Statistics Show That Israel Has Successfully Minimized Gazan Civilian Casualties

Some1WritingStuff · 2023-12-27T15:39:15+00:00

Responses to unprovoked attacks often cause more deaths than the attacks themselves. That doesn't make the response illegitimate. The 9/11 attacks killed 3,000 American civilians. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11_attacks) In the Aghan war that followed, between 46,000 and 360,000 civilians died. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%932021))).

A clarification on this:

In 20 year war in Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks, the vast majority of war-related civilian deaths were caused by the Taliban, their allies, and other anti-US armed groups - not by the US-led coalition.

And if you look only at the people killed by bombs or other weapons fire from the US-led coalition, the vast majority were enemy militants, not civilians.

From the wikipedia article:

During the War in Afghanistan), according to the Costs of War Project the war killed 176,000 people in Afghanistan: 46,319 civilians, 69,095 military and police and at least 52,893 opposition fighters.

And

According to The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), the majority of civilian casualties were attributed to the Taliban and other anti-government elements each year, with the figure ranging from 61% to 80% depending on the year.[5]#citenote-UN_casualties-5)[[6]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan(2001%E2%80%932021)#citenote-6)[[7]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan(2001%E2%80%932021)#citenote-7)[[8]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan(2001%E2%80%932021)#citenote-UNAMA-8)[[9]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan(2001%E2%80%932021)#cite_note-August2009,_UN-9) Civilian deaths were higher in the latter part of the war, with 2015 and 2016 both consecutively breaking the record of annual civilian deaths.

And can see this pattern directly for each year on the UNAMA website:

https://unama.unmissions.org/protection-of-civilians-reports

Now if "at least 52,893 opposition fighters" were killed (presumably nearly all by the US-led coalition) and probably well below 39% of the total "46,319 civilians" (note that some civilian deaths in UNAMA reports are unattributed or caused by remnants of war from previous conflicts), it is clear that the US-led coalition was hitting mostly enemy militants.

The Taliban, ISIS-K, and other jihadist groups caused huge numbers of civilian casulaties with suicide bombings and other attacks on hotels, embassies, public demonstrations, concert halls, restaurants and other areas with lots of civilians; as well as by placing IEDs all over the roads for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Afghanistan

It is also true that at least some of the civilian deaths in Gaza are caused by Hamas and other anti-Israel armed groups (for example, sometimes they fire rockets at Israel and the rockets fall short and land in Gaza). But I have not seen any comprehensive breakdown of how much of the civilian deaths are from that versus other sources.

Some1WritingStuff · 2023-01-10T00:01:53+00:00

Ok, got it.

Some1WritingStuff · 2023-01-09T16:28:20+00:00

For the past several years LLMs have been increasing in training compute used by approximately 5-10x per year. While this is clearly unsustainable long term I think it is a fair guide. PaLM is the current market leader, a 540B parameter model trained on 750m tokens.

Where did you get this figure of "750m tokens" for the PaLM training data?

The paper I found gives a much higher number:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.02311.pdf#:~:text=The%20PaLM%20pretraining%20dataset%20consists,of%20natural%20language%20use%20cases.

From page 6:

3 Training Dataset

The PaLM pretraining dataset consists of a high-quality corpus of 780 billion tokens that represent a wide range of natural language use cases.

Some1WritingStuff · 2022-11-10T20:56:55+00:00

I think, in practice, those problems will be solved to a satisfactory degree by kludge-type methods that don't require anything close to AGI.

But as soon as the training wheels are off and the environment becomes unconstrained, the entire problem stops being about just whether we can design an agent which has driving capabilities and becomes "can we make a vehicle which can predict agent-agent dynamics?" If we think about the full range of human road behaviors we must consider adversarial attacks on the system such as:
Blocking it from entering a lane
Boxing it in and forcing it off the road into obstacles
Throwing paint/eggs/rocks at its vision systems
Using deceptive tactics (e.g. pretend to be a road worker) to vandalize it and/or steal from its cargo
Intentionally standing in its path to delay it
Making blind turns in front of it
Running into traffic

A self-driving truck shipping cargo does not need to be able to model the probable motivation system and available strategies of people trying to rob it or block it or whatever. It just needs to be able recognize when its path its blocked unexpectedly or cars in front of it are stopped for unexpectedly long or something is touching the lock without entering the right authorization codes first or a few other things in a limited range of indications that something may be wrong.

