This video by a political science professor explains it best: https://youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY?si=N5oHElN4Xlbiqznh

In short, the only people who truly know are Hamas, and the best the rest of us can do is speculate.

Some possibilities are that Hamas wanted to sabotage normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Muslim world, that Hamas wanted to bait Israel into a wildly disproportionate response that would garner themselves sympathy and recruits, that Hamas was bluffing and feigning strength and counting on Israel to think the attack was bait, that Hamas was just acting on bloodlust and wanted to attack regardless of the consequences, or many other possibilities.

Further, we focus a lot on the substative issues, i.e., the grievances and disagreements at hand, but we don’t talk about the bargaining frictions nearly enough. There are countless border disputes around the world, and yet they rarely result in war. Why? Because war is costly and most wish to avoid it. War typically happens when there are both substantive issues and bargaining frictions, i.e., things preventing the two sides from negotiating a solution. But us onlookers can’t even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.

All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won’t be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn’t actually know with any degree of certainty. Nobody but Hamas actually knows.

I do recommend watching the full video above, as the professor is very engaging, rather amusing, and covers this topic quite thoroughly.

And Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in cervids such as deer, moose, and elk, which thankfully has not been shown to be transmissible to humans yet. Prions are the stuff of nightmares.

Oh, and Fatal Familial Insomnia.

Definitely. If you don’t understand how the world works, you can’t tell if someone else does either. Only experts can easily spot fake experts. And that’s exactly the trouble with things like pseudoscience and misinformation; it’s easy to fall for without the domain knowledge necessary to avoid falling for it.

A great example is when you’re in elementary school and you get that one really athletic kid on your team for some team sport in gym class. You know you’re not on that level and never will be, so you tie yourself to them, knowing that them succeeding is good for you.

Likewise, we like to attach our fortunes to a designated person, and they become greater than just a person in our mind. Like, that athletic kid is not longer simply a kid who’s good at sports; they’re the athletic kid. Our favored 19th-century political thought leader is no longer just some person who had opinions on society and wrote them down; they’re a political messiah.

The type of biome you get depends largely on availability of water, not temperature.

Deserts are deserts because they have very poor availability of water most of the time. This is most often caused by simple lack of precipitation, but other factors can influence this:

• High temperatures cause high evaporation rates, meaning to need more precipitation to achieve the same level of plant growth. This is why, for example, 10 inches (25.4 cm) of precipitation will get you desert in the tropics, subtropics, and temperate latitudes, but it’ll get you boreal forest in the colder subpolar latitudes.
• Extremely low temperatures (such as in Antarctica) result in everything being perpetually frozen. Most of Antarctica is a desert, both because it gets very little precipitation and because all the ice on the ground isn’t available as liquid water.
• Extremely sandy or gravelly soils which do not retain water cause poor water availability, even with abundant precipitation and a mild climate. While these aren’t typically classified as "true deserts), the plant life certainly reflects the harsh conditions and poor availability of water.

As for why we largely don’t see desert at the equator, it’s because of precipitation. Due to the circulation of cold and warm air in the atmosphere, the equator typically sees warm air, often laden with moisture due to the oceans and the high moisture capacity of warm air, rise. As it rises, it cools, and because cool air cannot hold as much moisture as warm air can, it drops a lot of that moisture as rain. This results in most of the equator getting a lot of rain.

Once the air has risen and cooled, it cycles north and south into the subtropics, where it falls down to earth again. And in falling, it warms up again, especially as these regions still receive a ton of sunlight, particularly in the summer. But the air has already lost much of its moisture, so now it’s just a bunch of hot, dry air blasting down over the subtropics. This is why we have bands of deserts across most of the subtropics, from the Sahara to the Middle East to the desert of the SW US and northern Mexico. Same on the opposite side of the equator, with the Kalahari desert in southern Africa, the Australian outback, and the Patagonian desert.

There are other factors, too, of course, such as rain shadows from mountains and ocean currents, but the atmospheric circulation is the big one to answer your question.

