He represents Vermont, our second least populous state, with only about 650,000 residents, and 371,000 votes cast in the 2020 election.

For reference, Washington DC has a population of 690,000, and cast 346,000 votes.

Additionally, Sanders is a long time incumbent. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1991 where he served until becoming a senator in 2008 (which was prior to citizens United). In Vermont, the house of Representatives is a statewide election due to their small population.

Despite being an independent, Sanders has in many ways been acting as a Democrat, so the Democrats have avoided running against him for fear of splitting the vote. Combined with the overall democratic lean of the state, that gives him a relatively secure position.

Many other Democrats are similarly secure in their own seat. However, as part of being members of the party proper, they are under much more pressure to raise money for the party as a whole to spend on competitive raises

Volatility has always been built into investing, including index funds.

If retirement is a long way away, then this is a non event. If retirement is close and your 401k was in a target date fund, you are heavily invested in bonds at this point, precisely to deal with this sort of situation.

If you are close to retirement, and heavily weighed to tech heavy indecies, then this will probably delay your retirement a few years. If you’re already retired and so invested, you may have a problem.

In fairness to the PA, Palestine has an approximately 0% chance of winning a war against Israel. And an approximately 100% chance of them getting blown to pieces if they ever had an attack successful enough for Israel to fully mobilize against them (see Gaza).

Their most likely to succeed strategy would be pursuing victory through the Israeli court system (which was relatively on their side, leading to the attempted “court reform” power grab that was the political story in Israel prior to October 7). Their next best bet would be Israeli politics moving away from the current right wing nationalist coalition.

That is not to say that any of the above is easy, or likely to succeed. But at least it has a plausible chance. And, if it fails, that failure still leaves them better off than a war against Israel.

They haven’t finished step 2 yet. Hamas is only releasing 3 hostages a week during phase 1. Male Israeli soldiers are not scheduled for release until phase 2.

Even when he is in charge, he can’t stop his corruption trial. Netenyahu began testifying mid December, and I believe is still expected to give further testimony. Currently, the trial is on hold due to a surgery, but should resume soon.

Him being PM definitely slows things down, but Israel has no problem trying an active head of state.

Official death tolls are always an undercount. Even after mundane disasters like hurricanes, the death toll gets revised up during the cleanup as more victims are discovered. The disaster in Gaza is still ongoing, so people have more important things to do than count the dead.

In addition to this, the Gaza Health Ministry has taken a deliberately conservative approach of only counting bodies that make it to a hospital and are clearly dead as a direct result of the conflict (e.g, not disease or famine).

The official death count is not a reflection of how many people are dying. It is a reflection of the Gaza Health Ministry’s capacity to count the dead.

Women’s skirts work just fine for men. You just need to translate between sizing scale, which is not that difficult (although it is annoying unless you are in person and can actually try things on).

Crop tops are much more difficult to buy, as a lot of those really look bad if you don’t have breasts.

I think of this as analogous to the movement to get women to wear pants. It’s not that we wanted them to present as masculine; it’s that we wanted pants to stop being masculine and start being just clothes. Basically all masculine coded attire became androgynous, but almost no feminine code attire did.

It’s not like skirts are inherently feminine either. There are plenty of examples across cultures and time of it being perfectly normal for men to wear them.

You get this property in algrabraic structures called “wheels”. The simplest to understand wheel is probably the wheel of fractions, which is a slightly different way of defining fractions that allows division by 0.

The effect of this is to create 2 additional numbers: ∞ = z/0 for z != 0, ⊥, and ⊥ = 0/0.

Just add infinity gives you the real projective line (or Riemen Sphere if you are working with comples numbers). In this structure, 0 * ∞ is undefined, so is not quite what you want

⊥ (bottom) in a wheel can be thought as filling in for all remaining undefined results. In particular, any operation involving ⊥ results in ⊥. This includes the identity: 0 * ⊥ = ⊥.

As far as useful applications go, there are not many. The only time I’ve ever seen wheels come up when getting my math degree was just a mistake in defining fractions.

In computer science however, you do see something along these lines. The most common example is floating point numbers. These numbers often include ∞, -∞ and NaN, where NaN is essentially just ⊥. In particular, 0 * NaN = NaN, also 0 * ∞ = ⊥. The main benefit here is that arithmetic operations are always defined.

I’ve also seen an arbitrary precision fraction library that actually implemented something similar to the wheel of fractions described above (albeit with a distinction between positive and negative infinity). This would also give you 0 * ∞ = ⊥ and 0 * ⊥ = ⊥. Again, by adding ⊥ as a proper value, you could simplify the handling of some computations that might fail.

I think it’s even simpler than that. A lot of the people conflating anti-Israel sentiment with anti Jewish sentiment are ethno nationalists. On the Israeli side, those would be Jewish nationalists; but here in the US, the sentiment is disproportionately coming from Christian nationalists. Incidentally, these people also tend to be the same people who conflate anti-current-governing-coalition-and-policy-of-Isreal sentiment with anti Israel sentiment more generally, because that conflation is part of fascist ideology, and ethno nationalism tends to be a fascist ideology.

