> Who is your enemy and why do they want to hurt you
It seems like the perfect occasion to quote Mickens' immortal words:
> Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is
not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@
virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to
use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos
of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.
If they are that competent then it implies they let October 7th and September 11th happen. My know-nothing take is that given the funds, lack of morals, and government support they can pull off some actions that benefit them, but let’s not act like it is more than it is.
Don’t forget that governments are big organizations. The Israeli government “knew” in the sense that they were earned by the Saudi and Egyptian governments, and the Israeli intelligence community had Hamas’ plans at least a year before the attacks and widely circulated them, and had specific warnings months and days before the attacks:
One take on this is that Netanyahu allowed them to happen because he needs to stay in power to delay his personal risk of going to jail, which would be compatible with his subsequent actions to prolong the war, but it’s also quite plausible that this simply reflects widespread arrogance: many reports say the intelligence alerts were ignored because senior officials didn’t believe that Hamas was capable of a sophisticated attack. Their tactical excellence would have fed into this, because they generally do outclass their opponents considerably.
I'm a big Netanyahu critic, as are many in Israel nowadays. And I think he'd do pretty much anything to stay in power, which is at least some part of the reason the war is still ongoing, if not the main reason.
But the idea that he actually knew about this and let it happen, is IMO very, very unlikely. I mean, just from that same pragmatic perspective in which he'd do anything to remain in power - he lost massive amounts of support because of October 7th. He's been able to claw some of that support back, but he's still polling far below where he was before October 7th, and it is very unlikely he will remain in office past the next elections.
But the idea that he actually knew about this and let it happen, is IMO very, very unlikely.
Another take is somewhat between yours and that of the parent:
It's not that Bibi "knew" that an all-out massacre was coming on the scale that it actually did. Rather, that he chose to discount the signals he was receiving (that something "big" was in the works), and to downgrade the actual risk to his people. Thinking "Okay, so they might try something, but then we'll just hit back with some heaver-than-usual rounds of lawn mowing. Which will get the message across, and be lots of fun besides."
So in that sense he did "know", in that he could have known if he wanted but his ideology and his blind belief in his insane long-term strategy vis-a-vis Hamas prevented him from seeing what should have been staring him in the face.
Very much like with Bush II and the warnings he got about 9/11 -- but in Bibi's case, apparently the indications were much more specific.
Regardless of what Bibi knew or didn't know, the army was totally gone. Bibi is not the chief commander of the army, there is the commander of the South, the chief of staff (ramatkal), the head of intelligence - all were missing in action. Israel's entire understanding of border defense was completely lacking - and we now know that the same issue has been going on in the North. Had Hezbollah wanted to they probably could have created an even bigger October 7th - that's why Israel is now insisting on creating some kind of security zone clean of Hezbollah fighters for a few kilometers in South Lebanon.
The stark truth is that no one in the public really knows, yet, because there still hasn't really been any outside investigation of what happened. Netanyahu is pushing hard against such an investigation, btw.
The little we do know doesn't seem to point to him being a single point of failure - it does seem like there were many warnings, but for various reasons being uncovered now, it looks like several people in the establishment discounted these.
I do too think it's more stupidity than malice, but this is a very rare case of a conspiracy theory that could easily convince me. One, the civilians hit by the 7th october are bedouins, leftists still living in their anarchist commune, and partying teens/YA who wouldn't vote for him anyway. Two, intelligence agencies all knew, they had the plan (according to haaretz), and it is well-known that Egypt send a lot of advance warning (the week when it happened).
The fact that most of the IDF was busy finding ways to "liberate" land in the left bank while it happened to me is a reason why i mostly think it is due to stupidity. It's very plausible, and that's what IDF primary purpose was until last october. By removing people from their houses in the west bank, they allow settlers to take that land (as it is unused), and that's how Israel grow. It was like that that they took my father's (christian) orphanage and school: pretexted the building was too old and needed reparation, put the Sisters and the kids out, destroyed the orphanage, settled the place. Easy. They probably thought the warnings were given to prevent them to build new settlements fast enough, and choose to ignore them.
> It was like that that they took my father's (christian) orphanage and school: pretexted the building was too old and needed reparation, put the Sisters and the kids out, destroyed the orphanage, settled the place. Easy. They probably thought the warnings were given to prevent them to build new settlements fast enough, and choose to ignore them.
> the civilians hit by the 7th october are bedouins, leftists still living in their anarchist commune, and partying teens/YA who wouldn't vote for him anyway.
That's a pretty crazy claim. There were very few Bedouins killed (and how the heck would Bibi know who Hamas was going to kill btw? Hamas could have tried driving straight to Ashkelon or could have focused only on Sderot).
Nova party was not a left wing event, right wingers are just as likely to go to raves - I would say the rave was pretty much an ordinary representation of Israeli secular society.