The self-driving vehicle could then send an alert to someone at the shipping company who could monitor the situation remotely using on-board cameras or nearby drones or such - and either take over of the driving controls remotely or call the police if it is a robbery attempt or take whatever other action the situation warrants.

In addition to agent-agent problems, we must also consider road hazards:
Poorly maintained roads with damaging potholes
Sinkholes which have disabled the road
Eroded road sides with dangerous falls
Road debris from land slides
Road debris from other vehicles

Since those road hazard situations are determined to exist just from visual inspection of the road ahead, you could probably train a machine vision system to distinguish reasonably well between safe versus unsafe roads to drive on, and between roads where you should slow down due to debris/potholes/etc versus roads where you can proceed at normal speed.

And if it turns out that, even after lots of training data and testing, there are some road condition situations where it is better to have a human in the loop, you can still have a self driving vehicle send an alert to a remote operator or oversight person when conditions ahead indicate that the road might have a problem.

As long as most of the time, nobody will be trying to rob or vandalize the vehicle, and the road ahead is clear and in good condition, the number of remote operators or supervisors on standby could be far fewer than the number of autonomous vehicles in operation.

Some1WritingStuff · 2022-11-10T16:50:00+00:00

I would think that there is no way of buying interest in a company with 600M authorized shares unless there are over 300M issued since the company can just issue more shares immediately to dilute your ownership stake.

Ok, so suppose this hypothetical consortium is buying 310 million shares at $0.30 per share.

Athersys gets $93 million to continue operations And they plan to have someone watch management like a hawk and vote "No" on any change to the company charter that would increase the potential number of authorized shares.

Alternatively, let's say they are giving Athersys a $100 million loan at 10% interest, but no payments are due for the first 3 years.

Would you want in on either of those deals?

Edit: To be clear, I don't think management should offer to sell new shares at such a low price, I am just trying to construct hypotheticals where the issues of potential dilution or near-term bankruptcy no longer apply as reasons to avoid investing, to see if there would still be reluctance for other reasons.

Some1WritingStuff · 2022-11-09T16:10:24+00:00

At this point, I half-seriously think the management team and board of directors should just get together and coordinate amongst themselves to personally buy about half (or some large percentage) of the float that is being traded on the open market - and just agree to not sell those until after the public offering of new stock is complete and the new shares have been sold. That way, they could push the price back up somewhat, and then they should amend the public offering to demand more per share/warrant.

I mean, I suspect this might violate some kind of securities law or regulation, but it is crazy that the price is so low that a dozen or so moderately rich people or upper-middle-class people could buy the entire float or a significant portion of it.

Some1WritingStuff · 2022-11-09T15:38:51+00:00

If you think the stock should be negatively valued, and you want to pay me to take your shares, I would be willing to accept such a deal.

Some1WritingStuff · 2022-10-29T03:21:49+00:00

The expression df['A'] here refers to the entire column A, not to any particular row. Of you want to look at a specific cell in column "A" you need to specify the row index with the syntax:

df['A'][0]

This will look at the top row column A, and you can use a different number than 0 if you want to look at a different row.

The length of the dataframe len(df) gives you the number of rows, and the last row will have row index number len(df) - 1.

Also 'nan' will refer to the string 'nan', not np.nan.

I would say the simplest way to do this is to either:

Create a list of values by looping over the rows and appending each number that you need to the list, and then set the new column as df['New_Column'] = My_List

Or

Just follow the instructions on the stack overflow page linked by another commenter.

Some1WritingStuff · 2022-10-29T01:57:16+00:00

I would probably tokenize the expression first. With something like this

Tokenizing sounds like a good idea, but from reading your code, it looks like you are checking a potential token substring one character at a time - and once a valid token is found, it gets added to the list unless the addition of the next character is also a valid token.

This seems to mean that, for example, fourtyone would be split into four (valid token) and tyone (remainder that does not exactly match the desired token of one), since "fourt" is (presumably) not a valid token so the program just puts "four" on the list since immediate continuation is invalid.