The reason we see pro-Zionist media ferment anti semitism is simply that the Zionist movement is ideologically aligned with most anti-semetic movements.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

I suspect they are inclined to tell the Russians to kick rocks. However, they are going to need some foreign support. As long as they are on the US terror list, it will be very difficult for that help to come from any US aligned group.

Having said that, between the growing disagreement over Israel policy, the coming 4 years of a Trump administration, and the desire of a lot of European countries to resolve the Syrian Refugee crisis; I could see a lot of European countries going against the US on this one and helping the new Syrian government.

Even your framing is giving Israel to much credit. Suppose everyone in that car was 100% a terrorist involved in the 10/7 attack.

You still do not get to target them while they are actively distributing humanitarian aid. Particularly if said distribution has been specifically coordinated with you (I haven’t seen specific reporting about this one, but in general the WCK deconflicts their movements with the IDF, for obvious reasons).

When even the official Israeli story is unconscionable, I don’t understand why we are even having a conversation about “if” they are committing war crimes

You don’t make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemies.

Unless you actually plan on commiting a full scale and thorough genocide, eliminating terrorists is simply not a viable strategy for defeating terrorism. If you don’t go all the way to genocide, then a sizable portion of the non-terrorists you didn’t kill will become terrorist

Leaders say a lot of things. Even without nukes, Israel has enough conventional military might to have a significant detergent effect (and to defend against attacks that actually do happen).

Further, the politics in the middle east has not been Arabs vs Israel for decades. Israel is a well positioned member of the anti Iran coalition.

That hasn’t been the case for decades. Israel has a lot of allies in the region (basically the entire anti-Iran coalition). Admitadly, these alliances are largely premised on Israel’s military and intelligence might, which would be diminished without US support; but Israel still has significant in-house capabilities.

As to the actual power dynamics, I agree that the US has a lot of leverage. But that is meaningless if they don’t use it. Moreso now that Israel knows they would only need to wait for the next administration to reverse course if we started using our leverage now.

American’s were used to living in a low inflation environment. Argentinians have been living in a high inflation environment for decades.

Israel is not alone in the region anymore. The middle east is bipolar now, and Israel is well established in the anti-Iran coalition. I wouldn’t call this “stabilizing”, but if the actual fighting is contained to Israel, Iran, and Iranian proxies, that is good for the rest of the anti-Iran coalition.

Sucks for Israel, but when your political leadership is fighting with military leadership because the latter is not sufficiently hawkish, I don’t think “stability” is the policy objective said leadership is actually pursuing.

Both can be true. A large swath of the electorate is stupid for electing Trump, but the Democratic party failed to reach them. This is a lesson that Republicans have known for decades but Democrats still don’t get. Voter’s are not rational; being better than your opponent does not win elections. People can be annoyed at the voters for making this reality, and at the Democrats for still not getting it.

In fairness to the Dems though, the incumbent party lost ground in almost every Democracy, and Harris underperformed less in swing states where both parties campaigned.

The Social Security Trust Fund does not exist. It is an accounting fiction. When Social Security was passed, it came with a tax increase to offset the increased spending. For decades, the tax increase was greater than the spending increase, so the government spent the difference on other stuff; but made a note that Social Security had a surplus. However, since 2010, this flipped and the cost of Social Security has exceeded the income of its associated tax. The bean counters would the flip happened in 2021, but that is because they believe in the fiction of the Social Security Trust Fund, so that interest on the Trust Fund counts as income to Social Security, despite the fact that said interest is paid by the federal government.

So, why does this accounting fiction called the Social Security Trust Fund matter? Because it has the force of law. Under current US law, Social Security is exempt from the the typical budgetting rules. As long as the bean counters would say the Trust Fund has a positive balance, Social Security is authorized to increase it’s budget to meet it’s obligations. In contrast, most Federal programs get their budgets increased as part of the yearly budget (or a continuing resolution when Congress can’t pass a budget. Or they just close when Congress can’t pass a CR).

So, what happens when the trust fund runs out?

Option 1, Congress does not authorize continued spending at current levels. This is typically known as a spending cut. But because it is triggered by an existing law and Republicans have spent decades playing up the trust fund, they can act like this cut was a force of nature, and not them actively deciding to cut it in the congressional budget.

Option 2, Congress funds social security just like it funds everything else, through an appropriations bill. SS keeps operating, and becomes another political football in the annual budget fight

Option 3, Congress picks some way to tell the bean counters that the social security trust fund is still positive. Social security keeps operating at current lol levels, and remains exempt from the normal appropriations process.

So, what is all this talk about removing the cap on the Social Security payroll tax? If we ignore all the accounting trickery, that is about taking a regressive income tax payed by workers earning less that $168,600/year and turning it into a flat tax. Nothing whatsoever to do with social security, but I agree that a flat tax is better than a regressive tax. Still not as good as a progressive tax, which is the only thing that would have been politically viable but for the fiction that this tax is at all related to Social Security benefits (and their associated limit).

Social Security isn’t even the only federal program to have this issue. Our highway system is payed for by the Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by a tax on gasoline. This fund has been insolvent since 2008, so Congress just included highway funding in their appropriations bills and payed for the difference like they pay for most Federal programs.