Trump's decision.
What happened was entirely predictable, as the article says. Iran using the Strait of Hormuz as leverage was an obvious consequences of putting them into a sufficiently precarious position.
Chances are that this was a calculated outcome that was found desirable. The potential closure of that strait has been the topic of intelligence reports going back more than half a century.
People talk a lot about Trump. But he's of course not acting alone. The big picture here is that this wasn't as impulsive as it may seem and was rather enthusiastically supported by the team that runs day to day policy for him. The worrying thing of course is that things aren't exactly going as planned. Which by itself was entirely predictable and widely predicted from day 1. But the point here is that Trump is a stooge and focusing on just him is a mistake. Follow the money.
His presidency was bought and paid for. Partially with oil money and the accompanying hard line towards the middle east. Those are the same deep pockets behind the Gulf wars I and II. And we might as well start referring to this one as edition III.
A lot of that money comes from Texas. Where all the oil and gas is. Texas exports oil and gas. That stuff becomes more lucrative if the Strait of Hormuz is closed. And it looks like rebuilding infrastructure might take a few years. IMHO, they overestimated how successful they were going to be with this and all the disruptive effects (e.g. Maga supporters getting angry at Trump) because of oil driven inflation at the pump might be backfiring a bit. But it's easy to see how the decision making could have gone if you just follow the money.
He very clearly thought he could just take out the supreme leader and Iran would ultimately appoint a servile replacement that'd kiss his ass.
That's why this has gone so wrong. He can't articulate further goals because he didn't expect this to be anything other than a 10 day conflict with Iran begging for the US to stop punishing them.
That is to say, he accomplished his objective on day one, but that didn't produce the results expected. And now because everything is fucked, he keeps escalating because if he pulls back now it will be a clear loss. We are basically fighting a war now because a narcissist can't admit he fucked up.
Is this something that is likely to also change the way Github Copilot bills? Right now the billing is message-based, not token-based. And OpenAI and Microsoft are rather opaquely intertwined in the AI space.
Hard to say, but GitHub Copilot also allows access to Anthropic, Google and Grok models, so I don't know that a change from a single provider would necessarily change how they bill
Java can work with transparent hugepages (in addition to preallocated hugepages), but you just use +AlwaysPreTouch to map them in during the startup so that at runtime there won't be any delays or jitter.
Redis should add a similar option
The default US policy tends towards starting wars in the middle east. But even very hawkish previous administrations never started this particular one, for the reasons we're seeing right now. So I strongly doubt a Harris administration would have.
You're also ignoring just how far outside the norms Trumps administration is. They're entirely dysfunctional, breaking all kinds of laws and full of unqualified extremist with their own agendas.
Because it would take a change to the constitution to do that while reinstating the old draft laws only takes a regular majority in parliament. The draft is a severe limitation of personal freedom, so you can't just do that by law. The draft for men is already enabled in the constitution, the draft for woman isn't.
At this moment, changing the constitution is not possible, there is no majority for this. So that pretty much took the option to change the broader parameters out of the discussion entirely.
If there were one. The closest thing is the Treaty of Lisbon, which in turn was an update on the Treaties of Maastricht and Rome.
However, the matter has been heard in the European Court of Justice in 2002, and the short version is "Community law does not preclude compulsory military service being reserved to men."
It probably could be challenged under the German constitution, but nobody knows if that would be successful. The draft for men is set up in the constitution, but there is also an explicit equality for men and women in there. In the past any challenge would almost certainly have been denied, but it's a different time now.
In practice, this draft is not a real draft yet. Nobody is actually drafted, so there are almost no practical consequences. If there was an actual draft, I'd expect to see a challenge to this.
Some countries in the EU, like mine, have funny discrimination laws that say a positive discrimination is not considered a discrimination under the law, so it cannot be challenged. It is used as the basis for all women-favoring regulations.
This: https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocumentAfis/224130 article 2, paragraph 9. I tells there is no discrimination if you do it under the pretext of improving equality or if it is a positive measure for "disadvantaged groups". A disadvantaged group is any group that is in a position of inequality with the majority, basically anyone rating less than 50%. That was used to define any group the state wanted to provide advantages as "disadvantaged group", even when they were not a minority.
I wouldn't trust the European Union to be the one that will challenge that German mobilization register at all.
