How can Israel’s encirclement of Gaza City work if Hamas fighters can simply head south via tunnel?

by philg

A question for armchair general readers… We are informed that the IDF has surrounded Gaza City, is engaged in urban combat, and is hoping to kill or capture Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad soldiers (“freedom fighters” or “terrorists”, depending on your perspective; 300 University of California professors, who are also designing the state’s K-12 curriculum, say that the heroes of October 7 were fighting for freedom and are definitely not “terrorists” (letter)) via standard military encirclement tactics.

We were previously informed that there is an extensive tunnel network underneath Gaza. A CNN story reports a Hamas claim of having more than 300 miles of tunnels.

What stops the Hamas fighters from simply evading the IDF by proceeding south via tunnel? Once in the southern zone, the fighters can melt into the population that elected Hamas and continues to support Hamas according to opinion polls (example).

Has the IDF already cut the north-south tunnel links?

In other Gaza mysteries… here are Palestinian doctors giving a press conference in which they talk about how horrible Jewish doctors are:

Four weeks ago, we were told that the hospitals in Gaza had just a few days of fuel left for their generators. October 17, United Nations: “Fuel reserves at all hospitals across Gaza are expected to last for an additional 24 hours only.” Yet this video shows lights on, fully charged mobile phones, and clean scrubs that appear to be fresh from the washer/dryer. We are also told that Gaza has been without Internet for 32 days (example), yet a continuous stream of video content emerges from Gaza. (See also, a November 8 broadcast from the ICRC, in which people in clean clothes (both patients and health care workers) move around under blazing overhead lights.)

Paul Graham, of Y Combinator fame, has been dutifully posting press releases from Hamas regarding deaths among the noble Gazans at the hands of the genocidal Jews. Others seem to accept the relevance of body counts, but question whether Hamas is a reliable source. Graham then cites some people who think, as he does, that Hamas is a reliable source. Example:

My response to the above:

One of the first things young doctors learn in training is “don’t order a test unless you know what you’re going to do with the result”. You’ve gathered and broadcast various body counts on one side of an active ongoing battle. What is the practical value of these numbers? Is there a threshold number at which you are planning to take some action or think that, e.g., NATO and the U.S. military should take some action? If so, what’s the threshold and the proposed action?

Graham didn’t answer, of course. From the United Nations side, the answer is never “Hamas should surrender and release its hostages,” but always “there should be a ceasefire [during which Hamas can be resupplied].” Is that the guaranteed subtext of all of these reports of casualties among Gazan fighters and civilians? If so, could Hamas achieve victory simply by killing a lot of civilians and making it look like Israel did it? Suppose that Hamas puts implosion charges around some apartment buildings and detonates them, for example, causing 10,000 civilians to die. Then Gazans use the Internet and electric power that we’re told they don’t have to broadcast images of the destruction. Then General Joe Biden uses the U.S. military to force the Israeli military to withdraw.

(Some more posts from Paul Graham:

A grim month: 31 Israeli and at least 3600 Palestinian children have been killed since October 7. (link)

Is there a threshold number of their constituents’ children dying that should motivate Hamas to surrender? Graham doesn’t say.

One gauge of the civilian toll in Gaza so far: At least 72 United Nations staffers have been killed in Gaza so far, the UN says. Whatever that is, it’s not surgical. (a repost)

Graham was thinking that all fighters in Gaza have RFID tags implanted, thus enabling the IDF to target only estimated 50,000-ish Gazans who carry guns for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad?

Graham reposted an article suggesting that Gazans do not support Hamas (which makes the IDF a liberation force?).

A November 2 tweet from Graham himself:

I didn’t get “Turn the other cheek” when I was a kid. Why let people hit you? But when you combine it with “Hurt people hurt people,” you see the point. You have to absorb hurt instead of merely reflecting it, or it just keeps cycling around forever. (link)

A suggestion that Israel ignore the cross-border excursion of October 7 in the same way that the U.S. ignores the daily cross-border excursions of noble migrants? An accusation that Palestinian Islamic Jihad members are defective “hurt people” rather than brave fighters for what they believe and for what is written in the Koran?

One in which Graham seems to agree with the idea that Israel is killing civilians intentionally and without any military goal (if true, why doesn’t Israel bomb the various outdoor mass gatherings of Gazans that we see on Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok? The IDF could kill thousands of civilians with one bomb if that were its strategy):

Graham reposts an accusation about Israel’s purported “ethnic cleansing” plans. To my knowledge, he has never posted about Kuwait’s cleansing of 400,000 Palestinians in 1991 (Wikipedia) nor about Pakistan’s recent cleansing of 1.7 million Afghans.

Here’s a curious one:

It’s not a sufficient defense of activism to claim that it “increases awareness” of a problem. There are forms of activism that increase awareness and yet set back efforts to solve the problem.

