Fantastic! I’m back in. Thank you so much.

I think PTH is not around, not sure about Apollo.

Heh, wrong type of tracker. :)

Excellent job, Wolfkiller.

Oh, and buying fossil overpriced energy in the bargain too. How truly good.

You can dress it however you like, maybe even plead necessity, but what you can’t do at the same time is say how democratic it is because this features exists (which they don’t).

Edited for spelling.

Wow, it’s like he chose those examples on purpose to make his argument as ridiculous as possible: open borders (except for all the people forbidden to leave), regular elections (except now they’re indefinitely postponed)…

First it was NS2, now the cables. I wonder if they’ll admit the claims of Russian EM weapons–so-called Havana syndrome–are likewise groundless.

Haha, I was just going to post that. It’s such a cliché:

Made in China 2025 has, then, achieved most of its aims. But at what cost?

And of course the cost is… not enough consumer spending and services. Right. (with a tiny nod towards healthcare.)

At a guess, it’s following older British norms, whereby a billion is what it is in other European languages (a million million) and a thousand million is a thousand million or, more pretentiously, a milliard. You’d have to ask the authors though.

Mmm, China perfidiously stealing the hard-earned talent of Western engineers? I know just the solution! They should build an anti-communist self-defence wall:

We no longer wanted to stand by passively and see how doctors, engineers, and skilled workers were induced by refined methods unworthy of the dignity of man to give up their secure existence in the GDR and work in West Germany or West Berlin. These and other manipulations cost the GDR annual losses amounting to 3.5 thousand million marks.

Some fine historical irony. Of course, given the way the university system works in places like the US, there’s not even a good argument that this imposes costs on the public, who trains personnel only for them to leave and benefit some other state.

Maybe this is what Trump’s wall is for.

At least there seems to be some change in messaging that indicates peace may be nearer.

It’s interesting how NATO is “forced” to take action by Chinese military build-up, doesn’t leave any room for China being forced to take action by NATO’s military build-up. Reminds me of that recent video of previous NATO’s head complaining about China placing bases close to NATO, when any NATO country is thousands of km away and China is deploying near its own coast.

I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren’t so bad.

I was wrong.

I’ll continue using Firefox because it’s the least bad option, but I can’t advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don’t expect it to last long with this orientation.

So it goes.

Unfortunately this came conveniently too late.

There’s a very good report to the UN Human Rights Council on the human rights situation in the Palestinian occupied territories, numbered as A/HRC/55/73, which has a very good section on human shields.

58. IHL strictly prohibits the use of human shields. 188 Their use constitutes a war crime, 189 as it violates the duty to protect the civilian population from dangers arising from military operations. 190 When human shields are used, the attacking party must take into account the risk to civilians. 191 Indiscriminate or disproportionate harm to civilians remains unlawful and the civilian population can never be targeted.

59. Israel has accused Palestinian armed groups of deliberately using civilians as human shields in previous aggressions on Gaza (including in 2008-09, 192 2012, 193 2014, 194 2021 195 and 2022 196 ). It also used it to justify high civilian casualties and attacks against paramedics, journalists and others during the 2018–2019 ‘Great March of Return’. 197 UN independent fact-finding missions 198 and reputable human rights organizations 199 have consistently challenged these allegations, sometimes concluding that evidence of human shields had been fabricated. 200 Nevertheless, Israel has used these accusations – sometimes then retracted to justify widespread and systematic killing of Palestinian civilians in its ongoing assault. 202

60. After 7 October, this macro-characterization of Gaza’s civilians as a population of human shields has reached unprecedented levels, with Israel’s top-ranking political and military leaders consistently framing civilians as either Hamas operatives, “accomplices”, or human shields among whom Hamas is “embedded”. 203 In November, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs defined “the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields” and accused Hamas of using “the civilian population as human shields”. 204 The Ministry defines armed groups fighting from urban areas as deliberately “embedded” in the population to such an extent that it “cannot be concluded from the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted, that an attack was unlawful”. 205 Two rhetorical elements of this key legal policy document indicate the intention to transform the entire Gaza population and its infrastructures of life into a ‘legitimate’ targetable shield: the use of the all-encompassing the combined with the quotation marks to qualify civilians and civilian objects. Israel has thus sought to camouflage genocidal intent with humanitarian law jargon.

61. International law does not permit the blanket claim that an opposing force is using the entire population as human shields en bloc. Any such usage must be assessed and established on a case-by-case basis before each individual attack. 206 The crime of using human shields occurs when the use of civilians or civilian objects to impede attacks on lawful targets is the result of a deliberate tactical choice, not merely arising from the nature of the battlefield, such as hostilities in densely populated urban terrain. 207

62. Nevertheless, Israeli authorities have characterized churches, 208 mosques, 209 schools, 210 UN facilities, 211 universities, 212 hospitals and ambulances 213 as connected with Hamas to reinforce the perception of a population characterized as broadly ‘complicit’ and therefore killable. Significant numbers of Palestinian civilians are defined as human shields simply by being in “proximity to” potential Israeli targets. 214 Israel has thus transformed Gaza into a “world without civilians” in which “everything from taking shelter in hospitals to fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding”. 215 The accusation of using human shields has thus become a pretext, justifying the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.

Interesting article. I knew a bit about the split between the covenants of civil and political rights, and economic, social and cultural rights, but for example I didn’t know the right to self-determination was introduced thanks to the Soviet Union.

A funny thing about the article is that it is not especially favourable to the Soviet Union–it reproduces the usual uncritical clichés–but even that makes liberals really annoyed.

So it would still help optimising persuasion at scale (also known as lying to people to best et them to act against their interest). Why is this a good thing again?

what do I think the history is? A record of the sites I visited.

What do I think the history isn’t? A correlated record of which advertisements I’ve been exposed to, and which conversions I’ve made, that gets sent to people who are not me.

Pretty relevant distinction. One thing is me tracking myself, another thing is this tracking being sent to others, no matter how purportedly trustworthy.

I’d like people to STOP PRETENDING that the only plausible reason why someone doesn’t agree with this is that we don’t understand it. Yes, I understand what this does. The browser tracks which advertisements have been visited, the advertiser indicates to the browser when a conversion action happens, and the browser sends this information to a third-party aggregator which uses differential techniques to make it infeasible to deanonymise specific users. Do I get a pass?

Yes, this is actively collaborating with advertising. It is, in the words of Mozilla, useful to advertisers. It involves going down a level from being tracked by remote sites to being tracked by my own browser, running on my own machine. Setting aside the issues of institutional design and the possibility for data leaks, it’s still helping people whose business is to convince me to do things against my interest, to do so more effectively.

I don’t blame Mozilla for not single-handedly ending advertising online. That’s too much to expect from anyone. But they could at least avoid active collaboration with the enterprise. And if they’re going to engage in it, they should at the very least warn their users.