But he can be held responsible for the US’s actions.

The extant to which treaties carry weight under US law is untested. Congress tried going to court over this in Goldwater v Carter over Carter’s withdrawal from the Sino-American mutual defense treaty. However, the Supreme Court dismissed the case as “unfit for judicial review”.

Biden is also arguably violating the Foreign Assistance Act, which provides that:

Except under circumstances specified in this section, no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.

However, the Senate voted 72-11 against attempying to enforce the relevent provisions in this case.

This is not a privacy bill. Anyone referring to it as a privacy bill is lying. Not even the bill title claims to be about privacy. It is the “Protecting Americans’4 Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024”.

More aid is irrelevant once you have enough aid. And you can get enough aid in through land. More importantly, we have the roads and trucks to get food in today. We have been using the land route to get food into Gaza for years. The problem is that the most powerful military in the region is blocking the land route.

Now, instead of applying pressure on that military, we are going to spend months building a port to go around them.

By itself that makes sense; except that military is our close ally. We are their biggest shield on the international stage, and biggest supplier of weapons and defensive systems. However, instead of trying to leverage any of that to try and solve the actual barriers to aid delivery, we are going to spend months building a water route.

If this approach ends up working, it would not be because water routes are more efficient. It would ve because the US war ships operating the dock exert enough pressure that Isreal would not dare oppose them.

Of course, even success here only gets food into Gaza. It does not address internal distribution. Ideally, we would use established networks for that. However Israel has running a largly successful campaign to dismantle the only aid network that has been operating at scale within Gaza (unrwa)

When there is a severe shortage of food; any food is at risk of being targeted by desperate people. Food is a tier 1 need. It doesn’t matter if the food is being delivered by land or sea. The solution to this is to provide enough food that people know they are not going to starve to death even without resorting to violence to get what food they can

Additionally, this judgment is for his civil fraud trial. Where he was found liable for inflating the value of his properties in order to obtain loans against them.

Given that, I can understand a general reluctance to loan against the value of his properties.

The difference between physics and magic is that physics works by describing the forces acting on a system. To predict an outcome, you just progressivly apply those forces over time.

With magic, you just specify the outcome, but not how you get there.

This is how we know that thermodynamics is magic. Conservation laws and Lagrangeans too.

https://xkcd.com/2904/

who will balance Israel’s right to self defence against the horrors we’re all looking at

I really hate this framing. Israel’s response has not been in Israel’s self interest. There is approximately 0% chance they will defeat Hamas, and approximately 100% chance they have hardended militant anti-Israel sentiment among Gazans for a generation. Further, they have alienated all of their potential regional allies (just as relations were starting to normalize), which is terrible for their long term security prospects in general; and their ability to resolve the Gaza problem in particular (since an ally that Gazan’s can trust would be incredibly useful).

Further, Hamas is not Israel’s biggest threat by far. They spent years planning an attack that only succeeded because of a massive failure on the part of the IDF; and only lasted for a day before the IDF completely steamrolled them.

As we can see know (and has been obvious from the beginning), Hezbolla in Lebanon is much greater military threat. Prior to the war, they were constrained by their rational self interest of avoiding a full war with Israel. In the beginning of the war, they made some pro-forma attacks, to which Israel offered some pro-forma responses; but things along the Israel Lebanon border were relatively quiet, because neither sude really wanted a war. However, as Israel continued its operation in Gaza, the political pressures in Lebanon grew, forcing an escallation of the conflict their. At this point, excluding the initial attack most of the damage to Israel has come not from Gaza, but Lebanon; and the IDF cannot just steamroll them.

And Israel is still in the “good case” of escalation. The elephant in the room here is Iran. As far as I can tell, Iran is not happy about this level of conflict, and is actively trying to avoid getting drawn in. However, it cannot simply abandon its proxies without massive loss of regional power. Nor can it be seen to abandon Gaza without significant internal political problems. The longer this war goes on, the greater the risk of Iran being fully dragged into it. If that happens, then everything up to this point will look like childs play. Israel will probably survive, but for the first time in decades, that will be brought into question.

None of this is new. This is the exact dynamic that was in play on October 6, when Israel’s actions were fully consistent with being aware of this dynamic. When October 7th happened, it did give Israel a bit more leeway to operate in Gaza; but that has always been limited, and has been long exhausted. Now, the dynamics are effectively the same as on October 6, but Israel is making the other decision of actively poking the bear of a regional war insted of simply tiptoeing around it as they had been doing. And Israel’s security suffers greatly for it.

So? If porn is the only thing that stopped me from getting raped, then my problem is solved. I’d call that a win.

Interestingly, according to the article, the biggest effect is in 15-19 year olds; which are the people the law is intended to bar from accessing porn. Granted, I have no idea how good the underlying study that article is based off of is.

Are we still complaining about Starbucks? Let’s call it $7 for a coffee. That comes to about $2555 a year. Sounds like a lot of money.

Say I wanted to buy a house. The median home price in the start of 2020 was $329000. End of 2023, it was $417,700 (down from its peak). An increase of $88,700. Assuming a down payment of 20%, your median down payment went up buy $17,740. Almost 7 years worth of Starbucks. In just 3 years.

But wait. Interest rates also changed. Assuming the same %20 down payment, your principle increased by $70,960. The 30 year mortgage over that time went up from around %3.72 to %6.66. An increase of about %2.9. The increased interest on the increased principle is about $2,057; so I guess your Starbucks habbit would cover that.

Of course, that is a strange metric. You pay the full %6.66 on the increased principle. The %2.9 is the additional interest you pay on the original principle. So your annual interest payments went up by $12,358 just for delaying your purchase by 3 years. If you cut off your 4.8 starbucks coffees a day addiction, you’ll be able to afford this increase.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US

You joke, but after cosmonaut Alexi Leonov complained about the possibility of a bear attack, the TP-82 ahotgun was standard issue on Russian spacecraft for decades.