To address your second point “not voting for Harris is a vote for Trump”; why isn’t the opposite true? “Not voting for Trump is a vote for Harris”, follows the same logic, so refusing to vote or voting independent should be net neutral, no?

You’re missing some context - “not voting [instead of] for Harris is a vote for Trump”. If the dilemma is between not voting and voting Harris, choosing not to vote subtracts a vote from Harris.

Of course Harris got a boost in donations after she became the candidate - she appealed the the people who thought Biden was too conservative. That doesn’t mean conservative democrats are an insignificant demographic, they simply already donated earlier. The move towards the center is meant to not drive them away into not voting [instead of voting for Harris]. Obviously there will be some progressives and some conservatives who will decide to not vote [instead of voting for Harris], the goal is to move to the point where these margins from both sides will be minimal.

Volunteering?

There’s a good chance got them because dunkin donated them or because the cafe didn’t want to give cash for fear it could be construed as pay.

The point of gift cards is that they’re: a. Not money (when using money might have some sort of disadvantage for either side). b. Have restrictions that the person who gave it to you might want to impose. c. Are usually cheaper than paying money directly to the vendor.

And frankly, no one forced you to try and use them. They were given as a gesture of appreciation, and you could have given them to someone who would have been happy to have them, or just politely refuse to accept them. Also, not checking the expiration date is on you.

And those Hezbollah operatives can lose their pagers

And you can lose your car keys. But if someone asked you where they were, you wouldn’t say “Oh, they’re in a random place”.

or they themselves can move randomly through populated areas with the hidden bomb strapped to their hip

The explosive charge was small enough to seriously harm only those who are in direct contact with it. There’s a video of one charge going off in the middle of grocery shopping (speaking of your next point) with a person standing maybe 20 cm next to the explosion. That person was able to run away without apparent harm.

They never go to buy groceries, or stop at a hospital or school, or have their devices stolen or lost in some random location

There’s no method of warfare that would never harm civilians.

a manner that has absolutely no mechanism by which to control where they actually are and who else is in proximity to them when detonated.

The pagers being bought by Hezbollah is the mechanism. Did you mean a real-time mechanism? Is this what it boils down to? Edit: Sorry, I misread what you said. Changing my reply to: As you can see from the video, where they are and who is next to them isn’t really a factor. I would agree that if they are in very close proximity to another person (hugging them of maybe riding in a crowded public transport), the explosion will probably harm the other person. Once again, relative to other methods aimed against targets operating among civilian population, this seems more selective, not less.

No one is forcing to to reply. I’m continuing it because to me the operation was extremely selective in which people it targets relative to modern warfare among civilian infrastructure, and I’m trying to understand the counter argument.

I did

OK, it took me a while to understand this, and I’m assuming you meant “I do have some criteria”. If you meant something else, I can’t even guess what it was.

after the bit you cherrypicked.

Ah, my bad. I mistook the “pagers that will randomly move around a populated area” part as a purely rhetorical statement and my brain kinda swept it aside. Sorry. The explosives weren’t planted in a random batch of pagers. It was in a batch specifically meant for Hezbollah operatives. You could make the argument that some of the pagers got into non-Hezbollah hands (and obviously they did), but what you said is a gross and unfair exaggeration. Your criteria doesn’t apply here.

I don’t care in the least if anyone thinks I’m in cahoots with anyone; it won’t change that I’m in cahoots with no one.

Sorry, I was trying to say - Please don’t imply I might be willingly misunderstanding you when you’re not communicating clearly. Even your edit is somewhat unclear, as it isn’t evident if the part before the edit is still relevant.

how absolutely heartless and tragic […]

Wait, what? The prevalent criticism against the exploding pagers (both on Lemmy and other places) is that they’re akin to mines and are essentially terrorist attacks. Both of these thing are (at least somewhat) specific and objective, and that’s where we started the conversation. Going from that to “It’s heartless”, which is a very subjective description, seems to me like moving the goalpost.

Yes, of course it’s heartless and tragic. War is heartless and tragic. How else would you describe taking a kid who was in high school a few months ago, putting a rifle in his hand and telling him “See that other kid who’s just like you? go shoot him because he happen to be living on the other side of an imaginary line”?

Saying “Well, this heartless and tragic thing is acceptable but I don’t like that heartless and tragic thing” is arbitrary unless there’s an actual criteria. Either way you’re entitled to your own opinion, it’s just that earlier I thought you have some criteria or test.

