I'm beginning to think that Crowd Funding is the latest greatest version of a scam artist's dream.
Step one: Promise the world Step two: Set up crowd fund account Step three: Exploit Media for free publicity Step Four: ??? Step Five: Profit! Step Six: don't deliver anything to anyone.
Crowdfunding is just like a startup or any other kind of project, failure is to be expected.
If you want a guaranteed product then go to a store and buy an item that already exists, but if you're banking on the creation of something new there's a real chance it won't work out.
Forget going after their internet communication. Go after their money. Bomb their trucks, bomb their oil wells. Block all money flowing from Saudi Arabia to ISIS. We can't do anything about random terrorists in Paris but we can do something about the huge area of land that ISIS is occupying. Many people in that region are joining ISIS just so they can get better food, cheaper electricity, and luxuries like Redbull.
And what happens after ISIS when all the oil wells are gone and the area is economically devastated and unemployed? Part of the reason ISIS took hold is the Iraq war, and economic devastation was a part of that.
Really I think it should be easier than that to cut off their money flow. Oil isn't diamonds, it's very cheap so you have to move a lot to make money.
A big oil trunk is ~10,000 gallons and there's 42 gallons in a barrel, at $40 a barrel that means a big truck can only carry about $10,000 in oil, that's not a very efficient way to smuggle oil.
If they're selling oil there has to be ways they're smuggling big volumes of oil to parties who are geographically close to ISIS. If it's happening I can't imagine it's that hard to shut it down.
They never go into detail in the book (I believe... pardon it's been an eternity since I've read it) but my assumption was always Soylent Yellow and Red were some artificially produced edible protein where it's entirely likely yellow came from insects and red maybe even came from real animals (rats?).
The way to get people to eat this stuff is to have it come out in NOT-INSECT-LOOKING form such as a cube of blended worm-meal.. maybe even with some artificial flavoring / coloring added. I mean... people eat Tofu don't they? (I don't... but some people do.;)
Or process it into protein powder (assuming it's cheap enough of course) though that's not viable for the home market.
I think the issue isn't just the repulsion against eating insects but the lack of processing you can do. My biggest amount of squeamishness doesn't come from the fact that they're bugs, but from the fact I'm eating heads, digestive tracts, etc. Of course you can get over it and I think some sardines come in a similar condition but we like to think of our food as nice and pure and it's hard for those to do.
Just do course smoothing and you can reduce the bias to zero.
Either way I don't know what my watch does but I have 5 marathons recorded and the recorded distances ranged from 41.95 to 42.5. Being Boston Qualifiers they were at least 42.195 so 4/5 were overestimates and a total error of less than 1%.
I also do a series of XC races where the published distances (measured by mountain bike) are notorious for being 5-10% longer than peoples GPS. Assuming the bikes aren't horribly calibrated the explanation is these are hilly courses (GPS misses the up/down) and the GPS will cut corners.
So on a straight course without correction it should always be an overestimate (barring error in the start/finish pos), but to claim in overestimates in every scenario is wildly inaccurate.
The shooters are yelling "Allahu Akhbar" and you goddamn liberals are blaming the French !!
I have to say, this is a rather fair point...
Fighting in a war zone is one thing, going into restaurants in the middle of Paris and opening up with automatic AK-47s into civilians eating dinner is quite another.
People who would do such things are animals and aren't worth dealing with on an even level. If they wish to behave this way, then they should be treated that way.
ISIS and what they stand for are unbelievably horrible.
But for them to carry out terrorist attacks on western civilian targets is sadly rational. Right now ISIS is being perpetually bombed by the west, and that's likely to continue until they cease to exist. The only way that ISIS survives long term is if they carry out wave after wave of terrorist attacks against western civilian targets until western populations decide saving the middle east isn't worth it and they call back their planes.
To put it another way it's asymmetric warfare. We bomb ISIS because they can't fight back against bombers. They carry out terrorist attacks because we can't fight back against terrorists.
I don't know how we should respond, bombing ISIS will lead to unspeakable tragedies here, leaving ISIS alone to collapse by other means creates unspeakable tragedies there. Letting in refugees probably means some ISIS militants sneak through the cracks to carry out attacks, keeping out refugees causes a humanitarian crisis and creates resentment and homegrown terrorists. It's a balancing act with many bad outcomes.
There is usually a large sign near the phones in prisons and jails that says something like this, "Phone Use Is Recorded". In person conversations between client and lawyer are not supposed to be recored though.
I have to agree with this. Just thinking about it from a technical perspective making a system so that just the attorney client communications aren't recorded is a tough problem.
Set aside the fact that you need someone with the right authority flicking a switch labelled record/don't record for a specific phone when an attorney call is going through. You also have the task of authenticating that the call is actually to the attorney and not a gang leader's lieutenant who can spoof caller ID.
