BraveSirZaphod

In most cases, longer. Jews had been in Iraq more than a thousand years before Islam was even developed.

There's this notion that modern Israelis are essentially just Europeans who invaded after WWII, which is simply not true.

While the Zionist movement largely did originate in Europe in the late 1800s, the majority of Israeli citizens today are not of European ancestry / Ashkenazi. The majority are what's called Mizrahi, coming from Middle Eastern Jewish communities that were forcibly expelled from Arab countries during the 50s and 60s. For instance, Ben Gvir, the current Minister of Defense (and to be clear, a complete little shit), is from an Iraqi family. In 1948, there were roughly 150,000 Jews in Iraq, making up nearly 40% of the population of Baghdad. Today, there are estimated to be less than five. Likewise, in Yemen, there were roughly 50,000 Jews, maintaining a presence that goes back well over 2500 years. Today, there may be one single Jew left in the country. The same situation happened all throughout the Arab world. The departing Jews generally had to flee their homes without any significant belongings, since their property was often confiscated. In Syria, for instance, a 1964 decree prevented Jews from traveling more than 3 miles from their homes, banned them from owning land, banned them from working in the government or in banks, banned them from leaving anything as inheritance - which would instead be seized by the state.

If something is possible, and this simply indeed is, someone is going to develop it regardless of how we feel about it, so it's important for non-malicious actors to make people aware of the potential negative impacts so we can start to develop ways to handle them before actively malicious actors start deploying it.

Critical businesses and governments need to know that identity verification via video and voice is much less trustworthy than it used to be, and so if you're currently doing that, you need to mitigate these risks. There are tools, namely public-private key cryptography, that can be used to verify identity in a much tighter way, and we're probably going to need to start implementing them in more places.

An extremely specific and highly regulated type of work action has a lot of rules in order to legally be protected.

For instance:

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a “sitdown” strike, when employees simply stay in the plant and refuse to work is not protected by the law.

https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes

Especially at the level of working for Google, employment is a voluntary agreement, not a right. If the employees find it unconscionable to work for Google, the correct thing to do is to, you know, not work for Google.

Workers have essentially zero right to protest on company time on company property and disrupting work.

It would be another thing if, to address your counter-example, an employer went through everyone's social media and systematically fired everyone who made the "wrong" public stance in an avenue that has nothing to do with the job (still legal probably, but much shittier), but using your own work time to interrupt business operations isn't going to be tolerated pretty much anywhere.

Again, if these employees had been protesting outside the company offices on their own time and were fired for that, I'd be more sympathetic, but that's not what happened here.

That's what's always a bit maddening about these conversations. It's not like companies are just shredding plastic into the atmosphere because they're cartoon villains who love evil.

They're making cheap plastic shit because we love cheap plastic shit. They're making this stuff in response to explicit consumer prioritization of low costs above all other factors. If consumers broadly demanded soda in glass bottles and expressed a willingness to pay the extra cost that this entails, every soda company would use glass.

I'm not saying that you individually should be blamed for all environmental pollution, but we have to realize that companies are responding to the exact same incentives that we do. They're obviously operating at a much larger scale, but they use cheap plastic shit for the exact same reason we do. If you're looking for policy solutions, a great option would be to introduce an externality tax on plastic so that this environmental cost is actually factored into the production and end price and can fund remediate the damage, similar to carbon taxes. Of course though, the moment you say the word 'tax' people's brains completely shut off, so this is probably a non-starter.

I mean, it's a plant. You can grow it, and plenty of it is grown. It is objectively more sustainable than, say, coal or helium.

This feels more like a poor non-native English speaker than an AI. LLMs do happily lie, but they don't usually have significant grammar mistakes like the missing articles here.

This isn't even true though. The vast majority will agree that a little bit of inflation is good, deflation is very bad, and hyperinflation is essentially cataclysmic.

That's the infuriating thing about this whole mess that feels impossible to solve.

Rhetoric like this directly radicalizes Israelis and pushes them towards violent escalation, which then radicalizes Palestinians into violence as well, further inspiring more Israeli violence, and on and on the cycle goes.

And then anyone who advocates for any amount of moderation will simultaneously get called a terrorist sympathizer for not wanting to nuke Gaza and a genocide accomplice for not wanting to forcibly remove or kill every Israeli.

In this particular context, "I believe Joe Biden should be the elected to another term" in apparently objectionable.

Similarly, "I believe that the murder of 1000 Israeli citizens on October 7th was bad, and also that the Netanyahu government is atrocious and its military response has been grossly disproportionate and involved multiple war crimes" is enough to get you ejected from plenty of leftist spaces that insist that the October 7th attacks must be celebrated as an act of radical resistance.

It is also a Club founded to keep the LGBTQ community free of anointed gatekeepers and machine politics

This is comically hypocritical given that you'll be gatekept out of any group like this the moment you express any opinion they disagree with, speaking as a gay guy myself.