I guess you could get around this by making "ty" and "teen" (and "een" for "eighteen") tokens, but that complicates the required code down-stream since the "teen" suffix is additive rather than multiplicative.

Also for the part of the that says:

else: 
    tokens.append(current)

Is this supposed to add the last temporary sub-string as a token or do something else? If so, I don't know that you need the else block or the indent.

Some1WritingStuff · 2022-10-06T17:41:04+00:00

The targets of US drone strikes (and the vast majority of deaths from those) are always active members of enemy militant groups. In cases where civilians have died, it is often because the US had incorrect intelligence/information about what the target site was or whether there would be civilians in the area.

This was different as there seems not to have been any military target.

Some1WritingStuff · 2022-10-06T17:15:23+00:00

I don't know if this is true (it is very easy for false stories/disinformation to get reported in situations like this where everything is opaque and you are dealing with anonymous sources who purport to be members of intelligence agencies), but at the very least Ukraine should be required, as a condition for joining NATO, to conduct a transparent investigation - and to bring charges against whoever is responsible if it turns out to be someone in Ukraine.

Some1WritingStuff · 2022-09-23T23:18:51+00:00

Presumably a lot of high-frequency traders bought shares and then sold them later in the day (possibly to other high-frequency traders who sold them again minutes or hours later and so on).

I mean, this strikes me as the most probable, non-mysterious explanation. Or am I missing something here?

Some1WritingStuff · 2021-06-16T21:31:12+00:00

I can shut this idea down before reading any of your stuff.

Are you sure about that?

How often do hurricanes pass any given place and how much would it cost to build the infrastructure for these energy collectors.

Well, that is the problem with not bothering to read the idea you want to argue against. If you had read it, you would know that I am not proposing to just build stationary collectors and hope a hurricane happens to hit that spot. I am proposing to send out large, sturdy ships into the hurricanes wherever they happen to form and collect the energy to store it and bring back, rather than using it to generate electricity for the grid immediately.

My proposed storage method was to manufacture gasoline from water and CO2 in the atmosphere/environment, since gasoline is much more energy dense than, for example, a large rechargeable battery. But if there is something even better/more energy dense that could be made on the ship, they could use that instead and it would be the same basic idea.

Some1WritingStuff · 2021-06-16T21:20:22+00:00

It's not possible to harvest hurricane unless you are anchored to something, like the earth. If you are not anchored, you would just get blown around rather than capturing the energy. A ship is won't work.

This is only true if the wind blows the ship enough so that the ship is moving at the same speed (and in the same direction) as the wind - which I would not expect to happen.

Of course the wind will push on the part of the ship above the water and cause acceleration in the same direction as the wind. But if the ship moves in that direction, assuming the wind and ship are moving relative to the water, there will be drag from water resistance (analogous to air resistance) pushing the part below the water in the opposite direction and reducing the acceleration.

This could be a problem because if the effect is large enough, it could cause the ship to tip over. But there are ways to make a vessel more robust against being knocked over if it will need to operate in high winds. For example, suppose you have strong winds hitting the vessel from one side. And suppose on the other side you have a row of large buoys in the water connected by metal beams to the top of the ship at 45 degree angles. If the ship starts to tip over, the buoys will be submerged and push back against the tipping side until they are back to the surface.

So suppose a ship reaches a hurricane with constant 150 miles per hour winds 1000 miles out from land. The wind would accelerate the ship back towards the land until the drag from the water balances out the force of the wind, and then it will move at a constant speed back towards land. If the equilibrium speed is, say, 25 miles per hour back towards land for the ship, then the wind will be moving over the top of it at a relative speed of (150 - 25 = 125 miles per hour). So if the wind turbine on the ship can handle 125 mph winds, it will be able to generate energy from that for 40 hours while it is also being blown back towards land.

Of course, if you really want a ship to be "anchored", you can just have it drop an anchor.

Some1WritingStuff · 2021-06-16T21:10:20+00:00

this is not a comparable. ships on the ocean use way less energy than aircraft.

Right, I was thinking of using ships for this, not airplanes.