Graham won’t leave his comfortable UK/US homes to help the Gazans defend against the Israeli aggression that he highlights (i.e., increases awareness about).

Graham reposts content from a nonprofit organization that doesn’t want Hamas stripped of its human shields in Gaza City:

Graham’s first posts about the battles in and near Gaza were on October 11. Example:

The events of October 7 were not “a humanitarian catastrophe” for anyone (as far as I can tell, Graham never posted anything about the Hamas freedom fighters’ October 7 operation in which Israeli civilians were the victims). The “humanitarian catastrophe” is that people embroiled in a war will be short of electricity for a while.

(A Ukrainian friend after reviewing the Paul Graham oeuvre: “These people weren’t posting like maniacs when half of Ukraine was without power for several days, including including dozens of hospitals in EACH city.”)

That’s your analysis of world events from the Great Statesman of California Tech.

Circling back, so to speak, to the main topic of this post… how is encircling an enemy effective when the enemy has tunnels leading to safe spaces with millions of friendly civilians on the ground?

Related:

  • “Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War” (NYT, today): Thousands have been killed in Gaza, with entire families wiped out. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Palestinian neighborhoods to expanses of rubble … But in the bloody arithmetic of Hamas’s leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. Quite the opposite, they say: It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel. It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.” … “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times. … [the October 7 attack] broke a longstanding tension within Hamas about the group’s identity and purpose. Was it mainly a governing body — responsible for managing day-to-day life in the blockaded Gaza Strip — or was it still fundamentally an armed force, unrelentingly committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state? … “Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr. al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”
  • “Dabblers And Blowhards”, a 2005 look at Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters”: Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data. Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick. … Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings – in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface – will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you. For evidence of this I would point to my college classmate Henning, who was a Swedish double art/theatre major and on most days could barely walk. Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying to get into aren’t even wearing pants to begin with. Your job as a painter consists of staring at naked women, for as long as you wish, and this day in and day out through the course of a many-decades-long career. Not even rock musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental, exhilirating essence.
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Cambridge City Council and “Israel’s current genocide in Gaza”

by philg

Harvard students were urged via mailing lists to vote (today) for three candidates with a link to a letter that they wrote:

We are heartbroken by the ongoing conflict in Palestine and Israel. We send our deepest condolences to everyone affected by this tragic situation.

We condemn all forms of violence unequivocally. That includes the recent attacks from Hamas and Israel, and the ongoing Israeli occupation and apartheid of Palestinians for the past 75 years. What we are witnessing in Gaza is an evolving humanitarian atrocity, and we remind all that collective punishment is a war crime. We do not support U.S. funding of Israel’s current genocide in Gaza.

We must come together as a community in Cambridge to protect and hold each other as the situation continues to escalate. We denounce all doxxing, intimidation, hate speech and silencing of individuals in our city. We specifically call on Harvard University to protect its students from racist attacks and threats.

We urge everyone in our community to spread love, not hate, to treat each other with empathy and support, to acknowledge all the suffering that is happening overseas and locally and to lean on our shared humanity and desire for peace. We must all do what we can to alter the course of history toward peace, justice and freedom for Palestine.

Quinton Zondervan, Ayah Al-Zubi, Vernon K. Walker and Dan Totten

(Hamas did some bad stuff on one day; Israel has been doing bad stuff for 75 years.)

As I noted in Why won’t the people who say that Israel is committing genocide go to Gaza and fight?, it remains a mystery to me why people who have identified an ongoing “genocide” advocate doing almost nothing about it. Do these progressives propose sending in the lavishly funded U.S. military to stop the genocide? Do they say that they’re going to leave their comfortable Cambridge homes ($1,000/square foot or, if one refrains from working and gets through the waiting list, $0/sf in public housing) and go to Gaza to help the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad stop the genocide? Do they demand war crime trials at the Hague for Israelis? Do they demand the expulsion of Israelis, the perpetrators of this genocide, from the U.S.? No, no, no, and no. The Righteous of Cambridge (TM) suggest a slight reduction in Israel’s financial resources.

Let’s meet the candidates for election…

Mr. Zondervan is an incumbent who isn’t running for reelection, but is hoping to pass the torch to these three new candidates. Quinton is an MIT graduate (he and his now-wife were on our floor in the old CS lab) and immigrant from Suriname:

Ayah Al-Zubi is a Harvard graduate in sociology and psychology who immigrated from Jordan:

Vernon Walker works on “the inseparable connection between climate justice and racial justice”:

Dan Totten is “a queer renter from Central Square and a democratic socialist”:

They’re all apparently content to be idle bystanders to an ongoing genocide so long as they think they aren’t directly funding it. Let’s see how these milquetoasts do in today’s election, which might be decided by people who can’t read English. Here are the language options from the city :

Update: The people have spoken (in at least 8 languages). None of the above candidates were successful (which means they’re all free to go to Gaza and help Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad stop occupation, apartheid, and genocide). All of the incumbents were reelected, including Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui (“the first Muslim mayor in Massachusetts”). Two insiders were elected, one a former councilor and one a school committee member. One outsider won, a bike lane advocate (of course, Cambridge does it in a mostly unsafe manner compared to Denmark).

