So... only politicians have conflicts of interest? I think Assange has many things he wants and ways of getting them - avoidance of extradition and arrest, for starters. He probably believes that if he does a big favor for Trump, Trump will do a big favor for him. And he's probably right. HRC would certainly have wanted him put on trial.
So, I don't believe he is particularly trustworthy, some kind of neutral impartial observer with no skin in the game.
And if you follow the maxim of "cui bono", or follow the money (or benefit, if not actual money), why is it so unbelievable that Russia would have engaged in turning the election? It's very much in Russia's interest to have a lapdog president. Putin has stated over and over that he wants the Soviet empire back, even without a communist government. Since the tsars, Russia has wanted a compliant girdle of vassal states. This is not unique to Russia, certainly the USA has declared Central America its "backyard" and has exercised overweening influence there, covertly and overtly.
All I can say is I wouldn't want to be an Estonian right now, used as they have become to European-style culture and freedom.
Here's my solution - a page on the app that is a taximeter. After all "taxi cab" comes from "taximeter cabriolet". Why shouldn't I, if I want to, be able to follow the price on my device? I don't have to if I don't want to, and the driver doesn't need to bolt in a taximeter like a real taxi. This would let me know if I am running up crazy charges as it's happening, not afterward, and I can stop the car and get out.
I had a situation the other day, where I opened the Uber app to call for a car, then it tells me there's x1.9 surge pricing. I tell it to inform me when the surge is over, then I call a regular professional taxi. Ten seconds later, the surge is over, but my taxi in on the way. Part of what's annoying about surge pricing is the whimsicality of it.
I understand the "economic efficiency" arguments for surge pricing, but there's also the "behavioral economic" argument against it - that it seems obnoxious and breeds resentment.
One more thing - a phone number (toll-free, preferably) where you could call to order a car. I have a disabled relative who can't use a smartphone. Sure, right now he can call a regular taxi, but if Uber and the like make the taxi industry go away, they take on the responsibilities of that public utility.
Also, they should have a phone number for customer service.
I know the "kids nowadays" don't want to look at a meter, because it destroys the fantasy that they have a private limo... or the fantasy that the driver is a buddy just giving them a ride because they love them. Also an actual meter would be an expense. On the other hand, there IS a meter - that fare is being calculated somewhere. Why can't I see it? The app should have a screen where I can watch the fare, and see all add-ons - health & safety (or whatever they call it), surge multiples, everything. Anybody who prefers to ignore it can.
These are well-paid and unionized jobs - there should be more women there! Pink-collar jobs tend to be lower-paid and non-union.
When Scott Walker co-opted the police and firefighter's unions in order to isolate teachers and state employees, he was favoring men over women.
Because "what they want to do" is not so clear. Are we all firefighters? Cowboys? What if a biased adult tells a child over and over that they're bad at something, and then the child shrugs and says, okay, they want to do something else. Is that a true expression of "what they want to do?"
I preferred the old way of printing and zooming. And I guess I agree with the Apple comparison, because there seems to be an implied notion that being explicit with what controls do and where they are is for losers. I think that someone is too impressed with the power of design to make things obvious, when the way to make things obvious is to label them. Also, let people learn them and then live with them.
There's also an implication of neophily - love of the new. I can't see a single thing with the new design that I couldn't do before - well, except that more of the screen is covered by map, which is nice. Oddly, when they took the left-hand pane and shrunk it to boxes that keep changing size, it seems like more of the map is covered, when in fact more is revealed. And the more people say "the map is covered by boxes", the more Google engineers can sneer and ignore them.
I think there's also a comparison to Microsoft here, because with Office and Windows, I get the feeling of corporate fiefdoms, where things have to happen, even if they're lousy, because some overpaid executive needs to make a mark to justify their bloated pay package. Nobody gets a $20M bonus for saying, "I think it's great - let's just make it more stable."
This is not to say that people may eventually get used to things (like the Office Ribbon or the Metro interface... *gag*), but the "move fast and break things" ethos is sad and puerile.
Sending someone to jail for robbing someone is impinging their rights because they impinge someone else's. So, yes. That's what is being suggested - the usual thing.
