Maybe cops are different where you live, but here in Seattle, I cannot imagine a crime so trivial as "someone broke the speaker on a gas pump" ever rising high enough on the SPD priority list for anyone to lift a finger about it, no matter how well-documented it may have been.
It would not surprise me to hear that someone had committed a crime of that scale while being watched by an SPD officer and still gotten away with it.
You don't need a special grep for every language, you just need a tool that translates the mini version into the formatted version and back. Then you chain the tools, just like anything else in UNIX.
Seems reasonable. Since you're likely to perform this translation more than once for any given file, it seems like it would be practical to cache the translated output, perhaps as a file on disk.
I got irritated with the profusion of "no cash accepted" signs a few years back and started making a point of always carrying cash, to use whenever practical. I don't take it to an extreme, but I also don't want to live in a world where every transaction is trackable and all commerce is regulated by Visa, Mastercard, Apple, or Google.
In right there with you. I live in a small town and so whenever spending money at a local small business I try as much as possible to use cash. The shopkeeps who are also the owners are so appreciative as it's essentially a 5-7% "tip". It's difficult for them to keep good change though as people who do spend cash are either $20 or $100 bills which for a few $5-10 items consumes the small bills pretty fast. But in a no sales tax state so makes giving change easier (no coins)
> The shopkeeps who are also the owners are so appreciative as it's essentially a 5-7% "tip
this is false reasoning on their part. They never have thought about how much cash costs them so it looks like extra money but it really isn't. they need to count the time lost to counting the cash as you pay, then the time to count the money in the till at the end of the shift. Each count above is 2 counts at best the average is closer to 3 because you sometimes get it wrong. There is also theft costs which is generally ignored but a real problem.
credit cards is money right to the computer which is not only fast it makes less mistakes.
Many banks also charge fees to process cash deposits for business accounts, as well. It's still often a tenth of credit card interchange fees, but between that, labor to balance your cash drawer, and actually go to the bank to make the deposit, the difference isn't as substantial as you'd make it out to be if you only look at the direct surcharges to process the payments.
That said, while I default to using Apple Pay for basically...everything, I too do not wish to live in a society where large companies get to govern every transaction I make. Or, for that matter, every transaction I make being on a ledger that the government can monitor.
Even if the place is jacked, if you have enough staff, this could be one trustworthy person (under camera surveillance) that has other functions throughout the day.
customers come in groups (lunch hour is when many shop) so the free time is a different part of the day and you send them home. When a clerk is counting cash they could serve the next customer. If there isn't a customer they could stock shelves or clean. stores might have one clerk doing nothing at a till but there are several more scattered around the store doing something else while waiting for a help needed call.
You also completely discounted the managers time counting cash in the backroom. That is more than an hours work in my experience, time that could be used for other things.
Plus cash always works while card transactions are sometimes not available or get declined which either means time wasted until the customer finds a working card or a lost transaction.
Square is 2.6% + 15¢, so to get 5-7%, you could be doing most transactions under $5. That seems to require fairly high sales volume to make any decent wage though, so there is an added transaction cost for them to “keep good change” instead of serving more customers
Potentially ranging from 4.7% to over 15%, costs include labor for counting change, closing drawers, preparing deposits, security expenses like armored transport, bank fees for cash services, insuring against significant risks of theft and fraud.
I think this writer focuses on the buyer side but on the merchant side, there are similar tradeoffs. People (employees, robbers etc) steal cash and it adds work to close out registers at the end of your day. Having no cash in your store solves those problems.
I run a non profit with membership dues and I have tried to just boot the 3% of our membership that pay w/ check or cash annually (I haven’t convinced the rest of the board so we haven’t done it yet). It takes so much extra time to follow it in real life, receive checks in the mail, and effort to deposit in the bank. It’s just not worth the time
I understand why people do it; but - there has to be some threshold beyond which you would not be considering this decision, doesn't there? Would you still be considering this if 5% of your members were paying in cash? 10%? There's a point at which it would be clearly worth it to you to accept cash.
All I can do is try to keep that share of cash users up through my own action, and talk about what I am doing to encourage other people to do likewise, in hopes that business owners will continue to see cash as a normal part of their operation worth maintaining, and not as an oddball nuisance.
No, I donate a lot of money on top of the time I volunteer for free. Someone has to spend maybe an hour every few months to deposit a single check for $50.
You got me on the rejection part because there are some benefits the members get (being able to attend social events, newsletters, etc) but if your donation is a net negative on an organization, I just don’t think they should donate at all. They don’t know it’s a net negative though and maybe would donate with an electronic payment but possibly don’t know? I think it’s mostly old people doing things the way they are used to
But TBH I’m not sure if much of this matters other than the ratio. Time is money and if there aren’t enough people utilizing something, it’s just not worth it to continue. If it’s a government org that’s possibly the only thing that needs to accept all forms of payment
What’s scummy about this? Seems like the poster was giving a perspective where they are trying to maximize outcomes of the non-profit rather than maximize dollars raised.
It depends on the nature of the non-profit. If membership confers some benefit, then it would be deliberately denying that benefit to the class of people who can only pay by cash or check. That would be scummy.
