Hi all. I'm Dan. You can message me on Matrix @danhakimi:matrix.org, or follow me on Mastodon at @danhakimi.
You might want to check out my men's style blog, The Second Button, and the associated instagram account
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how does qwant compare to Google and DDG in terms of the quality of search results?
Big companies have enough money to develop and maintain dedicated applications for multiple platforms. Small and medium-sized services might be able to get one platform going, but they'd be lucky if they had any money left for marketing, or for developing new features, and would eventually either need to grow or accept obsolescence.
And again, I'm not going to develop a web application for my personal blog, and nobody's going to download it; I would need to use a centralized service.
Usenet was for geeks who didn't want a user interface getting between them and the raw text. It was never going to go mainstream, it was never going to be the internet.
I did not know that a terminal-BBS existed, but it sounds even worse than usenet. When I was a kid, people used the letters "bbs" to talk about web forums, generally. Those were websites. They were fine, but even they died out for a reason. The development and marketing of a web forum is not something that scales as well as the multi-forum technologies we have now — reddit and reddit-style fediverse systems.
People didn't want to, and should not have wanted to, install a new app every time they wanted to try talking to new people, but they always did want a good user interface for the conversations they have.
I think you’ve got that backwards. The early days of the web were the wild west; blogs, personal sites and forums were multitudinous. Weird, niche content was everywhere. Nobody knew what the web was supposed to be yet, so it could be anything. Nobody really knew how to make money from it, so passion rather than dollars was the motivation to create content.
This relied on web browsers. Without web browsers, it would be worse than it is now.
It would only be mediated through more complex applications. We'd have open source apps like thunderbird for email, still, but most applications would be written by large companies who can afford that kind of ground-up software development.
All walled gardens, none of the democratization we've come to know. None of those tiny websites. No independent blogs except on closed services like substack and medium. No independent forums, just one central service that houses all of them... IE reddit. Maybe social media is even more centralized than it is now; maybe nobody manages to get a network monopoly in this world, and some communication standard pops up, a less good version of the fediverse, so I don't need five fucking apps, but the corporations still find a way to dominate that world.
Most importantly... The hyperlink is kind of dead. I can no longer click on an Associated Press article without an Associated Press app, or an app that knows how to read associated press apps. Maybe my RSS app has a feature like that built in, but if it does, it's bordering on browser territory. The same holds true for buying; I can't share a link to a niche brand's website because it doesn't have one, and you definitely don't have their app installed, so clothes need to be on amazon or nordstrom or not exist.
The fact that most people can't just click on a link to see what it is means that there are fewer references between some things and other things, the web is less connected.
This also ruins search. We can search Wikipedia, but we can't search the whole internet, because the internet doesn't have a unified format of references by which pagerank can operate, there are no websites to crawl, and the results you find each require you to download an app to interact with.
What does all of this mean? ... well, it really means that somebody would have eventually seen the need for a browser and invented it.
Reposting content from other sources using bots generating content via bots.
Buying an electric vehicle does not make the world a better place, but buying and using a gas vehicle makes the world worse by a bigger margin, so if you're buying a vehicle, an electric vehicle is probably better.
What he does to Martin Starr's character might have been the biggest issue. Classic shakedown, a little bit of useful business advice... Except it ends up getting him into trouble, both with the law and without. Starr's life falls apart, and instead of saying fuck it and ratting on the guy who forced him into it and saving his own ass, he goes all in on the criminal conspiracy that only ever hurt him.
"It's not friendly to go up to people and tell them that they're not friendly. If you want to get along with people here a little better, maybe rethink certain parts of your approach."
Or just leave it.
I liked it, but couldn't bring myself to finish it once I realized that Sly's character literally only ever hurt people. It felt like it was supposed to be "old man, set in his ways, criminal, doesn't know how to live in this world, says the wrong thing, but has principles, does the right thing."
But in the end it was just "old man, set in his ways, criminal, doesn't know how to live in this world, says the wrong thing, but has principles, but he's still an asshole and makes everything worse all the time, and of course he does, he's a criminal and a jackass."
It's still fun to watch him go Mike Ehrmantrout on a situation, but Mike's plans usually end well for the people he's helping.
I think you mean
"Two chicks at the same time, man."
I think the main success of the current narrative on Palestine is disguising Israeli expansion as Israeli self-defense. Here’s a map of the UN partition plan for Palestine and you can check today’s borders to see how much land Palestine has ceded to Israel, unwillingly of course. Israel was created as a result of the Palestine Civil War and have been expanding ever since. That was the plan the whole time, as it says in the above linked page:
Arabs rejected that partition plan and waged war after war against Israel. Land changed hands both ways in the late 1940s—the great sin of Israel is that it won more land than it lost, that's what the Arabs can't forgive them for. The Arabs started the war thinking they could beat the Jews and expel them altogether.
Some of the land taken in 1967 is up for debate, but regions like the Golan Heights have a large strategic value and have historically been used to attack Israel. Israel happily returned Sinai to Egypt for peace. I'm generally opposed to settlement expansion, but that's almost never framed as self-defense. And the current war in Gaza is really not expansionist.
I don’t see how Palestine is any different from Ukraine in terms of needing to cede land to the invader in exchange for peace. What do you think? I’m sure there’s a lot I’m not aware of.
I'm assuming you're talking about the Olmert proposal or similar, since land isn't really a big part of the Gaza debate, Israel wants the hostages back and Hamas gone.
