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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The Geneva conventions do not contain the level of protection for civilians that you think.

    In particular, Israel has ratified and is a party to the conventions of 1949. After much debate in 1949, those conventions ultimately allowed things like indiscriminate carpet bombing of cities (which the US practiced extensively in the previous war).

    Later protocols from 1977 added more civilian protections more along the lines you propose. These protocols banned carpet bombing and introduced the concept of proportionate response into the conventions.

    Israel and the United States have not ratified the 1977 protocols 1 and 2 concerning additional civilian protections. According to the text itself, they are not bound by the provisions if they do not agree.









  • None of the current ICBM platforms were designed for missile defense. Missile defense simply did not exist at the time.

    Sentinel is busting its budget because it’s renovating and rebuilding all of the ground segments: all of those decrepit silos and computer systems. It’s still money well spent in my opinion.

    Missile guidance is not a computationally hard problem, and it hasn’t changed much since the 50s. Terminal missile defense is a fantastically hard problem, and wasn’t mastered until the last decade or two. And the current generation missile defense capabilities still haven’t all been demonstrated in combat.

    Having said that, I would generally expect NATO’s missiles to work as advertised in a hot war. And I would plan for Russia’s missiles to be somewhat less effective than they advertise, but still a credible threat.




  • Question, when you move to a new place in Spain, do you need to register residency with the police?

    I don’t know if Spain does that or not, but I think Italy does some version.

    The United States doesn’t have that, and doesn’t have a national id card. Although most people effectively register themselves to get a driver license, that is only required if you drive. So voter registration nominally provides some way for the government to get the information on residency, which is important for figuring out which local elections you need to vote in.

    Now recently, in the last couple of decades, some states started requiring photo id verification to vote. This defeats the purpose of having a separate voter registration system, because you still have to go to the driver registration system to get either a driver license, or a non-driving photo ID. Nevertheless, the separate voter registration system has hung around in every single one of these states, because the real goal is to prevent people from voting.