To the extent there's a risk of abuse by prosecution, police, and prison guards there needs to be safeguards around how they can access the call recordings so it's only for legit purposes.
Of course they're fleeing to the richer parts of Europe where some Muslims already live, they're rational people who want them and their children to have good lives, why wouldn't they?
This sounds nice, but the reality is that there is a queue of people on the French border trying to get smuggle themselves into the UK. Any argument for asylum evaporates if France isn't good enough for you.
I assume they're trying to get into England from France for the same reason other people might want to be in England instead of France, maybe they have relatives there, or maybe they just speak English.
51 percent are Syrian. The rest have come mainly from nine other countries. Most of these refugees and migrants have been men — 72 percent
So 49% are definitely not from Syria and 72% of the total (Syrians and non-Syrians) are men. Syrians should have more women among them, so almost all non-Syrians "refugees" are men.
And also from the website I linked:
But his comment that “the majority of them are young males” is contradicted by the best data available on the Syrian refugees’ demographics.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — which refers refugees for resettlement in other countries — says there are more than 4 million registered Syrian refugees. Its figures on the demographic makeup of refugees is based on available data on the 2.1 million who were registered by the UNHCR in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. (Another 1.9 million Syrian refugees were registered by the Government of Turkey, and more than 24,000 were registered in North Africa.)
UNHCR’s data show that 50.5 percent of refugees are women. Females age 18 to 59 make up 23.9 percent of the refugees, while males in that age group make up 21.8 percent.
Even younger males — age 12 to 17 — represent 6.5 percent of refugees, while females that age are 6.1 percent. The majority of refugees — 51.1 percent — are under age 17, including 38.5 percent who are younger than 12 years old. These numbers were as of Sept. 6.
The figure you site talks about the 400k sea arrivals, at most 5% of the arrivals.
Which raises the obvious question, why did you use the quote at all? Did you not think I'd actually read the article enough to see it was out of context? Did you somehow miss all the other context and only saw the phrase that seemed to support you? Did you know you were taking it out of context, realize I'd spot it, but decided to post it anyway? I just don't see the point.
they're rational people who want them and their children to have good lives, why wouldn't they?
"Wanting" isn't enough. They left their children behind to seek handouts in Europe. These "refugees" are the first in history to have a majority of men and few to no families among them.
Personally I think considering 1000+ year old land claims is a really bad idea.
I think considering 70 year old land claims is also a bad idea. They're equally as bad. No one, absolutely no one has claim over any land because they had an ancestor who lived there.
Not quite equally as bad, but bad.
I don't think Israel should be given back to the Arabs, I've said so repeatedly. But I do think it's important to recognize that the Jews had no claim when they first started immigrating in the early 1900's. The Arabs had a very just cause to be angry in 1949 and again in 1967.
At some point you have to say "ok, that was bad and unjust, but at this point we have to let it go". The question is where that point is. From what I can tell the objective of the current Israeli leadership is to keep annexing land and stalling peace. Their motive is the thought that when peace finally does come people will realize the Settlements are too far established and they can't be given back.
That's why I think a very line has to be drawn at the '67 borders, because as long as they think they can keep annexing land for good there's no incentive for peace. As soon as they start seeing the settlements for the massive liability they should be then peace becomes far more attractive.
If the conflict has been settled by overwhelming force in a way grossly unfair to one side, why does that count as "settled" morally? When the side that won keeps redefining the deals, including kidnapping children in an attempt at cultural genocide (the cases I am aware of ended in the 1940s), denying the other side things guaranteed by treaty, and doing things like selling resources on tribal reservations in sweetheart deals that do not benefit the tribes?
I didn't say it was morally settled, I just said it was settled, the truth is that North Americans of European descent will never be able to make up for the injustices of the colonization of North America.
But there's no more active conflict and tensions have subsided, there's new tensions that have arisen but they're distinct enough that I don't think terrorism would be justifiable.
I'd be entirely unsurprised if this was completely real, that the authors are just ignoring the legal risks and the investors are either exaggerated (a ploy to draw real investors) or figure the inventors have a non-trivial chance to either dodge legal liability or transform the app into something legal.
If you couldn't find investors just because something was a terrible idea then we wouldn't have Twitter.
I think it's been mentioned before that China is moving a lot of its rural population into cities to allow them to provide government services more efficiently, as well as create a larger consumer culture. At the same time, one of the only stable stores of wealth for Chinese is real estate. As many articles lately have mentioned, the stock market is even more speculative than ours and not suitable for long term investing. The only issue now is filling all these empty spaces so the original investors can get their money out.
We'll see what they have in mind for this next phase, but China has been remarkably good at long term central planning. It's something missing in Western countries -- the full control of authoritarianism while doing anything necessary to grow the economy. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Rather it's been very short term thinking, doing massive infrastructure projects of only marginal usefulness in order to maintain 10% economic growth and avoid a recession for reasons of political stability.