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Massachusetts governor: the border should be open, but migrants should not come to Massachusetts

by philg

“As Massachusetts shelters fill to capacity, Maura Healey says there are ‘a lot of places in the country where people can go’” (Boston Herald):

With the state’s shelter system at or approaching maximum capacity, the governor is suggesting new migrants could consider settling somewhere other than Massachusetts after they cross the U.S. border.

According to Gov. Maura Healey, there are 40 to 50 new families arriving in the state every day and seeking state assistance with housing, and the influx of people to Massachusetts — many without lawful presence in the U.S. — has pushed the state’s shelter system close to its 7,500-family limit.

“We expect to reach it soon,” Healey told WCVB. “We’ve just reached capacity here in terms of the physical space where we can house people, the number of service providers who are out there to provide services, and also the funds to pay for this.”

Healey did not directly say what happens to a family seeking Emergency Assistance shelter after the cap is reached, though she said she hoped it didn’t come to unhoused people sleeping at Logan Airport or in emergency rooms. She also suggested that there are other options available to new U.S. arrivals.

“There are a lot of places in the country where people can go once they cross into the United States,” she said.

“Mass. AG Joins Lawsuit Challenging Trump’s Emergency Declaration At Southern Border” (state-sponsored WBUR, 2019):

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey on Wednesday joined 19 other states in challenging President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The suit claims the Trump administration’s use of the emergency declaration in this instance is unconstitutional and unlawful.

The states are asking a federal court to block the emergency declaration in order to prevent construction of a border wall and stop the diversion of federal funds to pay for Trump’s proposed wall.

“Healey Among AGs Suing Trump Administration Over ‘Public Charge’ Immigration Rule” (AP 2019):

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is among those in 13 states that have filed a lawsuit challenging a Trump administration rule that’ll allow immigration officials to deny green cards to migrants who use public assistance, including food stamps or housing vouchers.

Under new rules unveiled this week, Citizenship and Immigration Services will consider whether applicants have received public assistance among other factors such as education to determine whether to grant legal status.

The attorneys general argue the expansion will cause “irreparable harm” and deter noncitizens from seeking “essential” public assistance.

“Massachusetts Becomes the Second State to Sue Trump Over Muslim Ban” (Slate 2017):

Massachusetts will become the second state to sue the federal government over President Trump’s executive order barring immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. In a press conference on Boston’s Beacon Hill, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey declared the order “harmful, discriminatory, and unconstitutional” and announced that her office will join a suit filed Saturday night by the Massachusetts ACLU and immigration lawyers seeking to have the order overturned.

Related:

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Gun violence is a “public health crisis” and “urgent”, but Maskachusetts won’t pass a gun safety law this year

by philg

“Mass. Senate’s gun bill won’t bow until 2024, top Dem says” (MassLive.com, October 27, 2023):

The state Senate’s version of a much-anticipated gun violence reduction bill won’t make its debut until January — even as the chamber’s top leader has acknowledged “the true sense of urgency” around the issue.

That’s the word from Senate President Karen Spilka’s, D-Middlesex/Norfolk, office.

“It’s a very complex issue. The House struggled with it, they took their time as well,” Spilka said, according to Politico. “But we recognize the true sense of urgency here.”

The House passed its version of the bill after a marathon debate on Oct. 18, MassLive previously reported.

“Mass. House passes updated gun violence reform bill” (October 18, 2023) is the referenced story:

Since July 1, there have been 90 separate shootings in the Commonwealth, which have left 40 people dead and 86 injured, Day said.

“We are in the midst of a public health crisis and it is unrelenting,” he said. “‘Thoughts and prayers’ are not enough.”

The revised measure makes slight modifications to where people can carry firearms, expands the state’s assault weapons ban to include firearms developed after 2004, and aims to stem the flow of illegal firearms.

The bill also includes language that prohibits someone from bringing a gun into schools or government buildings and polling locations.

A major focus of the bill is also cracking down on “ghost guns” or untraceable firearms, by registering them with the state. As ghost guns are becoming more common Day said he hopes that serializing these firearms will help police trace where they are coming from and who’s putting them out on the street.

The updated legislation requires receivers – the part of the gun that contains the firing mechanism – to be serialized, but not the barrels or feeding device.

