I don't think it was an intentional decision to target a school. If targetting schools was a goal, there would likely have been many more targetted.
It certainly seems that there was an intentional decision to disband departments in the military last year that were intended to confirm targets are appropriate before a strike (although I can't find a reference now). There's also a lot of reporting that they used AI to do the targetting selection; if so that was an intentional decision to allow for poor selection; especially since it doesn't appear there was validation of targets. There's a lot of intentional decisions to make comments declaring 'no stupid rules of engagement' and such.
I think it's most likely that the intentional decisions led to the situation where the targetting of a school would not be noticed until after the school was hit and international outcry was made, but that doesn't mean it was not a targetting mistake. You can certainly hold people accountable for the decisions that lead to the targetting of a school, at least in the court of public opinion since there's an accountability vacuum in washington DC lately.
There are many examples of targetting mistakes that are excusable. I don't think this is one of them; but that it is inexcusable and was the result of intentional decisions doesn't make it necessarily an intentional act and not a mistake.
>It certainly seems that there was an intentional decision to disband departments in the military last year that were intended to confirm targets are appropriate before a strike (although I can't find a reference now).
On the Media recently interviewed somebody involved with that effort, and they discuss the bombing of the school.
The "proof" of the mistake is Hanlon's razor and the fact that the school was adjacent a military facility and the building itself used to be for military purposes.
>Footage from Russian state broadcaster RT has captured the moment a missile lands just a few feet from where its reporter was broadcasting in southern Lebanon.
What's this supposed to be proof of? That because a bombing happened near a journalist, that he must have been intentionally targeted? Does the US even have capabilities to track journalists in Iran, of all places? Given that journalists are specifically going into war zones, what even is the expected amount of journalists to get bombed, from pure chance alone?
Israel has a track record with the coincidentally anti-journalist ordinance. At some point you land a coin on heads twenty times and have to think maybe the coin is weighted.
At this point, Hanlon's razor should be considered a fallacy.
In fact, quite a lot of what looked like incompetence was malice. Intentional and proud malice. It does not mean there is no incompetence, but Hanlon's razor is no longer valid.
Second, army working group meant to ensure these mistakes wont happen was dismantled by Hegseth. All the while he framed such efforts as woke nonsense and praised lethality only. He was sending clear message about what matters to troops
The system was changed to allow and facilite errors like that.
I wonder if there is some kind of new law that we should be looking at drafting, in which we hold accountable folks who attribute bad actions to incompetence instead of malice despite the actors being explicitly malicious?
I think that covers a lot of western media in all the wars the US has waged in my lifetime:
it's always "a regrettable (but worthwhile) mistake" until it's a "horrific but unique war crime"... it's never "who the fuck said these vicious idiots could kill whoever they want and never face just and material consequences for their crimes".
This shit certainly seems intentional. Maybe the folks who are attributing things to "incompetence" are just projecting their own incompetencies in interpreting the world, but at this point I suspect that they to are complicit in this malice.
"Despite the war aims being nebulous, illegal, and ever changing, none of them would be advanced by bombing a girls school."
If the goal is to force the enemy into giving up? Many are willing to give their life to a cause, but way less are willing to give the lifes of their children.
This was not just some school, but a school where the children of the iranian leadership are going to.
And coincidently Trump himself said he would target the families of terrorists, if voted into power.
"The Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab is part of a broad network of schools structurally and administratively affiliated with the IRGC Navy.
These schools are classified as nonprofit institutions and are primarily intended to provide educational services to the sons and daughters of members of the IRGC Navy."
IRGC means leadership (I did not said highest leadership, they would be in Teheran)
I was going to comment pedantically that soccer balls were dodecahedrons not icosahedrons, but in reading the article, I came to realize that truncated icosahedrons are the same as truncated dodecahedrons.
This was such a delightful realization I felt the need to comment anyway.
Hmm. I'm sorry, but truncated dodecahedra are different from truncated icosahedra.
Truncated dodecahedra are made from twelve 10-gon and twenty triangular faces. Truncated icosahedra are made from twenty hexagonal and twelve pentagonal faces.
Every sedentary society has historically scared its members of the dangers of the nomadic lifestyle, heathens, ...
The implied conclusion being that since our ancestors switched from nomadic to sedentary it must have been preferable, a kind of informal democratic collectively and individually approved choice.
Surely sedentary must have been better, how else could such a transition have been sustained?
Rather easy how else: its perfectly possible for average or mean life quality under sedentary lifestyle to be a net setback compared to nomadic lifestyle, since slavery can't be effectively implemented in a nomadic lifestyle, whereas the sedentary lifestyle creates both the demand for labor (routine monotonous work in the fields) and the means to enable slavery (escaping nomadic tribes under Brownian motion is much easier than escaping from a randomly assigned position deep in a larger sedentary empire, even if you escape the sedentary village, the stable neighbouring village will happily return you to "your owner" so that he would hopefully return the favor if ever he catches one of "their slaves").
It's easy to claim a net improvement in life quality ... by discounting the loss of life quality of the slaves!