You: So the pagers were ordered by Hezbollah…

Me: “The pagers were used by Hezbollah, not Hamas.”

You: “I realize that, I was drawing a parallel between the two circumstances.”

Me: asking for clarification.

You: “you seem not to (or have chosen not to) understand [the parallel?] the first two times […] Edite: I see I typed Hamas when I meant to type Hezbollah in one place”

It seems you’ve mistyped, then misunderstood me when I fixed it (though I attributed it to a lack of knowledge) and now you’re insinuating I might be misunderstanding you willfully? If that’s the case, you’re making it so easy for me other people might think we’re in cahoots[1].

Anyway, Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean I didn’t understand the argument. And I’m pretty sure I did understand at least one of your points. I’ve explained why the pagers aren’t like landmines and why the rational behind the treaty to ban landmines seems to agree with me. If that’s the only argument you made (“It’s been one argument the entire time”), you can simply reply to what I said instead of reframing anything.

[1] Speaking of other people, are people downvoting me as a dislike button, or is there a specific reason? I don’t mind the downvotes, just wondering if they’re because people don’t agree with me or because they think there’s something wrong/harmful with my messages.

I realize that, I was drawing a parallel between the two circumstances.

Err… what circumstances? What was the purpose of drawing a parallel between Hamas and Hezbollah? What insight was I to gain by it? Asking seriously.

And again - when you drop a bomb, you can credibly have made an attempt to ensure no one is in the vicinity who you don’t intend to bomb. (Not that israel seems to do this) - this is especially true with modern technology.

Sorry, were you making two arguments or one? You asked about the difference between landmines and what Israel did. I thought the rest of what you said was to show how planting bombs in pagers is like landmines, not a new argument. If there were two arguments, you didn’t respond to my answer regarding landmines.

I can talk about the difference, and you’ll respond with a counter argument etc. Ultimately, it’ll come down to me saying Israel is able to reasonably predict who’ll carry the explosive and you saying they can’t. The bottom line for me is this:

Some weapons have been banned from warfare while others haven’t. The banned weapons follow certain criteria for being banned. exploda-pagers don’t follow the criteria under which landmines have been banned. If you know of other weapons or tactics that are banned and are akin to exploda-pagers, we can discuss that. Otherwise, I’m left with the conclusion what Israel did falls within the bounds of a legitimate military operation. You can, of course, think differently.

The pagers were used by Hezbollah, not Hamas. They are two different entities, and while it doesn’t make any difference in the narrow context I’m replying to, it’s really a basic detail that anyone voicing an opinion on the matter should know.

How is this argument different than defending the use of landmines?

From the Wikipedia entry about landmines: “The use of land mines is controversial because they are indiscriminate weapons, harming soldier and civilian alike. They remain dangerous after the conflict in which they were deployed has ended, killing and injuring civilians and rendering land impassable and unusable for decades. To make matters worse, many factions have not kept accurate records (or any at all) of the exact locations of their minefields, making removal efforts painstakingly slow.”

Planting bombs inside pagers specifically used by Hezbollah isn’t indiscriminate (unless by “indiscriminate” you mean “when they go off, they harm anyone in the proximity”, but going by that definition everything with an exploding charge is “indiscriminate”, yet only mines are banned). And obviously exploded bombs don’t remain dangerous and aren’t difficult to remove.

First off, I think we should contextualize what happened - according to some news sources, the bombs were supposed to go off in the first days of an Israeli attack that would probably start an all out war (Some Hezbollah operatives became suspicious). The operation wasn’t intended to create an “escalation where Hezbollah will answer”, rather opening a full out attack against Hezbollah to force them to stop firing missiles at Israeli civilians and abide by the UN resolution.

Israel didn’t send “thousands of bombs God knows where they land”. They planted bombs in hardware that is used exclusively by Hezbollah operatives and their accomplices to evade gathering sigint. Yes, civilians got hurt. That’s the nature of war, and what makes it so horrible - people who might hold no malice nor pose any threat to the other side get hurt and die. The modern rules of warfare aren’t designed to eliminate civilian casualties, rather mainly to deter the warring parties from using civilians as a tool of war. That’s why an army can’t hide behind civilian population, but given an army that’s hiding behind civilian population, it’s acceptable for the other army to fire at them as long as they take proper measures to minimize civilian casualties (this in meant only as an example, not directly relating to Hezbollah or Hamas). If any act that results in civilian casualties is not “proper defense” I don’t think there has been a single case of “proper defense” in large scale armed conflict in modern history. People in the west might not realize it because for the last decades wars are fought away form their boarders, so it’s easier to view civilian casualties as optional.