Do you really think they planned for massive empty cities? What do you think happens to big empty buildings? They don't hold their value.
They aren't looking for housing, they are looking for socialist freebies in the (still) richer part of Europe.
So you've uprooted your family to escape a really awful war zone and now need a new place to live, you have two options.
1) Stop in a country with a poor and fairly zenophobic population and very few people who share your religion or culture.
2) Stop in a country with a richer and less zenophobic population and communities of people who share your religion or culture.
Of course they're fleeing to the richer parts of Europe where some Muslims already live, they're rational people who want them and their children to have good lives, why wouldn't they? Would you really settle in a poor country if you were in their position?
As for settling them in the Chinese ghost cities they'd be put in a very difficult position without other people who shared their culture or language and living in a country who doesn't really know how to deal with immigrant populations, it probably wouldn't be their first choice.
> Similarly trying to do some historic conquest like giving back Arab land to Iran I completely disagree with this. Arab leadership in Iran has destroyed what is a beautiful country and the uprising that brought them into power resulted in the massacre and continued victimization and oppression of a diverse range of peoples.
As for the Native Americans... I'm not so sure a lot of tribes have it all that much better than Palestinians in the Transjordan region...
I'm not sure what you're talking about, I know some Iranians and they are very emphatic about the fact they're Persian, not Arab. I don't know why you think Arabs are leading Iran.
Yeah here's the problem... you're completely wrong about basically everything. First off we've got loads fo documentation going back centuries (incl. arab historians such as Muqaddasi and Ibn Khaldun) of the Jews being one of the only permanent inhabitants of an otherwise desolate malaria ridden shithole that just kept getting conquered and reconquered by various empires.
Second if there were such a thing as a "palestinian" then the term would apply to everyone from the roman region of Syria Palestinia, which by definition would include all of jordan and every jew from the region. Once again there's tons of documentation that the entire concept of an ethnically distinct arab people called "palestinians" is a modern fabrication.
1) I spent most of my time referring to Arabs, I'm not sure why you just made an argument about "Palestinian"
2) The Jews were a persistant long term minority, there are many long term minorities in the world. And since historical Palestinians aren't really a thing, only Arabs, the Arabs were a long term minority.
Third the levant is barely mentioned in the quran and primarily in the context of its holiness to the jews, until the arab league started stirring up nationalistic hatred against Israel using Islam as a vehicle nobody gave a fuck about it other than them and there's a couple centuries of edicts from various caliphates and empires backing that up too.
I'm an atheist, if they think those are holy sites to their religion then they're holy sites to their religion.
Finally when the british mandate ended the arabs were invited to the table to help draw up the partition and refused. The british STILL gave the ARABS over 80% of the land and called it "Jordan". The tiny remaining sliver was named "Israel" and given to the Jews since most of that land had been legally purchased from the ottomans before the collapse of the ottoman empire or was otherwise unowned land that had been settled and developed. Remember the entire world population was barely over a billion and the middle east was so utterly uninhabited that everyone from Mark Twain to the Peel Commission made a big point out of how absolutely desolate it was.
Well if they considered the entire idea of the partition to be unjust of course they'd refuse.
And much of that Jewish immigration had been illegal, but the British didn't really stop it because they didn't really mind and wanted a western friendly state there.
However you cut it they were still colonizing someone else's land, if the resident Arabs were in control they wouldn't have allowed the immigration since virtually no one allows another group to come in and take over their territory.
The Arabs from that region were nomadic tribes-people, similar in a way to the American Indians.
In the early 1900's? I'm not sure that's accurate, they had cities.
What happened to the American Indians was also deplorable, but the term to describe it is 'progress.' People can go all new-agey about the Indians and it's popular for people to do in late adolescence and early adulthood.
But it's no different than bemoaning progress in other spheres of human activity. Lots of people deride the 'buggy whip maker' losing their lifestyle here on slashdot. This isn't a lot different.
The American Indians also fought back for several hundred years and are now a minority in really bad shape.
The question isn't whether we should try to reverse the European colonization of NA, the question is if we recognize those past colonizations were unjust and that we shouldn't perform another one.
A similar thing came up in the recent Canadian Election where several candidates were withdrawn due to social media posts, some were justified but others were probably an over reaction. Either way we're going to have to figure out how to deal with it unless we want our political ranks full of people who have never tried to express an opinion.
I think the way to think about this is to think of it as things said in a bar, opinions will be hyperbolic and sometimes completely out of character. But sometimes you'll see that people do have very extreme beliefs and probably shouldn't be in power.