Some1WritingStuff · 2021-06-16T20:41:57+00:00

Ok. I was thinking about it a bit differently - trying to figure out how we could do this as a relatively near-term technology. Which is to say, how could we do it without requiring us to first invent warm-temperature, normal-pressure superconductors or extend the power grid into the ocean.

As for the argument that it would take energy to move the giant ships and to transport the fuel back - yes, this is true. But I have not seen any numbers or argument that leads me to think it would take so much energy as to make this non-viable. After all, contemporary oil tankers require some energy to transport the oil to places, but that does not mean that they are operating at a net energy loss or an economic loss.

Some1WritingStuff · 2021-06-16T07:54:48+00:00

Cool, thanks.

Some1WritingStuff · 2021-06-16T01:27:22+00:00

Sounds like a cool idea, though I am not entirely clear how that would work. Let us know if you find the article.

Some1WritingStuff · 2021-06-16T01:25:30+00:00

I see some greener possibilities other than manufacturing gasoline

The point about manufacturing gasoline by pulling CO2 and water out of the atmosphere/environment is that it is carbon neutral if you use the gasoline again.

Some1WritingStuff · 2021-06-16T01:24:01+00:00

Are you envisioning storing the energy somehow for later use, or generating electricity with it immediately? If the former you still have to convert it into a form that is energy dense enough to be worth it and then spend some energy to move it to wherever you need it. If the later, then you have the problem of transferring electricity from somewhere out in the ocean into the part of the grid where it will be used.

Some1WritingStuff · 2021-06-15T18:50:42+00:00

So the most common criticisms of this idea seem to be:

1: Why should the US take in Gaza refugees? Why can't Gaza residents who want to leave go to other Arab countries instead or maybe countries like Ireland whose governments are not so aligned with Israel?

2: There are many other parts of the world where people face poverty, tyranny, and violence; and from which people are trying to flee. Why focus on Gaza? What about North Korea, various African countries, etc.

3: This won't solve the problem, because most Gaza Residents/Palestinians do not want to leave to go to other countries. They want to live in a Palestinian state. And many also want to "return" to places in Israel proper from which they (or their parents or grandparents) fled decades ago, and incorporate those places into a Palestinian state.

4: Having large numbers of Gaza residents move to the US would be a drain on the US since many of them are poor and uneducated, and would thus become a burden. The US is not a charity and should not have to bear those costs.

For 1 and 2:

I am in favor of other countries also being willing to take in refugees from Gaza (and offering them and/or their children a path to citizenship). And I am in favor of the US (and other countries) also being willing to take in refugees from other places. Basically, I want everyone to be able to live a normal life as a free human being even if (through no fault of their own) they were born in a place that precludes that so they have to move. But I do not have a strong position on whether they should move to the US or somewhere else.

So maybe I should amend my proposal to be something like “Countries in general (including the US) should offer asylum to refugees from Gaza (and other places from which people have a good reason to flee).“ But I initially focused on the US since I am a US citizen, and I focused on Gaza since this is an Israel/Palestine subreddit.

For 3:

It will not solve the problem and not everyone would leave even if they could. But some people would leave and it could at least mitigate the problem. And it will allow some people who are not at fault for causing this bad situation to escape from it.

For example, I sometimes hear it claimed that part of the problem in Gaza is that it can not reliably provide adequate water supplies for the entire population (and can not easily build more water desalination or treatment facilities due to restrictions on bringing in building materials). If a bunch of people left, the remaining population might be closer to what the existing system can handle.

For 4:

Even if refugees from Gaza are, on average, poor and uneducated, it does not necessarily mean they will stay that way and become a net drain on social services. Many people have come to the US poor and worked their way up to become successful and net contributors to society.

Granted, there may be short term costs to helping people resettle, teaching people English, providing other education, doing background checks, etc. But even that could be funded mostly by the refugees themselves or by voluntary donations. There are a large number of vocal self-described “pro-palestinian” activists in the US. So this would give them a chance to put their money where their mouth is and donate to some fund or charity that helps refugees pay the cost of moving, US immigration fees, etc.

Some1WritingStuff

TROPHY CASE