20 karma · joined June 14, 2023
UBI does not need an increase in taxes, just a proper tiering of it, such that the ultra rich pay more to support society better. By having people who pay negative taxes, they are not burdened with living paycheck to paycheck and can focus on improving their lives. If you are working, saving and paying your proportionate taxes, UBI should not affect you in any way.
It's just a fix for rampant capitalism, where the rich are supposedly working millions of times harder than their exploited working class.
Let me reiterate that the numbers have been accurate so far and for previous conflicts, you can't just brush it away by saying "Hamas said". I can also say "IDF said" and brush everything away, but when there is evidence time and time again that they are accurate, you can't erase them away. Moving on...
I am not sure why you don't consider infrastructure as collateral damage too. That would too shallow of an analysis to forgo. Without infrastructure, like hospitals, power plants, water desalination plants/water towers and even homes, that the IDF has been destroying, there would be no electricity, water, sanitation, healthcare and shelter for the civilians that are left alive after all the bombings. It is already a humanitarian crisis situation, but the loss of infrastructure is almost amounting to a genocide, because there is no support structure left for the people, who are already barricaded in and have no chance to flee. They will just die from dehydration, disease, malnutrition or the weather, if the bombs don't get to them first. I also don't mean the definition of "genocide" that has happened after the successful killing of thousands of people, I mean genocide that shouldn't and cannot happen, because we can't let it happen. "Never again" applies to all human beings. Also the "aid" that is going in, is not enough to sustain the civilians, hundreds of trucks need to go in daily but that many trucks may only go in, in a week.
> 3) a large fraction of "children" appear to be militants.
If you think it's justified to kill women and the "children", than you are no better than the supposed militia you are fighting. I am not sure what to say, further than that. Even B'Tselem would have a stroke hearing that.
> I think this is unrealistic and any effort to do so would be suicide.
I also don't think the carpet bombing is justified and more could have been done. A combined operation from ground and air would have been better, than full air bombardment.
I am not sure how Netanyahu is not in jail after his corruption charges from 2019, who in Israel keeps allowing him back in power if they hate him so much? Just a rhetorical question.
Why are your trying to blame all Palestinians, like as if they are a monolith and all of them are troublemakers?
1. I am not sure if you are saying that extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich are not in charge, but their rhetoric and speech has made it clear they do not care for Palestinian deaths, and rather would like to carry out more killings. If you didn't know about the people in charge of your government, I implore you to look into their history.
2. I would ask you to look more critically at the IDF, after all that B'Tselem has shown them to have committed. I would look to what the IDF did during the peaceful 2018 Great March to Return where they shot and killed hundreds of unarmed civilians, including women and children, and severely injured thousands of others. Only one Israeli soldier was slightly wounded in the whole conflict. They have also been killing children indiscriminately in the West Bank, what would justify that? There are dozens to hundreds of other cases where the IDF has been incriminated for unjustified violence but I am not able to collate them for you at the current time. If that is not enough evidence to change your stance on the IDF, that nobody can help to change your mind.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/28/west-bank-spike-israeli-...
I am not sure about what you mean by "pretty low" collateral damage when almost half of the infrastructure of Gaza has been damaged or destroyed, including historical and heritage sites. More than 17,000 Palestinians have been killed, around 70% being women and children. I guess those "civillian" casualties are militants to you.
It is also disingenuous to say that the casualty numbers cannot be trusted as they are from "Hamas-controlled" entities when historically the numbers the Gazan health ministry gave has tallied with Israeli numbers in every war prior. It is like conflating that the FDA cannot be trusted if Trump said not to get vaccines, because they are under the same government. Different agencies are not held to the same standard and they might not have the same goals, Hamas is mainly a military wing, while the Gazan health ministry cares for the health and survival of their people.
Also, Israel keeps track of every person born and dead in Gaza, they have state-wide surveillance there, they could have chosen to send in surgical strike forces and taken out the militants strategically, but instead chose to carry out one of the heaviest bombardments in the current decades. Netanyahu has also said their military won't leave Gaza, after the war. Seems like they plan to expand their West Bank Occupation operations to Gaza.
I wanted an app, that has the question and answer capabilities of OkC, to get to know a person, without actually having to type anything. It would have filters for partners or personalities. It can have more provocative questions to get the users desires, morals and values. It would be a blind date sort of deal, to prevent it becoming a beauty contest. Meeting in-person would be the main goal, with safety in mind of course. Dating would not be the main point of the app, meeting people would be, doing activities together and such.
It would have a public dashboard of users, like ratio of M:F. I would love the return of the OkC blogs too.
In terms of scaling, I don't care about infinite growth, it would be like a B-Corp with a sustainable growth model. The monetisation could be a 3-6 month full-feature subscription. If it didn't work out, the user could just move on. The other worse option would be ads. The app could be open-sourced or a freemium model, I am not sure about the feasibility.
After going through the comments here, it seems @com2kid had already made something similar but I have some ideas to make it better. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512127
Would love to know what he had learnt from working on that project!