Seems about right, my new laptop has 8x that which is a about the same ratio that my last new laptop had to my phone at the time.
5,895 karma · joined March 29, 2014
If we can get people to go to bars/etc on rental scooters then they won't have a car to get back in when they are drunk. Ideally they walk, bus or taxi at that point (new public education campaigns can help with this), but even if they get on a rental scooter, that's still a win for public safety.
I'll point out that it is much easier to take a taxi home and leave a rental scooter at a bar then to have to leave your car there overnight and go back the next day.
Kinda seems like you do since I didn't say anything like that.
> surely you can't be saying "I believe those civilians are being slaughtered/collectively punished/genocided and it's better to keep them where they are rather than let them flee to save their lives because they might not be able to come back"?
I said that Egypt bears some responsibility for the deaths because of they made that choice. I provided historical context because I think Isreal also bears some responsibility for that Egypt's choice because of Isreal's historically poor behavior towards returning refugees with the wrong ethnicity.
> Just out of interest, would you say that the proportion of moral responsibility that Egypt has is equal to the proportion of news coverage and Hacker News discussion Egypt gets on this issue? And if not, do you have an idea why not?
That's a weird question. Moral responsibility isn't something you assign as a fraction and certainly isn't based on how much coverage something gets. That's a bizare way to think about morality, so I'm not even sure why you'd want to ask that in a good faith discussion.
> Furthermore I doubt Netanyahu has any incentive to keep the hostages in Hamas hands
Netanyahu has both a clear lust for power and a slate of corruption charges hanging over his head. This conflict has been quite effective at helping with both, why would he want it to end?
> My view is that if Israel is conducting itself according to international norms on war
They aren't, that's why the ICC has issued arrest warrants. Given your stated stance, you should support Netanyahu turning himself in.
> Ah, but that's something different. I agree that power comes with responsibility. There is a common belief that in any conflict the party in the wrong is the more powerful one.
If a significantly more powerful party is in a conflict with a less power part and is killing way more of them, then yes, the does put the more powerful party in the wrong, reglardless of whatever talking point they have. The more powerful party has the greater responsibility for achieving peace and protecting lives and the failure rests primarily on them.
> As I said, I do not believe absolute numbers of casualties determine justifiability in war. I believe war goals and means determine justifiability.
I didn't ask about absolute number, but a percentage of the population. You seem to be saying that there is no percentage at which you will adjust your point of view. If Isreal kills 90% of the population, that really wouldn't count as ethnic cleansing to you? What about 100%? There's really no point at which you would stop just taking Israel at its word?
> Israel has many more detractors than supporters globally (I would guess the ratio is something like 100:1) so I simply don't expect most of the reporting to be fair to Israel.
If the entire world is telling you to stop murdering children, maybe you should consider listening?
> I simply don't expect most of the reporting to be fair to Israel. Furthermore, I find that many anti-Israel claims simply don't hold water.
Like the Pro-Isreal claim that you made and I debunked? How about casting doubt on the widely accepted death toll numbers?
I've seen the kind of information sources you cite. It's pretty clear you only look for sources that confirm your world view.
When presented with unsourced statistics on the web, probably best to assume the weakest interpretation.
Factually false. Out of well over 1000 annual collosions in GB in 2023 there were a a handful of deaths but they were all the e-scooter riders.
> The real world has a lot of hard sticky-out bits (and perhaps ironically cars don't due to crash testing rules,
The most dangerous parts of the streets for scooters are the cars, not the other "sticky-out" bits that don't move and are pretty easy to avoid if you aren't drunk or on your phone or not looking forward. Less than a quarter of e-scooter accidents involved no other vehicle and I'd be willing to bet those tended to be less serious.
E-scooters are great because they aren't as dangerous to other people. People get to make their own choices about risk tolerance, speed and gear all while presenting less hazard to the public when they make bad choices.
> you have no protection
The protection you get in a car comes from the added mass that also makes you so much more dangerous to other road users.
You also need somone to go take that walk with you and the social skills to organize it
Yes, it is possible to hangout without spending money. That said, the kind of activities it tends to be easier to get people to agree to go do also tend to cost money. As those activities cost more and more, that decreases the amount of socialization that happens. Sure, some of that shifts to lower cost activities and perhaps that shift increases over time as culture changes. That doesn't mean that rising prices don't explain some of the measured decrease in social activity.
That's not really how statistics work. Since the reduction was probably calculated against the population average you need to know the relative size of the groups to calculate the risk increase for the inverse group. Additionaly, the group you specified is not the inverse group since you exclude those who have some, but not all, of the safety signals.
Your calculation would be accurate if almost nobody took all safety precautions (that would mean the average risk rate would be affected much by that group) and everbody else took no safety precautions.
What you have calculated is a rough lower bound for the risk increase given unknown population behavior ratios.