Other than that tons of cops got killed, tons of right / center leaning people in the towns near Gaza and so on. And yes quite a few left wingers.
His party polls very low among the youth (that do not vote a lot anyway), i'm not saying that people who go to raves are left or right-wing, i'm just making a claim about their youthfullness. I don't even believe that anyway, i think it's more stupidity than malice, i just wanted to say i understand the people who believe that.
I don't think this is a Netanyahu issue anyway, i think that most israeli leaders, whatever their political leaning would probably have made the same mistakes. Not at least acknowledging "discourse on colonialism" from Cesaire when you have settlers yourselves is to me a grave mistake of the Israeli society. I'm not saying you must agree with most of it, i don't, or that it apply 1 for 1, it doesn't, but acknowledgement this text exist and trying to draw parallels and do a self-criticism is a very good way to limit the impact of colonialism on your own population and (especially in this case) leadership.
It’s too conspiratorial for my tastes, too, but I think you have to at least evaluate it given how much advanced notice they had. It certainly wouldn’t be unprecedented for someone to think they could spin things in a more favorable direction than turned out to be the case.
That said, if I had to bet my money is on simple arrogance. When you’re that consistently outclassing your opponent it’s easy to assume that’s always true as opposed to to _mostly_ true. We had similar problems with 9/11 where FBI offices were playing internal political games because they just weren’t serious enough about major domestic attacks.
Don't confuse ruthlessness for competence. Israel does a lot of things because it knows it can get away with them. Israel is also known for spreading blatant disinformation. Occam's Razor suggests they were unprepared for the Oct 7 attack because they simply didn't see it coming even if they knew Hamas was up to something.
When having terrorist organisations shoot bottle rockets at you or have their members blow themselves up is a common occurrence and your tolerance of collateral damage in your military counter-attacks is so high that you've continuously killed an order of magnitude more people in your counter-attacks every year while maintaining a much higher ratio of civilians casualties per military target, you don't actually need good intel because your mode of response defaults to "just kill 10x as many of them as they killed of us".
This happens on mine if I don't let the scale calibrate before the first measure. The scale turns on if you step on it, so it's tempting to just put both feet on in quick succession while the scale it's still off. That will give you a wrong reading. If you step off, the scale calibrates, and the next reading will be right.
You should get two equal readings if for the first one you push on the scale with one feet, take it off, wait a few seconds, then weigh yourself.
Case insensitive matching is a surprisingly complicated, locale-dependent affair.
Should I.txt and i.txt match? (Note that the first file is not named I.txt).
Case insensitive filesystems make about as much sense as ASCII-only filenames.
You don't need to decide how to upper or lower case a character to be insensitive to case, though. Treating them all as matching isn't a terrible option.
And yet case insensitive file name matching / string matching is one of my favourite windows features. It’s enormously convenient. An order of magnitude more convenient than the edge cases it causes me.
People aren’t ASCII or UTF-8 machines; “e” and “E” are the same character, that they are different ASCII codes is a behind the scenes implementation detail.
(That said, S3 isn’t a filesystem, it’s more like a web hashtable key-to-blob storage)
> People aren’t ASCII or UTF-8 machines; “e” and “E” are the same character
They are the same character to you, a native speaker of a Western language written in a latin script. They are the same to you because you are, in fact, an ASCII machine. Many many people in the world are not.
They are the same to me, they are different in ASCII, therefore I am not an ASCII machine. To me, the person using the computer to do work. Not the person wanting to do extra work to support the computer's internal leaky abstractions of data storage.
Your position, the position of too many people, is that I a native speaker of English etc. should not be allowed to have a computer working how English works because somewhere, someone else is different. This is like saying I shouldn't be allowed an English spell checker because there are other people who speak other languages.
Are the words hello and HELLO spelled differently? I am pretty squarely in the camp that filesystems should be case sensitive (perhaps with an insensitive shell on top), but I would not consider those two words as having a different spelling. To me that means they are the same sequence of characters.
And you seem to be conflating characters and letters. There are fewer letters in the standard alphabet than we have characters for the same, largely because we do distinguish between some letter forms.
I suppose you could imagine a world where we don't, in fact, do this with just the character code. Seems fairly different from where we are, though?
When you press the "E" key on a US keyboard and "e" comes out, do you return the keyboard because it's broken? If not, then you know what definition I'm using even if I misnamed it.
Every single time I type a path or filename (or server name) in the shell, or in Windows explorer, or in a file -> open or save dialog, I don't trip over capitalization. If I want to glob files with an 'ecks' in the name I can write *x* and not have to do it twice for *x* and *X*.
When I look at a directory listing and it has "XF86Config", I read it in my head as "ecks eff eight six config" not "caps X caps F num eight num six initial cap Config" and I can type what I read and don't have to double-check if it's config or Config.