The House bill has been met with praise from gun safety advocates and lawmakers who’ve been pushing for the Legislature to act on Day’s bill since it was first proposed.

(It didn’t meet with praise from a gun enthusiast friend who still lives in Massachusetts. “I can possess normal magazines and ARs but won’t be able to carry magazines over 10 rounds. And they have to be stored at home both in a safe and also unloaded. And I will no longer be able to pick up my kids at school with a gun.” (I didn’t ask who needs to be shot in the pick-up line.))

So… politicians agree that we are in a crisis and there is urgency. It’s a one-party state so there is no political opposition to whatever Democrats might agree to do. People are dying and this new law will prevent those deaths. But there is no need for the Senate to act, e.g., simply approving the language already passed by the House, so that the new law can take effect.

And from the southeast part of the state…

And in the west-central part…

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The Elon Musk biography

by philg

I have begun to listen to Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. A few interesting points so far…

Musk, born in 1971, had three big passions in the early 1990s: electric cars, rockets to Mars, and solar power. Thus, he is today working on the same things that he thought were important when he was 20-22. The author explains that Musk’s interest in solar power was due to a belief that the world was going to run out of fossil fuel in the medium-term. In fact, oil production today is higher than it was in 1990 (source):

Musk didn’t count on fracking, apparently!

The book lays to rest the myth that Musk was born into wealth and privilege. His father had some fleeting financial success when Musk was young, but he had minimal resources by the time Musk needed seed capital.

All of Musk’s friends and family begged him not to marry Justine Musk (originally “Jennifer Wilson”; a friend is fond of saying that only women and insane people change their names). Musk’s mother said, “She has no redeeming feature.” Musk went ahead against this advice and the 6-year marriage produced 6 children (sadly, one died of SIDS after 10 weeks and one changed gender ID, which may be the motivation for Musk’s current opposition to elite ideology).

In a previous book, Isaacson wrongly credited Apple with the invention of the switched-mode power supply (“switching power supply”), which this history says is properly dated to the 1950s. Musk is plagued by confusing descriptions of tech challenges and inaccurate historical context. Isaacson describes the World Wide Web as having been opened up to commercial use in 1994-5 when, in fact, it was open to commercial use from its inception in late 1990. Isaacson also describes this period as one when venture capitalists were throwing huge money at any kind of dotcom startup, which a visit to Wikipedia would have shown did not happen until 1998 or 1999.

Isaacson wrongly credits Musk with having the idea to combine maps with business Yellow Pages-style information in a company that he co-founded, Zip2. Had Isaacson or the editor/publisher been willing to visit the Wikipedia page on geographic information systems, they would have discovered that this idea goes back to the 1960s (all of the Web-based mapping services are essentially Web front-ends to a GIS) and was widely available to consumers in 1994. “Navigating Automobiles By Computer” (NYT, February 8, 1994):

What do you add to a car after you’ve installed a CD player and a cellular telephone? A computerized navigation system, of course.

The new product, which will be announced today by Sony Mobile Electronics and Etak Inc., is designed especially for tourists, traveling salesmen and delivery people. It uses a network of satellites launched by the Pentagon, called the Global Positioning System, and a detailed road map, which includes street names, to display a car’s location on a 5-inch color computer screen. Push a button and little knife-and-fork symbols appear to designate the locations of nearby restaurants, with descriptions from a Fodor’s travel guide. Parks, shops, nightspots, museums and other attractions are also included.

A slightly simpler version called City Streets, also using Etak’s data, goes on sale this month for laptop computers. Sony’s version comes on two compact disks and covers only California, with more disks to come later; City Streets, produced by Road Scholar Software of Houston, covers 170 American cities and 80 more in Europe, but does not give advice on where to eat or visit.

General Motors and Zexel Inc. introduced a similar system early this year at the Detroit Auto Show as a $2,000 option on some Oldsmobiles. That system’s data base was more equivalent to the yellow pages than a travel guide.

Sony also plans a version that can be carried around, like a laptop. Road Scholar, meanwhile, suggests that its program could be useful in a desktop computer without the satellite data; it could be used, for example, to print customized maps to take along on a trip. In addition, if running on a laptop in a vehicle, it can keep a moment-by-moment log of where a vehicle has been, a feature that a delivery company might use.

Zip2 was founded by Elon and Kimbal Musk and Greg Kouri in November 1995 (Wikipedia). That’s more than 1.5 years after the above NYT article. It’s ten years after Etak, which likely had all of these features in the 1980s (would require a bit of research to find out when Etak added a points of interest database, but I think that it was by 1988 or 1989 at the latest) but wasn’t available to every consumer as an off-the-shelf item.

