I mean… you really can’t. Contracts and even people on the ground more or less reveal this real fast (and is what the OSINT community lives off of). The US and even Ukraine do the same. You can keep it a secret exactly how juicy a target is but you can’t really hide that missiles or tanks or whatever are being built somewhere.

For example, a buddy of mine lives near a US facility that is near some REALLY nice climbing areas nearby. Every couple of months the army swings by and tells everyone to go the fuck away. And it does not take much brain power to realize that THAT is when they are moving whatever they don’t want people to know is at that base. But any other time? You can literally watch equipment being moved from warehouse/hanger to warehouse/hanger while giving someone a belay.

Can we? Yes. Immediately sending peacekeeping forces to prevent the IDF from continuing to engage in genocide and coordination with neighboring countries to figure out whether this is a relocation situation or a proper two state solution (and what that would require).

Will we? No. Because if we cared we would have done it decades ago. The US doesn’t care because we decided Israel are our allies in the region and most of NATO falls along those lines. And neighboring countries don’t care because they don’t actually like the Palestinian people (and actively block refugees) and mostly just want to hurt Israel through them.

It is the biggest “problem” of modern warfare. We don’t fight wars of conquest anymore because that tends to actually make other countries care (because those brown people have resources!). So we attack and then leave.

It is similar to why France and England (or China/Japan/Korea) were basically at continuous levels of war for hundreds (?) of years. Because when you roll up and kill a bunch of people and maybe steal a goat? The remaining people want revenge. When you conquer them and either ethnically cleanse them to nonexistence or integrate them into your society? They forget why they were angry after a generation or two.

I very much do NOT believe the world would be a better place with more ethnic cleansing and stealing of land. But we also are in a mess where retaliation between countries just continues with no real consequences to the people who are calling for the attacks. And the civilians just get rightfully angry when their kid is permanently blinded because she was looking the wrong way at the Lebanese equivalent of a Kroger.

And then you get the keyboard warriors who hop in decades (or even centuries) into the conflict, pick a side, and immediately say THESE terrorists are good guys and THOSE terrorists are bad guys.

The pagers were very questionable. Even assuming ONLY hezbollah had the explosive pagers, they were still detonating in public since the point of a pager is to be able to carry it around.

Walkie talkie wise? I still need to reflexively condemn anything that kills children. But… that actually does seem super targeted and would presumably not be something a terrorist “should” carry around in public during their non-terrorist lives.

It can be hit or miss with some particularly stupid government workers, but Passport Cards are very much a thing and qualify as Real ID Compliant.

As a passport it is only valid for like Canada and Mexico but it is well worth the extra 20 or 30 bucks when you get a passport. On travel it is a nice ID that you don’t REALLY care if it gets stolen (since your Driver’s License is back at the hotel). Also incredibly useful when you need multiple forms of ID for something.

But also would not be a horrible choice as a non-driver ID. Just a hassle to get one without a Driver’s License because 'murica.

• Wait a couple of weeks.
• Return to police station, pay the fee, and pick up your brand new ID or passport.

I mean… that IS how you get a passport. Just replace “police station” with “post office”.

The issue is that the US is comparable in size to the EU. Even excluding the flyover states, people can spend an entire lifetime just going on domestic trips for holidays and the like.

So the vast majority of Americans see no need for a passport until they have booked their dream trip and realize that France is a different country. Hence the mad rush and expedited processing and so forth.

I personally make life more inconvenient for myself because I refuse to deal with booking time for photos at a post office or pay a pharmacy to do it for me so I end up spending ten minutes in gimp formatting things every N years. But that is very much a stupid me thing.

I mean… none of that actually helps a third party at the presidential level. Or even addresses spoilers. Going to address your points out of order to make my own

If not, the candidates with the fewest first choice is eliminated, and those that voted for them, they move on to their second choice picks.

So… the third party candidates get eliminated in the first round. Because they cannot compete with the two big parties in terms of campaign funding. Assuming it doesn’t end in the first round because…

If a candidate gets the majority vote in the first choices they win outright.

So the republican wins because there is one right wing fascist running against a dozen flavors of Left wing. Or the Democrat wins because all the third parties were a negligible percentage of the vote to begin with.

I HAVE seen proposals that change the ordering so that a third party “can’t” be a spoiler (I forget the specifics but basically it is removing the small percentage votes first and only comparing once you downselect to N candidates where N is usually 2) but…

People confuse the idea of making a third party candidate viable with minimizing how much you are pissing away your vote by voting for a third party in the presidential election. Ranked choice is great for the latter but it still has many of the same spoiler problems without additional changes. And, arguably, would increase the impact of third party spoilers if one party over-splits. I continue to point people toward the mess in France where basically all the Left wing parties had to unite and make a coalition to MAYBE stop the right wing fascists.

Personally? I would much rather we abolish the electoral college and just do a popular vote. That will have a MUCH bigger impact on third party candidates because it suddenly becomes viable to run a national campaign where you convince maybe 15% of the overall populace rather than needing 40% of each county just to end up on the politico map. Because the latter is what really screws over third parties at the presidential level because they just don’t have the money or resources to sway enough counties to get any meaningful electoral college votes. And ranked choice alone has no impact on that.

It depends how you look at it.

Ranked Choice is not going to make a third party viable at the presidential level. Simply because the other two parties have orders of magnitude more funding to campaign and make sure people know and “like” their candidates. And, depending on the implementation of ranked choice, it may still result in splitting the vote.