> nor does it actually tell you anything about the base rate safety
It doesn't by itself. What it tells you is given a base of rate of 3x more deadly per mile, those who follow all the rules are as likely to die as an average driver (which still isn't an fair comparison.) To be fair, you'd beed to compare agaisnt driver who have a license, registration, insurance and are wear a seatbelt. (Or maybe helmet..)
I believe it matters how many people you kill. Killing more people is bad.
I think the overall morality is complicated and based on more than that, but yes both the absolute numer if deaths and the ratio of deaths between sides and between combantants / civilians also matters.
> In any case, whilst we're looking at multipliers, what do you think of the Battle of Mosul?
I think any battle where you kill that many more civilians than combatants is deeply problematic. There were war crimes on both sides of that conflict as well.
Technically speaking, the ISIS were the occupying force and this was a "liberation" but I don't think that matters so much practically or morally. The people assuming control had the moral responsibility to keep people safe.
> Furthermore, normally in times of war, third countries allow civilians to flee to safety. Why won't Egypt? Why won't other countries take in refugees via Egypt? Why do they insist that civilians must stay in harm's way?
Isreal has a well established history of refusing to allow refugees to return to their homes.
I agree that Egypth should be allowing them in and does share some moral responsibility.
> It doesn't matter who recognises them. Before Oct 7th they had the monopoly on violence within Gaza. They are the de facto state. Civilian wellbeing is ultimately their responsibility, like German civilian wellbeing was the German government's responsibility in WW2.
When an occupying power destroys all the local infrastructure, deliberately destroys the police force and assume defacto control of the country, they assume the responsibility as well.
> but until the unconditional surrender of Hamas and the release of all hostages I believe that Hamas holds all the moral responsibility for what happens to its people.
The hostages were almost released. It is people like you that insist on unconditional surrender that are the reason they aren't home. That and Netanyahu's malicious desire to hang on to power.
I seriously dont unsterstand the stance that Hamas has ALL moral responsibility for civilian deaths. That doesn't match any moral framework I have ever read or heard about and seems be be just a jingoistic talking point.
> You're in good company. It is very common to believe that "might makes wrong".
I believe power comes with responsibility, yes.
> The death toll is appalling. Hamas should be receive the utmost pressure to unconditionally surrender and release the hostages. Egypt should receive the utmost pressure to allow civilians to flee so that Israel can finish off Hamas and destroy the terror infrastructure they have built in Gaza.
I don't have any support for Hamas or their choices or their war crimes, but then again my government isn't supplying Hamas with weapons to commot those war crimes with.
What I can't understand any moral individual believing what Isreal is doing is ok.
I've answered most of your questions, so I have a question for you: What percentage of the Gaza population needs to be killed before you will call it genocide or even just stop supprting Israel? 2% isn't enough so is it 5%, 20%, 50% or even higher? Will you continue to support Israel until they've killed 100% of the Gazans and achieved peace?
To be fair, I think the allies commited a bunch of war crimes they were never charged with during WWII, and firebombing is high up that list as is dropping nuclear bombs on cities.
That said, WWII was an actual war and Germany (and the axis in general) lost fewer people than their enemies.
This is not a war, this an occupation and slaughter. Isreal has killed 50 times as many people as Hamas.
> Do you have a source for your death statistics that doesn't ultimately trace back to the "health ministry" of an internationally proscribed terrorist organisation?
These numbers are pretty much universally acknowledged as more likely to be too low than too high (including by Isreal.)
Here's a study not done by a Palestinian organization that says that the official Palestinian estimate is 40% too low.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.19.25329797v...
> 3. Not all children who have died in Gaza since 2023 will have been "killed by Israel". Many will have been killed by Hamas for a variety of reasons, including misfired rockets, booby trapped houses, mosques and schools, and getting caught in the crossfire. Since Hamas knows that every child death will be attributed to Israel it's quite happy for that statistic to rise.
I don't even know what to say to the twisted amount of self deception involved in that sentence. "It's not us, they're just killing themselves guys, not our fault."
> As far as I can tell, Israel does not kill children (or any civilians) intentionally. Any civilian killed by Israel in Gaza was unintentional, and civilian deaths occur in any war. This happens all the more in Gaza since Hamas deliberately puts civilians in harms way, and booby traps civil infrastructure or uses it to hide in.
Isreal happily kills civilians to avoid risks to their soldiers, that's why this "war" has such a disproportionate death toll.
> Hamas is the government of Gaza, and as such it seems like it is their responsibility, not Israel's, to take action to ensure that harm is prevented to their civilians, up to and including freeing the hostages they hold and unconditionally surrendering. That's what the governments of Germany and Japan ultimately did.
Hamas won one election 20 years ago and neither Isreal nor the USA recognize Hamas as the government a sovereign country. It seems pretty bad faith to claim Hamas is the government only when it is convienent to blame them. (To be clear Hamas deserves plenty of blame.)