I always carry cash. Just tonight, I saw that the local sandwich shop that I frequent put up a NO CASH ACCEPTED sign. I asked why the change and the worker said it is due to employee theft. I asked if the tip jar still accepted cash. “Yes,” he said.
I have similar concerns, but I think it's the payment conglomerates you have to worry about. Visa knows how much you spent, Fiserv knows what you bought.
It's not just Fiserv, there are often others involved as well. Even the merchant gets more data as they now have a fairly good way to identify you and correlate transactions.
i think anyone seeing very many piles of merchandise abandoned at checkout would be wise to review such decisions. it would definately be a failure to consider area demographic
But from a business point if view, cash is super expensive to deal with.
As a side-effect of an acquisition we inherited a small number of customers that paid in cash. Turns out it's expensive to bank that cash, it's a security risk, it's a risk to the person transporting it and so on.
In the general case, if most sales are already by card, the marginal gains of cash transactions are consumed by the cost of dealing with the cash.
I'm not saying stores should be cashless, but it's worth understanding that accepting cash is very much "not free".
How does that cost of accepting cash compare to the interchange fees? I’ve heard business owners say interchange fees were their single largest expense after payroll.
I’ve also gotten discounts on large purchases for paying “cash” (check). They effectively deducted the interchange fee from my bill. If cash was so expensive to process, they wouldn’t be doing this.
Again it'll vary by area. For us the cash was a lot more expensive. (Banks charge to deposit cash, and many of our bank branches don't accept cash anyway, so we have to go a bit further.)
Fortunately it was little enough that we didn't need a cash-transit vehicle, and it didn't affect our insurance.
Yes, I expect some merchants offer a cash discount, and that can add up for large purchases. But I'd prefer not to be carrying large amounts of cash. (We haven't had checks here for probably 15 years or so.)
We have a very efficient (and cheap) direct deposit system though, so I can pay via my phone straight from my bank app for a very nominal flat fee. So for large transactions that's akin to a cash discount.
The Bank of Canada did a report about this a few years back, and found that cash was the cheapest payment form for merchants to handle for transactions of up to $6 while debit cards were cheaper above that point; credit cards of course were never the best option for merchants.
As I understand it, the argument is: cash is valid payment for all debts public or private. But a sale isn’t a debt. The business that refuses your cash sale is refusing your business at the time of sale.
NYC outlawed cashless operations after it started to become popular and the marginalized were increasingly locked out of everyday commerce. Hopefully it catches on in the rest of the US.
A single-pass compiler is easier to implement in part because you're not going to do any of that optimization. You're writing a single-pass compiler either because you're banging out a quick sketch of an idea, and you don't care about production use, or because you've time-traveled back to the '70s or the '80s, where processors were so painfully slow and memory so eye-wateringly expensive that you might not even be able to read the entire source file into RAM at once, much less convert it all into some intermediate representation before starting to write out the machine code.
I used to write software on my HP calculator, when I was bored in classes, before smartphones existed. It used a tokenized language called RPL, and the editor would read and parse just enough tokens to fill up the screen.
I miss how fast it was, compared to modern computers. VS Code is much laggier in comparison.
I used to dream about owning a programmable calculator in the late 70s/early 80s, but by 1980 we had Apple ][s in my high school and in 1982, I was able to use the PCs in college, first programming in BASIC and later Turbo Pascal, which was the best PC development tool in the 1980s. Most of my classes were in Pascal. My first job was in C++ and I was doing C++ by 1993 and still am.
Have you tried Lazarus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_%28software%29, https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)? When doing something for the fun of it, I would much rather work with Pascal than Python. Both languages were developed to be quick and dirty, but I feel like Pascal is more on the quick side, and Python is more on the dirty side.
I had a 48S then a 49g+. I played around with a few games and a Magic Eye style (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_dot_stereogram) 3D image generator, as well as programs to do actual math in my math classes. The math teachers teachers at my high school had a policy that, on exams, students could run any program they wrote, so I wrote programs to do the math and "show my work". Solving equations on paper was half of the grade, and getting the correct answer was the other half, but my handwriting is really bad, so I'd always get the wrong answer if I did it by hand.
HP's calculators are pretty capable, with built-in commands for image processing, so RPL programs could rival the capabilities of assembly language programs on TI-8x calculators.
I had asked because I was thinking of getting some small device like a PDA or programmable calculator, to use to write small programs for fun and possibly actual use, when I'm not with my laptop.
I am not sure if any PDAs or such calculators are still made these days. I have googled some, but so far did not find any, IIRC. So I may have to buy a used calculator or PDA, if I can find a model I like.
I used to have 2 different Palm PDA models earlier, first a V and then a Zire, but I never did any programming with them, although I do remember trying to use Pippy, a Python 2.x version ported to the Palm. But it used to crash all the time, so I could not really do any programming on it, unfortunately.
HP 's graphing calculators are the best, but they can be very expensive.
Every major calculator manufacturer makes modern back-lit full-color graphing calculators, like HP's Prime, TI's Nspire, and Casio's ClassWiz, but they don't have the charm of reflective LCDs.
The best bang for your buck is probably a Casio FX 7400, 9750 or 9860 GIII series, which have Python interpreters. If you want something more fun, albeit only programmable in BASIC, Casio's CFX have an oddball color display that doesn't use subpixels.
