They are of course heavily sanctioned by the US for stuff that happened in the ancient past. That will not affect natural resources but it will affect the equipment to harvest them.
What equipment is needed for Cuban's to harvest fish?
People have been harvesting fish from the ocean for thousands of years. They have been making bread for even longer.
Sanctions are not why Cuban's aren't able to eat. Cuba can and does trade with the rest of the world.
Cuban's can't eat because of how poorly their government allocates resources. This is the problem with all centrally planned economies - they eventually stop being run well.
The problem they face is a shortage of wheat flour, not bread-making technology. Wheat doesn't grow in tropical climates (though the Brasilians are working on this). There are 10 million people on the island of Cuba. There weren't 10 million people living there and baking bread thousands of years ago.
There are very limited options for doing business with Cuba due to the trade embargo laws the US has passed. US sanctions in general basically cut a country or organization out of the international banking system. There are limited exceptions for food etc but where are they supposed to get the money to pay for that food with the other industries being embargoed?
It's shocking the lack of credit you're extending to the decade's long embargo for doing it's job of keeping Cuba poor.
Russia is the single largest exporter of wheat in the world, followed by the EU, Australia, the US, Ukraine, and Argentina. China is a top producer but also a top consumer; nothing for export.
Still, plenty of it out there, at this point it's more due to local disfunction more than anything.
To harvest fish at an meaningful scale for a population of a bit over 11 million requires a lot of equipment and that's not what they're having trouble with. It's bread.
Kind of, but they can't do any business with a US based company. Many specialized products are only produced by a small handful of companies, and if all (or most) of those are US based, Cuba's SOL. They've also had problems where a supplier was bought out by a US based company, so now they can't buy that product anymore.
There's also the fact that it's far cheaper to ship goods to Cuba from the US then it is to ship goods from Europe or China. This means that even if they can buy some goods, they're often much more expensive then it needs to be.
The cost of shipping is more than made up for in the cost of labor and capital that goes into the products. Which is why most other countries use China as their number 1 trading partner. There is also nothing critical manufacured by the U.S. for Cuban agriculture that is not available elsewhere. They are a tropical island with one of the most ideal climates on planet Earth, food grows virtually all year there, nevermind the abundance in the ocean itself.
No, because they are under heavy sanctions that threaten any country that dares trade with them.
The origin of the sanctions goes back decades, to Cuba's land reform, where the government took back land from private corporations, such as United Fruit Company, who then lobbied the US to go after Cuba on their behalf.
The United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba… Despite the existence of the embargo, Cuba can, and does, conduct international trade with many countries, including many U.S. allies; however, U.S.-based companies, and companies that do business with the U.S., which trade in Cuba do so at the risk of U.S. sanctions.
This article is about bread. Bread, perhaps the most simple, easily manufactured food on the planet. It doesn't even take fancy modern equipment to make - people have been making bread for thousands of years all across the world.
Cuba was settled 6,000 years ago according to Wikipedia - long before importing goods was even a concept. They did not, and still should not need to import anything to feed their population. The resources are misappropriated by their government - it's that simple.
Cuban's rely on the government to ration/provide ingredients to make bread. And just like the USSR, the government eventually fails to provide and the population - who became entirely dependent on the government - are left with no alternative means to support themselves. It's a tragedy that has bestowed damn near every single communist nation that has ever existed.
There is no valid excuse for not being able to make enough bread.
I'm going to interpret your comment as "Venezuela is starving because of US sanctions"
We actually have a really nice unintentional experiment. The Biden administration removed sanctions from Venezuela, they still had starvation after sanctions were removed.
Cuba is an island nation that has full political and trade relations with industrialized countries around the world. Plenty of other island nations have no trouble in their agriculture sector. Cuba's inability to make their economy work has everything to do with their lack of democracy and excess of Marxism, and nothing to do with their neighbor, the US. We have seen food shortages after Marxist takeovers pretty much everywhere that has suffered that fate.
They can’t build equipment themselves? You’re saying socialist countries can’t feed their citizens without relying on equipment invented, designed and built by capitalists?
It is hilarious how the US uses sanctions as a weapon while simultaneously trying to use tariffs to build capacity internally, but yes, access to the best of the world and the benefits of specialization is very helpful.
This article is about the ingredients for bread. If you can't get water and flour without "access to the best of the world and the benefits of specialization", that's on you.
Of course they can't make competitive CPUs. That's perfectly understandable. But provide ingredients for bread?
Agriculture is one of the most technological and oil-intensive things that modern civilization does. Combine harvesters are intricate devices which cost millions, and the US happens to be one of the countries with the best relative advantage in growing food due to our climate. For reference, the USSR industrialized to near capability parity in the 60's, but never closed the agriculture gap.
Growing a little grain is possible with ancient technology, but a lot of people starved back then, as they do now when agriculture is practiced without oil, pesticides, herbicides and advanced (keeping in step with population growth) machinery.
Wheat doesn't grow well that far South, it's too warm. [0] Just look at the map of wheat production in the US. So it's a trade item and that's where the embargo and all it's effects come in.
The United States can’t survive on what we build alone, either. We’re dependent on resources and equipment made by communist states (e.g., China) and worse (e.g., Saudi Arabia). It proves only that the world is connected.
They are as close as it gets- the "economic calculation problem" makes an actual centrally planned communist economy impossible, hence the mass famines. Cuba also in practice has a free market capitalist economy nowadays. From what I've heard, in practice North Korea also feeds people through a capitalist black market.
They can buy whatever they want from China and most of the "global south" our sanctions are not followed by them. They are on some of the most fertile ground on planet earth. It's just late stage communism doing its thing.
> Enact a law that requires a service to respect the do not track signal from a browser (currently entirely voluntary), and not store any tracking cookies, clear gifs or other trackers – and require that a site not “discriminate” against users who elect no tracking – basically – provide all functions to users whether they consent or do not consent.
This is indeed the obvious solution. I don't understand why the EU didn't mandate the do not track flag to be obeyed. I know some browsers already removed it but that was because nobody bothered to obey it. As soon as it can be mandated it will be useful and come back quickly.
Also, there was criticism from the advertising industry that the do not track was on by default but that's how tracking should work in the EU anyway: opt in.
By not doing this the EU keeps getting flak for the many cookie walls.
That there is no such mechanism can be explained pretty well with this extreme scenario:
- Browsers would come with the no tracking signal enabled by default (why wouldn't they?) so that tracking would become opt-in.