At the congressional representative level? Ranked choice has a lot of benefits there. But that is also the level where third party candidates are still viable under the current model.

The reality is that most of the things people want out of ranked choice we already have out of the primary system. Wide range of candidates run in the primary on each side. Primaries exist to figure out who The People like and to let the party down select. Done right, you have what would otherwise have been “third party” candidates who suddenly have a LOT of influence within the party (see: Bernie Sanders in 2020… less so in 2016) because they get a lot of influence on the platform in exchange for supporting the candidate who has the majority of the vote and the party backing.

The key is that people need to understand they are still compromising to get some of what they want AND to engage with their local (and even national) parties to make sure their voices are heard.

project 2025 likely ends with trump and the magats. Because it is almost entirely based upon the idea of a POTUS who actively has no idea how government works and doesn’t want to do anything other than get headlines.

Because under a romney or a cheney? They don’t need project 2025 because steps will already be taken. Just like they have been since reagan with the bushes gradually eroding away democracy.

And… the reality is that it is inevitable that republicans will gain power again. Because The Left will pretty rapidly be at each other’s throats once trump is gone (just note all the Bernie Or Bust crew who still can’t shut the fuck up about the most important event in the past 8 years…). And people will lose interest in voting because they didn’t get exactly what they want.

The hope is that Kamala actually acts and works to restore those checks and balances so that four years of a republican is four years of a mess for Democrats to clean up and not the first four years of Gilead.

That is very incorrect.

There is a lot of footage (some “fun” and some horrific) of pagers exploding in grocery stores and malls and the like. Because the point of the pagers was for the terrorists to be reachable outside of caves and camps.

And… there are civilians standing around in those cases. With kids who tend to have heads at waist level.

I saw unsubstantiated reports claiming there was 10-20 grams of high explosive (eg C4). Which looks pretty “right” based on the footage I looked at before remembering this would be faces of death. An energetic “explosion” coming out the side of the pager that, combined with the metal from the batteries or the interior plates of the pager, would generate a good amount of shrapnel. So high odds of death if you were looking at your pager to read the message and almost guaranteed injury and cuts otherwise. And, if you were gripping your pager on the wrong side, likely loss of fingers (like a fire cracker in the hand).

Its one reason that a big part of securing your supply chains is to actually inspect what you purchase. (Allegedly) Israel with a few hours in a warehouse overnight could swap out a LOT of pager backplates in ways that are more or less indetectable at a glance or even picking it up (20 grams is nothing). But if you were to weigh those and realize they are 20 grams heavier than all the other pagers you bought (since packaged goods are fairly consistent), that should raise a lot of red flags.

But I am not aware of even government orgs (let alone terrorist orgs) who are willing to put the effort in to do that.

Supply chains matter a lot and governments, let alone terrorist organizations, fail to protect them.

US centric, but far too much of policy is “Don’t buy Made in China” with no thought beyond that.

For this scenario? My assumption is they ordered from their usual supply sources and nothing was hinky. But Israel (or whoever) compromised a port or fedex center along the way and installed some explosives since the only people buying those pagers were terrorists. And nobody on the hezbollah side even bothered to weigh the packages before handing them out.

The secret service are cops too.

But hey, I guess I am just angry at badges and not at increasingly militarized orgs that have no problem violating people’s rights (breaking up protesters and the like) but can’t even do the fucking job they are allegedly shitting on civil rights to do.

Knowing almost nothing about “Nix”: I am inclined to say this is just one person who is REALLY REALLY REALLY angry that they were not properly respected and were ever told no and blah blah blah. Hence the clear vendetta and… calling the HA devs luddite terrorists…

Would genuinely love a perspective on this from someone with basic people skills who understands what the nix devs actually wanted/needed to know if that was reasonable. But all signs point to “no” and “spray them with deodorant while you are at it”

Sure Jan.

Look. I don’t know much about your project or what it’s goals or ideology are. What I do know is that your behavior is tainting it and making me think your entire community are assists who call people terrorists for not supporting you.

Think about that

But it is a flood of people using a project in a way that it never was intended to be used in the first place.

Yes, HA is “weird” because it is an open source project that actually has significant amounts of funding (to which I contribute). But this isn’t a case of the authors and org deciding to support a new distribution platform. This is a case of a subset of community members deciding it should support that distribution platform and insisting that the project spin up knowledge and support for it.

… So did you wake up this morning and just say to yourself “I need to defend some cops”

The secret service were in charge of trump’s security detail. There was an armed gunman on a roof for a ridiculously large amount of time. No matter how many punisher skulls you have tattooed on your wee wee, they fucked up. Simple as that.

Its unclear how many “moderate republicans” will vote for her. In large part because it is unclear how many “moderate republicans” there actually are and it is worth remembering that folk like liz cheney and romney largely voted in lockstep with trump and the magats outside of MAYBE one or two issues that personally impact them. And it isn’t like any of the “former Republican leaders” have particularly strong support bases considering they lost to the magats years ago.

The reality is that this is just part of the republican party trying to prepare for a post-trump election. trump supported candidates consistently lost downballot and the primaries for this election were a shitshow. maga/tea party republicans die with trump so they are making sure they can go back to reagan/bush style “We are the party of decorum and church rights. You need to meet us in the middle and let us kill just a few trans folk per day”

So… the secret service did their job this time? Rather than waiting while someone was camped out on a roof taking ages to miss a shot?