For instance the comment 'describing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry as having a "mental age" of no more than 12'. I severely doubt he actually thinks Kerry's mental age is no more than 12, he may not even think Kerry is below average intelligence, rather he's just insulting Kerry which doesn't show anything more than he really didn't like Kerry at that particular instant.
On the other hand 'accusing President Obama of anti-Semitism' is a bit different, it raises the possibility that Baratz either seems anti-semitism in any action that seems to go against Israel or that he likes to use accusations of anti-semitism to attack his enemies. If either is something Baratz makes a habit of than he probably isn't someone you want influencing the government.
The creation of Israel was as unjust as the creation of the US, Canada, every SA country, most European countries. India, most other ME countries, etc. The world over is full of nations that conquered people who were living there immediately before they declared themselves a nation/state.
It sounds like you're just pissed that Jews did it this time.
I'm not going to bother arguing with you, I'm just going to ask you to imagining you were an Arab from that region and to honestly try putting yourself in their position.
Your arguments are stupid, which is probably a result of your own innate stupidity.
The Jews took control of the land and created a country in the time-honored tradition of fighting a war and coming out on top. Thousands of nation states have come into existence that exact same way, including virtually every single Arab-dominated country in the world. Just because the Jews did it relatively recently does not mean their method was illegitimate.
The source of the Israeli-Arab conflict is rooted in the fact that Arabs can't stand losing to Jews. If the Kurds carved out a State in northern Iraq, the world would applaud it, and no one would consider it for another second. Only when Jews are involved do we need 2 UN organizations involved to keep the Arabs as perpetual "refugees".
Fine then you've just lost all moral grounds to complain about Palestinian terrorism, because if you think that Israel is justified in taking land through war (which BTW isn't allowed under international law for obvious reasons) then the Palestinians are justified in fighting back.
You can't argue that the Israel is allowed to conquer another people's land while simultaneously claiming the other people aren't allowed to fight back.
> because those aren't examples of "giving them enough of someone else's land" Uh, yes they are. Arabs become dominant in those regions when they took over - how is this different other than that the re-establishment of Israel was internationally sanctioned and not a bloody conquest? If you're going to ask Israel to "give back" land to the Arabs then you're going to have to at least ask Arabs to give back land to Persians, Zorastarians / Aryans, Assyrians, etc.
Hmm, lets unpack this.
1) At the time of WWI Arabs were the majority in those regions, Western powers had no right to interfere in changing demographics and certainly not in giving power to a new ethnicity they'd just let in.
2) My point was to explain why the creation of Israel was extremely unjust and a huge mistake. Not to say that we should try to undo that mistake and give Israel back to the Arabs. Similarly trying to do some historic conquest like giving back Arab land to Iran or give back all Canadian/US land to Native Americans would also be a terrible idea.
3) Israel has undergone a fairly continuous expansion into Palestinian territory since 1967, therefore I see all of the post '67 settlements as part of a current ongoing conflict. Therefore I think a peace agreement starts with the assumption that Israel doesn't get to keep any of the post '67 settlements.
The issue with Israel is Jews had virtually no claim to that land, they had been a small minority for centuries but hadn't been a majority or rulers for a very very long time.
That's laughable because all the other inhabitants hadn't been rulers in that region, ever.
So what? The Arabs had been the substantial majority for a very long time.
There never was such a thing as a state called Palestine, nor a people called Palestinian.
I suspect this is a standard argument for you since I spend most of the comment talking about Arabs.
Many nations have come and gone over the centuries but only the Jews have constantly lived there for thousands of years.
Well that's false.
Many populations had constantly lived there for thousands of years.
As for nations coming and going why give the land to a nation that hadn't existed in thousands of years?
So, you might be justified in arguing that Jews were not the majority in the region for a few thousand years
It's not an argument, it's a statement of fact.
but you are not justified in implying that any other nation held a majority over the region (or held it at all) any longer than the Jews.
I can only assume when you say "nation" you mean ethnicity.
I find that claim very dubious, to the extend we can track ethnicities I suspect Arabs have been a majority for longer. And certainly at the end of WWI they had been the majority of over 1000 years.
Personally I think considering 1000+ year old land claims is a really bad idea.
The previous owner of the territory in question was the Ottoman Empire, but that nation ceased to exist during World War 2.
I assume you mean World War 1.
The Arabs would have had some degree of autonomy under the Ottomans, either way that didn't give the West the right to give Jews ownership of the land.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm beginning to think that Crowd Funding is the latest greatest version of a scam artist's dream.
Step one: Promise the world
Step two: Set up crowd fund account
Step three: Exploit Media for free publicity
Step Four: ???
Step Five: Profit!
Step Six: don't deliver anything to anyone.
Crowdfunding is just like a startup or any other kind of project, failure is to be expected.
If you want a guaranteed product then go to a store and buy an item that already exists, but if you're banking on the creation of something new there's a real chance it won't work out.