This book will no doubt be referenced by historians and will be considered authoritative, well-researched, and fact-checked. Thus, it serves as a good example of how easily history can be rewritten. I recognize that the history of GIS is not as critical as, for example, the history of the state of Israel, but I think the same process can work to rewrite history on more important topics. American schoolkids, for example, are taught that American colonists were subject to a crushing tax burden, justifying rebellion, when, in fact, they paid some of the world’s lowest tax rates (about 2 percent of total income when residents of England were paying closer to 20 percent) and not a penny of tax revenue collected in the colonies was ever taken back to Britain (the country lost money on what would become the U.S., due to the expense of providing military protection from hostile Native Americans). Nobody challenges this victim narrative.

Related:

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Getting into an elite college via fencing

by philg

I was recently sentenced to being a spectator at the USA Fencing October North American Cup, held in Orlando’s convention center (America’s 2nd largest, after Chicago’s). In épée, one scores a point by touching one’s opponent anywhere. The tip of the sword responds to pressure. You could score a point by touching the ground or your own foot, for example. Each competitor’s épée is attached to a retractable wire tether. The competitors go back and forth on a conductive mat. If the sword tip is touched to the mat, that does not register a point (but touching just to the side of the mat, unless the ref notices, will score a point). If you think that your friend has just scored a point, having advanced dramatically with sword pointed at the opponent’s body, almost surely he/she/ze/they has just lost a point.

My friend refuses to accept the limitations of age and was mixing it up with college students. He was thus eliminated after a few hours. His main reason for traveling to Orlando, however, was for the kids, both in high school. The event was packed with Chinese- and Indian-American families anxious to get their cherished offspring into elite universities. What are their chances? “A boy needs to be ranked in the top 20 nationally to get into a decent college,” my friend said, “while a girl can get in by being anywhere in the top 40.” Why the difference? “A lot of colleges have women’s fencing programs, but not men’s. This is so that they can keep their Title IX balance when they have a football team, for example, for which only men are good enough.” He cited Tufts, Brown, and Cornell as examples of schools with no men’s fencing (a larger list). Here’s an excerpt of a federal form:

(Note the gender binarism on parade! Athletes count only if they identify as either “men” or “women”.)

Reflecting the sport’s center of gravity being in the Northeast, USA Fencing went all-in on forced masking and forced vaccination. They formerly required proof of Covid-19 vaccination and then proof of booster shots for the fit teenagers who were competing (at a time when the injections were not FDA-approved, but only emergency use authorized) and also for the middle aged parents who wanted to enter the venue as spectators. Everyone within the venue had to wear a basic mask and competitors had to wear masks under their fencing masks. Coronapanic was great for my friend’s kids. While their competitors lost a year due to fencing clubs being shut down, they were being trained in their 3-car garage by their dad, a world-class fencer in his youth. (Coronapanic also helped their relative academic ranking. Their education continued uninterrupted while comparatively poor kids in big Democrat-run cities lost 12-18 months.)

Despite masks now being optional, I was able to find an example of dressing to defend oneself against a virus armed with a sword:

Note that #Science told this fencer to wear a full beard in addition to the (now-voluntary) mask.

Although everyone at the competition whom I met resided in the U.S., those who were immigrants from foreign countries would usually have a country affiliation other than “USA” on their back, e.g., “MAR” for Morocco (Maroc). Players from The Country That Shall Not Be Named were required to sign papers denouncing Vladimir Putin and the Russian military in order to compete. They would then appear without a country affiliation on their backs.

Circling back to the college admissions angle, think about the parental investment required for this gambit: years of driving to a local fencing club several times per week and weekends devoted to competitions multiple states away. All in hopes that one’s son can reach the Top 20 or that one’s daughter can reach the Top 40. Note that a non-Asian athlete will usually have an advantage over an equally-ranked Asian fencer. Coaches have found that a lot of the pushed-hard-through-high-school Asian kids quit fencing early in their college careers, saying “my parents want me to focus on getting into medical school.” The non-Asians have been more likely to stick with the sport.

How about getting your flu and Covid-19 vaccines at the event? Nothing could have been easier. The event had been going for about 16 hours when I stopped to check. Given a crowd of people with a track record of doing absolutely anything that the government tells them to do, the pair below had injected… two people (one every 8 hours).

What else was happening? I stopped on the way up at Bok Tower Gardens, a truly magnificent

We were staying at the Hilton next to the convention center, so I took my friend, pumped full of Advil, to SeaWorld across the street as a cultural experience.

You can celebrate Pride together with Shamu:

SeaWorld reminds visitors that immigrant lionfish are “disruptive” and the term “non-native” is used in a pejorative manner.