(See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLew3Dd3IBA)
The back-loaded vesting schedule is such blatantly cynical bullshit. It shows that they're planning to overwork you, push you to wash out, and undercompensate you for the experience, which is exactly what I've seen happen to a good number of friends. Amazon has become notorious here in Seattle - everyone knows they're a burnout factory. Some people make it through, and they make good money, but you have to really care about money for that to be worth the effort.
I had an Amazon interview loop on the calendar during my recent job search, a couple of months back, but it was difficult to get excited; they think so very highly of themselves, for what they're offering - and I don't just mean the money, but the culture too. They treat you like an interchangeable wage slave, not like a respected professional; it's all hoops to jump through, and procedures to memorize - dance, monkey, dance!
The recruiter was shocked when I cancelled the rest of the interviews, like, aren't you even going to give us a chance? But no: I had received a good offer from an ambitious, well-organized, well-funded AI startup which was excited to have me on board. With that on the table, why would I put up with Amazon? They won't offer better pay, they can't offer a better culture, and they don't have more interesting problems to work on.
This is a serious challenge in relation to hiring also. If you want to pay for good talent, and so are prepared to pay good money, how do you avoid people who are there for the money.
They got away with this attitude in the earlier days but it’s really hurting them now. A good chunk of the best talent out there won’t even consider Amazon. Culturally it’s very hard to turn that around now and catch up.
90% of the folks there that I know that were good have left for elsewhere. Of the ones that didn’t most are on H1Bs and basically have no choice but to stay and deal with the toxic environment.
This is an uninformed take. Yes the RSU is backloaded. But during the first two years, you get a large monthly cash sign up bonuses so that assuming the stock stays flat, over the four years, your total comp stays flat. If the stock increases your comp goes up.
I spoke to someone who is there now and when you get your yearly review, now you can choose between mostly cash vs mostly stock for your raise and most people choose mostly cash.
I make the same now as I did when I was at AWS and I much prefer my all cash comp over my less cash + RSUs when I was there.
RSU grants assume a growth rate (15%? I forget) so if they stay flat, go down, or grow slower than the baked-in growth rate, then you make less each year. If you do well enough, they’ll give you some RSUs to “make you whole” (as they used to say) but that doesn’t really happen anymore (or not much).
This is not true for your initial four year grant. I’m going to make up a number to make the math easy. Say my total compensation target was $200K. My initial 4 year offer was structured based on the then current stock price.
It would have been what ever it takes where base + prorated signing bonus + RSUs would equal $200K taking into account the 5/15/40/40 RSU schedule.
> The back-loaded vesting schedule is such blatantly cynical bullshit;
I don’t understand the complains about it. Amazon pays monthly cash ”sign-on bonus” in the first two years, which is ~ equal to the stock that you get in the years three and four (counting at the grant price). Is this fact not advertized well enough?
The "sign-on bonus" comes with serious strings attached. A good friend of mine got royally screwed when he mistook that bonus for real money, then got pushed to the point of burnout and had to leave; Amazon demanded a lot of the money back, but he didn't have it anymore.
I worked at Amazon in 2021 and rage-quit after 9 months. The sign-on bonus I received was paid out monthly, so I didn't have to pay anything back. If it's large enough, they pay it monthly because they know it's very likely you won't make it to the 2nd year.
Well for me, I was already 46 when a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE (software development) position at Amazon Retail. They said it would require relocation after COVID (this was April 2020). I knew about Amazon’s reputation from both stories and my best friend who had worked as an L6 in the finance department.
There was no way in hell I was going to sell my house and uproot my life to work for Amazon. Then the recruiter after she kept talking suggests I interview for a “permanently remote” [1] “field by design” role at AWS ProServe. I thought sure why not?
The plan was always to make some money - I made over a quarter million more over 3.5 years than I could have made as an enterprise dev working in Atlanta - put AWS on my resume, gain some industry contacts and move on in four years.
I saw the writing on the wall shortly before my 3 year anniversary. I played the game well enough to get past my next vesting period and get my “bust your ass and try to work through your PIP or receive a $40K+ severance and ‘leave immediately’”.
I didn’t hesitate. I took the severance and already had two job offers lined up and had been waiting on the severance offer.
[1] They forced their “field by design” customer facing roles in the office at the end of last year. I would have left anyway before I ever went back into the office.
My friend is a native-born Seattleite, so no, it was definitely not a relocation bonus.
Perhaps they recently changed their policies? I don't know, but it's not a risk I would want to take. Who would want to work for people who treated their coworkers like that?
Alright, I did some quick research and it seems that they do sometimes pay full first year of sign-on bonus, which you need to repay (prorated). I didn’t see that that during my time at Amazon.
The full payment that requires pro-rates is even worse. They expect you to pay it fully back. (ie. with the deducted taxes included!)
I bet it is possible to profit from a such scheme if Amazon is able to declare that as a reversed-transaction (similar to VAT-refunds) at the end of the fiscal year.
I worked there in 2013 and had the signing bonus paid monthly. I thought it was great since I could work there as long as I could tolerate it (10 months) and leave without regrets about having to pay back anything. Decent cash comp so I feel I got a good deal.