However, I place the responsibility and the majority of the blame on the group with the vast majority of the power: Isreal.
At a certain point, the comparative death toll and comparative wealth/power imbalance make it clear: Isreal is engaging in genocide, not war.
At this point streaming servcies have been enshitified enough to make piracy again the better experience.
I don't think it is that niche. I think lots of people would take advantage of it not just for their kids, but themselves.
The problem is that it is a feature that makes YouTube less "sticky" and thus there is economic incentive against implementing it due to lack of competition in that area. (Their competitors also want to maximize stickiness.)
Let's put Netanyahu in front of the ICC and let the lawyers figure it out.
Edit: That isn't tongue in cheek, I think it is one of the few ways to difuse the cauldron of violence that keeps brewing hotter and hotter. A broad international coalition to hold the leadership on both sides responsible for their war crimes.
Oops, I killed 17,000 kids, totally an accident, my bad, so I'm just gonna keep doing the same thing, but I said it was an accident so that's totally cool right?
You realize that's more than a order of magnitude more than the total number of people killed on October 7th? If October 7th was justification for this war, what Isreal has done in response justifies so much more. (To be clear, I don't believe in collective punishment so neither is justified.)
> How are you so sure that the article I linked is a blatant lie and the one you linked isn't?
I start by looking at the sources reputations, then look at the amount of context that they include that contradicts their implicit or explicit view point. From there the process gets more complicated if necessary.
In this case you have blog source that clearly elides relevant context against a news article that presents the position of both sides coming from one of the more trustworthy news organizations. I don't necessarily trust the AP to be unbiased or not spread propaganda but in comparison to that blog, it is pretty easy to guess which is more reliable.
Gambling is a dangerous addiction for some people. I don't think victim blaming is an effective response.
17,000 kids killed directly by Isreal.
> the UN refuses to collect them and distribute them
A blatant lie.
Actual news coverage of that border crossing:
https://apnews.com/article/aid-gaza-hunger-united-nations-e7...
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_Unit...
The currently state of affairs is that "e-bikes" with more than 750W didn't have a legal classification. They couldn't be treated as motorized bicycles or motorcycles under state law so were it seems they were probably legally limited to private property in Connecticut.
This law seems to expand access as to where these kinds of devices can be legally used, so it doesn't make immediate sense in the context of the article. My best guess for actual relevancy is that it also effectively expands the penalties for using them illegally (i.e. in bike paths or without the appropriate license or insurance) since they now qualify legally as a motor vehicle.
Not a lawyer, just an enthusiast who tries to understand the changing regulatory landscape for my hobby.
It is, however, a great example of the kind of device being discussed in the article. Sold as a "class 2 e-bike" but with a software toggle to let it hit 70mph at will. However, I would argue that in many jurisdictions (such as Connecticut) it still doesn't legally qualify as an e-bike even with the software limiter because it has a >750w motor.
> By law, an electric bicycle is a bicycle that (1) has operable foot pedals and an electric motor of less than 750 watts and (2) qualifies as a class 1, class 2, or class 3 bicycle
Try getting hit by them, you'll feel a pretty big difference. My Zero in a custom riding mode that limits its speed will do way more damage than any e-bike at the same speed.
Not legally.
I would argue that the presence of pedals matters much less than the power and weight of the device when it comes to how it should be regulated. Power and weight are what create the risks that the laws exist to regulate.
If you have an ~80 pound device with hardware that can do >40mph on flat ground, it should not regulated like a bicycle.
Edit: To make my point clearer, I think the focus on top speed in a bit of a red herring. High speeds can be achieved on anything with enough hill/drafting/etc. The rate at which the object can gain kinetic energy is what matters. Devices that gain kinetic energy quickly are much more dangerous to operate. Thus the combination of Power x Weight is what the regulations should focus on. There is such a plethora and proliferation of different device types, any other type of distinction can't keep up and will either leave safety gaps or unnecessarily curtail critical innovation in personal transport technology.
It's like the author did zero research.
While you can't easily modify most bikes to hit 70mph, there is an entire market segment of "class 2" "ebikes" than can be trivially modified to reach speeds that significantly exceed what the law allows (and arguably what is safe on those hardware components.) Often this can be done in the software without any hardware modification. If it can't, there are usually simple modifications that can be made to achieve the same thing.
Including the pseudonyms associated with those stories creates unnecessary risk of, and arguably incentive for those individuals.
I also just don't get the mindset of dumping something like this into an AI tool for a summary. You say "a 300MB JSON file that (hopefully) only exists on my computer" but then exposed part of that data to generate an AI summary.
Having the file on your computer is questionable enough but not treating it as something private to be professionally protected is IMHO another ethical violation.