And you know what? I’d WISH all civilian casualties in war would be confined to people who are in direct proximity to enemy personnel. If I could press a button and replace all Hezbollah attacks against civilian targets with bombs sent to IDF personnel, I’d do so in a heartbeat.

Regarding Netanyahu - right now, he’s slowly climbing in the polls. His plan is to keep his coalition from falling apart till the next election. Anything that disturbs the current situation is not in his interests (and, on the whole, the last time Netanyahu was proactive in anything other than a political capacity was about 2 decades ago). If Netanyahu wanted a war, he would have the public’s support for it months ago (in fact, the public very much supports a large scale conflict in order to stop Hezbollah targeting Israeli cities). His hand is being forced by other parties in the coalition. The obvious “culprit” are the far-right parties, but I personally think the main catalyst are the ultra-orthodox parties. This gets a bit complicated, but bear with me: The ultra-orthodox parties need to pass a law that’ll exempt their constituents from military service (long story short - they were exempt for years but due to court rulings, need a new law to keep that privilege). Galant (the minister of defense) is the one stopping the law from passing. Netanyahu was about to replace him and sell it to the public as Galant being the one who was against a war against Hezbollah. Actually, I’ll go as far as saying Israel being forced to activate the bombs prematurely, thus stopping Galant from being fired, makes  a war a bit less likely (Though obviously other factors have also been put in play, so the government can’t just do a U turn).

During the last month there were not 1, not 10, not 100 but 807 alerts in Israel for missile attacks. Some of them weren’t fired by Hezbollah, and some might have been the same alert in different areas, but that’s still about 7 missile PER DAY even if we assume only 1 in 4 alerts was due to an attack by Hezbollah (side note: during the entire war, about 2,000 missile were launched from Lebanon to Israel, that’s an average of about 6 per day). In addition to this, there were 452 aircraft intrusion alerts. Most of these attacks are against civilian targets.

Right now, there are about 79 thousand people (around 0.8% of total population) who are still evicted for nearly a year from northern Israel.

And just in case it needs to be said - the first attack was made by Hezbollah (on Oct. 8th) and without any provocation by Israel.

Not only is this a situation no sovereign country can stand, but it’s also a violation of the Lebanon-approved UN Security Council’s resolution 1701, that was the basis for ending the 2006 Lebanon War. Hell, just having missiles in the area is by itself a violation of the resolution.

Regarding political reasoning - A war in Lebanon is actually bad for Netanyahu. His interest is a slow-burning war so he can prolong the current situation as much as possible (once the war is over, the pubic will demand an election). In fact, that’s probably the main reason you had “a missile here and a bomb there” and not an actual war.

No no, they meant first of many unfulfilled promises.

Ohhh, I think I get it.

Purple is what you get when you force the visible light spectrum into a wheel, so there’ll be something that “connects” blue with red?

If so, is the reason we perceive green as a different color than purple is because we have receptors for that specific wavelength, otherwise both colors would affect our red and blue color receptors similarly?

So what would be the color created by a wavelength of 550nm?

I think we’re on two different wavelengths.

Put stuff in: Stand next to closed car with no free hands, could use automatically opening doors.

Take stuff out: Open car. Pick up stuff out of the car. Stand next to open car with no free hands, could use automatically closing doors.

Because taking stuff out is like putting stuff in, only in the reverse order.

First, Ask the colleague why she feels her way is better.

If she says something like “it just is”, reply that while you’re open to other ways to do things, you have a way that currently works for you, and would need a reason to switch your workflows.

If she gives an actual answer, consider it. Maybe it is better than what you’re use to. maybe it’s possible to incorporate both ways to have the best of both worlds. Assuming you still think you way is better, say something along the lines of (I’m basing this on something I said to a co-worker in order not to be too abstract): “I get that doing it your way [is simpler and requires less troubleshooting], but it can also [give wrong results if a thing changes and we forget to correct for it]. My way [corrects for it automatically]. For me, eliminating the risk of [forgetting to manually correct] is worth the need to [do some troubleshooting]. Maybe that’s because you have [better memory] and I’m better at [technical stuff], so we each have a way that works for us, but will not work for the other. I appreciate that you took the time and explained your way of thinking, and I hope you understand why my way is better for me”.