Forget going after their internet communication. Go after their money. Bomb their trucks, bomb their oil wells. Block all money flowing from Saudi Arabia to ISIS. We can't do anything about random terrorists in Paris but we can do something about the huge area of land that ISIS is occupying. Many people in that region are joining ISIS just so they can get better food, cheaper electricity, and luxuries like Redbull.
And what happens after ISIS when all the oil wells are gone and the area is economically devastated and unemployed? Part of the reason ISIS took hold is the Iraq war, and economic devastation was a part of that.
Really I think it should be easier than that to cut off their money flow. Oil isn't diamonds, it's very cheap so you have to move a lot to make money.
A big oil trunk is ~10,000 gallons and there's 42 gallons in a barrel, at $40 a barrel that means a big truck can only carry about $10,000 in oil, that's not a very efficient way to smuggle oil.
If they're selling oil there has to be ways they're smuggling big volumes of oil to parties who are geographically close to ISIS. If it's happening I can't imagine it's that hard to shut it down.
They never go into detail in the book (I believe... pardon it's been an eternity since I've read it) but my assumption was always Soylent Yellow and Red were some artificially produced edible protein where it's entirely likely yellow came from insects and red maybe even came from real animals (rats?).
The way to get people to eat this stuff is to have it come out in NOT-INSECT-LOOKING form such as a cube of blended worm-meal.. maybe even with some artificial flavoring / coloring added. I mean... people eat Tofu don't they? (I don't... but some people do. ;)
Or process it into protein powder (assuming it's cheap enough of course) though that's not viable for the home market.
I think the issue isn't just the repulsion against eating insects but the lack of processing you can do. My biggest amount of squeamishness doesn't come from the fact that they're bugs, but from the fact I'm eating heads, digestive tracts, etc. Of course you can get over it and I think some sardines come in a similar condition but we like to think of our food as nice and pure and it's hard for those to do.
Just do course smoothing and you can reduce the bias to zero.
Either way I don't know what my watch does but I have 5 marathons recorded and the recorded distances ranged from 41.95 to 42.5. Being Boston Qualifiers they were at least 42.195 so 4/5 were overestimates and a total error of less than 1%.
I also do a series of XC races where the published distances (measured by mountain bike) are notorious for being 5-10% longer than peoples GPS. Assuming the bikes aren't horribly calibrated the explanation is these are hilly courses (GPS misses the up/down) and the GPS will cut corners.
So on a straight course without correction it should always be an overestimate (barring error in the start/finish pos), but to claim in overestimates in every scenario is wildly inaccurate.
The shooters are yelling "Allahu Akhbar" and you goddamn liberals are blaming the French !!
I have to say, this is a rather fair point...
Fighting in a war zone is one thing, going into restaurants in the middle of Paris and opening up with automatic AK-47s into civilians eating dinner is quite another.
People who would do such things are animals and aren't worth dealing with on an even level. If they wish to behave this way, then they should be treated that way.
ISIS and what they stand for are unbelievably horrible.
But for them to carry out terrorist attacks on western civilian targets is sadly rational. Right now ISIS is being perpetually bombed by the west, and that's likely to continue until they cease to exist. The only way that ISIS survives long term is if they carry out wave after wave of terrorist attacks against western civilian targets until western populations decide saving the middle east isn't worth it and they call back their planes.
To put it another way it's asymmetric warfare. We bomb ISIS because they can't fight back against bombers. They carry out terrorist attacks because we can't fight back against terrorists.
I don't know how we should respond, bombing ISIS will lead to unspeakable tragedies here, leaving ISIS alone to collapse by other means creates unspeakable tragedies there. Letting in refugees probably means some ISIS militants sneak through the cracks to carry out attacks, keeping out refugees causes a humanitarian crisis and creates resentment and homegrown terrorists. It's a balancing act with many bad outcomes.
Running out of legitimate target?
Has Jesus Christ now become the latest target of your liberal SJW attack?
Well no.
You said Christianity was better because it didn't portray killing as honourable.
DogDude pointed out that there's lots of killing in the bible.
You moved the goalposts and said the New Testament didn't killing as honourable.
Opportunist pointed out that Jesus never invalidated the Old Testament, so DogDude's point is still valid.
You then responded with a bizarre claim that he was criticizing Jesus and an even more bizarre side rant about a "liberal SJW".
Same here. The other thing I like with Konsole is the shortcut for switching tabs is Shift+ which is very quick to hit.
Honestly as long as you give me tabs and the ability to type I'm pretty happy.
There is usually a large sign near the phones in prisons and jails that says something like this, "Phone Use Is Recorded".
In person conversations between client and lawyer are not supposed to be recored though.
I have to agree with this. Just thinking about it from a technical perspective making a system so that just the attorney client communications aren't recorded is a tough problem.