Granted, there is a difference between a temp agency or a third-party recruiter and a “coaching” type service. The former are strictly about finding applicants, and they get paid for that service by the prospective employers. The latter are about 1-on-1 coaching, CV editing, etc., and hence they’re paid for by the prospective employee.

That said, I’ve never used one of them nor do I really see the point, given the wealth of information available for free out there. Then again, I did benefit from speaking to career advisors at my university, which were free to me at the point of service but obviously still paid for by me via my tuition.

I am struggling to find any online testimonials from third parties. I have seen other similar deals with other legit companies, but how they usually work is you sign a contract with them to give them a certain percentage of your salary for the first year or two of any job they help get you hired for. This is important as it gives them an incentive to actually follow through and get you as good a job offer as they can. With an upfront payment like this, they have no material incentive to follow through and actually try to get you a good job. Even if they’re not a straight-up scam, it might be sufficient for them to avoid a lawsuit by getting you one or two crappy job offers, then throwing up their hands and saying, “We’ve done our job; it’s on you if you don’t wanna accept these jobs.”

I wouldn’t bother with these guys. If you really want this sort of coaching, go for a reputable one that you would sign a contract giving them a percentage of your salary. And definitely one with plenty of third-party reviews online.

This is exactly what I don’t understand about people who want peace in Ukraine as soon as possible and at all costs: capitulation for the sake of short-term peace endangers long-term peace.

If we globally set the precedent that you can invade whomever you want and win just because you have nukes, that makes for a vastly more dangerous world. Every country with nukes will suddenly be more willing to go all imperialist, and all the countries without nukes will want to have them as a guarantee against invasion. And I don’t know about y’all, but a world with way more nukes in way more hands is way more dangerous.

Plus, Putin has shown he’ll keep on invading neighbors so long as he can get away with it. Delivering a crushing defeat to Russia and specifically Putin is the only way to achieve a more lasting peace.

Me, who’s not in web dev:

Remember that in social media (including Lemmy) there’s always some sort of general audience, lurkers that are following the discussion but not interacting with it. What matters is less to convince the moron(s) and more to inform the general audience.

This 100%. The rule of thumb I’ve heard is that about 90% of people are lurkers, 9% are commenters, and 1% are posters. This might be skewed somewhat on lemmy, as the reddit migration resulted in a disproportionate amount of commenters and posters to move to lemmy, plus the general sense of “doing my part” to provide content for this platform.

Anyhoo, regardless of the actual numbers, the most important people to convince in an online discussion are the onlookers. Rarely will you convince the person you’re debating, but if you come in calm and rational and bring good links and supporting evidence to your claims, most lurkers will recognize that in my experience. If you look deranged and/or ignorant, you’re unlikely to sway many except those who already agree with you.

The reason this is important is because, unfortunately, misinformation can spread like wildfire on the internet if you let it, so convincing onlookers of the actual facts is important. Sure, it’s not healthy to dedicate our lives to schooling ignoramuses on the internet, but it’s always good to help in the ways you can in the fight against misinformation.

For science news/communication, Sabine Hossenfelder is really good. She’s an actual physicist and does a great job at presenting science news in a no-bs way. Also a good sense of humor.

For climate-related stuff, Climate Town is very good. He has a master’s degree in climate policy, and he cites a ton of sources. His videos have a lot of humor and sarcasm, but they’re very strongly fact-based and in-depth. He’s not strictly news, but he does more mini-documentaries of topical topics relating to climate science and especially climate policy.

For general journalism and analysis, The Atlantic and The Economist are very good in my experience. They’re both subscription-based (which honestly might be why they’re so good; they don’t have to chase clicks for ad revenue), but you can just browse their website for articles, then copy-paste the article links into archive.is to bypass the paywall. Both have a lot of excellent explanatory journalism and analysis.

I also find public broadcasters produce a lot of good content, as they likewise don’t have to chase clicks for ad dollars. PBS and NPR (American), CBC (Canadian), DW (German, but they have English-language documentaries on youtube here), and Al Jazeera (Qatari, just don’t trust their reporting on Qatar; their English international journalism is highly reputable, though, and they produce good documentaries available on youtube here) are some examples. In general, I find the long-form content produced (i.e., longer videos and documentaries as well as long-form articles) by these outfits to be better for “getting informed” than their regular just-the-facts news.