After that, if she still insists, tell her you clearly aren’t able to come to an agreement among yourselves, so maybe it’s better you both talk to the charge nurse if manager or whatever.

I think that depends on the groups that exist near you.

I know someone who was in a similar situation (divorced around 50), and she found a local hiking group of divorced people who wanted exactly what you’re looking for. So maybe ask on a local group on some social networks?

Hiking specifically is great because it’s an activity that both kinda forces people to talk, and also supplies a default topic for conversation (It’s also free, healthy and doesn’t require special skills). If you’re not into hiking, maybe a book club? Volunteering groups, like other people suggested, also fits that bill. Point is, don’t just look for [an activity] with people your age, think about how much that activity is conductive for making friends. Something with 10% people your age, but that encourages talking with each other, might be better than something with 90% people your age where the group listens to a teacher together and then everybody does their own thing separately.

Also, It might actually get easier to find new people in a few years. Some people wait for their kids to grow up/move out before divorcing, which creates a spike of single people at that age.

What do you mean by “comedy impersonation” - parody, or just copying a comedian?

If I were to set up a music show with a Madonna impersonator and slightly changed Madonna songs (or songs in her style), I’ll get my pants sued off.

If Al Yankovic does a parody of a Madonna song, he’s in the clear (He does ask for permission, but that’s a courtesy and isn’t legally mandatory).

The legal term is “transformative use”. Parody, like where SNL has Alec Baldwin impersonating Trump, is a recognized type of transformative use. Baldwin doesn’t straight up impersonate Trump, he does so in a comedic fashion (The impersonation itself is funny, regardless of how funny Trump is). The same logic applied when parodying or impersonating a comedian.

I’m going to offer some practical advice that might help, but first there are also a few things I’d like to point out.

First of all, from reading your question and some replies in the thread - Is there any chance you might be neurodivergent (I think that’s the “proper” term. I mean what’s been known as low end autism or asperger)?  Neurodivergent people have trouble understanding social cues/norms,and might have issues understanding why people act/react the way they do.

This is meant as a general observation that might be beneficial to understand the gap between you and other people, not as a judgment or way to imply there’s something wrong with you.

The second thing - the division between introverts and extroverts is kinda false. In reality, it’s like height - there are tall and short people, but most people are of generally average height. Like height, most people are towards the middle. You are probably on the end of the bell curve of extrovert-introvert. That’s something you need to understand. This also doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you, but right now it looks like you’re acting like a 2.2 meter tall person who thinks everyone below 2 meters is short. Yes, society is built for people who are of mostly average “sociality”. Just like it’s built for people of mostly average height, and tall people might have issues finding clothes or having enough leg room in their car.

Most people expect some level of sociality with their co-workers. They aren’t necessary attention seekers or “extroverts”. That’s just the way their brains are wired. When they don’t get that social interaction, they will look for an explanation - Did they say something to offend you? Are you busy? In a bad mood? A standoffish person? Maybe you’re just shy, and they should initiate more interaction to make you more comfortable?

So, what you want to do is to answer those unasked questions in terms they can understand and without offending them. Imagine you’ve accidentally bumped into someone while walking. You’ll say something like “Oh, I’m so sorry for bumping into you, I was in a hurry. Are you alright? OK, sorry, again, have to run”.

If someone asks “How was your weekend?”, give a bland answer like “Oh, it was good/fine/ok”, then say “Sorry, I don’t mean to sound rude, but there’s a ton of stuff I need to get done” Say this in a tone like you’re apologizing for accidentally bumping into them. Then say “But look, if you’d like some help/advice/to tell me something about that [work related thing we have], I’d be happy to”. For most people, this conveys the message that (a) you’re trying to focus on work, (b) you really don’t mean to offend them and © you’d be happy to talk to them about work related stuff. Some people might ask you again next week. Give the same answer. Most of them will figure out you’re just always busy working and stop bothering you.

Two more things:

1. Do try and offer help in work related things once in a while - “Hey, I heard [work thing] is giving you trouble. I’ve actually had the same issue and would be happy to help”. This conveys you’re approachable on work-related things, and will make people more inclined to help you when needed.

2. Walk fast and with a purpose. This serves a dual objective - to better convey that you’re always busy, and minimize interactions. The only question you’ll get is “why are you walking so fast?” or whatever. This can be handled by saying something casual like “you call this fast?”, “ah, you know how it is…” etc. without slowing down more than necessary.

Andromeda really picks up in season 2. Not a amazing, but it’s very good.