Set aside the fact that you need someone with the right authority flicking a switch labelled record/don't record for a specific phone when an attorney call is going through. You also have the task of authenticating that the call is actually to the attorney and not a gang leader's lieutenant who can spoof caller ID.
To the extent there's a risk of abuse by prosecution, police, and prison guards there needs to be safeguards around how they can access the call recordings so it's only for legit purposes.
Of course they're fleeing to the richer parts of Europe where some Muslims already live, they're rational people who want them and their children to have good lives, why wouldn't they?
This sounds nice, but the reality is that there is a queue of people on the French border trying to get smuggle themselves into the UK. Any argument for asylum evaporates if France isn't good enough for you.
I assume they're trying to get into England from France for the same reason other people might want to be in England instead of France, maybe they have relatives there, or maybe they just speak English.
From the website you linked:
51 percent are Syrian. The rest have come mainly from nine other countries. Most of these refugees and migrants have been men — 72 percent
So 49% are definitely not from Syria and 72% of the total (Syrians and non-Syrians) are men. Syrians should have more women among them, so almost all non-Syrians "refugees" are men.
And also from the website I linked:
But his comment that “the majority of them are young males” is contradicted by the best data available on the Syrian refugees’ demographics.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — which refers refugees for resettlement in other countries — says there are more than 4 million registered Syrian refugees. Its figures on the demographic makeup of refugees is based on available data on the 2.1 million who were registered by the UNHCR in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. (Another 1.9 million Syrian refugees were registered by the Government of Turkey, and more than 24,000 were registered in North Africa.)
UNHCR’s data show that 50.5 percent of refugees are women. Females age 18 to 59 make up 23.9 percent of the refugees, while males in that age group make up 21.8 percent.
Even younger males — age 12 to 17 — represent 6.5 percent of refugees, while females that age are 6.1 percent. The majority of refugees — 51.1 percent — are under age 17, including 38.5 percent who are younger than 12 years old. These numbers were as of Sept. 6.
The figure you site talks about the 400k sea arrivals, at most 5% of the arrivals.
Which raises the obvious question, why did you use the quote at all? Did you not think I'd actually read the article enough to see it was out of context? Did you somehow miss all the other context and only saw the phrase that seemed to support you? Did you know you were taking it out of context, realize I'd spot it, but decided to post it anyway? I just don't see the point.
they're rational people who want them and their children to have good lives, why wouldn't they?
"Wanting" isn't enough. They left their children behind to seek handouts in Europe. These "refugees" are the first in history to have a majority of men and few to no families among them.
Wrong
Personally I think considering 1000+ year old land claims is a really bad idea.
I think considering 70 year old land claims is also a bad idea. They're equally as bad. No one, absolutely no one has claim over any land because they had an ancestor who lived there.
Not quite equally as bad, but bad.
I don't think Israel should be given back to the Arabs, I've said so repeatedly. But I do think it's important to recognize that the Jews had no claim when they first started immigrating in the early 1900's. The Arabs had a very just cause to be angry in 1949 and again in 1967.
At some point you have to say "ok, that was bad and unjust, but at this point we have to let it go". The question is where that point is. From what I can tell the objective of the current Israeli leadership is to keep annexing land and stalling peace. Their motive is the thought that when peace finally does come people will realize the Settlements are too far established and they can't be given back.
That's why I think a very line has to be drawn at the '67 borders, because as long as they think they can keep annexing land for good there's no incentive for peace. As soon as they start seeing the settlements for the massive liability they should be then peace becomes far more attractive.
If the conflict has been settled by overwhelming force in a way grossly unfair to one side, why does that count as "settled" morally? When the side that won keeps redefining the deals, including kidnapping children in an attempt at cultural genocide (the cases I am aware of ended in the 1940s), denying the other side things guaranteed by treaty, and doing things like selling resources on tribal reservations in sweetheart deals that do not benefit the tribes?
I didn't say it was morally settled, I just said it was settled, the truth is that North Americans of European descent will never be able to make up for the injustices of the colonization of North America.
But there's no more active conflict and tensions have subsided, there's new tensions that have arisen but they're distinct enough that I don't think terrorism would be justifiable.
I'd be entirely unsurprised if this was completely real, that the authors are just ignoring the legal risks and the investors are either exaggerated (a ploy to draw real investors) or figure the inventors have a non-trivial chance to either dodge legal liability or transform the app into something legal.
If you couldn't find investors just because something was a terrible idea then we wouldn't have Twitter.
I think it's been mentioned before that China is moving a lot of its rural population into cities to allow them to provide government services more efficiently, as well as create a larger consumer culture. At the same time, one of the only stable stores of wealth for Chinese is real estate. As many articles lately have mentioned, the stock market is even more speculative than ours and not suitable for long term investing. The only issue now is filling all these empty spaces so the original investors can get their money out.
