• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • I really think there are two different aspects to the classification of the threat. It’s actually pretty analogous to the Afghanistan War.

    First, neither Al Quaeda nor Hamas represent an existential threat to their opponents. The US hasn’t really faced a believable existential threat since the collapse of the USSR, Israel hasn’t really faced one since the 80s. Countries in Eastern Europe face an existential threat from Russia. And so on. Killing 1200 (or 3000) people, no matter how brutally or unjustified or evil it seems, it does not threaten to destroy the state of Israel. It is, of course, now an existential threat to Netanyahu, which is one reason why it’s being pursued with such enthusiasm.

    The second aspect builds from the first and questions whether the solution pursued by Israel (and the US) were both efficient (ie proportional to the threat so as not to divert attention and resources from other threats) and effective. They have to be expected to achieve specific and measurable goals and timelines.

    The ability to pull off an Oct 7th might have been equally well but more efficiently and effectively with intelligence and commando units, and Israel would have been given free rein by most of the planet to do so.






  • Are they barred from veteran’s day and St. Patrick’s Day parades as well, or does the NPS participate in those? How about 4th of July?

    Has this always been the case? If not, who was on the board that made the decision and what is their political affiliation?

    In a world where half the electorate thinks a judge must be prejudiced and has no problem with their autocratic leader saying that ethnicity decides whether someone is “fair,” I think these are legitimate followup questions.

    We needed a de-trumpification of the government. Anyone appointed by Trump or hired by an appointee should have been dismissed. This is basically what Trump is planning on doing.


  • Between the “I have an immune system and I don’t need no mask and covid isn’t real anyway” crowd and the munchausen patients, there’s a lot of people. One reason why “whole body scans” as a diagnostic tool on healthy patients is controversial is that you end up making the patient think they have something that they demand treatment for. In this case, patients will request specific meds or tests based on a marketing campaign specifically designed to sell drugs. Patients don’t need that kind of input, and it’s potentially harmful - not because people want to be sick, but because of the kind of phenomenon that makes WebMD users think they must have cancer.









  • I do this for a living. Seasonality as a generic term refers to temporally periodic signals but can even be extended to talk about non-temporal aspects of a signal. The same math used in areas like econometrics to remove periodicity in annual data can be applied to multiple domains. The main motivation to removing or isolating periodicity is to allow for investigation into the underlying phenomena, or to allow the investigation of the sources of periodicity independently of other drivers. In every case, though, seasonality is an acceptable term in everything I’ve written, read, and worked on.