(I’m not sure that it can be blamed on the mass immigration of lionfish, but Interstate 4 between Disney World and Orlando was subject to traffic jams at all hours of the day and night (e.g., at 10 pm). Congested as the roads are with 2.7 million people in the metro area, the population is expected to grow by 75 percent between now and 2060.)

I also took my fencing friend to Disney Springs. The M&M store:

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How long can Hamas keep its tunnels ventilated?

by philg

We’re informed that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) has, literally, tons of fuel. NBC:

As U.N. officials say hospitals in Gaza are running dangerously low on fuel, Hamas is maintaining a stockpile of more than 200,000 gallons of fuel for the rockets it fires into Israel and the generators that provide clean air and electricity to its network of underground tunnels, according to U.S. officials, current and former Israeli officials and academics.

How long will this last?

“We don’t know how much they have, and we definitely don’t know how much they need, because no one is sure to what extent this underground city goes,” said Elai Rettig, an assistant professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv who studies regional energy cooperation. “If it’s just for ventilation and basic communication, it will last for months.”

I wonder if these estimates are wrong. Hamas’s western allies have been demanding fuel deliveries ever since the battle began. Here’s one from the UN Secretary General, just four days after the Gazans’ mostly peaceful attack on Israelis:

Note that fuel is listed first, so we can infer that it is more important than food and water. A week after the latest round of fighting began, state-sponsored PBS wrote that hospitals were “desperately low on fuel”:

Medics in Gaza warned Sunday that thousands could die as hospitals packed with wounded people ran desperately low on fuel and basic supplies. … Hospitals in Gaza are expected to run out of generator fuel within two days,

Every few days we are informed that hospitals in Gaza are 1-2 days from running out of fuel.

Hamas supposedly keeps its fuel reserves directly underneath hospitals so that (1) the fuel will be safe from Israeli bombs, and (2) any fuel delivered to the hospital can be easily transferred into the tunnel ventilation reserve.

If Hamas truly had “months” of fuel, why would their allies be so interested in supplementing this supply? And why did the calls to send in fuel begin just a few days after the October 7 attacks? Is it possible that the “months” of fuel that the Islamic Resistance Movement was estimated to have is actually more like “a month”? Also, what if the IDF is able to clear one or two hospitals of civilians and destroy the Hamas fuel supplies underneath? The useful lifetime of the tunnels could be radically shortened.

American and British bombing of Germany wasn’t very efficient in slowing down Germany’s war-fighting capability. As many as 635,000 civilians in Germany were killed, for example, more than 55,000 RAF Bomber Command crewmembers, and 75 percent of the pre-P-51 American bomber crews were shot down or killed. Yet the initial effects on German war production were minimal. Monday morning quarterbacks have concluded that the Allies should have concentrated on bombing energy production, energy transportation, and electricity production facilities. In other words… fuel. If Israel can prevent Hamas from being resupplied, either directly or via hospitals and UN facilities, perhaps Hamas will be forced to fight in the open (or just melt into the civilian population and wait for Israel to leave).

Readers: What’s your guess as to when Hamas runs out of fuel to keep its tunnels ventilated? (“Never, because the United Nations and other allies will keep the fuel restocked” is an acceptable answer.)

Update: A November 6, 2023 video posted from Gaza shows lights on, fully charged mobile phones, and doctors in clean scrubs that appear to be fresh from the washer/dryer.

Related:

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Predictions for what happens to Sam Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators?

by philg

Let’s see if I got the Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) trial right… All of the co-conspirators who enabled the fraud at FTX agreed to testify against SBF in exchange for reduced punishment. They all then testified that everything was SBF’s fault and they were helpless puppets (somehow incapable of quitting FTX or exposing the fraud before it got bigger). Now SBF has been found guilty and will be sentenced to up to 110 years in prison in March 2024.

CNN:

Over the four weeks of his trial, Bankman-Fried watched a parade of people he once considered his closest confidantes testify against him. They included friends from math camp and MIT who became his co-founders; and, critically, his ex-girlfriend and trusted business adviser, 28-year-old Caroline Ellison.

The most damning evidence against Bankman-Fried came from Ellison, who testified for the prosecution over three days.

As both the CEO of Alameda and Bankman-Fried’s romantic partner for two years, Ellison was uniquely positioned to comment on what was happening within the tight inner circle of Alameda and FTX executives, many of whom lived together in a $30 million luxury apartment in the Bahamas.

Ellison’s at times emotional testimony offered a narrative of events in which virtually every decision at both Alameda and FTX came down to Bankman-Fried, who founded and was the majority owner of both firms. A common refrain from Ellison, when asked who directed her to carry out various actions, criminal or otherwise, was a variation on the words “Sam did.”

From reading early reports on the meltdown, I got the impression that it was Ms. Ellison’s investment losses that had created the necessity for the fraud. Did that turn out to be false?

