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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 26th, 2023

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  • And what happens after you kill the Houthi leadership? Do all of the Houthi forces turn over their weapons and go home? Get taken over by a more radical leadership? Split up into a bunch of cells with no centralized leadership?

    The Houthis are not a force for good on the region. However, compared with other terrorist groups, they are relatively rational and constrained. If even half of their forces want to go more extreme, they will have a proximate reason to do so, and no leadership to stop them.

    The likely result is the Gaza war expands into having a full war on the Yemen front (which is, admittadly, on track to happen anyway), against an enemy that no longer has the capacity to negotiate or surrender.

    As a fun side note, a bunch of those cells are also going to be freshly angry at the US, which is very much not in her interest.

    We’ve tried killing terrorist leadership before. It tends to not end well.


  • The Israeli Minister of Diaspora endoresed the anti-semetic National Rally candidate in the recent French election.

    Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu has been aligning with the anti-semetic Trump in the US elections.

    There has always been a significant amount of anti-semetism in the Zionist coalition. Hitler’s “final solution” was his solution to the “Jewish question”, which had been explicitly talked about in Europe since at least the mid 1700s, but was popularized in 1843 with the publication of Bruno Bauer’s book “The Jewish Question”.

    Before Nazi Germany came up with it’s final solution, they considered a more modest proposal of resettling their Jewish population outside of Germany, including some support for Zionist movement. Their only major opposition to Zionism was a concern that it would destabilize the region. Otherwise, it would get Jews out of Germany, thus solving their Jewish Question. Ultimately, Nazi Germany settled on a much less well structured approach of “voluntary emigration” by making life intolerable for their Jewish population, before finally settling on their final solution.

    Once Israel was established, her anti-semetic neighbors seized on the opportunity to resolve their Jewish question by finally forcing out their Jewish population (who now had somewhere to go).



  • The main complaint isn’t so much that Israel is killing enemy leaders; but that it is doing it in a strategically self destructive way.

    Bin Laden was a risky move, but the strike was conducted in Pakistan, who was friendly to us; and there are allegations that the Pakistani government gave more of a green light to the operation than they were willing to admit.

    Al Zawahiri was in Afghanistan about a year after we left. The Taliban at the time was still occupied in condolidating their power domestically; and their big victory was getting the US to withdraw. They lacked the will and means to start a major war with the US.

    Al Bagdhadi was done as part of the Syrian civil war, in direct coordination with the SDF. At the time the operation was planned, the US military was directly involved on the ground in Syria, although our sudden withdrawal prior complicated that.

    Israel is dealing with a country that is antagonistic to Isreal, and which has spent decades building up its military capabilities in anticipation of an eventual hot war with Israel. Iran has demonstrated that it has serious political will in avoiding a hot war, however it is just 1 miscalculation away from stumbling into one anyway; and every direct attack Israel makes causes Iran to roll the dice again. Or, at some point Iranian leadership might decide that all Israel’s direct attacks mean they are in a hot war already, an that Iran should respond with full force.

    In the case of this particular assassination, I struggle to see what tactical or strategic upside Israel gets to justify the risk. Israel is nominally trying to negotiate with Hamas; but they just killed a senior Hamas member who was involved in those negotiations. Worse, they killed a member who was, within the context of Hamas, a pro peace moderate. Him leaving for completely benign reasons would have been bad for Israel, because his replacement woukd likely be more antagonistic then him. This is 100x worse when he leaves due to a direct and deliberate attack by Israel.

    The only way Israel’s actions make sense is if the leadership that has been spending years trying to start a war with Iran is trying to start a war with Iran; and if the leadership that has been spending months sabatoging any potential deal in Gaza wants to sabatoge the potential for a deal in Gaza.



  • The actual difference between a working new mouse and a failing double click mouse is in the button itself (mechanical parts are almost always the problem).

    However, it is not some exotic failure mode. All mechanical switches have a “bounce”, where the contact makes and breaks a few times before settling into the connected position. Switches are typically designed to make the actual contact spring loaded (which is the origin of the click sound you here). As they age, this mechanism degrades, making the bouncing problem worse.

    However, this is a well understood problem that any electrical engineer should be familiar with. One solution is to install a filter capacitor. Now it takes longer to switch between the on and off state, so the inherent bounce in the switch is smoothed out to the point where you cannot detect it.

    They probably did testing with a new switch, and decided that they didn’t need to include any explicit debounce component, ignoring the fact that the switch would degrade over its lifetime.



  • People have been warning from day 1 about the possibility of a regional escalation.

    Apparently you cannot spend months acting in a way that neighboors who already don’t like you find morally reprehensible without some of those neighbors inserting themselves into the conflict.

    The real question is how long can Iran avoid getting dragged into that. And if Iran gets involved directly, will we be able to contain this to a regional war, or will this small decades old conflict between parties whose total population is only about 12 million become the trigger for world war 3.


  • Biden tried to restart the deal back in 2021, and has been trying ever since.

    However, it turns out that the US is not the only party involved in international treaties. We can’t just pick up the ball and go home mid game, then come back in a year with a new coach and expect everyone to continue playing like nothing happened

    The original deal was a difficult achievement on its own. Now, we need to not only repeat that, but also deal with the fact that Iran does not trust us to follow through with our end of the deal. Overcoming that needs good negotiation, and a lot of concessions we did not want to make.

    This is why administrations of both parties have historically upheld deals made by the opposing party that they didn’t like. Unilaterally breaking deals every 4 years because of who wins an election makes the US a non-credible partner in negotiations. You can’t just wave a wand and fix that.


  • In addition to the raw compute power, the HP laptop comrmes with a:

    • monitor
    • keyboard/trackpad
    • charger
    • windows 11
    • active cooling system
    • enclosure

    I’ve been looking for a lapdock [0], and the absolute low-end of the market goes for over $200, which is already more expensive than the hp laptop despite spending no money on any actual compute components.

    Granted, this is because lapdocks are a fairly niche product that are almost always either a luxury purchase (individual users) or a rounding error (datacenter users)

    [0] Keyboard/monitor combo in a laptop form factor, but without a built in computer. It is intended to be used as an interface to an external computer (typically a smartphone or rackmounted server).