Nomadic lifestyle was simply outcompeted by sedentary-enabled slavery!
> even if you escape the sedentary village, the stable neighbouring village will happily return you to "your owner" so that he would hopefully return the favor if ever he catches one of "their slaves")
Tell that to all the people who ran the Underground Railroad in the pre-Civil War US, not to mention all the other ways that Fugitive Slave laws were persistently violated.
I think you are vastly underestimating the benefits of a modern "sedentary" society. But as I pointed out in my other post, if you really don't think they're benefits, then you can simply forgo them. Go and live an off grid subsistence lifestyle. There are people who do that. But of course they don't post on the Internet.
How is someone living a hunter-gatherer subsistence life going to get Internet access? That requires a technological society, which requires a lot of wealth creation way above a subsistence level.
If you're saying that someone might claim they're living a hunter-gatherer subsistence life except when they're not, well, that's just hypocrisy. If you're going to make use of things that require a modern technological society, then you're saying life in a modern technological society is preferable to a hunter-gatherer subsistence life, whether you like it or not. You can't have it both ways.
If you think a subsistence nomadic lifestyle is preferable to a modern "sedentary" one, then how are you able to post here? Subsistence nomads don't have Internet access (to name just one of umpteen things we "sedentary" moderns have access to that they don't). There are ways to live off grid if you really think it's preferable.
Fine. And whatever device you're using to post here just happened to emerge spontaneously from the dirt, instead of being built by the efforts of thousands of people spread all over the world as part of a modern technological society.
Also: where do you get your food? Do you grow it? Or hunt for it in a natural wilderness, untouched by technology, using tools you made yourself, without the benefit of modern technology?
Where do you get your clothes? Do you make them yourself? Out of natural materials that would be there if our modern, technological society did not exist?
I'm going to make a wild guess that the answers to those questions are "no"--that you are relying on sources of food and clothes that also require a modern technological society. Not to mention transportation and whatever else you need to do the things that occupy your day.
So no, you are not living a hunter-gatherer subsistence life. You are taking advantage of the fact that it is possible in a modern technological society to be a homeless bum living under a bridge, without having to do all the things that actual hunter-gatherers living a subsistence life have had to do all through human history to survive.
They said “short duration” not “short term”. The real risk is from spread duration rather than simple interest rate duration, and assuming they don’t lever up, that should be minimal.
The beauty of MBS floaters is that you’re relatively insensitive to prepayments because to a first approximation they’re always priced at par.
From an investor standpoint, as they say, you’re making maybe SOFR + 1.5%. That’s not a very sext return. But let’s say your banks repo desk is willing to finance the purchase at 5% down. Then you can lever up your investment 20x and now you’re a big shot making SOFR+30%, which is very sexy. But what’s that, when your lever like that, a tiny decline in price wipes out your entire stake (Welcome to 2008).
Very well put. And yes, to your point, we don't lever up.
And yes, SOFR + 1.5% isn't very sexy, but we're competing against existing treasury product that use money market funds and pay SOFR (or less, after fees). So that 1.5% is meaningful.
It wasn't just an omelette on top of a waffle (and both of them the size of a medium pizza). As you strayed from the edges toward the center it became difficult to see where the waffle ended and the omelette began.
A bit of a tangent, but I just want to say how, as a Canadian, I'm getting a lot of joy reading about this restaurant. It's a hilarious facsimile of a Canadian restaurant for a couple reasons:
- There's nothing Canadian about a pancake house. We love pancakes but they aren't really ingrained with our identity. Maple syrup on the other hand, is EXTREMELY important to a lot of Canadians. Serving table syrup instead of real maple syrup is an affront. I found a Reddit thread[1] where a user espouses "tons of free syrup" you were given at RCPH. That's NOT a good thing if you ask me!
- In Canada (and I assume other British Commonwealth countries) you aren't legally allowed to have "Royal" in the name of your business without Royal consent from the Governor General of Canada[2]
Just a bit of Canadiana sparked by your comment I thought I'd share. I always get a kick of the small but conspicuous cultural differences between Canada and USA. They give me that Ingluorious Basterds "number 3" moment.
It sounds like you're kind of a little up and to the right of the Ugandan Rolex[1]. This sounds like some hideous method of gangland killing, but is in fact a tomato omelette rolled up in a big fresh chapati. Nothing to stop you using any other variety of omelette and indeed I've had excellent results with cheese ones.
The article you linked claims "any type of omelette", but the vast majority of omelettes[*] are semicircles, not circular, right? You'd have to cook the top and bottom separately or mostly separately to get a circular one. Hm.
[*] of course, here I mean proper omelettes, which are an egg shell around ingredients, not scrambled eggs with ingredients mixed in.
In my experience if they're semicircular it's because they're folded over on themselves. Not sure what that has to do with cooking (or not) both sides.
Your ingredient mixing distinction doesn't reflect what I've encountered. That seems to have more to do with the nature of a given ingredient or alternatively with presentation or other concerns specific to a given recipe.
Yeah if you wanted "cooked separately and also circular" you'd need to make a two omelette sandwich. I've yet to encounter that at a restaurant.
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