There are many interest groups involved in this. Uber may (or may not... I suspect it is) be good for SOME consumers, but there are other interests at stake. There are unions, which are good for the polity in that they help funnel more wealth to workers, and thus create a wealthier citizenry. There are the elderly and the handicapped, who are shut out of Uber and will suffer if taxi businesses shrink. And there are, of course, the least sympathetic victims of Uber, the owners of taxi fleets. They are part of chambers of commerce (or whatever the local Germany version is) and hold sway within their communities.
Let's not kid ourselves. As a function of smartphones, Uber serves a certain clientele - generally young, generally well-off, not all citizens.
Further, I'd love to see an analysis of the ethnicities of taxi drivers versus Uber/Lyft drivers. I suspect that the U/L drivers are, more than taxi drivers, doing this part time, and part of the majority ethnicity. Taxi driving is traditionally a job for recent immigrants.
One last note. It's just barely possible that in German, "Uber" brings up bad memories... Uber alles, and all that. I don't know, but it could be.
Very true. That sense of hope and delusional optimism is hard to come by naturally (for some of us, anyway).
And if you join certain, very strict and communal religions, they'll even pick your spouse and job, and tell you whom to vote for! Quite the package.
Absolutely right. What's interesting is how people join a belief group (usually a church or something like that) and then start to bend their beliefs around that. Later, they'll truly believe that the reason they joined is because the doctrines appeal to them, or it "make sense."
It seems right to me that religion supplies a package of emotional benefits that are hard to cobble together on one's own.
It is, nevertheless, possible, and if one finds the truth-claim stuff toxic (as I do), then one must find some other avenue.
I recommend going into the theater or other performing arts, as awful as that is from a career and financial standpoint. You'll be part of a tightly-knit community, there are rituals aplenty, many of which are in a special "holy" place, you'll be exercising your mind with reading great literature and memorizing long passages.
That was my family's "religion" for three generations. When I was little, and catching my dad's anxiety about money, I asked him what "class" we were (I had just heard people at school talking about the upper-class, lower-class, middle-class, etc), and he said, "We're artists. We are in every class."
I found that to be one of the most inspiring things he ever said to me, and I've always felt comfortable among all kinds of people. Coming from NYC is good for that, too.
Well, yes. It's about both - the implication of the story is that now, the aristocracy can record the plebes with their expensive devices, but the plebes only have their primitive smartphones which have to be lifted and pointed in an obvious manner.
Here's what I want - a personal swarm of fly-sized drones, with distributed sensor and image-processing electronics, uploading video/audio continually. Kill one of them, no problem! And I wouldn't have to wear awkward glasses or headgear.
Perhaps one of them would have an LED to indicate recording... but I could just ask it to fly into an ink bottle.
What's interesting to me in all of this is the cultural mindset of either side. I think 'global warming' is a proxy for our feelings about broader cultural movements. We have the extraction industry barons who have brought us many benefits (cheap energy, plastics, etc.) and benefited personally beyond the fever dreams of maharajahs. They have, since the origins of their industry, influenced the government to pay them to do so, at everyone else's expense. And they don't pay for the negative externalities (pollution, certain illnesses, worker safety, etc.). But they represent a cultural figure, the protective, strong daddy, which certain elements of our country worship. So any word against them, such as the global climate change scenario, is an existential threat - must be a lie!
On the other side (and of course there are many sides, not just two), they are considered the mean, punishing daddy, and only the protective government (in the metaphor, the mommy), can shield us from his selfish depradations. Anyone who follows that mythos finds global warming to be persuasive - after all, so much of what the extraction barons do is bad/cruel, just another one is totally easy to believe. After all, what wouldn't they do to line their own pockets! Oil spills, dead charismatic megafauna, sad coal miners, union busting... the list goes on, if you're in the business of making lists like that.
That's why this isn't a scientific debate, but a cultural one, of competing conspiracies. Either a conspiracy of extraction barons, meeting in Vail or Sutton Place, buying scientists to sow doubt, or a conspiracy of pointy-headed academics who want to emasculate the country and crush growth.
Well, right. I love SF, the SF that existed until recently (i.e., largely, but not completely, gentrified). The people that live there make it the cool place that it is. The housing stock is only a part of it. I'm from NY and I see how gentrification gets to a point where it improves things, and then gets past that to where it destroys things. I'm against breaking things, but I'm also for stringent NYC-in-the-80s-style rent control. And if landlords don't think they're making enough dough, they should get into another business where their margin is higher. I'm sure such things exist.