- Nobody chooses to be tracked.
- The whole industry built on tracking users collapses, namely advertisement
- Web sites who based their business model on advertisement go under
Because of this I bet that the industry is lobbying extremely hard for solutions that are maximally useless and inconvenient for the user. Unless the user "chooses" to be tracked of course.
In that vein, another proposal for stemming the flood of cookie consent banners comes from the German government and outlines a multi vendor strategy with very little technical guidance for centralized consent management systems:
Maybe I'm soft, but I always ad block and yet I don't think millions of people losing their jobs, and the resultant economic depression causing millions of other people to go hungry/homeless is a perfect outcome.
it's like when we "found out" leaded gasoline is bad for every living being on the planet. the whole automotive industry and its associates really didn't want to change, but at the end of the day life goes on. maybe one day we'll be able to have an internet that is not financed by mass surveillance enabled psychological abuse.
Well yes but the websites will find suppliers of untracked (context sensitive e.g. car ads on a website about cars) ads, which will become more valuable since they no longer have to compete with tracked ads.
Companies like Google and Meta would lose their huge moat because they're the only ones with the kind of pervasive tracking network that make tracked ads viable. They no longer have a big advantage over smaller ad players. And them losing their huge market position isn't a bad thing IMO.
I don't think ads would disappear, they would just become untracked. Neither would websites. They will find a way.
The implementation in technical terms is left open yes, but they could have added a clause that settings like this (and not necessarily specifically this alone) must be respected if set. And in that case no other questions may be asked because the preference is already given. In that case the EU would have done themselves a huge favour because now they get blamed by everyone for the cookiewalls. Even though this was never the intention of the law.
What do you mean verify? If it's set then it's set. It gets automatically injected with every web request. It's not possible to make sure the user manually set the flag or if it was default, no. But in the EU the law says that tracking must be opt-in so this is perfectly good behaviour in line with the law.
> I don't understand why the EU didn't mandate the do not track flag to be obeyed.
GDPR is a general regulation. It doesn't concern itself with browsers, or cookies. It's on industry to come up with a solution for specific technologies.
Oh, and for browsers they did. It's called the "Do Not Track" header, and the industry immediately sed it to fingerprint and track users.
> By not doing this the EU keeps getting flak for the many cookie walls.
No. It's the industry winning the PR wall. The EU never mandated the cookie walls. It's the industry's calculated malicious compliance.
Well, in the end the industry might end up with EU strictly regulating every single technical aspect of this, but then the industry will cry about government overreach or something.
> Oh, and for browsers they did. It's called the "Do Not Track" header, and the industry immediately sed it to fingerprint and track users.
They do this anyway. They should have mandated this be honoured (or any other type of tech). If that were the case the browsers would have brought it back in short order.
> The EU never mandated the cookie walls. It's the industry's calculated malicious compliance.
Exactly. And this is their fault for not regulating this properly.
> They should have mandated this be honoured (or any other type of tech)
GDPR mandates honoring user consent.
It's a general data protection regulation. It doesn't talk about specific technologies.
> this is their fault for not regulating this properly.
What "this". Should there be a separate law for browsers? And a separate law for mobile apps? And a separate law for desktop apps? And a separate law for offline businesses? And...
Or should we blame the people and industries who couldn't care less about user privacy?
Even a paid alternative is very iffy. Some jurisdictions like Germany have allowed it after a court ruling but most have not. Meta is also getting flak from the EU for their "accept or pay" model.
Yes I prefer using the special EU cookie wall plugin. I forget the name right now, sorry.
Ublock just blocks the popup which breaks some sites that don't work until you make a choice, which you can't because it's blocked. The other plugin answers it for you in the background with your chosen options.
And 150 of the 400 "partners" will also have a pre-ticked "legitimate interest" checkbox that you have to untick separately. To me that's an automatic maximum penalty fine, but sadly there is no enforcement.
Yeah but there's the rub. Asking Google to take analytics away just isn't going to happen. It makes them billions.
And marketeers want this data because sales data only tells them where they succeeded. Not where they failed to sell, which is more interesting to them because that's where the growth is found.
The EU can simply tell them they can no longer operate Analytics. Too bad if it's hard on Google. They are a preditory company that violates privacy rights. There is clearly competition in the markets they serve. Any threat of complete exit is empty. Those competitors are more than willing to gain any market they exit. These companies need to be put in check by the government or a regulatory body. Marketing and Advertising are toxic to the internet.
> The EU can simply tell them they can no longer operate Analytics. Too bad if it's hard on Google.
No they can't. The US doesn't even let them decide whether to supply chip machines to China. Or for Schiphol Airport to reduce slots for noise abatement. the US immediately trumped up diplomacy and raised threats to stop those things.
Banning google analytics is just unthinkable in the current relationship between EU and US. I agree they are a predatory company but this is unfortunately how things are right now in the balance of power.
This is why the AdNauseam extension is so hated by Google et al. It doesn't eliminate ads but rather fights against them using a different approach: polluting the well. It is built on Ublock Origin so it indeed blocks ads, but aside doing that it also silently clicks on all of them so that data collected by advertising companies suddenly become useless.
https://adnauseam.io/
I don’t get the argument. Sure it makes Google ad targeting worse, why would Google care? They have monopoly power in online ads and targeting doesn’t work that well anyway. As long as people keep buying the gimmick, no amount of bad data will amount to anything.
Yeah and not enough people do it. That's the biggest problem.
If enough people do it, it will have an effect. Remember when Apple pulled the advertiser ID unless users opted in? That really got the ad industry barking. That they feel. Ad Nauseam they don't. It's way too fringey.
It's only if you qualify as a 'covered expatriate' though. I'm not a lawyer or an accountant but a plain reading of the standard suggests the vast majority of Americans would not be covered.
I think the key would be how they arrive at the net worth numbers. If it's just a calculation of all your assets as if they were sold at FMV, ~90% of the US is below the net worth threshold.
The average tax liability standard looks like it would take 5 years at $600K+ of adjusted gross income, too. Plenty of people would meet this standard. Most people would not.
So it basically says if you net worth is over $2 mil, you're need to pay exit tax, right?
If a house and 401k also counted towards net worth, it could impact quite a few Americans. Besides, those who expatriate for tax optimization purposes usually have a significant amount of wealth.