I joined in 2022 from a different location, there were 2 kinds of comp in terms of bonues, each split into 2 other;
1. Relocation package
a. Lump-sum (7k EUR): You get certain amount of money, and you deal with your own move yourself. (Albeit with some reimbursement possible for the initial trips)
b. "Other" (I don't remember the name): More supportive option, good if you have family & furniture to move. They essentially pay everything for you.
c. Important: The 7k EUR was subject to the tax, hence I got taxed at 55% (EU) due to having no tax residency at the moment (obviously). Nobody ever mentions this. But the re-payment is with the tax-included, ie. you are expected to pay 7k back!
2. Sign-on bonus: This splits into 2-year period
a. 1st year: 50% of the total bonus, transferred to your bank account on your first work day.
b. 2nd year: Each month, you get 1/12 of the remaining 50%, essentially something like ~4.18% each month on the second year.
c. The 50%/50% ratio may depend on the team/role/location, I heard some of the L4s joined to the team got split of 40%/60% (ie less in the first year) for reasons unbeknownst to me.
Conditions are pretty simple, if you leave (for any reason), you must repay monthly-pro-rated amount that you haven't worked given the total period is 24-months. ie. In Luxembourg, probation is 6-months. (Until) at the end of the probation, Amazon can just fire you for no reason. In this case, since the 2nd year sign-on hasn't vested yet, nothing to pay from that, but you must pay 1/4th of your "relocation expenses" and full half of (ie untaxed full amount divided by 2) sign-on bonus you receive on your first day. (ie. 25% of the total sign-on bonus)
Firstly, I know someone (a Greek national) who left Amazon during his 12th Month. Amazon demanded total of 4k+ euros from the guy, citing he hasn't finished his 12th month, hence the first half of his relocation bonus plus the 1-month of pro-rated sign-on bonus, before tax. As far as I know, it was more or less equivalent to his monthly gross salary, and he paid in installments.
Secondly, I heard someone joined from non-EU country in 2023, and essentially got laid off. But because she was in probation and obviously worker rights are much stricter in EU, Amazon just declared her as a probation-failed case instead of layoff. (She also got laid off within last 2 weeks of her 6-months long probation). Since she only got the residence permit recently, not having more than a few months (when unemployed as a 3rd-country national), plus Amazon demanded money to be paid back. As far as I know she contacted an labour lawyer and they basically advised her to go back and not to pay anything back as it becomes an international matter. And the costs/fees for such is much higher than what would Amazon get it back, hence she did what was suggested. Although it obviously burns the bridges but in this case, Amazon started the fire first...
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As a result, the practices applied here falls no short of what you can hear from the news. As the company has no heart or soul, people are just numbers in a balance-sheet...
> The back-loaded vesting schedule is such blatantly cynical bullshit.
I don't understand this. A friend was recently offered an insane pay package from Amazon (compared to another big-tech). The way I saw it, the Amazon pay package was more attractive than the alternative because of the back-loaded vesting schedule.
Basically they pay you out in cash for the first two years, then after that you have an option to keep working there. If the stock price goes down in the first two years, you got your guaranteed cash -- no risk (and it would be a good time to interview again). If the stock price goes up, you now have basically an option on extra exposure in the form of staying longer with highly valued RSUs, and now getting some high proportion of your pay in RSUs.
It just seems straight up better? If you want the stock instead of fungible cash, just buy it on the open market?
It's bullshit because it assumes 15% IRR. So if they tell you you're getting $100K in outyear 3, it's not actually $100K, it's $65K of present value equities. If it fails to reach the target value, well, "Ownership" is an LP. You might get some more stock that vests in another year to make up for it, but that assumes you survive the PIP factory for another 12 months.
Oh, and if the stock actually goes up more than 15%, then regardless of your performance you won't get a raise because you've already exceeded band penetration.
I almost exclusively debug via printf / logging, and I am so stupendously ignorant that I have even written and published a multi-platform interactive debugger, to go with the compiler I also wrote (one of several, but this one was the most successful). Make of that what you will, I suppose.
That's funny. I remember using interactive debuggers all the time back in the '90s, but it's been a long time since I've bothered. Logging, reading, and thinking is just... easier.
Really ? I find myself thinking the opposite. My program always runs in debug mode, and when there's some issue I put a breakpoint, trigger it, and boom I can check what is wrong. I don't need to stop the program, insert a new line to print what i _guess_ is wrong, restart the program from scratch etc.
Properly debugging my stack is probably one of the first things I setup because I find it way less tedious. Like, for example, if you have an issue in a huge Object or Array, will you actually print all the content, paste it somewhere else and search through the logs ? And by the way, most debuggers also have ability to setup a log points anyways, without having to restart your program. Genuinely curious to know how writing extra lines and having to restart makes things easier.
Of course I'm not saying that I never débug with logs, sometimes it's require or even more efficient, but it's often my second choice.
I imagine that it depends on the kind of software you are working on. I found debuggers helpful back when I was working on interactive GUI programs which had a lot of complex state, built in classic OOP style with lots of objects pointing at each other, but I have not done that sort of thing in a long time. In part, that's because I got seriously into functional programming, which left me with a much more rigorous approach to state transitions; but then I shifted from conventional software into embedded firmware, where you can sometimes stop the microcontroller and use a debugger via JTAG, but it's usually easier to just stream data out over a serial port, or hook an LED up to a spare pin and make it blink. The world doesn't stop even if you want the software to stop, so the utility of a debugger is limited.
