The specific composition of this specific mountain range in Fordow made it almost ideal for this purpose. It's not only the depth, but also the rock type, the fact that the rock layers were compressed, and overall accessibility - all of these limit the selection space for 'deep holes in the ground for building a nuclear facility'.
Also, you need to take into account an important fact: It is in Iran... There may be other, better locations on Earth, but having sovereignty on the land is key:)
It's a bad law (although somewhat covered with 'good intentions', it does have a scent of racism which shouldn't exist in state laws).
However, note that the outcome was the unintentional creation of Jewish/Arabs communities in the Galilee, which actually help bring Jews and Arabs together.
It is also important to note that Arab Israelis have full rights as citizens, have representatives in the parliament and even were a part of the previous coalition. This, of course, is not the case for Palestinians in the occupied territories, and this issue MUST be resolved (one- or two-state solution, either way the current situation is unbearable).
With that, the current coalition does include extremists, and many (according to recent polls, >60%) in Israel want to see them replaced.
So, a couple of thoughts: First, a nitpick - the range of emotions probably behaves more like a weighted average than a regular average (recent experience impact your overall interpretation of a certain event differently than the first time). Second, there seems to be an assumptions that thoughts and words are 'digital', and so follow the entropy laws of digital entities. This seems like a logical leap to me, which requires proof (especially since this seems to be in the foundation of the claims).
Agree, emotions I guess are more like weights or gradients of subconscious patterns. As from real vs digital I think somehow in the lines of Daniel Dennett. This is from his book " From Bacteria to Bach and back."
“The fundamental architecture of animal brains (including human brains) is probably composed of Bayesian networks that are highly competent expectation-generators that don’t have to comprehend what they are doing. Comprehension—our kind of comprehension—is only made possible by the arrival on the scene quite recently of a new kind of evolutionary replicator—culturally transmitted informational entities: memes."
For the record no international court has ruled that the Cambodian genocide was a genocide either. The perpetrators were arrested years or decades after the genocide and charged under a special UN endorsed tribunal for various crimes against humanity, but not genocide... That doesn’t mean there was no genocide in Cambodia, obviously.
Even in cases where international courts did rule a genocide, such as in Rwanda, it usually happens months, years, or even decades after the fact. In Rwanda it wasn’t until the genocide was officially over where the UN entertained making charges for genocide, with a special court established 4 months later (nov. 1994), initial indictments a year after that (nov. 1995) and it wasn’t until 1996 when the first perpetrators were found guilty of genocide. The Bosnian Genocide tribunal took even longer.
In no cases has anybody ever been found guilty of a genocide by an international court during an ongoing genocide.
You are right about one thing though. The term genocide is used politically, but not in the way you are arguing. During the Rwandan Gencocide countries—particularly the USA, but also many European countries—avoided the term, and fought hard against using it to describe the horrors in Rwanda, because under the genocide convention they were obligated to take active role in preventing it, which they had no interest in doing. Usually avoiding the term is what politicians do to avoid their responsibilities.
I'm not sure that's what he meant. My understanding from the post is: First, do your job (I'd add - do it well). That's table stakes, and, some people may be happy with that.
But, if you want to get promoted, if you want to 'not feel trapped by your title', then, do more. Don't wait for others to tell you what you can or should do - take initiative. Then, people will notice and you'll either get more responsibility/get promoted, or at the very least, you'll gain more experience (with results to show for it), and in any case you're better off for your next position.
I can really relate to the feeling described after modifying save files to get more resources in a game, but I wonder if it's the same kind of 'cheating'.
Doing better in a game has its own associsted feeling of achievement, and cheating definitely robs you of that, which to me explains why playing will be less fun.
Moving faster on a side project or at work doesn't feel like the same kind of shortcut/cheat. Most of us no longer program in assembly language, and we still maintain a sense of achievement using elite languages, which naturally abstract away a lot of the details.