COVID-19 has proven that if anything, the European Union tends to spread national initiatives among other countries (and Germany is often a leader in EU).
In this specific case, the EU is more likely to be the type of organization that would think about how to create a unified permit
-> as they did with the EU Digital COVID certificate; some sort of "I am in the register of mobilization" / "have a temporary travel authorization".
So, EU might be an enemy that pretends to be your friend there.
Humbug. Defence policy, especially how the EU member states choose to organize their military forces, is very much in the hands of the individual countries. A majority of the member states don't even have conscription anymore.
Yes, there is the common security and defence policy, and the Article 42 of Lisbon and all that, but it all still relies on national systems.
That's interesting because on the face of it this none of the EU's business... but also typical of the EU and EU governments to expand what is thr EU's business little by little.
The whole existence of the EU has its background in the end of WWII.
> 18 April 1951 – European Coal and Steel Community
> Based on the Schuman plan, six countries sign a treaty to run their coal and steel industries under a common management. In this way, no single country can make the weapons of war to turn against others, as in the past. The six are Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. The European Coal and Steel Community comes into being in 1952.
Absolutely not. What you quote is beside the point and irrelevant.
Defence and the military is a sovereign matter that has nothing to do with the EU... except we are seeing that this is changing without democratic national mandates.
I can only repeat that defence is a sovereign matter in which the EU has no power, but there is a trend of changing this by making it happen as "fait accompli", especially since the war in Ukraine, which is used as pretext.
Theoretically yes, practically no. The ECJ can order the revision of national laws, but the country in question is responsible for implementation, and can send plaintiffs on a multi-decade merry chase. Several countries have also taken the view that they can refuse changes to their constitutions. This stands on shaky ground legally, but there is no real enforcement mechanism anyway.
Yeah, the law is unjust but spare even this part of the population this unnecessary risk. It's not like they can't join if they want to but why put force on it? So everybody feels miserable? What's the point?
It depends on whether the paper is simply wrong for some reason, or if there is either fraud or a fundamental mistake in the procedure. But in general you're right, retractions are not the way to handle most scientific disputes.
Your point about consensus unfortunately doesn't quite work in cases like this were the people using the paper are not scientists. They're not continuing work in the same area, people are using this paper to support their arguments.
She should have been tied to a wooden post and shipped out of DC on an uncovered railcar for labelling a peaceful protester assassinated by ICE a "domestic terrorist".
Her scandal was not being subtle enough with the theft of government funds for Trump's taste, and he found a way to get rid of her that he could claim he had no part in.
I dont see the us empire recovering. This is in the starting / middle of a collapse. If any additional crises pop up inconjunction to this we are going to fall like the bronze age collapse
I think the argument here is a bit of a strawman, though there is a good point in there as well. AI will not automate all customer support, but it has the potential to automate a large fraction of it.
The anecdote in there is about complex B2B enterprise software. That's not the majority of customer support, and is very heavy on escalating to actual experts.
You don't have to remove 100% of the jobs to have huge effects. Automating large parts of a few sectors would already create significant disruptions.
The article literally addresses this point. The easily automated stuff doesn’t save that much money. The big costs of support are the hard things you can’t automate.
I think this mentality must have its own imminent apocalypse. Gifted with an enormous increase in potential productivity, the decision is to do the same but cheaper? Who allocates capital to such spiritless commodification? It all feels like using a printing press to make one bible a month.
There must be a role that can be more productive. It might not necessarily be our skillsets that fit those roles - and the roles might be more stratified - but someone is going to be able to be do more, be paid more.
I don't know the details here for PFAS (and they likely would vary enormously for the different molecules that fall into this broad category). But in general a molecule doesn't have to react to be accumulated. Inert usually means it doesn't react with other substances in a normal environment. It doesn't mean you can't make it react if you add enough energy. For example nitrogen gas is considered inert. Bacteria (or chemical plants) can make it react and produce different nitrogen-containing molecules from it.
Inert doesn't really say anything about toxicity, it's not directly related to that. The opposite is though, pretty much any strongly reactive chemical is dangerous or toxic in some way since it will react with stuff humans are made from.
With PFAS the inert example is also usually Teflon. That is also a solid polymer, so not many individual molecules. There isn't much you body could do to process a macroscopic chunk of Teflon, so you'd almost certainly just excrete it.
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