I think the (disputable) argument is that, for global stability and equilibrium reasons, there should be a general prohibition against kidnapping/assassination of de facto heads of state, regardless of whether they were legitimately elected or are dictators.
Most of the people who make the argument I described probably believe the UN is the only legitimate body that could make this decision, based on some combination of practicality, historical precedent, and international agreement. And the UN absolutely has a mechanism for doing it (the security council). But one alternatively might argue the UN is broken/dysfunctional/corrupt enough that it can't be relied on despite having the "proper paperwork", just as national democracies can be for national affairs.
It's why the UN has an obsession with a tiny democracy in the middle east and ignores the multitude of brutal dictatorships which oppress and kill far more people around it and across the globe.
Well, as always, who decides the leader is illegitimate? Are the Saudis illegitimate, according the the rubric we put on Maduro?
The UN deliberately has no mechanism for this because it's a talking shop intended to help avoid war by providing a talking venue. That's the whole idea, they're not the world police, there is no such thing. They're a forum.
I'm absolutely not defending any given dictator but history shows that every attempt to remove a dictator "for the greater good" is usually 1) selfishly motivated and 2) backfires horribly.
I'm arguing against the US installing leaders in Latin America, sorry if I was unclear. I happen to have some Chilean friends and stories from them, from the Pinochet era, have helped shape my perspective.
To phrase it more completely, regime change and general destabilization of Latin American countries has definitely led to the immigration crisis in the United States now. Lack of stable governments and economies has absolutely exacerbated the production and transportation of drugs into the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed or disappeared by US-empowered gangs or governments.
Now that said, I don't know what the world would look like had their right to self-determination been preserved. Nobody knows. But as a general rule, countries whose power structures were not toyed with by colonial powers do better than countries whose power structures were toyed with.
Imagine if Hitler was removed before... Instead, foreign powers favored appeasement and trade; conservative elites thought they could control him, Nazi propaganda and terror consolidated power, and Germans were disillusioned with democracy after WW1.
> are you seriously saying Maduro had Hitler-like potential to ignite global war if we didn't stop him?
No, and in fact the comparison to Hitler felt out of place. I'm simply saying that it isn't as black and white that one should NEVER remove a head of state.
What I will concede is that catch 22 of not knowing how the future will play out, so how COULD you confidently and with wide agreement intervene BEFORE someone commits atrocities.
I'm still not convinced removing Hitler before his invasion of Poland would have been a good idea, it seems possible someone like Himmler would be just as capable of picking up Mein Kampf as an ideological framework to continue imperialism and kick off genocide. "Look what the Jews and communists did when we tried to stand up to them, they killed the leader of our movement," etc etc.
Once the genocide started though I do thing all considerations, including national stability and continuity, are lower priority than ending the genocide as fast as possible.
Like Hitler, Trump has (or rather, had, based on recent performance) the power of oratory. Himmler did not and I wonder if he would have been able to whip up the kind of fervor that Hitler did.
That's what made Trump so dangerous, it is insane that such terrible people have such a charismatic appeal. To me they are horrible men, to others they seem to come across as some kind of savior.
Basically, "leave it to the population to sort out themselves, even if they've lost the democratic means to do so," up until a government has gone so insane it's massacring its people, or other people.
So we should have done a much bigger intervention in Syria, much earlier? We should intervene in Sudan right now? We should finally intervene in Russia where they slaughter their own children and Ukrainians in a genocidal war of aggression? We should finally intervene in Palestine and destroy Hamas (and in Iran and destroy their Mullah-sponsors) who've committed a genocide on October 7th, killing thousands of Israelis and ten thousands of Palestinians?
From a purely moral standpoint, my answer would be "yes, absolutely." Unfortunately, most of these interventions are not practically possible. Taking out a dictator in US's backyard is so much easier (and easier to do bloodlessly) than any of these examples.
General rules don’t apply to superpowers or the countries they protect. China, US, Russia get to do whatever their military or economic power affords them, unprovoked aggression, war crimes, terror acts.
There are general rules against war crimes and they still happen day after day, under flimsy excuses. Bombed a hospital or a wedding party? There was a suspected terrorist there. White phosphorus over civilians? It was just for the smoke screen. Overthrew a government overseas? Freedom for those poor people.
Right but "Don't kidnap/assassinate the enemy leaders" is often a good policy even when nobody will enforce that rule on you by force.
For example if your country is subject to a terror bombing campaign, it's very tempting to assassinate the one leader who had the power/respect/authority to order the attacks to start but often they're also the only leader who can order the attacks to stop
In the 1970s/1980s presumably the UK could have had IRA leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness assassinated. But it sure turned out to be useful, in the late 1990s peace process, that the IRA had identifiable, living leaders who could engage in negotiation, sign an agreement, and get the bomb makers to stop making bombs.
The definition is probably not very precise. They started a war of aggression and every other country is tiptoeing around them. Iraq was also a regional power and got a very different treatment. So the “power” line isn’t so clear.
China on the other hand doesn’t get visibly involved in almost any remote conflict and they’re obviously a (if not the) superpower.
Russia has neither industrial nor economic base to project power outside of its sphere of influence. The only reason why everyone tiptoes around them is because they’re world’s gas station that attacked world’s bread basket. And largest stockpile of nukes.