> If a house and 401k also counted towards net worth, it could impact quite a few Americans
I have no sympathy for people who want to dodge taxes being forced to pay a tax on income that the government has deferred taxes on while they were a citizen making taxable income in the US, and presumably if you're abandoning your citizenship you're not keeping your home and would have already paid sales and capital gains taxes on it when you sold it.
"
You fail to certify on Form 8854 that you have complied with all federal tax obligations for the 5 tax years preceding the date of your expatriation.
"
I agree you should pay up your taxes but this will not only recover the due taxes but it will take more.
Ahh so a simple supply chain attack. I was thinking it might have leveraged the built in batteries. But it was always unlikely, especially in a receive-only device.
Still, if you have the capability of such a supply chain attack, I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
Hezbollah has been escalating their armed attacks against Israel for almost an entire year, parallel with the war in Gaza. Every day tens of rockets hit Israel, almost the entire north of Israel is evacuated of civilians.
I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
Yes, there are blurbs about it if you know where to look and are already familiar with the situation. But a small blurb once about Israel being attacked is drowned out by the literally thousands of articles about Israeli actions, which mention time and again every small detail or infringement.
I don't agree; I think you're pushing some vague nonsense media conspiracy here. I haven't been following the war that closely, but I hear about Hezbollah attacks fairly regularly. I'm very critical of Israel right now, but it's not even remotely unknown that they're facing attacks from multiple fronts.
The "news" doesn't even seem to exist anymore. News providers have adapted to the readers only wanting hear their own views supported.
Not only are there specific providers for specific worldviews, but major providers seem to spit out articles catering to every viewpoint. You can find probably find multiple pro Israel and anti Israel articles coming from a single news source on a single day.
So, I dunno maybe we need some kind of cumulative news app to get any kind of meaningful idea of how things are actually leaning. Like an AI summarizing sentiments of the 20,000 articles on Israel in the last week to determine if the news is slanted.
They advertise pretty heavily, and I’ma bit skeptical of their ability to make money. but it basically uses AI to summarize stories, and it groups stories from many media outlets, categorizes their bias, and shows the slant of the topic overall.
> attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
I think retaliations are pretty fruitless anyway. Both sides have been lobbing missiles at each other for decades. This eye for an eye thing keeps going even though both sides have run out of eyes a long time ago.
Yes. Killing more of theirs in response to an attack on yours is fruitless. It just perpetuates the situation. And also, every time you kill one civilian there, their kids become terrorists for life (or at least have a good chance to). Hitting military targets is ok, but just lobbing a few missiles that way in retaliation because they fired some on you last week is really not going to help in any way. It only perpetuates the death and destruction.
Netanyahu seems to be very much against negotiations and keeps blowing the situation up because he doesn't want to 'look weak'. But this does nothing to actually help the Israeli people get safer. The only way they can actually be safe is to sit down and make peace. And of course not to keep taking more and more territory as Israel has been doing (and was even condemned by the UN).
Seriously, this shit has been going on since the founding of Israel. If they keep it up they will never feel safe. Neither side will ever be fully bombed into submission. Remember both Russia and the US tried that in Afghanistan, it didn't work there and it won't work here. All it does is keep the military industrial complex fed and wrecking lives in the process.
Someone has to take the first step and stop retaliating. And make some agreements which are fair to both parties. Then they can both build up a society and have less reason to upset things because they have a thriving society to lose.
I'm not defending Hamas nor Hezbollah. But this has to stop and 'responding' or 'retaliating' isn't going to help.
Only the Gazans charge that Israel kills civilians. The Lebanese understand exactly that Israeli targets Hezbollah. Read any Lebanese newspaper - they blame Hezbollah.
There's disagreement on how carefully they try to avoid doing it, but even their closest geopolitical ally the US has urged them to do more to prevent civilian casualties.
Hezbollah has been warning its members not to use cell phones because they get targeted by using them too. Seems like the pagers were supposed to be the workaround for that.
Lots of pagers operate in one-way only mode. Towers transmit messages without expecting acknowledgement a few times, pager is configured to filter out and only alert on messages routed to its ID.
Sure, theoretically one can detect a receive-only radio, but its massively more difficult than detecting something which actively transmits.
Most pagers do, yes. They are also usually unencrypted. And due to the one way nature, even if they are encrypted, PFS (perfect forward security) is impossible. Meaning that if someone captures the encrypted messages they can decrypt them all the way back when the encryption key is obtained.
But the impossibility of any kind of location tracking is definitely a plus of one-way pagers. Not just for terrorists. I'd get one if there were still a network where I live. It'd be really nice to be reachable and not be tracked 24/7 for once.
While the messages are not encrypted, you just have your actual message coded. Have agreed on phrases and what not discussed out of band. Send dummy messages to throw people off and not know what is a real transmission or a dummy one. Is that numbers station just spouting gibberish or communicating with spies?
The market closes at 5, dinner at the hotel, Grandpa will bring home the wine, bring your hat. Charlie 5 Alpha 2 4 7 3 Bravo. Maybe this is just discussing someone's evening, maybe its coordinating a group action.
Many pagers are receive only. The tower has no idea who's listening; it just broadcasts out the messages that it's told to. Pagers are much less trackable than phones.
> Surely a pager message isn't transmitted from every tower everywhere.
They generally are!
Some systems required the sender to select a geographic region to increase bandwidth efficiency, or alternatively the pager owner to update their coarse-scale location with the operator after moving significant distances.
The latter is what the old Iridium satellite pagers did (do?), for example. (Not sure how the new GDB-based ones work.)
The new Iridium pagers are two-way as far as I've heard. Only the old ones were one-way.
I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore. It has been supported for more than a decade without onboarding new customers though.
> The new Iridium pagers are two-way as far as I've heard.
Apparently that's optional:
> Iridium Burst-enabled devices can be configured as receive-only so that no transmissions are made, a feature valued highly by some customer segments.
> I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore.
If that's the case, it would have been inoperable since 2017 – they deorbited the old satellites immediately after confirming deployment of the new ones.
That's exactly how they work, actually. Or at least worked, traditionally. There are assuredly some two-way pagers out there now.
But yeah, you'd usually pay for service in a certain (large) geographic area, and if you wanted to take your pager out of that area while on a trip, or if you moved, you'd have to let the pager company know so they could start broadcasting in the new area.
They might have watched The Wire: you page Alice, and she uses a public phone to call you. Undetectable unless you wire all public phones in the city, or someone is dumb enough to always use the same phone (which is what happens in the series; they eventually switch to burner mobiles).