Isn't using AI to hide away implementation details just a natural next step, where instead of lengthy error prone machine level code, you have a few modern language instructions?
I see your point, and tend to agree. However, at least for the time being, I see the AI tools not inherently different than refactoring tools which were available over a decade ago. It helps me move faster, and I feel like it's one more tool I need to master, so it will be useful in my toolbox.
The author writes "I do not foresee any smartphone app ever being approved for this purpose." (the purpose is 'passing classified information for military operations'), while in fact, I'm not sure I see the issue - all the app (any one of them, including WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) needs to add is what is referred to as 'conditional access' to some chats. Meaning, you can define chats as only authorized for users whose identity is provided by a trusted Identity Provider, or are running on certified devices. This type of security is already implemented in many enterprises, supported by browsers (to some extent, at least), and can be relatively easily be supported by applications. Custom made chat apps already use this (e.g. Workplace Chat, which is used by Meta), and so I'm not sure it's something we won't see supported by other commercial apps messaging apps.
What he means by "I do not foresee any smartphone app ever being approved for this purpose." is that a commodity smart phone is an insecure platform, so the military will not be approving any app designed for a commodity smart phone.
And by insecure here, he and I mean that its not a platform designed and manufactured to meet the large number of requirements for handing classified information. It may be secure in the sense of industry standards or conventions, but its not secure in the sense of military information security.
If I read it correctly it's because they think phones are a no-go from the outset, so clearly apps for those phones are out, too:
> When government and military officials want to discuss operations, they’re typically required to go into a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), which ensures:
>
> - That they are not being wiretapped. (To this end, mobile phones are not permitted in a SCIF.)
Whether this is actually true or not I wouldn't know and can't be arsed to research, but it makes sense to me. Whether it's reasonable to assume based on this that phones are completely out I also don't know.
+1 on traveling light. The author did mention this, too: "
Your enjoyment of a trip will be inversely related to the weight of your luggage. Counterintuitively, the longer your trip, the less stuff you should haul. Travelers still happy on a 6-week trip will only have carry-on luggage."
It's certainly not always possible if you need real dress clothing or real hiking/camping gear. (I've never gotten to the point where I can do a month-long trip that includes a long distance week-long+ walk along with some fairly formal evening wear in a carry-on.)
But you can probably get closer than you think. By myself, if I'm mostly just traveling in cities with "business casual" as dressy as it gets, I can travel almost indefinitely with a 40L travel backpack.
For men, mixed business/pleasure trips to countries with a conservative dress code can be tough (Japan for example). I have found that higher quality suits have better fabrics that are more able to recover from being stuffed in a small space. The problem I have yet to solve is shoes. In the West, not only are suits for meetings becoming rarer, but dress sneakers are acceptable almost everywhere, and they can do double duty for leisure. In Japan I would feel underdressed if I wasnt wearing standard black leather shoes. Maybe it will change with the new generation. Things are certainly lighter than in the early 2000s and 2010s, when there was a distinct echo of the infamous Burleson dress code[0]. (Though the cultural disdain for tattoos still exists.)
The last couple of trips I took to Japan were for events with essentially a developer/marketing oriented organization and I was able to comfortably get off with pretty much business casual. Maybe I wouldn't have felt as comfortable for a customer event.
The last trip I really felt I overpacked for with respect to train/transit was some time in London, followed by a long-distance walk where I really needed everything I had with me, followed by an ocean liner return where I needed jackets and real dress shoes--which, as you suggest, even Rockports aren't really general purpose. You always want more shoes than you can reasonably carry.
Wheeled vs. non-wheeled luggage is definitely a tradeoff. I lean towards non-wheeled in general and just maybe take a few more taxis if the luggage is too heavy to schlep around the city a bit.
The thing is, it's not about removing brain matter, it's about replacing brain matter (with a manufactured copy, for example), and applying the same process in a secondary location (physical or digital, I guess). Will 'you' at some point stop being 'you'? Will the secondary copy at some point become you?