After that I went to work for Google, building distributed software running across many machines in a datacenter, and I have no idea how you would hook up a debugger even if you wanted to. It's all logs all the time, there.
By the time that was over, I was thoroughly accustomed to logging, and attaching a debugger had come to seem like a nuisance. Since then I've mostly worked on compilers, or ML pipelines, or both: pure data-processing engines, with no interactivity. If I'm fixing a bug, I'm certainly also writing a regression test about it, which lends itself to a logging-based workflow. I don't mind popping into gdb if that's what would most directly answer my question, but that only happens a couple of times a year.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Indeed I also worked on embedded a long time ago, and the debugger was often the last resort because the debug pins weren't always accessible.
Yeah, I remember learning to use gdb when I was beginning in the early 2000s. I totally thought I was "levelling up" as a programmer and to be honest felt kinda badass with all those windows open in Emacs. But I've found that the number of times I actually resorted to using the debugger has been so small I don't remain fluent in it's use. What am I supposed to do? Write more bugs? On the other hand, I'm always ready to read, think and put in some print/log statements.
> Suppose a man has already murdered most of your family, including several of your children, for no other reason than
...the fact that you have walled him and everyone he knows into an open-air prison, where nothing goes in or out without your approval, systematically keeping him, his family, his friends, his children, and everyone around him just this side of starvation, with no hope of release, for decades on end?
If I were him, I'd hurt you as hard as I possibly could, at every opportunity, with any means I could come by.
That is an interesting statistic, but India is a subcontinent while Gaza is one marathon long. I would anticipate need to travel to vary inversely with area. Wouldn't it be queer if, at most, 6% of Manhattanites stepped foot off the island each year?
Two clarifications. First, I’m talking about exits, not unique people. Pre-war Gaza logged ~500k documented exits/year (via Israel and Egypt) out of ~2 M residents; India logged ~21.6 M departures out of ~1.4 B. Both are trip counts, so repeat travelers are included.
Second, area is a red herring. Cross-border mobility is driven by policy, permits, visas, income, and border agency capacity—not square kilometers. Manhattan is integrated into a national customs/transport network; Gaza isn’t. Despite severe restrictions, Gaza still had hundreds of thousands of recorded border crossings annually.
That’s why the literal “open-air prison” claim fails. Prisons don’t run departure counters. If the term is metaphorical for harsh movement controls, say that. But if it’s meant literally, the exit data contradicts it.
I think we disagree on a great many things and it probably will not be resolved through an accounting of facts or reasoned argument. I will mention that as far as 'red-herrings' go, the OP did not mention 10/7 when they called Gaza an open air prison.
Indeed, I can see facts won't sway you, or most people in the pro-Palestine camp.
Also, I didn't mention the 10/7 attack either. The narrative that gaza is an open-air prison has existed for years, and it has been manifestly wrong for years; that hasn't stopped anyone from claiming it.
Indeed, I wrote "prior to 10/7" in my completely accurate statement that prior to 10/7 Gaza was not an open-air prison. I pointed out that there were roughly 500,000 exits per year from Gaza to Egypt and Israel in this period. The reason I mentioned this is because people justify the 10/7 massacre as some sort of freedom fighting operation where people were breaking out of a prison.
Thanks for defining the word "mention," brother, knowing this definition really addresses the central issue and refutes my central point.
I think @chaps was quite justified in defining "mention", given that you just talked about 10/7 and then immediately insisted you never mentioned 10/7. That suggests that you either don't know what "mention" means, or you don't take any care with your words. And if you aren't being careful with your words, why should we trust them?
Yes, of course you think that, but it's also rather silly. I said "prior to 10/7", to point out that people claimed there was an open-air prison before that date. I wasn't talking about the attacks; I was talking about before the attacks. Do you want me to define "prior" for you?
Additionally, when Israel gave Gaza to the Gazans in 2005, it wasn't fenced in yet the Gazans still attacked Israel, demonstrating the attacks weren't being about fenced in, but rather a visceral hate towards the yahood. The fences were built after the second intifada.
This is an accusation without meaning. You don't know what information I see, so you don't know whether I see propaganda at all. The reverse is true as well; I don't know what information (or propaganda) you see. But no, I don't see how Israel giving Gaza to the Gazans (something Egypt never did) demonstrates "the entire issue," whatever you happen to mean by that.
You are not commenting in good faith. The author, a respected computer scientist with deep knowledge of this issue, is not a propagandist; you just don't like what he says. I have been on Hacker News for well over a decade, I'm not some fresh two year old account like yours. And I didn't say I don't consume any propaganda (I'm sure I do), it's you who said I'm "deep into propaganda" which is a false and evidence-free statement.
"In 2022, the Egyptian authorities allowed more exits of people through their border. The 144,899 exits recorded during the year are 44 per cent more than in 2021, representing the highest figure since 2014."
That's 6.6% of the gaza population travelling out of gaza per year, higher than the percent of Indians who travel abroad each year. This statistic also doesn't reflect the hundreds of thousands of exits from Gaza to Israel each year.