Peace is the concession being made by Palestine, not for Palestine. many Palestinians are strongly opposed to peace with Israel. Hamas is categorically opposed. Palestinians want an end to the occupation, control of East Jerusalem, as much land as they can get, and a totally unrealistic "right of return" that would realistically end Israel.
The deal in question included East Jerusalem, removal of Israeli settlers from the west bank, an end to the occupation, acceptance of a number of Palestinian immigrants into Israel, and was just a starting point.
The land swaps—not a one-sided cession, swaps—are designed around areas that are already mostly Israeli settlers. Practically, moving multiple townfulls' worth of settlers is really unrealistic. Israel removed 80,000 settlers from Gaza unilaterally during 2005, and is willing to remove more but removing hundreds of thousands, especially from towns that are already mostly Israeli, is an extreme challenge and land swaps are a practical way to get around it.
About the negotiations and truce offered to Israel:
Lol, I assumed you were talking about a peace deal. Hamas was really open about this one: permanent concessions (there was more to it than just the land), in exchange for a temporary truce that was just a strategic aim on their part to shore up resources so they could more effectively massacre all of Israel when the truce had ended. And there's no way they'd be able to keep the truce going for as long as they said, they couldn't even handle the days-long truce in the current war.
but there was justification, I believe it was NATO encroachment or something about Nazis in Ukraine.
Lol, Ukraine never joined NATO, even after the Donbas invasion, Ukraine was literally run by a Jew, and the Russians have turned the Azov battalion into heroes. And none of that would have been grounds for war, if it made any sense to begin with.
the justification for Israel invading Palestine in the first place was “we are God’s chosen people and we want this land”
... what the fuck are you talking about? Are you attempting to describe the Israeli War of Independence? Or something else? I'm so confused.
How much land do you think Ukraine should cede for peace?
For a war Russia started? With no justification? None. Not even land swaps.
How much control should Russia have in Ukraine’s government in exchange for ending the occupation?
As much as it takes for Russian civillians to be safe, which is to say, again, none. Ukraine does not have a history of massacring Russian civilians, they haven't repeatedly stated that they'd repeat attacks on Russian civilians ad infinitum after any hypothetical ceasefire.
Also, are you aware of Palestine’s proposal to respect the 1967 borders, which Israel rejected?
Which proposal?
Actually the opposite, it’s a line of reasoning that supposes that no-one is really indigenous to anywhere in particular, thereby avoiding the good ol’ extreme claims to sovereignity.
... what? So you don't know what indigeneity is, so you just said, "fuck it, we're going to do away with the concept altogether so nobody has a right to live anywhere at all!"
I'm always baffled as to where you people think the Jews should be living.
I don't care what their opinion is, Israel in fact ended the occupation of Gaza in 2005.
People are now upset about a blockade that started in 2007. Aside from ignoring the reasons for the blockade, and totally ignoring the two years between the end of the occupation and the start of the blockade, people like to pretend the blockade is an occupation because it's not very nice and they don't know how to talk about an unoccupied Gaza (or because they're just too stupid to know what's going on there).
The Journey to the West is an option, although the moral of the story is usually all about how great Buddhism is (or how silly the monkey man is)
The Olmert proposal where Israel wanted to keep 10% of the West Bank (not that we know much about the proposal or why it failed, but from that point it's a no-go)?
No, the actual Olmert proposal. It involved land swaps for about 6.3% of the West Bank (to help minimize the number of Israelis who need to be forced out of their homes), giving East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as the capitol...
Abbas didn't feel like negotiating from that starting point. Because he either didn't want peace, or didn't think he could swing it politically (with a Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority). A not-one-inch even-with-land-swaps even-with-this even-with-that policy is not conducive to peace.
And what opportunity in 2005 they fucking blockaded the place as soon as they left.
No, the blockade started in 2007. You're missing the two years where Gaza was totally free and Hamas used that freedom to ramp up rocket fire, kill their opponents in Fatah, and gain a majority in the PA.
Gaza has not been occupied since 2005.
Palestinian arabs have been launching pogroms against Jews without rest since 1920, but Israel didn't occupy the West Bank or Gaza until 1967. Maybe if Israelis felt they could possibly be safe without occupying the West Bank, they would try it. Like they tried with Gaza. Gee, look how that played out.
Gee, I wonder how Germany and Japan managed to get freedom from occupation... Oh right, they went with peace!
... what?
"Jews of other countries" are also indigenous to Israel / Judea / Canaan / Palestine / whatever you want to call it. I'm a Persian-American Jew. Before Iran, my community came from Israel. Is it possible that there are some Russian Jews in my family tree? Or Egyptian Jews? Or Bucharian Jews? Or Iraqi Jews? Yes. Are they all still indigenous to Israel? Yes.
Conversion to Judaism is extremely rare, but it does happen. Is it possible that some portion of my family tree converted to Judaism and is not indigenous to Israel? Sure. Does one drop of Iranian blood in m DNA make me somehow not indigenous to the place the rest of my ancestors are from? Hell the fuck no. Especially given that my ancestors in Iran were never welcome for long. It's also worth noting that, since the Arab Conquest reached Iran, conversion from Islam has been, for most of that time, illegal (it's currently punishable by death!), so the idea of converts to Judaism is extremely rare.
This is a strange, disturbing line of reasoning. You wouldn't ask Native Americans with ancestors from two different tribes how they can be called indigenous, would you?
What's going on here?
what exactly does OP think he meant by "sissyfus"