> , there should be a general prohibition against kidnapping/assassination of de facto heads of state, regardless of whether they were legitimately elected or are dictators.
Since ideas don't execute themselves, who would you pick to enforce this prohibition, never mind even getting 100%(?) alignment from countries what the conditions are for "kidnap", "assassination", and "de facto head of state"?
Of who? If the PRC invades Taiwan and starts brutally oppressing the people here, you ostensibly have 1.3 billion people in support, plus possibly PRC allied, a non insignificant number of tankies abroad...
If people would still default to boycotting war-mongering states, the PRC would have a serious economic problem afterwards. Since, the relevant states (EU) are already in a (mild) crisis, they messed up there foreign economic diversity and individualism is all the rage now, there won't be.
> the PRC would have a serious economic problem afterwards
Don't get me wrong, I live in Taiwan so it's not something I want to have happen, but the PRC seems focused on localizing its economy as much as possible, so it may be that if that time comes, it doesn't matter if other countries boycott it. Didn't seem to matter that much to Russia in the Ukraine situation, or at least, it didn't stop them.
It's not about what should be the case. It IS the case. If we should decide to change that it won't work if one government unilaterally decides who stays or who goes for obvious reasons. Last month we saw Trump prostrate himself before MBS, who is apparently totally legitimate.
Cancers aren't perfectly optimized to metastasize, and metasteses (rather than, e.g., bulk pressure from the original tumor) are usually what kills you. It's perfectly possible that the procedure kills 90% or 99% of the cells in the original tumor but increases migration of the remaining cells such that the net effect reduces patient survival.
Don't cancer metastases have more to do with cancer mutations allowing the cancer cells to form new tumors? Some cancer types tend do not develop the ability to colonize new tumors while others do regularly.
I thought some combination of error correction and redundant systems was already widespread in airplanes to prevent cosmic-ray induced errors. (GPT agrees.) What am I missing? I've read multiple articles on this, and none of them address the fact that the problem, at the level of detail described in the article, should have been prevented by technology available and widely deployed for decades.
What do you think this adds? These things are sycophant confident idiots; they will agree and agree they're incorrect at the slightest challenge in the same interaction.
I'm quite aware of the limitations. That's why I bothered to post a comment. But it's definitely better to do due diligence by asking first, since many responses can then be checked. Mentioning it in the comment shows the effort, similar to "Google turned up nothing".
You're missing that the systems were designed in the 90's and they had no edac on them but instead relied on redundancy and a consensus system. The fact bit flips happened is not why they grounded the things and updated sw, they grounded them to address the consensus algorithm in the other CPU that did not get the bit flips.
Do you have a source on that? The current article describes the software very differently:
> In any case, the software updates rolled out by the company appear to be quick and easy to install. Many airlines completed them within hours. The software works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight.
Yes, my understanding of this was wrong and based on reading the failure analysis of another issue that was related to the ELAC but the SEU failure happened in the ADIRU.
I take my analysis on this back, it was true only for the other incident. I can't edit my answers anymore now. Not sure what is going on with this failure, would love to read a detailed analysis report as the other one I went through.
I check Google maps ETA estimates when I get in a car in SF; they are accurate for Uber or Lyfts, but Waymos are absolutely slower there. This is especially, but not exclusively, true for routes where a human would take the 101 or 280, for obvious reasons.
I have normal vision. I wouldn't say completely identical when they are side-by-side, but they are very close. It's effectively impossible to discriminate them when they are not side-by-side, which for this plot is very important.
The author's mistake was this: "[my colors] are equidistant in the hue circle". The problem is that the hue circle (at least under the parameterization scheme he used) is not uniform over discrimination, i.e., the ability to discriminate two hues is not invariant under displacing them an equal amount along the circle. (I presume this is one of those situation where it's misleading to think about three primary colors on equal footing because of quirks of human vision biology.)
First, the author could have chosen 7 hues at max-saturation that were easier to discriminate than this. But more importantly, he should have used the other color axes: saturation and brightness. dark red (~maroon) and light red (~pink) are a lot easier to discriminate, even when not next to each other, than the two shades of green he used.
As an outsider that's a reasonable thing to suppose based on a plain reading of copyright law, but in practice it's not true. Researchers update their preprint based on changes requested by reviewers and editors all the time. It's never an issue.
Yes, nerves from the brain to the heart can influence heart beat (and other features like heart conduction and blood flow to the heart itself) in response to stress and exercise. Heart transplant recipients lose these features. They make poor marathon runners :)
Batching isn't mentioned anywhere. Do you have a positive reason to think this, or is it just the easiest hypothesis (besides a typo) explain what the author wrote?
The premise of this question is wrong, and it's super disappointing that everyone is giving answers as if it's correct. The Honda test rocket only went to an altitude of 300 meters. It's been possible to propulsively land rockets from such low altitudes for decades, e.g., McDonnell Douglas DC-X test in 1996. (And ofc, if you're just talking about re-use for any landing method, the space shuttle first reused the solid rockets and the orbiter in 1981.)
Reusable, propulsively landed stages for rockets capable of putting payloads into Earth orbit is stupendously harder. The speeds involved are like 10-100x higher than these little hops. The first stages of Falcon 9 and Starship are still the only rockets that have achieved that. Electron has only re-used a single engine.
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