The "open air prison" is a lie. You can impute whatever motive you want to them leaving. I'm sure escaping Hamas persecution was a part of it for many of them. Israeli prosecution wasn't really a thing and the "mowing the lawn" narrative is propaganda.
> In 2022, more people were let out of Gaza; however, their movement remained the exception rather than the rule, with the vast majority of residents, over 2 million people, virtually ‘locked in.’
That's an editorial sentence; I was quoting a fact. The same fact appears in numerous other sources and gives lie to the open-air prison idea. Sorry you don't like that fact.
You keep insisting on that 6.6% figure, but you have yet to provide a single source that supports it. You made that calculation yourself, based on a statistic that you already admitted doesn't mean what you thought it meant, and doesn't correspond to the relevant statistic for India. Given how many times I've raised this issue to your attention, I would say you are now intentionally misleading people.
"You keep insisting on that 6.6% figure"
This is simply false. I have acknowledged your correction twice. It's more accurate to say that there have been more than 500,000 exits from Gaza in 2022, which as a percent of the population is approximately 25%, though this surely includes people who exited multiple times. In the same year, India recorded 22.6 million exits from a population of 1.4 billion, which is less than 2%. Given that there were 500k recorded exits, it wasn't an open-air prison. QED.
The acknowledgments.
"Thanks for this comment. I'd like to acknowledge that as you point out the 6.6% figure refers to exits from Gaza via Egypt using documented means, and may include people who exited multiple times, so the actual people exiting would be slightly lower. Similarly, it'd be nice for you to acknowledge that this figure doesn't include undocumented exits via tunnels in Rafah, or the 424,000 documented exits from Gaza via Israel."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45084323
"My claim is that it wasn't because people could get in and out. I have already acknowledged that the 6.6% figure refers to documented exits via the official Rafah crossing rather than indivudual people, and that this includes people who cross multiple times."
Also, this is data you appear to have been totally unaware of (as evidenced by your skepticism and repeated demand for sources), so it is you who should acknowledge you were wrong and stop spreading misinformation.
Yes, you acknowledged the correction elsewhere. However, when questioned about the 6.6% figure by another user, you literally just replied "I was quoting a fact". Perhaps you meant the fact about the number of exits to Egypt, but to me, that appears highly misleading, perhaps intentionally so.
I think oscaracso makes a very good point as well. In a country as vast as India, you can find almost anything you need without leaving its borders. Less so with Gaza.
So in other words you said I didn't acknowledge the correction, but I did acknowledge it, twice. I then modified it to point out that there were 500k exits from gaza out of a population of 2 million, something I'm glad you now don't dispute, because it gives lie to the whole "open-air prison" narrative.
No, that's not what I said. Once again, you are not being careful with your words, and as a result what you say has only a tenuous relationship to the truth. Yes, you acknowledged your mistake, yet you still insisted upon that incorrect figure later, to a different person in a different subthread.
As for the 500k figure, I'm not interested in disputing it since it's just as irrelevant as your 6.6% figure, for reasons I've already mentioned. But since you insist, I'll list them out again:
1. That figure is listing total exits, not distinct exiting individuals. Since most of those exits were made by workers and traders (who might cross very frequently, maybe daily), there is good reason to believe that the number of distinct exiting individuals is vastly lower. For example, if everyone crossing was a daily trader, the true number of exiting individuals would be smaller by a factor of 365. Of course, not everyone making the crossing is a worker or trader, only most of them, and we don't know how often they cross.
2. That figure does not distinguish exits by Palestinians, Israelis, or other citizens, so it has no bearing on whether Palestinians are trapped in Gaza or not. Many Israeli workers also cross into and out of Gaza constantly.
3. This figure is from before October 7, and movement is more restricted now. But, since you are focusing on the use of the term "open-air prison" before the massacre, I won't count that against you.
By the way, I certainly don't insist on calling Gaza an "open-air prison", that's far too imprecise for me. I simply object to the way that you misinterpret facts to support your argument.
> 2. That figure does not distinguish exits by Palestinians, Israelis, or other citizens, so it has no bearing on whether Palestinians are trapped in Gaza or not. Many Israeli workers also cross into and out of Gaza constantly.
I don't believe Israelis entered Gaza in 2022. In fact, cases where mentally ill Israelis entered Gaza ended in them being held as hostages by Hamas
Look, I can see we're straying from a discussion of facts to a discussion of what people said, which is not productive. I'm glad you now know that there were >500,000 exits per year from Gaza to Israel and Egypt in 2022, and don't dispute that figure. You're reduced now to accepting that figure, and trying to find a large and arbitrary number to divide it by. Fine by me. Whatever you divide it by, there were logged exits, so it wasn't a prison. In fact, many of the people who exited Gaza to Israel are known to have mapped the kibbutzim for Hamas's attack.
Similarly, I'm glad you now know that there are somewhere between 100 and 180 births per day in Gaza, depending on the month and source you trust. (I did provide 2025 data, you just overlooked it.) Whichever figure you choose--100 births/day or 180 births/day--you're now reduced to accepting that there were tens of thousands of births in Gaza, something you hadn't even considered before. And I know you didn't consider this before given how incredulous you were of this basic fact that you asked for sources multiple times. You also have no counter-proposal or alternative source on how many births there were. But it doesn't matter to me.