To be fair, they rotate the burners in the series every 2 weeks and it takes the police more than a week to get up on the new ones.
It was cool to see that it was in fact an opsec fail (the guy buying the phones all over the country got lazy and bought too many from the same shop) to break through that. Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
Although one thing in the wire I don't understand. Pagers are really easy to intercept, anyone with a scanner (with discriminator output) can do it and could do it in those times. I did it many times during the days when pagers were still in full swing. I really don't understand why they needed a court order for that (in season 1).
> Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
The show creator worked for years as a journalist on the crime beat in Baltimore, I expect most of the opsec seen in the series comes from real cases.
> really don't understand why they needed a court order for [wiretapping pagers]
As others said, you need it from a legal perspective rather than a technical one. This is particularly true in the US, where the "fruit of poisonous tree" doctrine is pretty strict: if your evidence was not gathered in the proper manner, it must be discarded and it invalidates any further effort based on it. In specific, wiretapping is illegal even when done by authorities, unless they've been authorized by judges - the relevant US laws were tightened up after it emerged (with Watergate) that president Nixon was eavesdropping on his political rivals.
They recently introduced pagers because they're less trackable than phones. Presumably the ones which have pagers are more important so its probably more impactful than targeting 1 or 2 percent of the regular terrorists.
They have about 100'000 members, and this attack has killed about a dozen, and injured about 2000. Only one recent shipment of pagers was affected. I don't think they are unable to respond.
Face saving. It's easier to put a PR spin on something only a few people actually saw. It's going to be hard to convince their rank-and-file this isn't a bit deal and deserving of retribution.
A missile is a demonstration of military force. Everyone in the region knows Israel is capable of blowing up a building.
This is a "we've got you hopelessly compromised as an organization" sort of demonstration that's far more humiliating.
For a similar example, see the US response to 9/11 - two decades of war, taking shoes off at airports, etc. - versus the US response to COVID, which killed a 9/11 worth every couple of days, but resulted in a "but I don't wanna wear a mask" response.
> It's easy to sit online and make bold and vague claims like there will be armed escalation in retaliation.
I mean, that's the pretty standard response in this conflict. Permanent tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, for decades/millennia depending on how broadly you count things. For a concrete example, Iran's April strikes.
> What do you think constitutes a major escalation?
Terror attacks on Israeli assets abroad - I'd be keeping embassies/consulates on alert - and rocket strikes against Israel. At least enough to try to save face, although the Iranian strikes offer a "good luck" for that.
Do you think Lebanon will escalate by capturing prisoners? I agree that that could be an escalation given the context and history. That said, I don't know what a path to peace with Hezbollah looks like. It's hard to imagine Israel tolerating it imperfect ceasefire while Hezbollah continues to arm, given how that worked out with Hamas
I think that netanyahu would be very happy to see a de-escalation on the northern border and it would be a big win for his cabinet.
Israel is desperate to provoke?
Hezbollah is bombing Israel since the October 7th attack. 300,000 refugees inside Israel because of this bombing. Who is provoking who ?
How is what you wrote about that Israel is desperate to provoke is related to Gaza ?
Israel is defending itself against Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iranian allies since October 7th 2023.
Why would Israel provoke Hezbollah? What's the point of it ?
We should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government. The people has nothing to do with this - this is all planned and executed under the auspices of the current prime minister and his associates.
Even though the people largely supports their agenda, an action that targets three people but affects 2,700 people as collateral damage would not pass by their parliament.
We should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government
I understand your point but synecdoche is the oil on the gears of discourse. This required a lot of people's involvement, from those issuing the orders to technicians at the bottom of the chain of command. It's not Netanyahu's cabinet that did the work of placing explosive charges in thousands of compact devices and then repackaged and shrinkwrapped them.
Obviously once could refer to the 'Netanyahu regime' or some other more specific term, but then someone else would complain that this was a mendacious mischaracterization of the country's political system or suchlike. To the extent that civilians there don't with to be identified with their political leadership or take on the moral responsibility for its decisions, they'd better step up their efforts to topple the government by means of a general strike or some other time-honored method.
I do think we can hold Israel as a country responsible. But what we can't do is blame Jewish or even Israeli people in general. Though I don't see anyone doing this. The current government is always quick to draw the antisemitism card when being criticised but I never see anyone actually doing that.
Why would you assume this targeted three people? I assume the most likely scenario is that the attackers targeted as many Hezbollah members as they could, and were extremely successful at it.
That's a very good point - if the goal was to disable comms and incapacitate as many targets as possible, then collateral damage numbers are much lower.
It's unknown how many were family members of targeted individuals, and whatever the number actually is, it'll be misreported.
Why would the family members of a Hezbollah operative be carrying a pager tuned to Hezbollah's private communications network? A reminder that Hezbollah operates a parallel phone system, and is in many ways more sophisticated and organized than the de jure government of Lebanon, whose military forces Hezbollah outnumbers.
The family member would not necessarily need to be carrying the pager, just near it. Picture a child standing next to adult, pager on hip would be next to the kids head. Pagers are not always worn too, could be on top of a table, etc..
We know now that at least 2 of the 9 already confirmed dead were children of their intended target. Fatima Jaafar Abdullah a 9 year old daughter of an unnamed Hezbollah member, and Mahdi Ammar the son of MP Ali Ammar (who’s age I haven’t found).
I also want to raise an issue which I’m not sure you personally have, but I have seen elsewhere on this thread and echoed by state department spokesperson Matt Miller that the targets were somehow legitimate because they were members of Hezbollah, which they claim is a terrorist organization.
Hezbollah is a much larger organization with many different functions, including governmental function, but also education and health care. We know that the targets did not only include their military wing, indicating that the targeting was indeed indiscriminate.
If people want to legitimate this terrorist attack by claiming that any member of a group which does terrorism is a legitimate target, that opens the door for all sorts of targets which unambiguously should not be considered military targets, including politicians and workers for governments and their political organizations.
If your country says that the IDF is a terrorist organization (a claim rather easy to make) your country than has the right to target any members of the Knesset that belong to any of the ruling parties is a legitimate target in a terrorist attack, if their family members are hurt in the attack, they become a legitimate collateral damage. Any worker for any ministry in Israel who contributes to the IDF somehow would also become legitimate.
This is of course not true, and the only conclusion we can draw here is this attack is an unambiguously immoral act of terrorism.
