• 24 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I saw both this and also this ambassador’s rebuke of the UN’s consideration of Palestinian statehood.

    How utterly juvenile. Their full court press against a Palestinian state is splitting at its worst.

    Most attorneys, given the chance to address the chamber, would make some sort of concession. Even Trump’s counsel have done so in his Supreme Court immunity case, which is already beyond real, erudite credibility based on the arguments they are making.

    Israel cannot continue making these arguments, invoking the Holocaust, while they are indiscriminately killing tens of thousands of Gazan women and children.

    It is almost a psychological reflex; as they continue to slaughter innocents, the enemy must be ever greater in order to justify their actions.

    The histrionic and jarring and aggressive speeches made by Israel at the U.N. appear to underscore their complete lack of remorse, their callousness in their approach, and their privileged status over recent decades.

    If the Israeli government cares about statehood, could they please manage to do what every other state does and describe their borders?

    The complete lack of an attempt at damage control in these diplomatic speeches underlies their viciousness.

    Holocaust denial or diminution is a real actual problem in younger generations because they haven’t interacted with relatives who have these horrors in living memory. It’s disgusting how they dither when asked about the Holocaust.

    Israel has a legitimate right to defend its borders, there is no doubt. However, they shouldn’t have a carte blanche license to kill.

    What happened to Mossad? They were meant to be the most surgical special intelligence service of the 20th century. Have they gotten lazy? Or is this a campaign to psychologically demolish an enemy? What happened to Israel’s scholars, who understand the concept of blowback?

    Starving Gaza is a war crime and should be punished as such. Such godawful optics that Israel has incinerated the goodwill they enjoyed after the October 7th attacks.

    This country is anti-freedom of the press (Al Jazeera, careful control of western journalists embedded with Israeli troops, complete exclusion of independent journalists in Gaza except for Gazan civilian reports, with many indiscriminately murdered Gazan journalists).

    They have the audacity to be shocked when the ICC and the UN try to hold them to account for their excessive bloodlust.

    It is my opinion that this change in approach is long overdue. Israel has been violating international law for decades with their continual incremental and violent expansion in the Golan Heights and making a modern day Ghetto out of the Gaza Strip.

    You cannot kettle a population like they have been doing; restricting travel, but also imports of goods that sustain its people. It is positively disgraceful.

    I hope that Biden continues to come around in substantive ways, and I’m encouraged by his shift on policy thus far. It must be hard for a very old man, with very old ties to his Israeli ally, with all of the political pressure he faces in the direction of supporting Israel no matter what, to be the first leader to balk at weapons shipments.

    But to do otherwise would be at best grossly irresponsible and at worst, suborning genocide.












  • I really hope this goes through, because the pile of dogshit they sold my municipal government can’t fairly be called code.

    It’s astonishing. I will never ever deal with that company if I have the opportunity in the future because of how utterly incompetent they were creating a “microservices architecture” for us which is in effect a series of AWS Lambdas running random Python that do not coordinate, suffer from race conditions, and in many places do not do the thing in the first place.

    It’s the second worst code I’ve ever seen. The first was home grown at another public sector job.

    The cost for this shit that could have been replaced by a simple Flask app? Or even a well structured, in-lined Python script? $1.5 million. Ongoing costs in the hundreds of thousands per year.

    This should be a $20-50/month EC2 instance.

    Absolute garbage.

    No, I am not underestimating the complexity requirements nor the communication overhead/competing stakeholder interests and all other manner of externalities.

    Deloitte belongs in the dust heap.





  • Why would it ever be remotely acceptable to look through your kid’s phone? One can hardly think of a more serious violation of privacy. Not just for the kid but for all the people the kid communicates with. It should not be socially acceptable to admit that you’ve done this.

    If they’re causing problems, address them another way. Take the phone away if you need to, but do not turn your house into North Korea.