When it comes to the death count, you need this to remain higher than the official health ministry count (which includes natural deaths and has other problems), so you offer the widely debunked theory that there are thousands of nameless, faceless, odorless bodies under the rubble - something for which there is no primary evidence. Your skepticism goes in one direction. Exercise for you: try treating the pro-palestinian narrative with that attitude and see how far you get.
For my own part, I used to lead pro-palestine rallies, and at the beginning of the war I even paid to help smuggle a Gazan out through one of the Rafah crossings some commenters here say don't exist, but then I tried to... y'know... apply equal skepticism to both sides.
>For my own part, I used to lead pro-palestine rallies, and at the beginning of the war I even paid to help smuggle a Gazan out through one of the Rafah crossings
No you didn’t. Or you’re saying you cared enough to hold rallies but now you just so happened to have developed “skepticism” once Israel started the genocide. And now you parrot hasbara talking points. Yeah nah.
Israel started the genocide not later than 1968. Pretending that the genocide is a novel phenomenon starting after the Oct. 7 attacks is a propaganda point actively pushed by those under the sway of Iranian propaganda that is designed to align with and subtly reinforce, among those not already aligned with the Palestinian cause, Israeli propaganda that what is described as genocide is a response to the Oct. 7 attacks, because Iran's interest is not in ending the genocide, but in ensuring that it continues while leveraging it for propaganda cover for its own geopolitical interests in the region.
There is an old Jewish saying: the antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence.
Whether or not I was part of the pro Palestine movement is completely irrelevant to the thread and I have no obligation to prove it to you. Whether you believe it or not doesn't matter to me and iota. But tell you what, if we can put some stakes on this (e.g. $10k if I have the goods), I'll do it for money. I'll be happy to donate to your $ to the idf.
>There is an old Jewish saying: the antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence.
Whether or not I was part of the pro Palestine movement is completely irrelevant to the thread and I have no obligation to prove it to you. Whether you believe it or not doesn't matter to me and iota. But tell you what, if we can put some stakes on this (e.g. $10k if I have the goods), I'll do it for money. I'll be happy to donate to your $ to the idf.
If it is irrelevant, why did you bring it up? It is obvious you are lying, like you have been in every other post in this thread.
And you had to fall back to the usual baseless accusations of antisemitism. Typical hasbara troll.
Nice one, but will you put your money where your mouth is?
The fact that I led pro Palestine rallies is irrelevant to the central point we're discussing, which is whether Gaza was an open air prison and whether the was a genocide. It's relevant to my own personal journey from the pro Palestine movement, which I left because of people like you.
It's interesting that the article directly contradicts your own takeaway:
"In 2022, more people were let out of Gaza; however, their movement remained the exception rather than the rule, with the vast majority of residents, over 2 million people, virtually ‘locked in.’"
Additionally, that's 144,899 exits, not 144,899 distinct people exiting, nor is it even 144,899 exits made by Palestinians. So your interpretation is multiply incorrect.
Would you like to clarify what you mean by "Israeli prosecution wasn't really a thing"?
Presumably, up to a few minutes ago you were unfamiliar with the accurate statistic I quoted. Noting your reaction to this new information: to double down and cast shade. Sorry you dont like it. And yes, with roughly 6.6 percent of gazans population traveling abroad each year, it's the exceptional gazans that travels abroad, much like it's the exceptional rural alabaman that travels abroad each year.
(The statistic I quoted also doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of exits from Gaza to Israel each year, or the undocumented exits through tunnels under rafah, so the exits were indeed much higher, not lower, than the official ocha figures.)
What I mean when I say that Israel persecution wasn't really a thing is that the men with guns in Gaza were Hamas, not the idf. If you were shot in the knee or thrown off a building for being queer, it was Hamas that was persecuting you, not the idf.
I'm not trying to cast shade, just trying to critically analyze information.
Again, could you provide a source for that figure of 6.6% of Gazans "travelling abroad" each year? As I previously mentioned, that article does not actually support that figure at all, so I'm not sure why you insist upon it. We could obtain a better estimate for the number of distinct exiting Gazans by counting the number of exit permits issued, since those are ostensibly required to leave. The article does say 18,000 permits were issued to workers and traders in 2022, but since it doesn't include permits to other civilians, nor does it mention the expiration period for these permits, I won't commit the intellectually dishonest act of trying to turn that into a percentage.
As for your claim about Israeli persecution, that's trivially false. There are too many instances of Palestinians being shot by IDF forces to list here, but there are casualty databases freely available online. Yes, Hamas persecutes Palestinians as well, I'm not defending them.
Thanks for this comment. I'd like to acknowledge that as you point out the 6.6% figure refers to exits from Gaza via Egypt using documented means, and may include people who exited multiple times, so the actual people exiting would be slightly lower. Similarly, it'd be nice for you to acknowledge that this figure doesn't include undocumented exits via tunnels in Rafah, or the 424,000 documented exits from Gaza via Israel.
In those conditions, it's hard to pinpoint an exact figure, but whatever the precise figure is--5%, 6.6%, 10%--it's clearly higher than zero, which is what one would expect in an "open air prison," the central point I was arguing against.
Aside from the exit rate, the "open air prison" claim is a lie for many other reasons, not least of which is that the guards patrolling the so-called prison (Hamas) are also the people who were claimed to be inmates, something one doesn't see in prisons.