First a style point: I don't think you get very far with things like "the only conclusion we can draw is that I'm right". I know I never sound like it, but the one thing I can confidently state in these kinds of discussions is that nothing is unambiguous. When it comes to conflict in the Middle East, if I have to be potentially wrong about things, so do you!
As I've remarked several times on this thread, the standard I'm using for this attack isn't one in which no innocents (or even innocent children) are harmed or killed. I don't like war and would happily confiscate every firearm in North America, but that standard is one no active military in the world meets. Rather: the "state of the art" in targeted strikes is air-to-ground weaponry, which routinely kills civilian bystanders at ratios far exceeding 1:1.
Here, my guess is that the ratio is something far south of 1:100, making this strike --- I think? --- unprecedented in precision in the last 100 years of warfare. We'll learn more as the day goes on, and if/when I'm wrong, I'll certainly say so.
"Terrorism" has nothing whatsoever to do with my thinking on this. Hezbollah is a large, sophisticated, organized, well-supplied combatant force, a military peer to its neighbors, and it is in open armed conflict with Israel.
The collateral numbers here are measured by their intended targets which seems to be all Hezbollah members. This is not a fair measure as Hezbollah has far more members than fighters.
The claim that this is a well targeted attack with legitimate targets ignores this reality. The attack may be well targeted, but the targets are still indiscriminate and illegitimate. That is unless you count any Hezbollah members as a legitimate target. But like I said before that is simply ridiculous.
We'll see, but I don't think it's very likely that Hezbollah school teachers are carrying Hezbollah pagers. There were a bunch of news stories written about why Hezbollah fighters are carrying pagers. Ordinary Lebanese people, from what I can see (I actually looked up market data here) carry Android phones like everybody else does. And I don't think Hezbollah is handing out pagers to random janitors in Dahieh.
Note Reuters reporting on the concentration of reports of strikes here: it's not uniformly spread across the population of Lebanon.
We will see. But at this point it is ill advised to consider Israel to be in the right. We have seen how they conduct their targeting in Gaza, and we have no reason to believe their targeting practice is any more careful, nor humane in Lebanon.
We have every reason to suspect they had no idea who would be carrying these pagers. That they did consider any Hezbollah member to be a legitimate target, be they senior administrators at a hospital, media workers, politicians, etc.
At the very least they must have known that higher party members (i.e. politicians) would be carrying the pagers, and that they had no idea who was actually close when they detonated, and simply didn’t care if children got hurt.
An army who is on trial for genocide does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I think they considered any Hezbollah member carrying one of these pagers to be a legitimate target. Why are senior administrators at hospitals and media workers carrying military command and control equipment?
If it turns out that large numbers of non-military personnel were carrying pagers that blew up, I'll be wrong about this, and I'll say so. My belief that this isn't the case isn't because I have any particular faith in Israel; it's because of the previous reporting about why Hezbollah had people carrying pagers: because it believed Israel was going to target these people through their cellphones. Pagers suck! I think people are carrying these things (or were; nobody's carrying any pagers anymore!) because they have to.
I don't know what "benefit of the doubt" means in this situation. Israel and Hezbollah are at war. War is ruthless.
Anyways all this is to say: Hezbollah is a military peer to Israel (I mean, I think Israel would win, but it wouldn't be easy). "Terrorism" has nothing to do with this. The conflict to me is fundamentally amoral, bilaterally, in a way that isn't the case with Gaza. Israel doesn't occupy Lebanon or control Hezbollah's supply lines. These are two opposing armies doing what armies do during hostilities.
The assumption here—at least from my part—is that this pager attack was an illegitimate state sponsored terrorist attack and deserves to be condemned as such. That statements such as “war is brutal” does not apply here as even war has rules for conduct, and even in wars the innocent deserve to be protected from harm. And war does not excuse terrorist acts.
In most wars, war crimes are committed. When war crimes are committed they need to be condemned, and prosecuted, not excused and repeated.
> Why are senior administrators at hospitals and media workers carrying military command and control equipment?
These are pagers, and cheap once at that, I don’t know if you have ever been a part of any activist organization, but it is pretty standard to assume you are a target of state level intelligence, and that state actors (most likely the police) is spying on you. Any activist would know to try to protect them selves and their organization by minimizing opportunities of breaches. This extends to lower level participants, who are unlikely to actually confront the police or cause any civil disruptions, but participate in other ways.
I assume Hezbollah would take similar measure. That higher level members at non-military institutions still see the need to protect them selves—and their organization—from infiltration. At the very least, it is criminally negligent of Israel to assume that they don’t, and still detonate when there is some probability the innocent will be harmed.
I don't see how an attack launched by one hostile military force against combatants of another, where both forces are in declared open combat, can possibly be described as "state-sponsored terrorism".
Again: all the available reporting suggests strongly that Israel wasn't simply targeting every pager in Lebanon. These were specific pagers procured by Hezbollah for military operations, something widely reported months before this attack.
Even if it targeted only military personnel, they were targeted going about their daily activities, putting their families and others who might, as we saw, just be shopping near them, at risk.
I think this is the reason booby trapping consumer devices which resemble those in use by civilians is an explicit war crime.
You can't guarantee the explode as intended. It is gonna be very difficult for Lebanon to find all of the unexploded devices and secure them. Very likely one of those booby traps will find their way to a thrift store in the next few years and unexpectedly explode when handled by innocent hands.
It is a stretch to call a pager a military equipment and the use of one a “military operation”.
No, Israel rigged consumer electronics used by people during their civilian lives off the battlefield as they posed no threat to anybody. There is no definition of terrorism which doesn’t encapsulate this act.
And no, this act is not justified even if every targeted victim of this attack was a Hezbollah member. As I said before, there are more members of this organization than fighters and generals.
No, that's not what the reporting says. Hezbollah operates its own military networks for these things, procures these pagers specifically for military purchases, and issues them to Hezbollah fighters.
"Off the battlefield" doesn't mean anything here: if they're members of the armed wing of Hezbollah, they are black-letter IHL combatants whether or not they're actively engaged in combat, the same way everybody aboard a naval vessel is a combatant if you sink it, including the cook.
Put it this way: if it turns out that these pagers were widely used by non-military personnel, like school teachers, I'll absolutely say I was wrong, and that this attack was probably hard to justify. If reporting firms up that these pagers exclusively carried by military personnel, does that change things for you?
One of the casualties was the child of an MP. That is not military. So we know of at least one instance of a non-military member being targeted, and their kid killed.
Israel has consistently lied about the military nature of their targets in Gaza. I see no reason to believe they behave any differently in Lebanon.