We'll see what they have in mind for this next phase, but China has been remarkably good at long term central planning. It's something missing in Western countries -- the full control of authoritarianism while doing anything necessary to grow the economy. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Rather it's been very short term thinking, doing massive infrastructure projects of only marginal usefulness in order to maintain 10% economic growth and avoid a recession for reasons of political stability.
Do you really think they planned for massive empty cities? What do you think happens to big empty buildings? They don't hold their value.
They aren't looking for housing, they are looking for socialist freebies in the (still) richer part of Europe.
So you've uprooted your family to escape a really awful war zone and now need a new place to live, you have two options.
1) Stop in a country with a poor and fairly zenophobic population and very few people who share your religion or culture.
2) Stop in a country with a richer and less zenophobic population and communities of people who share your religion or culture.
Of course they're fleeing to the richer parts of Europe where some Muslims already live, they're rational people who want them and their children to have good lives, why wouldn't they? Would you really settle in a poor country if you were in their position?
As for settling them in the Chinese ghost cities they'd be put in a very difficult position without other people who shared their culture or language and living in a country who doesn't really know how to deal with immigrant populations, it probably wouldn't be their first choice.
> Similarly trying to do some historic conquest like giving back Arab land to Iran
I completely disagree with this. Arab leadership in Iran has destroyed what is a beautiful country and the uprising that brought them into power resulted in the massacre and continued victimization and oppression of a diverse range of peoples.
As for the Native Americans... I'm not so sure a lot of tribes have it all that much better than Palestinians in the Transjordan region...
I'm not sure what you're talking about, I know some Iranians and they are very emphatic about the fact they're Persian, not Arab. I don't know why you think Arabs are leading Iran.
So you've just justified terrorism on the part of American Indians, Hispanics, and any number of US Territories we took by force.
When the conflict was active sure.
Since then the conflict has been settled and a peaceful resolution mechanism was establish. Further terrorism would be unjust.
Yeah here's the problem... you're completely wrong about basically everything. First off we've got loads fo documentation going back centuries (incl. arab historians such as Muqaddasi and Ibn Khaldun) of the Jews being one of the only permanent inhabitants of an otherwise desolate malaria ridden shithole that just kept getting conquered and reconquered by various empires.
Second if there were such a thing as a "palestinian" then the term would apply to everyone from the roman region of Syria Palestinia, which by definition would include all of jordan and every jew from the region. Once again there's tons of documentation that the entire concept of an ethnically distinct arab people called "palestinians" is a modern fabrication.
1) I spent most of my time referring to Arabs, I'm not sure why you just made an argument about "Palestinian"
2) The Jews were a persistant long term minority, there are many long term minorities in the world. And since historical Palestinians aren't really a thing, only Arabs, the Arabs were a long term minority.
Third the levant is barely mentioned in the quran and primarily in the context of its holiness to the jews, until the arab league started stirring up nationalistic hatred against Israel using Islam as a vehicle nobody gave a fuck about it other than them and there's a couple centuries of edicts from various caliphates and empires backing that up too.
I'm an atheist, if they think those are holy sites to their religion then they're holy sites to their religion.
Finally when the british mandate ended the arabs were invited to the table to help draw up the partition and refused. The british STILL gave the ARABS over 80% of the land and called it "Jordan". The tiny remaining sliver was named "Israel" and given to the Jews since most of that land had been legally purchased from the ottomans before the collapse of the ottoman empire or was otherwise unowned land that had been settled and developed. Remember the entire world population was barely over a billion and the middle east was so utterly uninhabited that everyone from Mark Twain to the Peel Commission made a big point out of how absolutely desolate it was.
Well if they considered the entire idea of the partition to be unjust of course they'd refuse.
And much of that Jewish immigration had been illegal, but the British didn't really stop it because they didn't really mind and wanted a western friendly state there.
However you cut it they were still colonizing someone else's land, if the resident Arabs were in control they wouldn't have allowed the immigration since virtually no one allows another group to come in and take over their territory.
The Arabs from that region were nomadic tribes-people, similar in a way to the American Indians.
In the early 1900's? I'm not sure that's accurate, they had cities.
What happened to the American Indians was also deplorable, but the term to describe it is 'progress.' People can go all new-agey about the Indians and it's popular for people to do in late adolescence and early adulthood.
But it's no different than bemoaning progress in other spheres of human activity. Lots of people deride the 'buggy whip maker' losing their lifestyle here on slashdot. This isn't a lot different.
The American Indians also fought back for several hundred years and are now a minority in really bad shape.
The question isn't whether we should try to reverse the European colonization of NA, the question is if we recognize those past colonizations were unjust and that we shouldn't perform another one.