What happens to all of the co-conspirators, without whom SBF couldn’t have stolen a dime? Back in December, the New York Post predicted that Caroline Ellison might get off with probation.

This TechCrunch article is titled “Ex-SDNY prosecutor says Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh probably won’t get jail time”:

‘I’ve had cooperating witnesses who did get jail time, but it’s the exception not the rule.’

When Wang testified, prosecutors asked at the end of their examination how many years he was hoping to be sentenced. “Ideally hoping for no time,” he replied, which prompted some quiet laughter in the courtroom.

If this plays out as predicted, do we think it is fair? One altruist goes to prison for 100 years while co-conspirators who stole at least $millions for themselves are free to move on to the next scam? If SBF’s guilt had been challenging to establish, maybe this would make sense in some practical way, but it didn’t seem like a tough case for prosecutors to make.

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Hello Prenup web service vs. ChatGPT

by philg

A family member is soon to get married. The couple had decided that they wanted a prenuptial agreement. Both work, but there are differences between the two in terms of student loan debt, expected inheritance, and expected future income. They don’t have a lot of money right now and didn’t want to spend $20,000 on lawyers (maybe that was the pre-Biden number?) for both sides to draft what ultimately would turn out to be a fairly standard prenuptial agreement. I did some research and found Hello Prenup, a Boston-based startup that, for $600, will run Web-mediated negotiations between the two potential victims. The company’s About Us web page shows a Chief Diversity Officer’s dream team:

I decided that my wedding gift to the happy couple would be to pay Hello Prenup’s bill.

First, it is odd that this company was founded in Maskachusetts. The state’s family law renders prenuptial agreements potentially useless. Even if a prenup is fair when signed, a judge can invalidate it via a “second look test”, evaluating the fairness at the time of the divorce (the “divorce” happens at the very end of what might be years of litigation, so the prenup could become unfair merely because, for example, all of the assets of the couple had been handed over to attorneys). A prenup in Massachusetts is more likely to lead to an extra $300,000 in legal fees (one side challenges the prenup; the other side has to defend against that) than a substantial change to the plaintiff’s profits. (Remember that a judge can work around an alimony waiver by simply awarding more child support, for example, or a larger share of the property.)

I like the idea of the site because it gives people nudges to work together to get to a finished document. Unfortunately, the flexibility is limited. For example, the options for alimony are (a) complete waiver, (b) leave it up to state law, and (c) waiver if the divorce lawsuit is filed before N years have elapsed and state law otherwise. In a country where people love alimony (apparently, since we keep voting for politicians who preserve the institution) there is no option to build in alimony via a formula. Suppose, for example, you wanted a formulae, e.g., lower earner gets alimony X% of the difference in income for Y% of the years prior to the plaintiff filing the divorce lawsuit. This is not doable except via editing the Word document after it is generated. What if you wanted to agree that if one spouse quits his/her/zir/their job to take care of kids for more than 2 years then the other spouse would pay 40 months of alimony in the amount of 50 percent of after-tax income? Not doable. (Remember that alimony is now tax-free to the recipient and not deductible for the payor, so old formulas based on pre-tax income would leave the payor destitute. The law changed starting in 2019 after the IRS noticed that alimony recipients were defrauding the U.S. Treasury on a regular basis by not reporting alimony received as income (payors, of course, were still deducting it).)

Hello Prenup doesn’t seem to contain enough education regarding what it takes to make a prenup valid. After using the service, the happy couple to whom I gifted the service wasn’t aware that sloppiness in disclosing existing assets could be an easy route of attack for a divorce plaintiff trying to invalidate a prenup.

Nit: Hello Prenup does a poor job generating Microsoft Word documents. It doesn’t use “keep with next” for section headings, for example.

It’s an interesting idea to interview each engaged person separately via the Web, but I’m not sure that the $600 service produces a better result than sitting down together at a single PC and using the forms that come with the $29 Nolo Press’s book on prenuptial agreements or by using various other free or low-cost forms from services such as Rocket Lawyer.

Maybe the answer is that Hello Prenup doesn’t have enough AI? I gave the following prompt to ChatGPT (GPT-4):

Give me an example prenuptial agreement between Robert and William. Robert is a 60-year-old Medicaid dentist earning $1 million per year while William is an unemployed 20-year-old. They plan to have children.

The result was a recipe for epic litigation. For example, “In the event of a divorce, Robert agrees to provide spousal support to William for a period to be determined, taking into consideration the length of the marriage and William’s employment status.” So the attorneys on both sides will argue in front of a judge what the appropriate period of alimony should be? They can also argue how long the marriage was (it can take 2-3 years for a divorce lawsuit to get to final judgment; does the “length of the marriage” include this period of litigation or not?).

ChatGPT also included the seemingly reasonable boilerplate “This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the state in which the Parties reside.”