Also, even if they were all military—which they probably weren’t—they were still going about their civilian lives far away from the battlefield, as they posed no threat to anybody.
Now that some time has passed we know a little more about the victims. Including a press conference by Lebanon’s Minister of Health Firass Abiad. There have been 12 recorded deaths so far. Of those were 4 medical workers, one 8 year old girl, and one 11 year old boy. The press conference noted that many of those carrying the pagers were civilians. And made special mention of the toll this scale of an attack had on their medical system.
The best interpretation for Israel here is that they conducted a terrorist attack in a civilian against an armed group during their civilian lives, inflicting at least some civilian casualties. But we know how Israel conducts it self in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine, and we have every reason to expect their intentions were far more nefarious.
The answer is no. The nature of the attack does not make it OK even if it turns out that only military personnel had these pagers. It is not OK for Israel to weaponize consumer electronics which are widely used in a civilian area, even if the users at the time are most likely military personnel.
But this question is irrelevant because this is very unlikely to be the case. The victims seem to be many civilians.
Since when did naming a country for their military action signify the opinion or inclination of the majority of civic population? When newspapers report on "country A did X" it almost always means their government did X. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make
It is some sort of dehumanization. Since it got into fashion, I've noticed some colleges started to refer to companies in China as 'China'. Like as if they are dealing with Xi when procuring washers.
You are lumping together a population that doesn't necessarily agree with the actions. It creates negative attitudes towards citizens of that country (or people who look like citizens of that country).
Why not both? Location data would be relatively easy to collect and forward, audio not so much (much higher storage and transmission throughput requirements for very low quality source data given the limitations of piezoelectric microphones and the fact that pagers are usually worn on belts).
If you're getting GPS data, collecting people's movements for a month or three probably provides 99% of what you will ever want to know. Once the patterns have been established you're into diminishing returns territory, while the risk of discovery goes up, which would neutralize the value of the explosive attack.
The strategic value of such a perfectly targeted surprise attack is massive, notwithstanding the relatively low fatality rate. Injuries are expensive and often devastating, and the psychological impact is brutal. Logistically, Hezbollah (and many other organizations, militant or not) are going to have to review and/or replace part of their communications tech. That's a massive technical disruption, a significant economic cost, and risks further exposing supply chain information. It's also going to create paranoia about many other electronic devices, poison in the food, and so on.
I'm not sure about the ethics of this. If one were certain that only Hezbollah officers were being targeted then it would be an acceptable kind of asymmetric attack through a novel vector.
However this also seems to have impacted quite a few civilians, and there is a claim (unverified so far) that a hospital just replaced all its pager equipment a couple of weeks ago and would otherwise have been impacted: https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1836080190855795092
If this happened in the US pursuant to one of the wars we've been involved in, we'd definitely be calling it terrorism and/or a war crime. It's a big strategic win for the Israelis in the short term but can hurt them two ways in the longer term. Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion, and non-aligned economic partners of Israel are likely to view Israeli products with renewed skepticism, hurting exports.
It would be a bit rich for us to call this a war crime, since our standard M.O. for targeted strikes --- like everybody else's --- routinely kills innocent civilians in much larger numbers than this.
The point was that the US government regularly accepts civilian casualties in trageted strikes, so it would be hypocritical for the US government to complain now.
Notably, this doesn't apply to anyone who hasn't supported such strikes in the war against terror.
From your source: "killing at least nine people and wounding around 2,800 across [Lebanon]". That's a total casualty count, and does not distinguish civilian from Hezbollah casualties.
Hezbollah itself claims 100,000 members, by which this would represent ~3% of the total force as targets of the attack.
The devices in question were ordered by, and delivered to, Hezbollah, per an NYTimes report I've just mentioned in another reply to another of your comments.
Wikipedia reports some civillian deaths, "including four healthcare workers and two children" citing NBC News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and Associated Press:
Given the very many highly motivated eyes on this story, I'm highly confident that if there were credible reports of a higher civilian casualty rate we'd be hearing about it in spades.
It's clear that there was some broader damage, but overall the attack was highly specific to Hezbollah. Arguments that this wasn't a highly-specifically-targeted attack don't pass the credibility test.
Again, I'm not uncritical of Israel, and try to follow the many nuances of the overall situation. I also realise that it's exceptionally difficult to remain dispassionate when its you and yours who are subject to attacks, and in a conflict spanning generations.
It says thousands were injured, not that the thousands injured were civilians. In fact, it’s likely that most casualties were Hezbollah operatives.
From the first link:
“Reports from Lebanon said Hezbollah recently received a new batch of imported pagers, which were being used to share information about possible Israeli drone strikes and other attacks.”
From the second link:
“The Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said the pagers belonged to the group’s officials and blamed Israel for orchestrating what appeared to be an unusual synchronized attack on Hezbollah’s communications system.”
Based on that, and the limited effective range of the blast (as visible in videos and the fact that the injuries are consistent with a pager in a hand or a pocket), it’s likely that the majority of injuries were of Hezbollah personnel.
Please explain to me how exactly Mossad got these pagers into only Hezbollah hands. It was just a shipment of pagers that was interfered with while in transit. There were absolutely non Hezbollah that had these things. Also please explain to me how nearby innocents were protected. That's right, they weren't.
The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Gold Apollo in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. Most were the company’s AR924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment.
The US would call this terrorism if it occurred in the exact same fashion to itself or allies. The hypocrisy is blindingly clear. It's hypocrisy because they don't complain. Your logic is completely backward.
1. It appears that the AUMBC referenced replaced their equipment but that had nothing to do with this and their doctors weren't impacted.
2. Your note of "...other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion..." is strange considering that this is already the norm. Almost all (perhaps all) of the attacks against Israel have been from terrorists targeting civilians.
Given Israel's successful precision targeting of various senior Hezb members in recent months, I wonder if the pagers were initially used as such, but as suspicion mounted, and chances of an overhaul increased, they decided to hit the kill switch while they still could.
Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days"
It's possible that they expected a higher kill rate. It's also possible that the kill rate will turn out to be higher after the consequences of injuries have time to play out.
> I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
The reason they were using pagers, as opposed to phones, was to avoid exactly this kind of potential attack.
Pagers are (typically) a broadcast technology, the pager has no transmission capability. A page is broadcast from every tower, it has no idea where the receiver is. A targeted page is done by the receiver filtering out and ignoring pages that it isn't the recipient for (eavesdropping all pages is trivial).