As far as I can tell, these weren't people who live somewhere else demanding to live in the rich people's neighborhood; in which case, you'd be absolutely right, even down to your tone of mild scorn. These are people who have lived in the neighborhood for generations, that the rich people have suddenly decided is kicky and cool. And now, their landlords have a new revenue stream open to them, and it doesn't include the people who have been living there. So, on the one hand, good for the landlords. On the other hand, I completely get the people who are suddenly have their rent multiplied by a lot.
On the third hand, in the long term, the people who are moving in will make the neighborhood boring and undesirable. I mean, look at SoHo in Manhattan - the artists made it interesting and desirable to the stockbrokers and periodontal surgeons, who kicked the artists out without a backward glance.
But that's the long term. And people, as the saying goes, don't live in the long term.
The article is right, but irrelevant. I don't know every Luddite (or even Ludd), but there's a difference between "technology destroys jobs", and "technology will put me out of work." The former may very well be false while the latter may be true. So the Luddite's incentive is to protect themselves, their family, and their community.
Damn. I took a second to sign in, and then this AC goes first, and violates Godwin's Law too.
What I was GOING to say, before this nincompoop smeared their greasy fingers all over the comment stream, was that I hoped their tweets would not all be triumphalist, manly statements about their martial prowess, but would also include all the inanities and irrelevancies one finds in a Twitter stream. But it could be that the "funny" Jews aren't involved in this particular effort.
And as soon as it has voice control and feedback, I'll want that too. Me: "Car, take me to work. And take Alvarado." Car: "Do you want me to take the 10 to Hoover?" Me: "Sure, if traffic isn't too bad. And queue up 'Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me.'" Car: "Sure thing. Buckle up!"
Let me escape the tyranny of screen interfaces AS WELL as the tyranny of driving.
Maybe because they're Canadian, I found that Kobo was the only e-book reader was the only one that provided a decent, free, French dictionary. As a native English speaker reading books in French, this is a great feature. I also really like Kobo's interface.
Will they be "the best"? I don't know... that's such an American obsession. Maybe they'll just be really good.
I still think newsPAPERS provide a value proposition not matched by internet news sources, even from the same publisher. In a newspaper will be far more likely to see articles I haven't explicitly hunted for, thereby exposing me to more unexpected material. On the internet I'll generally get only a narrow range of articles that I have searched for.
And paper is just easier to read; legible in any light, batteries not needed, light and foldable... lots of reasons.
Well put. There is a middle ground. Some work from home can lead to higher productivity, sometimes being in the office can lead to lower productivity. And vice versa. The premise is, I suppose, that mgmt can control what goes on in the office, but not outside. I think the commenter is probably correct that this is an effort to weaken the workers' negotiating position.
There may also be an element of proving to future boards of directors that she can be as "tough" (i.e., as stupid and mean) as any male executive, and that she won't cut working moms any slack. Allowing single moms to work from home would be seen as "favoritism", I'm sure. And allowing new parents leave would be seen as "European".
ON THE OTHER HAND, if the issue is that they had a lot of international workers collaborating remotely with US offices, and THAT is the practice that she is curtailing, this might be better for US workers.
Therefore, that's probably not what's happening...
Wait... what? alexo mentions article 13 of the Hamas covenant, and the response is Israel is just as crazy? What point is made there? There are two reasonable responses to alexo's comment: either Israel's constitution (or whatever it has) has a clause claiming that it owns Gaza (which makes no sense, because it doesn't, and it withdrew its forces from Gaza a few years ago), or that Hamas's covenant really does not contain that clause.
Anything else is avoiding the issue.
And, no, of course there are quite a lot of awful Israelis. The point is not who has the fewer awful people. There are awful people everywhere. The point is which awfulness is institutionalized. I would say, however much I loathe Israel's right wing racist nuts, they are in a tradition and in a political system that hews to certain standards. There are Israelis who defy those standards, obviously, but a "plague on both your houses" approach is, I think, flawed and unfair.
Israel is, sadly, burdened with a parliamentary system that gives wayyyy too much say to fringe religious nutcases. That's a tragedy that will not be fixed. But secular, more reasonable people also have a say, so there is a tension. Hamas, I'm sure, has some reasonable people, but they are, sadly, vastly outnumbered by Islamist nutcases. And the more reasonable people, I'll bet, are scorned as weak and conciliatory. That happens in Israel too, as it does right here in the USA, but I think the balance is different.
