According to the UN, 2.2 million people are in Crisis food insecurity (level 3 of 5), and more than half a million people are in what they call Catastrophe (level 5 of 5, the worst level of food insecurity a population can be in and still be alive). Amnesty International released a statement talking about how Israel is not only failing to comply with the ICJ ruling that steps must be made to protect civilians, they are actively obstructing aid. Right at the start of the war the military and political leaders of Israel made it explicitly clear they were going to starve the Gazans, and yet people still want to believe this wasn’t the plan the whole time.

Now the spin from Israel that is being put forth in the media is that the Palestinians are to blame for being desperate. When your entire population is halfway down the ladder to starvation with over 500k folks literally on the verge of dying from hunger, what do you expect? The desperation isn’t a Palestinian failing, it’s a human reaction that any population would have to months of illegal collective punishment via starvation.

I could not be more ashamed of supposedly moral Western nations like the USA, Germany, Britain and my own country of Canada who are not just being silent while the most intense humanitarian crisis of my life takes place, but are actively funding and giving diplomatic cover to it.

People are trying to shore up support for Biden by saying that Trump would be even worse, but Biden is literally letting this happen now. He’s not just letting it in fact, he’s taking measures like bypassing Congressional oversight to make sure weapons reach Israel. On average about 100 children die every day and hundreds more are wounded - that’s like a mid-sized k-9 school getting bombed every single day. Are American citizens supposed to view this as “restraint” and be thankful it’s “only” this bad?

Americans are faced with arguably the worst choice in their nation’s history this election. Biden is old and willing to make his nation complicit in war crimes. Trump is deranged, xenophobic, and a convicted criminal. It’s insane that those are the two people who have been deemed the best choices for office by American electoral processes. Given how unpopular they are, it’s really hard to call them American “democratic” processes.

I do disagree, with nuance. Explaining would make for a long post, so the short(er) version is I think if Trump wins things stay about the same for Gazans - which is to say very desperately bad. Biden’s PR team has been talking about the need to reduce casualties and protect civilians for months now, the ICJ ruled that Israel must protect civilians and facilitate aid and yet there’s no sign of Israeli restraint. For corroborating evidence, Oxfam released a report in January that shows the daily death rate in Gaza is 2.5x that of 2nd place for the 21st century (Syria), 5x greater than Iraq or Ukraine wars, and over 10x worse than Afghanistan. According the UN’s humanitarian office, over 60% of housing has been fully or partially demolished and only 22.5% of primary health facilities are operational (among many other facts on that page). Given evidence like that I’m not sure what I’m supposed to believe Biden is preventing - his PR talk about reasonable measures and lasting peace is worthless when compared with actions and consequences. Some say it would be worse with Trump, but how, to what extent, and what is that assertion based on?

In the USA, things get much worse if Trump wins. I won’t go into the list of reasons why I think that because that would definitely be a long post. I’ll just say he’s a dictatorial, narcissistic criminal and leave it at that.

So another Trump term = about equal in Gaza (which is what this thread is about) because under Biden it’s already terrible, and things also get much worse in the USA. Biden is clearly the less harmful choice domestically, but provably Gazans are right now dying quickly with Western (primarily US) support regardless.

After 13 years as a user and earning somewhere over 70k karma last year via discussions about topics like zoology, psychology, fitness, politics and video games, I have slowly stopped using Reddit the last few months because of the blatant censorship. I went from posting regularly each week to 3 posts total in the last 3 months. TL:DR is I got banned from /r/news and /r/worldnews for comments that broke no rules and weren’t rude or hateful. The mods just insulted me when I appealed. Actual Reddit staff could not care less, and I got a temp harassment ban for saying a mod handled my appeal badly (while carefully avoiding insulting them personally). I go back a few times a week to look at topics I like, but I actually made my account here on Lemmy today because I’m searching for long-term alternatives.