Amongst the above public broadcasters, I especially recommend the DW documentaries. They’re really prolific and produce a ton of high-quality documentaries, all available for free on youtube.

For geopolitics and the war in Ukraine, William Spaniel is the best I’ve found. He’s a professor of political science, and his videos are in-depth and topical on the happenings of the war. He also gives great insight into political science and geopolitics as a whole. Also has a good sense of humor and engaging style. He’s also very quick to upload an analysis whenever there’s a major development in the war.

For general data-based analysis, Our World in Data is a really good website. All the data is open-access and open-source, and they have a treasure trove of good charts and accompanying analysis for exploring the world by data. You can filter by subject category as well.

The main issue I find with strict factual reporting like Reuters or the AP is that most of us simply don’t understand the context on every single issue to think critically about every story we read. Like, I know I have certain topics I do know a lot about, but the world is just too complex for me to know a lot about every topic.

This is where good explanatory journalism can come in, like Vox does. If you can find a good explanatory journalism outlet that you can trust (for me Vox is one of them), it can do a lot for your understanding of the news. There are also solo journalists doing this, scientists doing science communication, and so forth. Explanations by experts are worth their weight in gold.

Honestly, the best way to get informed is outside of social media. What gets people talking isn’t always what you should know, and what people talk about on social media isn’t typically a very high level of discourse. Sure, you do find occasional people putting in high-effort, informed comments, but it’s hard to separate those from all the noise.

Probably my top recommendation is to find a non-fiction book (or several!) with good reviews and written by an expert on a topic that interests you and read it. As an example, I’m really interested in sustainable agriculture and gardening, so I got a few books on the topic, Farming the Woods and Silvopasture, and I read them. The nice thing about entire books written by experts is they’ll include a lot of details and specifics that you simply wouldn’t know that you don’t know. And because it’s a book, not some short video that has to appease an algorithm, they can take the time to guide you through all the depth you would miss from more superficial material.

Be wary to find legit books by legit experts, as there’s unfortunately nothing stopping charlatans from pretending to be experts to sell you stuff or peddle a weirdo ideology.

And thus the question becomes how we can craft a fairer legal system that isn’t so pay-to-win, but still maintains the core principles of property rights that allows business to, ya know, happen. Sure we could do what many naïve people on the internet want and seize the means of production, but who on earth would want to start a productive business or make productive investments in a country where the government can just up and seize your assets without justification? Just as we need protection against businesses screwing us over, we also need protection against government screwing us over. Anyone who says we should just seize assets and nationalize industries willy nilly should ask themselves if they wanna risk some ghoul like Ron DeSantis being the one with the power to do that.

As to actual answers on how to make such a system that isn’t pay-to-win but still maintains a stable system and rule of law, I don’t actually know. I’m no expert in the legal system. But I’m sure there are experts out there who have spent a lot of time thinking about these sorts of questions and have ideas on how to improve/reform.

I would like it if they at least talked about the real solutions, or perhaps provided incentives for municipalities to institute the necessary changes. Instead, we get them talking about things like rent control (well-meaning but horrible policy) and banning boogeymen like foreign investors (as if native-born slumlords are any less predatory).

If absolutely nothing else, they oughta be using their bully pulpit to get a national conversation going about these things, rather than solution theater that maintains the status quo.

Of course, the biggest thing they could do would be a federal land value tax to replace some amount of income taxes and other federal taxes. Land value taxes are more economically efficient, progressive, basically impossible to evade, can’t be passed on to tenants, incentivize more and denser housing (and less sprawl), and reduce upward speculative pressure on housing prices. In theory, there is no limit to how many taxes can be replaced by land value taxes; it has been shown that land value taxes are capable of replacing all taxes at all levels of government.

At the federal level, it seems absolutely nobody cares about pushing the real solutions – abolishing our insane zoning codes that bake in inequality, abolishing other crazy land use regulations like parking minimums, and taxing land.