The pager device is simple, it doesn't contain a GPS or have any concept of it's own location. No microphone or audio capability, very little processing capability. And adding such capability with something like a bug would be reasonably apparent to anyone opening one up and inspecting it.
How did they make sure a large percentage ended up in the hands of the targets? Seems like this could hit a lot of random people, just anybody using pagers. Unless they had way to target certain customers.
I think you're assuming that all pagers of this model were being sent out like this. That's unlikely.
Much more likely is they compromised someone in Hezbollah that was doing the ordering, or the distributor/vendor they ordered from, modified a couple thousand devices and sent them pretty much directly to their enemy, and only their enemy, to distribute among themselves. Then waited a bit, and set them off.
True but so can explosives. Clearly they were not competent.
Radio signals can be detected of course but it's possible to mitigate that a lot by only doing that at specific times and locations, or on request. And send the data out in batch. Ideally while you have the subject under observation so you know they're not monitoring for signals.
The same way Volkswagen hid their engine manipulation from tests by recognising the test and adjusting parameters.
Well, slightly off topic, but in the case of Volkswagen, everybody knew they (and other car companies) were doing it for at least a decade before the scandal blew up : car magazines were even publishing articles about it !
Compared to Stuxnet it's also a first where this kind of attack was done at scale. Regardless of the particular target it's of course the question whether this is a desirable practice in cyber warfare. For such a new field there are very few ethical guidelines yet, like we do have for more conventional warfare.
Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt. Anybody close to these people could have sustained serious injury, and there are reports of children injured and dead. We’ll have to wait for details to emerge.
Politically, this is the sort of action that invites comparison to conventional terrorism. It also begs the question of why Hezbollah or other actors shouldn’t try a similar attack against civilian targets. It’s almost like a chemical or biological attack, which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against (a big part of why it’s illegal). No country can perfectly safeguard its supply chain from intentional sabotage.
I’m afraid that the entire world is a little bit less safe after this move. Maybe Israel is goading Hezbollah into all-out war, who knows, but this affects all of us.
For a non-infantry massed attack on a military asset, the ratio of military to civilian casualties here is probably going to end up being unprecedented in the history of modern warfare; this will probably end up being an extraordinarily surgical attack by any military standard. Civilians are routinely killed in targeted strikes, because targeted strikes are almost always conducted by air. This attack may end up being distinguished by how few civilians were harmed.
Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is mobilized for all-out war here. Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria; Israel is fully committed to combat operations in Gaza. The north of Israel has been evacuated for months because of indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC, which is more or less at open war with Israel. If either side could have launched an all-out assault (or, I mean, a more conventional all-out assault than this one), they would have done so already.
> Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria
From what I understand this is inaccurate. Prior to the events of today, Hezbollah moral is very high and they have plenty of armaments from Iran - everything from small arms and uniforms to long-range rockets and drones. In fact, they even produce a very nice local drone made from foam and duct tape - literally.
They lost double digit percentages of their fighting forces, with several thousand additional casualties in non-Hezbollah Lebanese military and paramilitary forces. I'm sure they can duct tape drones together or whatnot, but there are reasons Hezbollah has --- quite notably at this point! lots of stories written! --- not escalated in the south even as the conflict between Iran and Israel heats up.
> Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria;
There is an awful lot of reporting stating the opposite of this, and I haven't really seen anything credible questioning the fact that Hezbollah has many thousands of missiles and rockets at the ready, along with a sizable number of competent fighters. In fact, the threat from Hezbollah is widely considered one of the largest deterrents Iran has against a direct attack from Israel.
Despite their potential to harm Israel, the group would almost certainly lose an all out war against the IDF. Many if not most of the members would be killed in such a conflict and Lebanon would be plunged into a war zone. So it's easy to see why Hezbollah would be hesitant to get into a full scale war, despite their combat potential.
Since 10/7 a number of top Israeli officials have advocated for a preemptive assault on Hezbollah. So far they have lost the argument but it still could conceivably happen at any time. Eliminating the looming threat and allowing civilians to return to the north are compelling reasons, but the risk of heavy losses and getting bogged down into another quagmire in Lebanon are serious concerns.
I don't know what it is that you think that article says, but nobody disputes that neither side has invaded the other. The funny thing to do would be to read your preceding comment and then Google something like [nasrallah israel]. I, uh, think Hezbollah's foot soldiers have been given sufficient notice at this point.
Can you please take a few steps away from snark and flamebait in your HN comments? We don't need you to change your views, but we do need you to follow the rules.
> Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt.
You should know that Hezbollah recently shot a rocket at an Israeli playground, 12 or 13 children were killed. The chance of a few civilians being injured is calculated against preventing the enemy from dropping another rocket on another playground.
I read the news in Arabic, there are credible reports of an 8 year old girl being killed in this attack. I haven't seen that yet in English language news. That is a horrible price to pay. But it is part of a calculated risk that, as per those same news sources, killed between 10 to 12 Hezbollah operatives and injured 2700 more.
It's implausible that any "civilian" company was involved. Pretty much all companies involved in the Iranian infrastructure, especially covert nuclear projects, are directly or indirectly owned by IRGC.
That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.
It does not make a whole lot of sense to distinguish the explosives packed into the warhead of an AGM-114 Hellfire missile from those of an explosive vest or a compromised pager. What distinguishes terrorism from military action is target selection, not weapons choice.
I cannot see any comment in the immediate sub-thread making a distinction between explosives per se?
Certainly to me I don't see the difference between explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by someone else. Except that in the first case US voters have some control over the supply -- not much, but some.
The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we consider absolute quantities instead of some relative measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter.
If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager murders.
But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned by some clever code jockey.
Do you honestly believe that "protocols and treaties" established "hundreds of years" ago have any bearing on modern conflict? Do you have any arguments that would be persuasive to those of us who believe them to be more or less irrelevant since the Franco-Prussian War? I'm an American. We firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, then got up the next day and made breakfast. Pick another major combatant nationality anywhere on the globe, and I'll tell you a similar story.
By the standards of modern warfare, what happened today was probably weirdly humane.
I wonder what modern humane outcome plays out to a tiny nation state surrounded by arabs they're engaged in these kind of hostilities with. It seems this balance depends on large imbalanced external support, which will be called into question more and more as the USA loses global grip.
It was astonishingly humane especially considering how effective it was:
1.) Communication network completely destroyed (anyone with a working pager in Lebanon has thrown it in the garbage).