Of course bad experiences were always a thing but overall you could talk things out or just move on and come back to the same forum another day. Now unopposed mods completely kill any discussion with permabans if it bothers them personally. The site-wide and subreddit rules are functionally just suggestions and Reddit (the company) does nothing to enforce them in many cases. Hateful speech is fine so long as it fits the subreddit and civil discussion is not if it doesn’t. Hate men/women/liberals/conservatives/whatever? Just find the right subreddit and you can get away with truly inhumane takes, but better hope you don’t break ranks while a mod is watching (even if you’re reasonable/polite). Thus Reddit has devolved into echo chambers where you are either preaching to the choir or silenced forever. I’m not interested in farming worthless karma by helping circulate a few popular ideas among people who are essentially guaranteed to feel the same way. Or interested in being treated badly for trying to take those opinions elsewhere.

I got invited to participate in their IPO at an “institutional investor” price with their e-mail saying “you have helped make Reddit what it is today”. No thanks Reddit. Not only does my brief research say Reddit isn’t profitable, but you don’t treat your users well or consistently. I can’t predict the future, but I feel like I watched how this goes when Musk took over Twitter and it’s not pretty.

Often companies don’t charge based on productions costs, they charge based on what they can get people to pay. If every competitor in an industry agrees to do the same there’s no incentive to lower selling price. The company doesn’t have to worry about customers leaving for a meaningfully cheaper competitor because everyone is charging as much as consumers will bear. Without that “best/cheapest” outside pressure any efficiency increases can be put into lowering costs like labor and thus increasing profits. It’s why prices don’t drop and suddenly there’s a lot more people within a few missed paychecks of serious trouble (the economy being roughly tuned to keep the most people possible paying as much as they can sustain).

Disclaimer: this is just my two cents, with some research but admittedly not a lot and no formal economics education. Feel free to tell me if I’m wrong.

A headline about the one-time world’s richest man (now #2), who famously opposes unions, accusing a company of chasing profits is an odd way to start the day.

After reading the article it sounds like the case hinges on proving that a) Microsoft is more than just an investor/partner and meaningfully controls OpenAI and b) that GPT is an actual AGI (an AI that is equal or greater to human intelligence). I don’t know enough about business thresholds of control to comment on point a), but I don’t think many experts would agree with point b).

Given that Musk is a competitor of OpenAI and has a habit of shaky lawsuits, I’m going to remain skeptical but I’d love to hear more takes from others.

I haven’t bought a game with microtransactions in several years, even if I was interested in the game. I know my resistance probably doesn’t accomplish much, but I simply refuse to support that business model. I don’t want to put up with pressure to pay “just a little bit more”. Day 1 DLC isn’t a guaranteed gamebreaker for me if I already really want the game, but it definitely reduces my interest and I’ve passed over several games before because of it.

I wholeheartedly support expansions so long as their content justifies their pricetag.

Good. If a court can criminally charge an entity based on the activity coming from their IP address, clearly it’s considered an identifying piece of information - almost like a virtual SIN or ID card. So my opinion is that in the same way there are restrictions on who you are compelled to give your SIN to, there should be limits here as well. There are, of course, going to be times when authorities legitimately require that information to pursue an investigation/prosecution but they should have to prove that need.

It’s a complex question, but I think the short answer is it depends on if your country has safeguards in place to control where that manufactured equipment goes. A few months ago I watched a video interview of a US State Department official who publicly resigned because he felt those safeguards (specifically laws of war and laws of proportionality) had been bypassed during recent arms transfer to Israel. I could see someone quitting their military manufacturing or engineering jobs for the same reasons. Whether or not you agree with how your nation’s arms are being used is a matter of personal ethics and involves things like political accountability.

I know I want my country to have self-defense capabilities, and that means having a well-supplied military. Thus I support at least some arms manufacturing. I very much dislike the idea of it being entangled with major economic factors because I don’t want war to make economic sense - i.e. “drive the industry”. My guess is a lot of people worldwide would like to see less arms-for-profit trading because it makes military industrialists rich at the expense of weapons spreading around the world and often causing harm to innocent people.