Canada has some of the most habitable land per capita in the world, so clearly it’s not a shortage of land or a “toO mAnY iMmiGrAnTs” problem (as some people would like to make it out to be). The problem is we have all collectively bought into the same delusion as America – that we can have government-mandated suburban sprawl for all, and that home values can go up in perpetuity.

But suburban sprawl is thoroughly unsustainable – both environmentally and economically – and the land use laws we use to artificially manufacture suburbia are artificially restricting housing supply, choking the economy, and driving inequality sky-high.

And those very same laws we use to mandate sprawl-for-all are responsible for maintaining housing-as-an-investment. But to be a good investment, housing has to appreciate faster than inflation, but if it’s outpacing inflation, it by definition cannot be affordable!

Plenty of desirable, high QoL cities have shown that upzoning can stabilize rents. Plenty of desirable, high-growth regions have shown that taxing land can stabilize housing prices. And any new housing – even market rate or “luxury” – improves overall affordability.

The housing crisis is a policy choice.

Edit: shoutouts for !yimby@lemmy.world and !justtaxland@lemmy.world

Exactly! Imagine if I said, “If we devalue my car, why did I spend years of toil to purchase it?” I’d look crazy. You buy a car for its innate utility, just like you buy housing for its innate utility. Cars ain’t an investment, and neither should housing be. Possession of artificially scarce property should not be the key to free money taken from those with the misfortune of being younger or later to market than you — that’s exactly the mechanism speculators and landlords exploit, driving up economic inequality and making life 100x harder for the rest of us.

I know the YIMBY movement has been growing tremendously across North America lately, but we still have a long way to go to actually eliminate the core problems manufacturing this housing crisis, e.g., mandatory parking minimums, exclusionary zoning, and rampant NIMBYism.

Housing ought to be a consumer good like any other – you buy it, use it, and it depreciates with use. Nobody expects a car to increase in value once you drive it off the lot. But somehow with housing, we’ve all bought into the delusion that housing is an investment. But to be a good investment, it has to appreciate faster than inflation, which means it cannot be affordable!

But this delusion is exactly why we have so much NIMBYism. If you manufacture an artificial scarcity to block out competition, suddenly the class of people who own homes or property can milk it for lots of money, at the expense of the rest of us. And almost all our politicians are homeowners.

I had a numerical methods class where the prof let us do the assignments in whatever language we wanted. It was nice because 1) fuck MATLAB, and 2) I’m a shill for Julia, so I got to do all my assignments in Julia. I saw on github at least one previous student for the course had done their assignments in Fortran. I suspect the vast majority did their assignments in Python, though.

What you’re describing is essentially how society functioned for most of human history until the advent of large-scale, organized civilization. In fact, even in modern society, most family structures and friendship dynamics worldwide still use this.

Mutual aid depends upon reciprocity, the idea that I help you today on the understanding that you’ll help me when I need help. But what happens when Gondor calls for aid but Rohan refuses to answer, especially despite being capable of it? Well, at a small scale (such as within families or among friends) we make a mental note to never help that particular person again, and we might even tell others that they’re a selfish scumbag and not to trust them. Therein lies the disincentive to cheat: if you cheat, you will find yourself cut off from any future aid.

But humans have a fundamental limit to how many personal relationships we can maintain. In fact, this concept has a name: Dunbar’s Number.

Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.[1][2]

It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.[8][9]

So if your society/family/mutual aid group gets bigger than Dunbar’s number, you stop being able to meaningfully keep track of who’s a cheat, and so does everyone else. Without that, cheaters can cheat without nearly as much repercussion, which breaks down the whole system of trust mutual aid is built upon.

And that’s why we now have more complex systems in modern society. Things like currency and laws to ensure fair exchange and stop cheaters. But even with all of this, we still have mutual aid in the form of our immediate friends and family. And because friends and family are a naturally select group, they’ll never surpass Dunbar’s number, allowing the system of trust to (mostly) function. It still sometimes breaks, of course, such as when families excuse toxic behavior so as to not rock the boat.