Does that mean the state in which the Parties reside at the time the prenup is signed? The state in which the Parties reside at the time that one sues the other? What if they don’t live in the same state either at the time of signing or at the time the lawsuit is filed? Hello Prenup generates agreements that are specific as to which state’s laws govern.

So… Hello Prenup has some deficiencies, but nothing like GPT-4’s!

If you’re considering getting married, don’t be distracted by foreign wars. Remember that, depending on the state where you choose to reside, you could be embroiled in a far more upsetting and personally costly war of your own in family court. A prenup offers a small degree of protection against this, though not against the most upsetting and expensive parts of a typical divorce lawsuit. The typical U.S. state sets up a winner-take-all battle between the two parents for who will (1) get to spend time with what used to be joint children, and (2) who will therefore get the river of cash that is associated with those children (“child support”; the flip side of this is “who will be forced to disgorge the river of cash while seldom seeing the children”). It is far more protective to move to a state such as Nevada that defaults to 50/50 shared parenting and limits child support profits than it is to work on and sign a piece of paper. For the typical married-with-kids person, it is far more dangerous to live in Maskachusetts or New York with an “ironclad prenup” than it is to live in a shared parenting state with child support profit limits with no prenup.

[Update: A friend provided the same prompt to GPT-4 today and it came up with a different clause for governing law…

Maybe ChatGPT has been going to law school?]

Related:

  • Real World Divorce, especially chapters 5 and 7 regarding what can be the subject of litigation
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Why won’t the people who say that Israel is committing genocide go to Gaza and fight?

by philg

It has become standard among American and European progressives to refer to the Israel military operation in response to the October 7, 2023 attacks by the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) as “genocide.” We can see the same term used in a comment on a post in this blog.

Let’s assume that the progressives are correct, ignoring the fact that the population of Gaza today is 3X what it was in 1990 (typically a “genocide” involves a population reduction, not a population explosion). Given that assumption, these folks say have identified an ongoing genocide. Why won’t they take meaningful action to stop the genocide?

If brave, they could go to Gaza and pick up a rifle (or a shotgun?) and fight alongside the Islamic Resistance Movement and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. If cowardly, they could advocate for the U.S. military and NATO to go in and destroy Israel or, at least, the Israeli military. Instead, however, they’ve decided to be idle bystanders while a genocide is perpetrated. They’ll perhaps post on Twitter or Facebook or occasionally attend a protest demonstration. “Dozens of students stage walk out at Harvard in solidarity with Palestinians” (CBS):

The Harvard students said Palestinians are facing genocide and they wanted to show their support. They’re calling on the university’s administration to address the conflict.

They’re young and healthy, but they won’t fight against genocide. Instead, they want to send meek Harvard administrators to do battle against the IDF.

Also, high school students in Democrat-run Philadelphia:

Hundreds of Philadelphia high school students walked out of school Friday to march around City Hall in support of Palestinians.

“This is not a war. This is a genocide,” Nora, a student in the School District of Philadelphia who helped organize the action, said of the ongoing Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, even in places where Palestinians were told to seek safety. “The goals of today’s protests are … to get justice, and to fight back, and to use our voices.”

Hamas has soldiers who are the same age as American high schoolers (Daily Mail). These Philadelphians say that they want to “fight back”. Why doesn’t that include volunteering in the real fight against genocide?

Across the pond… “200 Bristol students join pro-Palestine demonstration outside Bristol Uni’s Senate House”:

A student-led pro-Palestinian protest broke out today in front of Senate House, with members calling for the end of the “Israeli Apartheid” and accusing the Israeli state of “ethnic cleansing and genocide”.

Members of the Socialist Worker Student Society (SWSS), the student wing of a national Marxist organisation, led the protest with banners and speeches in solidarity with Palestinians.

Chants of “free Palestine” and “in our thousands and in our millions, we are all Palestinians” could be heard during the 45 minute protest.

If they’re healthy enough to go to university and they’ve identified “ethnic cleansing and genocide”, why aren’t they volunteering to put a stop to these crimes against humanity?

Here’s a tweet from Cori Bush, who represents St. Louis in the U.S. House:

Israel is guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “slaughtering” civilians, presumably with no military justification or rationale (unlike the U.S., which always protected civilians). Israel is committing “atrocities”. Does she advocate sending in the Marines to stop the Israelis? No. Airstrikes on every Israeli military base? No. Cori Bush suggests only that we cut off foreign aid to Israel, which can’t possibly deliver the hoped-for victory to the Islamic Resistance Movement or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Even after shutting down for coronapanic and spending a ton of money on early Covid-19 vaccination (end result: a higher excess death rate than Sweden’s) Israel has a GDP of about $500 billion per year.

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