Slashdot Mirror
So... only politicians have conflicts of interest? I think Assange has many things he wants and ways of getting them - avoidance of extradition and arrest, for starters. He probably believes that if he does a big favor for Trump, Trump will do a big favor for him. And he's probably right. HRC would certainly have wanted him put on trial. So, I don't believe he is particularly trustworthy, some kind of neutral impartial observer with no skin in the game. And if you follow the maxim of "cui bono", or follow the money (or benefit, if not actual money), why is it so unbelievable that Russia would have engaged in turning the election? It's very much in Russia's interest to have a lapdog president. Putin has stated over and over that he wants the Soviet empire back, even without a communist government. Since the tsars, Russia has wanted a compliant girdle of vassal states. This is not unique to Russia, certainly the USA has declared Central America its "backyard" and has exercised overweening influence there, covertly and overtly. All I can say is I wouldn't want to be an Estonian right now, used as they have become to European-style culture and freedom.
Here's my solution - a page on the app that is a taximeter. After all "taxi cab" comes from "taximeter cabriolet". Why shouldn't I, if I want to, be able to follow the price on my device? I don't have to if I don't want to, and the driver doesn't need to bolt in a taximeter like a real taxi. This would let me know if I am running up crazy charges as it's happening, not afterward, and I can stop the car and get out. I had a situation the other day, where I opened the Uber app to call for a car, then it tells me there's x1.9 surge pricing. I tell it to inform me when the surge is over, then I call a regular professional taxi. Ten seconds later, the surge is over, but my taxi in on the way. Part of what's annoying about surge pricing is the whimsicality of it. I understand the "economic efficiency" arguments for surge pricing, but there's also the "behavioral economic" argument against it - that it seems obnoxious and breeds resentment.
One more thing - a phone number (toll-free, preferably) where you could call to order a car. I have a disabled relative who can't use a smartphone. Sure, right now he can call a regular taxi, but if Uber and the like make the taxi industry go away, they take on the responsibilities of that public utility. Also, they should have a phone number for customer service.
I know the "kids nowadays" don't want to look at a meter, because it destroys the fantasy that they have a private limo... or the fantasy that the driver is a buddy just giving them a ride because they love them. Also an actual meter would be an expense. On the other hand, there IS a meter - that fare is being calculated somewhere. Why can't I see it? The app should have a screen where I can watch the fare, and see all add-ons - health & safety (or whatever they call it), surge multiples, everything. Anybody who prefers to ignore it can.
These are well-paid and unionized jobs - there should be more women there! Pink-collar jobs tend to be lower-paid and non-union. When Scott Walker co-opted the police and firefighter's unions in order to isolate teachers and state employees, he was favoring men over women.
Because "what they want to do" is not so clear. Are we all firefighters? Cowboys? What if a biased adult tells a child over and over that they're bad at something, and then the child shrugs and says, okay, they want to do something else. Is that a true expression of "what they want to do?"
I preferred the old way of printing and zooming. And I guess I agree with the Apple comparison, because there seems to be an implied notion that being explicit with what controls do and where they are is for losers. I think that someone is too impressed with the power of design to make things obvious, when the way to make things obvious is to label them. Also, let people learn them and then live with them. There's also an implication of neophily - love of the new. I can't see a single thing with the new design that I couldn't do before - well, except that more of the screen is covered by map, which is nice. Oddly, when they took the left-hand pane and shrunk it to boxes that keep changing size, it seems like more of the map is covered, when in fact more is revealed. And the more people say "the map is covered by boxes", the more Google engineers can sneer and ignore them. I think there's also a comparison to Microsoft here, because with Office and Windows, I get the feeling of corporate fiefdoms, where things have to happen, even if they're lousy, because some overpaid executive needs to make a mark to justify their bloated pay package. Nobody gets a $20M bonus for saying, "I think it's great - let's just make it more stable." This is not to say that people may eventually get used to things (like the Office Ribbon or the Metro interface... *gag*), but the "move fast and break things" ethos is sad and puerile.
Sending someone to jail for robbing someone is impinging their rights because they impinge someone else's. So, yes. That's what is being suggested - the usual thing.
Wow. Really? That's chutspatik of them.
