They’ve made peace with: Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, the UAE and Saudi. Hamas started the war because they were threatened by that. So no they don’t cultivate enemies. Islamists that hate Jews for not being part of their empire hate them.
Of course the other side of that is that Israel hasn't exactly been kind to the Palestinians. They've been Annexing land in the West Bank and blockading Gaza for what now seems like forever. I can certainly understand why Palestinians might be pissed, even if some of their tactics are abhorrent.
this is true, but i find it difficult to earnestly believe there would be some sizable decrease in violence in the counterfactual with no Gaza blockade. Settlements, sure.
Well since their land got invaded, houses stolen and demolished, burial grounds defiled, poisened with chemical weapons, ethnically dispelled, and crammed onto a piece of land the size of a city , I'd get why they'd still be pissed at the current state of affairs. This did not start on October 7th.
Saudi didn’t normalize because Hamas prevented it. October 7 was designed to radicalize and prevent normalization of relations. You’re helping them by reframing a justifiable war of self defense against terrorists as a “genocide”.
Yes, they didn’t normalize, so they’re irrelevant to the peace equation floated by the person I replied to.
So a genocidal campaign to level Gaza and cleanse it of its human anima- oops, I meant people, expand settlements in the WB, and occupy southern Lebanon and Syria in pursuit of a “Greater Israel” is self-defense. Makes total sense.
It's really not. The used font just doesn't move the needle regarding the global impression. 99% of people never ever think or care about the font they use.
What else should be decided on on the highest level: spacing, padding, allowance of the Oxford comma?
It is useful that somebody thinks about that stuff, just not the highest level of the government.
That's like the CEO of Microsoft having meeting about coding conventions, space vs tabs, variable name format etc.
The irony here is that Steve Jobs _did_ actually think about fonts. Sure, he certainly didn't think about Times New Roman, but I disagree with the idea that someone at the top should not have time to write a quick memo about trivialities if it bothers them.
(Part of) Steve Jobs' job was to deliver a great operating system, and part of that relates to how fonts are used. No part of the President's job involves picking a font, let alone legislating around it, unless there are actual political factors involved.
> That's like the CEO of Microsoft having meeting about coding conventions, space vs tabs, variable name format etc.
No. Those things aren't exposed to the public. But the UI is:
___
Bill Gates:
So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.
Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?
Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.
So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.
What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.
Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?
So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.
So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.
So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.
You want to know what the global impression of the US is right now? Here's a translated quote from a newspaper today, from a source in our military:
> – The US has the most qualified intelligence organizations in the world at its disposal. Both the CIA and the FBI have been politicized under the current regime. I find it difficult to see how we will be able to maintain the trusting cooperation we have had with the US in the past after this.
The actions of the current administration speaks far louder than any font ever could, and it's tearing down decades of good will and trust.
The Global impression of the US is down the toilet. This only adds to that. I kept being told that I was not American, and America didn't care what the rest of the world thought. Which is it?
Speaking as someone who is not from the US I can say that the global impression of the US is not helped by the secretary of state bikeshedding about fonts. There are important issues of foreign affairs that need thought and attention at this time.
That's not the point at all and I think you know that.
A big part of leadership is conveying priorities. This says "What's important isn't Israel, Venezuela, Russia/Ukraine, China, it's that you used Calibri in compiling a document." It is the very definition of form over substance.
It's an interesting thought, given what current global impressions are.
I'm imagining a scenario in which the President of the United States is doing his usual sort of diplomatic outreach, consisting of waffling incoherently about things he's heard on TV that he doesn't like about their country. At one point he loses his train of thought and starts bragging about how well he's doing in cognitive adequacy tests. The diplomats are waiting until the bit where they get to flatter and bribe him at the end, the bit where he usually reverses his foreign policy, so long as they can get him to understand what they're actually asking from him. One of them speculates whether it's even possible that half the country is actually dumber than this guy.
A staffer wearing a MAGA baseball cap sidles up to them with some briefing notes. And its just impossible not to notice the notes are typeset in the very same venerable font that was once used as the default for Windows 9x.
The diplomats are stunned. No sans serif wokeness here. The typeface exudes heritage and gravitas. At last they realize what a very serious adminstration they're dealing with.
Yes. We should also ban citing Wikipedia. If you don't know, Wikipedia itself recommends you don't cite it- quote the sources wikipedia or your AI use, don't quote secondary sources.
Goddamnit I cry everytime. RethinkDB was a great document store that didn't eat your data. It got eclipsed by an outfunded (and still dangerous at the time) MongoDB.
Agreed re Chia, but here’s a counterpoint: MXE is 16,000 times faster than FHE, completely changes the concept of computing (that in order to calculate something you need to see the data) and it as a result Arcium the hottest thing in crypto right now.
Yeah, because you know best. You never made any hiring mistake and you never have any bias whatsoever when you hire people. Who dared double-guess you, after you put all the effort of spending a few hours with each candidate?
You’re not responding to the post you’re replying to. I would’ve been happy to use tools to blind interview candidates. But that wasn’t what was asked - instead I was asked to racially discriminate against applicants.
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