The claim for Israeli persecution is not false (or "trivially false" as you put it). The odds of a gazan dying from an israeli weapon in 2022 was essentially zero: hamas claims 49 were killed that year, of which 22 are verifiable. The odds of a gazan dying from Hamas on the other hand was appreciable, in the thousands. After hamas's genocidal massacre on october 7, obviously this changed.
Yes, it's hard to pinpoint an exact figure, but you have provided no evidence with which to obtain even a ballpark estimate. I don't think the real figure would be "slightly lower" than 6.6%, I think it would be much lower, since many of those exiting Gaza would be e.g. truck drivers who make the trip constantly. As for the "secret Gazan escape tunnels", while some Hamas tunnels may exist connecting Rafah and Egypt, I can find no evidence that these are trafficked by civilians. Of course, I don't know how much lower than 6.6% the real figure is, and neither do you, that's the point. The real problem here is that you presented that figure as an absolute certainty, without any evidence to back it up.
Secondly, when people refer to Gaza as an "open air prison" they are employing metaphor. I have never understood it to mean that literally no one leaves, and I don't think any reasonable person understands it that way.
Finally, you have provided more figures about Gazan deaths. Would you care to provide a source for those figures? Even if they are accurate (and so far, none of your figures have been accurate) they still contradict your previous post, that the "only men with guns in Gaza are Hamas". The point of my questioning was to arrive upon a common definition for the word "persecution". Your offered definition was indeed trivially false, since you just admitted that the IDF shot innocent civilians in that time frame. Perhaps you would like to amend your statement and pick a definition more suitable for your arguments, such as Amnesty International's definition. In that case, I offer this report detailing the many ways Palestinians were persecuted under Israel's rule prior to October 7: <https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/>
We were debating whether Gaza was an open-air prison. My claim is that it wasn't because people could get in and out. I have already acknowledged that the 6.6% figure refers to documented exits via the official Rafah crossing rather than indivudual people, and that this includes people who cross multiple times. You have not yet acknowledged the >400,000 crossings from Gaza to Israel, and you put in scare quotes the "secret Gazan escape tunnels."
But these tunnels weren't secret and they did exist.
"To mitigate the impact of the blockade on Gaza, a tunnel economy evolved and
peaked between 2007 and 2013, with more than 1,532 underground tunnels running under the 12 km border between Gaza and Egypt. "
That's just one source and likely an underestimate on the number of tunnels. You claim you were unable to find the easily-findable stats on the birth-rate in Gaza; this should be an easy one for you as there are multiple documentaries about these tunnels you can find freely on youtube, and you can see video evidence of the tunnels.
I am glad you now say that when people refer to Gaza as an open-air prison, they don't actually mean what they say, but are instead referring to a situation where there were hundreds of thousands (indeed more than half a million) documented exits each year between Egypt and Israel; to a place where the men with guns patrolling the prison were Hamas, not the IDF; to a place where if you were going to get killed, your killers were most likely to be Hamas, not the IDF.
Likewise, I appreciate you acknowledging that this is a special kind of genocide where the population hasn't really been reduced much.
And I also appreciate your deep skepticism of everything I say, despite the many credible sources I provide, and your complete failure to provide any primary evidence for your claims of tons of nameless, faceless, odorless corpses under rubble; your evidence-free claims that people born in Gaza today have a low chance of living; and your prediction that if you give Israel 10 more years, it will eradicate the population of Gaza. I look at population charts; this will be an interesting one to watch - care to make a bet on polymarket with me?
You forgot the rest of the quote:
“ While the tunnels prevented the complete collapse of Gaza's economy, they were unsustainable, informal, uncontrolled and unregulated by governments on either side of the border. They were closed by mid-2013.”
I did not forget the rest of the quote; I omitted it because it turns out that was wrong. Tunnels existed from Rafah to Egypt right up to 10/7. There are videos of Egyptian and israeli authorities destroying them post 10/7.
You deliberately left it out because it invalidated your point. Even if Israel wasn’t lying about tunnels, they weren’t moving the amount of people you claimed. So your point was bogus.
What do you mean? There is photographic and video evidence of Israel destroying the tunnels after it established the Philadelphia corridor. CGI?
Also, let's pretend the tunnels didn't exist (they did). How in the world would that invalidate my point that Gaza wasn't an open air prison because there were more than 500k documented exits in 2022?
> (The statistic I quoted also doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of exits from Gaza to Israel each year, or the undocumented exits through tunnels under rafah, so the exits were indeed much higher, not lower, than the official ocha figures.)
That is what you said. That report didn't support that claim. Which was obvious if you read the part you omitted. Which is why you didn't bother to quote it. It is the second article you linked where you deliberately misrepresented the data. Like your claim of 500k people exiting, when that article said 83% are laborers who go to Israel and back. You realize prisons allow work release too, right?
> There is photographic and video evidence of Israel destroying
There is plenty of video evidence of Israel destroying pretty much everything in Gaza. They have claimed many things, most of them not true. Like those supposedly hidden Hamas C&C facilities in the basements of hospitals (they weren't there, Israel just wanted to destroy the health system).
For petty vandalism? That seems like an expensive overreaction.
Perhaps it depends on your demography.