Tab completion works if I type x<tab> instead of blanking on me and making me double check and type X<tab>.
Case sensitivity is like walking down a corridor and someone hitting you to a stop every few steps and saying "you're walking Left Right Left Right but you should be walking Right Left Right Left".
Case insensitivity is like walking down a corridor.
In PowerShell, some cmdlets are named like Add-VpnConnection where the initialism drops to lowercase after the first letter, others like Get-VMCheckpoint where the initialism stays capitalised, others mixed like Add-NetIPHttpsCertBinding where IP is caps but HTTPS isn't - any capitalisation works for running them or searching them with get-command or tab-completing them. I don't have to care. I don't have to memorise it, type it, pay attention to it, trip over it, I don't have to care!.
"A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant." - Alan Perlis.
DNS names - ping GOOGLE.COM works, HTTPS://NEWS.YCOMBINATOR.COM works in a browser, MAC addresses are rendered with caps or lowercase hex on different devices, so are IPv6 addresses in hex format, email addresses - firstname.lastname or Firstname.Lastname is likely to work. File and directory access behaving the same means it's less bother. In Vim I :set ignorecase.
In PowerShell even string equality check is case insensitive by default, string match and split too. When I'm doing something like searching a log I want to see the english word 'error' if it's 'error' or 'ERROR' or 'Error' and I don't know what it is.
If I say the name of a document to a person I don't spell out the capitalisation. I don't want to have to do that to the computer, especially because there is almost no reason to have "Internal site 2 Network Diagram" and "INTERNAL site 2 network diagram" and "internal site 2 NETWORK DIAGRAM" in the same folder (and if there were, I couldn't easily keep them apart in my head).
All the time in command prompt shell, I press shift less often, type less, change directories and work with files more smoothly with less tripping over hurdles and being forced to stop and doublecheck what I'm tripping over when I read "word" and typed "word" and it didn't work.
On the other hand, the edge cases it causes me are ... well, I can't think of any because I don't want to put many files differing only by case in one directory. Maybe uncompressing an archive which has two files which clash? I can't remember that happening. Maybe moving a script to a case sensitive system? I don't do that often. In PowerShell, method calls are case insensitive. C# has "string".StartsWith() and JavaScript has .startsWith() and PowerShell will take .startswith() or .StartsWith or .Startswith or anything else. That occasionally clashes if there's a class with the same name in different case but that's rare, even.
In short, the computer pays attention to trivia so I don't have to. That's the right way round. It's about the best/simplest implementation of Do What I Mean (DWIM) that's almost always correct and almost never wrong.
> Both options are independent of file system case-sensitivity.
In Windows world it works everywhere, in any win32 program - file open dialogs, et al. Here you have to have it built in to every tool. (and windows doesn't do it at the filesystem layer)
None of these are the filesystem though, they are all abstractions over the file system that could easily implement case insensitivity, and as a sibling comment pointed out, actually do in many cases. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of interacting with files using a case insensitive interface. I just don't feel like it should be the job of the filesystem to enforce case insensitivity.
The problem is real though. It stands to reason that the people that know how planes can be built safely are the one building planes; otherwise you could get in a situation where "those who know, build planes; those who don't, tell them how to do it".
There is a similar problem with financial regulation; my understanding is that the knowledge transfer between industry and regulation there is solved by the equally problematic "revolving doors", where people alternate between regulating and advising companies (and thus as regulators they don't want to make too many enemies).
Boeing merged with one of their competitors, and now outsource to subcontractors; both of these suggest the barriers, high though they are, are not insurmountable.
Also, the FAA could ask people from Lockheed to mark Boeing's homework.
The revolving door problem is mostly people coming back from a stint at a regulator to private employment at an salary that sometimes affect how beneficial their stint as a regulator was to the company hiring them post public service.
If that system was made one way so that people retiring from industry to government were forced to burn all "financial" bridges to the industry they were regulating by forcing them to accept a clause that they can newer go back especially not as a consultant a lot of those issues goes away.
No just regular male + female plugs. If not damaged, would look okay in all respects.
That was in the NL. Probably grey import, sold at flea markets, eBay / AliExpress purchase or similar. Doubtful such cords would pass under the radar of say, HP or the like. Then again, you never know. ;-)
Plugs? Sure, with one end female and one end male. I assume you’re thinking of male on both ends (which, yes, should not be sold), but that’s not necessarily the case.
> Unregulated and forced into the shadows, manufacturers lack accountability, and contaminants get into the supply chain.
I mean, "unregulated" is the whole point of alternative medicine, isn't it? If you take an extract from some plant, do a double blind stuy and prove it cures something, then sell it following government safety regulation, that's just called "medicine".
