Israel’s entire edge in the tech sector is in lax regulation and a steady supply of experienced, amoral ex-military software engineers. Western entrepeneurs who would otherwise have had trouble finding willing professionals and maintaining legal cover for their adware, data mining, or cyberweapons startup in a home country more concerned with ethics and international relations flocked to Israel over the last couple decades and singlehandedly propped up the local economy.

In return, the US, for instance, gets to wash its hands of the whole affair and say they’re not the ones selling spyware to the Saudis and other western-friendly authoritarian regimes, it’s all out of their control, while American venture capital reaps the rewards of investments in Israeli companies.

I just think we have different definitions of what accountability looks like. Have a good day.

I’m glad you can get excited at the prospect of a handful of cabinet members getting fined a fraction of the millions they enriched themselves by and getting handed 12-month sentences to be commuted while the people they imprisoned for political gain spend years in concentration camps. Where are the presidents on this list, by the way?

PETA is funded by the meat and dairy industry to give animal welfare/rights activists the worst possible PR. It’s hard to imagine doing much worse of a job at what they claim to be their goals.

How obsessed can people get with one inconsequential guy for being cringe on the internet?

There’s actually plenty of material to compare to, with a swath of Pal designs that are clearly original, in a similar style with similar inspirations. Then there are models with almost precisely the same silhouette and proportions as iconic Pokemon, which are frankly just worse designs for it, since the altered colors and markings clash with the original concept and result in a generally forgettable whole. They clearly had the skill and motivation to innovate more within their niche, but instead the game is half-full of what feel like hastily painted over placeholders.

• Segways
• 3D TVs
• steam-powered automobiles
• Lisp machines
• hovercraft
• supersonic airliners

A kitchen sink monster taming survival sandbox game with Pokemon-like cute creatures, a handful of reaaaaally familiar designs, edgy shock factor marketing featuring gun violence and animal abuse, and enough obviously Pokemon-inspired gameplay elements that Nintendo decided to bring out all the IP big guns, from copyright infringement down to bullshit mechanics patents and claims that mods don’t count as prior art. (if a modder invents something, no they didn’t, and a developer that puts the same feature in a game years later can sue anyone who imitates the mod, according to Nintendo.)

iirc, they fell behind during COVID, the increased funding and facility expansions needed to actively push them back down into the chokepoint never got approved, and the trump administration would rather spend 10x more moving all the infrastructure up to the US-Mexico border than do anything that would help other countries “for free” (even though they already chip in).

A lot of those reports are nonsense. There’s solid evidence that several dozen, maybe a hundred at most, people were killed by friendly fire, which tends to get exaggerated to “every single victim at the Nova festival was killed by helicopter strafing under the Hannibal Directive.” Neither side anticipated how easy the siege would be to break, and the resulting undisciplined bloodbath isn’t out of line with similar anticolonial revolts throughout history. I don’t think there’s any reason to jump to conspiracy theories to explain the results of the Israeli government getting lost in its militaristic hubris and dehumanization of Palestinians.

It would make a very apt metaphor for the machines as a social construct, fragments of billions of people’s subconscious thoughts combining to maintain the system that holds them captive.

No, all the danger to children comes from satanic pedophiles cold-messaging strangers from trailer parks in hell. Billionaires can always be trusted with sensitive data and photos of children. Parents also notoriously never do anything bad to their children.

9 months is a typical direct transfer, using a traditional rocket engine whose thrust is so high you can basically treat it as infinite: accelerate up to your transfer speed in a few minutes and coast until you need to slow down in a similarly negligible amount of time. You need to set a lot of gas on fire in those few minutes, though. Electric propulsion is so low thrust that it can’t put you on that kind of direct trajectory in one go, so the trip is more of a slow spiral around the sun with continuous thrust the whole way. The tradeoff for everything taking forever is unbelievable fuel savings, which is a surprisingly common occurrence in space travel.

Time tends to sand off the rough edges of any organization that wants to keep pulling in new members and that doesn’t need a framework of total control to protect itself from fizzling out early. It’s an evolutionary process, not just historical whitewashing. Though it’s also historical whitewashing.

Well, obviously?

Easy honestly, you just have to put some effort into your appearance and be ok with that attention coming from weird 60 year old men, just like anyone else.

You would not believe it, I just met the protagonist of sex the other day. Every time a woman mentions being interested in sex in any way, they secretly mean sex with him. I met another one the day before that, too. Actually it’s wild how many random guys on telegram, discord, forum direct messages, and literally any other means of internet communication are all the protagonist of sex.