2.) Most targets, while severely injured and even blinded, are still alive - I'm sure their families prefer this to them being dead.
3.) If you are an enemy of Israel, what can you even do now? You cannot assume your phones or your furniture or even your cat is safe. Any one of these things could detonate and kill or maim you at any time. And you can't trust anyone in your organization either.
I deplore zionism, but that doesn't change how humane and effective and incredibly precise this attack was. Probably its humane-ness was not particularly on purpose, and was more a side-effect of the constraints they were working with (hiding explosives in a small pager while still maintaining its correct operation), but that doesn't take away from how much better this is for all the casualties compared to, for example, Hamas casualties in Gaza.
The peace of Westfalia established state sovereignity. That is a cornerstone of international relations, and when it is breached it is usually condemned.
> peace of Westfalia established state sovereignity. That is a cornerstone of international relations
The Westphalian treaties gave France, Sweden and later Russia the explicit right to intercede (i.e. invade) to guarantee the Imperial constitution [1]. (Westphalia was concerned with the Holy Roman Empire.)
Historically there has never been any such moral consensus in the Middle East. It's been a continuous series of wars, massacres, and terrorism going back millennia — since long before Hezbollah or the modern state of Israel even existed.
In a comment by _alphanerd_ in this subthread he points out that problematic states such as Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Australia are in the Eurovision.
Maybe Israel's neighbors object to that?
Or maybe they can't find bad enough musicians to get an entry together and are afraid of losing?
Lebanon’s objection is specifically due to Israel’s participation, according to Wikipedia:
> Lebanon has never participated in the Eurovision Song Contest. The country's broadcasting organisation, Télé Liban, was set to make the country's debut at the Eurovision Song Contest 2005 with the song "Quand tout s'enfuit" performed by Aline Lahoud, but withdrew due to Lebanese laws barring the broadcast of Israeli content.
According to what _Bentley_ posted it sounds as though there is a moral signal: some states that object to Israel consider it to be beneath their standards to participate in the Eurovision. This implies that those that do participate have no problem with what Israel does. That includes the Australians and the others mentioned earlier by _alphanerd_. Otherwise they too could just not participate.
It was successful clearly, not disagreeing with that. So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My point was more that this is a truly significant line that has been crossed for the first time by a major military at this scale. People comparing this to isolated assassinations with booby trapped phones, or to wiretapping and other surveillance, are massively downplaying this.
Hezbollah already attacks civilians indiscriminately for one. Second, "won't someone think of the children" is a tired argument. Hate to be that guy - but maybe this will be a lesson on allowing these terrorists to roam your streets. Avoiding civilian death in a warzone is an impossibility. Limiting it is all you can do. Knowing that, this was an absolutely amazing job at target selection. Of all methods of target selection this is probably the most precise you can get with the exception of snipers, AGM-114-R9X, etc. The psychological damage from this attack alone is probably worth more than any other method. Hezbollah will be crippled at least temporarily and likely afraid to use any technology they don't control the supply chain for.
> which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against
This is not why. It's shied away from because it's extremely difficult to target effectively without causing mass unwanted causalities and the associated killing mechanism is considered cruel and unusual. "Being hard to defend against" is exactly something factored in with weapons. Why would I want to use a weapon that is easy to defend against? If that's the case, the US would march with clubs and bows, you know, "to make things fair".
Hezbollah is a political org, part of the government. Many hospitals, nurses were carrying those pagers.
And, the only well-known fake child death scandal was the one fabricated by Israel aka 40 beheaded babies, babies baked in oven etc- scandals used to justify the real mass killing of over 10,000 palestinian children by now. Can you point to any well known, well-distributed "Pallywood" incident involving children?
Based on the video shared by Reuters, I'm not seeing anything that would focus the attack to the pager's carrier. Anyone standing next to the target would also risk severe injury or death.
ETA: I should perhaps clarify: focus the attack exclusively on the pager's carrier. It does appear to be modestly shaped in some way (in that we're not seeing the pagers go up in a 2-meter-radius fireball), but it's also not contained exclusively to the carrier, has no verification that the carrier is holding the device, etc. Whether one considers that "focused" is left as an exercise for the reader. Certainly more focused than a rocket; a bit less focused than poison.
Hundreds of dead children would mean the devices killed 10x more child bystanders than the military personnel carrying the devices.
What focuses the attack is proximity to the owner wearing it. This is very highly selective in comparison to something like a rockets with accuracy and kill radius measured in double digit meters.
Interestingly, we're looking at the same video. I'm seeing a person who's pocket explodes and the person standing nearest them happened to be lucky enough to not be in the direct path of the blast. I can easily see that detonation severely wounding a bystander if they'd been in the (un)lucky angle and height.
I wouldn't even shoot a nail gun the opposite direction without safety glasses. People are gonna be blinded or vision impaired by the shrapnel just from happening to shop nearby someone with one of these pagers.
It's not a matter of popularity. Some people need the interaction. Others like me hate it.
This is why making it flexible is so great. You could be in the office with other people who enjoy it, while people like me don't have to.
Even before the pandemic I would often hang at the office until 10pm because I could only get work done after the others left. I would get so stressed from all the distractions around me.
The issue is that folks like newbies on the team end up left out, and when everyone is off doing their own thing there is often no actual team - which shows up in a lot of non-obvious ways.
Nothing prevents them from making meetings to connect with / meet their peers. When you work remotely, you need to change your habits a bit. You have the same type of interactions, it just takes some initiative.
Sure, but sitting next to someone and being able to ask them questions is easy, quick, and natural. And often helps build relationships.
As is sitting in an area and seeing who everyone goes to ask questions, and even overhearing the discussions.
So someone can learn how to phrase questions, what are useful types of questions to ask, what types of questions get someone told to ‘do their own research’ vs gets in-depth help, etc.
For a junior, that is very valuable because they often literally don’t even know where to start.
For someone with more experience, they often either already know all these things, or know how to find them out pretty quickly even without the help of watching what is happening, yeah?
That’s a fault of the existing teammates. I always prioritize 1:1 with new members in my team or my sister teams and make myself available for any onboarding or technical questions.
Yeah I'm just totally not a team player anyway. I would avoid such interactions in the office too, by picking another floor. I'm not a mother hen. Other people are and they like to be that, so it's much better that they do it. They also do this over Teams by the way.
I always maneuver myself into such a place that I have something to work on for myself.
reply