There are many interest groups involved in this. Uber may (or may not... I suspect it is) be good for SOME consumers, but there are other interests at stake. There are unions, which are good for the polity in that they help funnel more wealth to workers, and thus create a wealthier citizenry. There are the elderly and the handicapped, who are shut out of Uber and will suffer if taxi businesses shrink. And there are, of course, the least sympathetic victims of Uber, the owners of taxi fleets. They are part of chambers of commerce (or whatever the local Germany version is) and hold sway within their communities.
Let's not kid ourselves. As a function of smartphones, Uber serves a certain clientele - generally young, generally well-off, not all citizens.
Further, I'd love to see an analysis of the ethnicities of taxi drivers versus Uber/Lyft drivers. I suspect that the U/L drivers are, more than taxi drivers, doing this part time, and part of the majority ethnicity. Taxi driving is traditionally a job for recent immigrants.
One last note. It's just barely possible that in German, "Uber" brings up bad memories... Uber alles, and all that. I don't know, but it could be.
Very true. That sense of hope and delusional optimism is hard to come by naturally (for some of us, anyway). And if you join certain, very strict and communal religions, they'll even pick your spouse and job, and tell you whom to vote for! Quite the package.
Absolutely right. What's interesting is how people join a belief group (usually a church or something like that) and then start to bend their beliefs around that. Later, they'll truly believe that the reason they joined is because the doctrines appeal to them, or it "make sense." It seems right to me that religion supplies a package of emotional benefits that are hard to cobble together on one's own. It is, nevertheless, possible, and if one finds the truth-claim stuff toxic (as I do), then one must find some other avenue. I recommend going into the theater or other performing arts, as awful as that is from a career and financial standpoint. You'll be part of a tightly-knit community, there are rituals aplenty, many of which are in a special "holy" place, you'll be exercising your mind with reading great literature and memorizing long passages. That was my family's "religion" for three generations. When I was little, and catching my dad's anxiety about money, I asked him what "class" we were (I had just heard people at school talking about the upper-class, lower-class, middle-class, etc), and he said, "We're artists. We are in every class." I found that to be one of the most inspiring things he ever said to me, and I've always felt comfortable among all kinds of people. Coming from NYC is good for that, too.
Well, yes. It's about both - the implication of the story is that now, the aristocracy can record the plebes with their expensive devices, but the plebes only have their primitive smartphones which have to be lifted and pointed in an obvious manner.
A little piece of electrical tape would do the job nicely.
Here's what I want - a personal swarm of fly-sized drones, with distributed sensor and image-processing electronics, uploading video/audio continually. Kill one of them, no problem! And I wouldn't have to wear awkward glasses or headgear. Perhaps one of them would have an LED to indicate recording... but I could just ask it to fly into an ink bottle.
What's interesting to me in all of this is the cultural mindset of either side. I think 'global warming' is a proxy for our feelings about broader cultural movements. We have the extraction industry barons who have brought us many benefits (cheap energy, plastics, etc.) and benefited personally beyond the fever dreams of maharajahs. They have, since the origins of their industry, influenced the government to pay them to do so, at everyone else's expense. And they don't pay for the negative externalities (pollution, certain illnesses, worker safety, etc.). But they represent a cultural figure, the protective, strong daddy, which certain elements of our country worship. So any word against them, such as the global climate change scenario, is an existential threat - must be a lie! On the other side (and of course there are many sides, not just two), they are considered the mean, punishing daddy, and only the protective government (in the metaphor, the mommy), can shield us from his selfish depradations. Anyone who follows that mythos finds global warming to be persuasive - after all, so much of what the extraction barons do is bad/cruel, just another one is totally easy to believe. After all, what wouldn't they do to line their own pockets! Oil spills, dead charismatic megafauna, sad coal miners, union busting... the list goes on, if you're in the business of making lists like that. That's why this isn't a scientific debate, but a cultural one, of competing conspiracies. Either a conspiracy of extraction barons, meeting in Vail or Sutton Place, buying scientists to sow doubt, or a conspiracy of pointy-headed academics who want to emasculate the country and crush growth.
Well, right. I love SF, the SF that existed until recently (i.e., largely, but not completely, gentrified). The people that live there make it the cool place that it is. The housing stock is only a part of it. I'm from NY and I see how gentrification gets to a point where it improves things, and then gets past that to where it destroys things. I'm against breaking things, but I'm also for stringent NYC-in-the-80s-style rent control. And if landlords don't think they're making enough dough, they should get into another business where their margin is higher. I'm sure such things exist.