A similar thing came up in the recent Canadian Election where several candidates were withdrawn due to social media posts, some were justified but others were probably an over reaction. Either way we're going to have to figure out how to deal with it unless we want our political ranks full of people who have never tried to express an opinion.
I think the way to think about this is to think of it as things said in a bar, opinions will be hyperbolic and sometimes completely out of character. But sometimes you'll see that people do have very extreme beliefs and probably shouldn't be in power.
For instance the comment 'describing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry as having a "mental age" of no more than 12'. I severely doubt he actually thinks Kerry's mental age is no more than 12, he may not even think Kerry is below average intelligence, rather he's just insulting Kerry which doesn't show anything more than he really didn't like Kerry at that particular instant.
On the other hand 'accusing President Obama of anti-Semitism' is a bit different, it raises the possibility that Baratz either seems anti-semitism in any action that seems to go against Israel or that he likes to use accusations of anti-semitism to attack his enemies. If either is something Baratz makes a habit of than he probably isn't someone you want influencing the government.
The creation of Israel was as unjust as the creation of the US, Canada, every SA country, most European countries. India, most other ME countries, etc. The world over is full of nations that conquered people who were living there immediately before they declared themselves a nation/state.
It sounds like you're just pissed that Jews did it this time.
I'm not going to bother arguing with you, I'm just going to ask you to imagining you were an Arab from that region and to honestly try putting yourself in their position.
Your arguments are stupid, which is probably a result of your own innate stupidity.
The Jews took control of the land and created a country in the time-honored tradition of fighting a war and coming out on top. Thousands of nation states have come into existence that exact same way, including virtually every single Arab-dominated country in the world. Just because the Jews did it relatively recently does not mean their method was illegitimate.
The source of the Israeli-Arab conflict is rooted in the fact that Arabs can't stand losing to Jews. If the Kurds carved out a State in northern Iraq, the world would applaud it, and no one would consider it for another second. Only when Jews are involved do we need 2 UN organizations involved to keep the Arabs as perpetual "refugees".
Fine then you've just lost all moral grounds to complain about Palestinian terrorism, because if you think that Israel is justified in taking land through war (which BTW isn't allowed under international law for obvious reasons) then the Palestinians are justified in fighting back.
You can't argue that the Israel is allowed to conquer another people's land while simultaneously claiming the other people aren't allowed to fight back.
> because those aren't examples of "giving them enough of someone else's land"
Uh, yes they are. Arabs become dominant in those regions when they took over - how is this different other than that the re-establishment of Israel was internationally sanctioned and not a bloody conquest? If you're going to ask Israel to "give back" land to the Arabs then you're going to have to at least ask Arabs to give back land to Persians, Zorastarians / Aryans, Assyrians, etc.
Hmm, lets unpack this.
1) At the time of WWI Arabs were the majority in those regions, Western powers had no right to interfere in changing demographics and certainly not in giving power to a new ethnicity they'd just let in.
2) My point was to explain why the creation of Israel was extremely unjust and a huge mistake. Not to say that we should try to undo that mistake and give Israel back to the Arabs. Similarly trying to do some historic conquest like giving back Arab land to Iran or give back all Canadian/US land to Native Americans would also be a terrible idea.
3) Israel has undergone a fairly continuous expansion into Palestinian territory since 1967, therefore I see all of the post '67 settlements as part of a current ongoing conflict. Therefore I think a peace agreement starts with the assumption that Israel doesn't get to keep any of the post '67 settlements.
The issue with Israel is Jews had virtually no claim to that land, they had been a small minority for centuries but hadn't been a majority or rulers for a very very long time.
That's laughable because all the other inhabitants hadn't been rulers in that region, ever.
So what? The Arabs had been the substantial majority for a very long time.
There never was such a thing as a state called Palestine, nor a people called Palestinian.
I suspect this is a standard argument for you since I spend most of the comment talking about Arabs.
Many nations have come and gone over the centuries but only the Jews have constantly lived there for thousands of years.
Well that's false.
Many populations had constantly lived there for thousands of years.
As for nations coming and going why give the land to a nation that hadn't existed in thousands of years?
So, you might be justified in arguing that Jews were not the majority in the region for a few thousand years
It's not an argument, it's a statement of fact.
but you are not justified in implying that any other nation held a majority over the region (or held it at all) any longer than the Jews.
I can only assume when you say "nation" you mean ethnicity.
I find that claim very dubious, to the extend we can track ethnicities I suspect Arabs have been a majority for longer. And certainly at the end of WWI they had been the majority of over 1000 years.
Personally I think considering 1000+ year old land claims is a really bad idea.
The previous owner of the territory in question was the Ottoman Empire, but that nation ceased to exist during World War 2.
I assume you mean World War 1.
The Arabs would have had some degree of autonomy under the Ottomans, either way that didn't give the West the right to give Jews ownership of the land.