As far as I can tell, these weren't people who live somewhere else demanding to live in the rich people's neighborhood; in which case, you'd be absolutely right, even down to your tone of mild scorn. These are people who have lived in the neighborhood for generations, that the rich people have suddenly decided is kicky and cool. And now, their landlords have a new revenue stream open to them, and it doesn't include the people who have been living there. So, on the one hand, good for the landlords. On the other hand, I completely get the people who are suddenly have their rent multiplied by a lot. On the third hand, in the long term, the people who are moving in will make the neighborhood boring and undesirable. I mean, look at SoHo in Manhattan - the artists made it interesting and desirable to the stockbrokers and periodontal surgeons, who kicked the artists out without a backward glance. But that's the long term. And people, as the saying goes, don't live in the long term.
The article is right, but irrelevant. I don't know every Luddite (or even Ludd), but there's a difference between "technology destroys jobs", and "technology will put me out of work." The former may very well be false while the latter may be true. So the Luddite's incentive is to protect themselves, their family, and their community.
Damn. I took a second to sign in, and then this AC goes first, and violates Godwin's Law too. What I was GOING to say, before this nincompoop smeared their greasy fingers all over the comment stream, was that I hoped their tweets would not all be triumphalist, manly statements about their martial prowess, but would also include all the inanities and irrelevancies one finds in a Twitter stream. But it could be that the "funny" Jews aren't involved in this particular effort.
And as soon as it has voice control and feedback, I'll want that too. Me: "Car, take me to work. And take Alvarado." Car: "Do you want me to take the 10 to Hoover?" Me: "Sure, if traffic isn't too bad. And queue up 'Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me.'" Car: "Sure thing. Buckle up!"
Let me escape the tyranny of screen interfaces AS WELL as the tyranny of driving.
Maybe because they're Canadian, I found that Kobo was the only e-book reader was the only one that provided a decent, free, French dictionary. As a native English speaker reading books in French, this is a great feature. I also really like Kobo's interface. Will they be "the best"? I don't know... that's such an American obsession. Maybe they'll just be really good.
I still think newsPAPERS provide a value proposition not matched by internet news sources, even from the same publisher. In a newspaper will be far more likely to see articles I haven't explicitly hunted for, thereby exposing me to more unexpected material. On the internet I'll generally get only a narrow range of articles that I have searched for. And paper is just easier to read; legible in any light, batteries not needed, light and foldable... lots of reasons.
Well put. There is a middle ground. Some work from home can lead to higher productivity, sometimes being in the office can lead to lower productivity. And vice versa. The premise is, I suppose, that mgmt can control what goes on in the office, but not outside. I think the commenter is probably correct that this is an effort to weaken the workers' negotiating position. There may also be an element of proving to future boards of directors that she can be as "tough" (i.e., as stupid and mean) as any male executive, and that she won't cut working moms any slack. Allowing single moms to work from home would be seen as "favoritism", I'm sure. And allowing new parents leave would be seen as "European". ON THE OTHER HAND, if the issue is that they had a lot of international workers collaborating remotely with US offices, and THAT is the practice that she is curtailing, this might be better for US workers. Therefore, that's probably not what's happening...
Wait... what? alexo mentions article 13 of the Hamas covenant, and the response is Israel is just as crazy? What point is made there? There are two reasonable responses to alexo's comment: either Israel's constitution (or whatever it has) has a clause claiming that it owns Gaza (which makes no sense, because it doesn't, and it withdrew its forces from Gaza a few years ago), or that Hamas's covenant really does not contain that clause.
Anything else is avoiding the issue.
And, no, of course there are quite a lot of awful Israelis. The point is not who has the fewer awful people. There are awful people everywhere. The point is which awfulness is institutionalized. I would say, however much I loathe Israel's right wing racist nuts, they are in a tradition and in a political system that hews to certain standards. There are Israelis who defy those standards, obviously, but a "plague on both your houses" approach is, I think, flawed and unfair.
Israel is, sadly, burdened with a parliamentary system that gives wayyyy too much say to fringe religious nutcases. That's a tragedy that will not be fixed. But secular, more reasonable people also have a say, so there is a tension. Hamas, I'm sure, has some reasonable people, but they are, sadly, vastly outnumbered by Islamist nutcases. And the more reasonable people, I'll bet, are scorned as weak and conciliatory. That happens in Israel too, as it does right here in the USA, but I think the balance is different.