dlubarov

Compared to traditional concrete, isn't hempcrete much weaker and less rigid? It's an interesting material for sure, but I thought it was basically considered non-structural filler.

Autoclaved aerated concrete is worth a mention as well - it's also a decent insulator and somewhat environmentally friendly, while additionally being, light, easy to cut, and somewhat usable as a structural element.

My point is essentially that there are no new problems here, just the usual problems that we already have regulatory frameworks to address. Sometimes those existing frameworks are imperfect, e.g. in some states, power companies can't charge large customers for many of the infrastructure upgrades needed to serve them.

There's no novel problem here that any particular industry would need to find novel solutions for. Just some states ought to tweak their rules about the costs of distribution infrastructure upgrades.

The rules shouldn't be specific to datacenters though; mechanics like Pennsylvania's "but-for" cost allocation make sense globally. If a new smelting plant requires upgrades to a substation, which wouldn't otherwise be necessary, the smelting plant should be charged accordingly.

Yeah - there seem to be a lot of pretenses which don't actually justify banning a particular industry.

If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies, and tweaking the rules about billing for infrastructure upgrades.

It's strange how we're suddenly talking about things like illegal concrete dumping, as if concrete foundations were somehow specific to datacenters, and not 99% of buildings built in the past century.

What do you mean? Proving things about sensitive data without revealing it is what ZKPs are for. If you mean that the tech isn't mature enough to be trusted yet, I think there's some truth to that, but it depends on what software we're talking about specifically. Zcash has been in production for almost 10 years now.

Right. Is your view that nothing can be done about the extortion? I think there are lots of ways other states could make it risky for ships to pay Iran; the US was at least attempting that before the MoU.

The usual view of the international community is that everyone is bound by customary international law. This would remain the case even if the US or others violated it; the hypocrisy of other states wouldn't release any state from its obligations.

One can object to this notion of customary international law, but if we're going to say that laws of the sea don't matter here, then we must also give up the legal notion that the strait is Iran's (and Oman's) territorial waters. There's no consistent legal framework under which the strait is Iran's territorial waters, but not an international waterway.

There's the practical reality that Iran can extort ships anyway, even with no legal pretense. But then it's essentially just piracy, and anyone with a few boats or mines can do that, unless they're stopped by force.

Any Jew certainly has cultural ties to Palestine, if we're talking about the region rather than the modern national identity with the same name.

What do you mean by “Palestinian”? They’re Palestinian by the classic definition of “those who live in the region of Palestine”.

If you mean citizens of the State of Palestine, that’s a political matter, and zero Jews have that citizenship.

If you mean something along the lines of “unbroken lineage of ancestors who never left Palestine", that would also exclude many people who we all consider Palestinian, such as Arafat himself who was born in Cairo.

rare exceptions of Mizrahis

It's not rare at all, the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi.

A lot of the stricter codes have very real safety benefits though - modern electrical is much safer, fire sprinklers add significant cost but really do help contain fires, etc.

(Not that it's all good, e.g. I don't like Washington's WAC 51-11R which just seems way overcomplicated.)

Judaism is in fact, just a religion

Never heard of non-religious Jews or Jewish atheism before?

Don't start wars

US/Israel may have opened the current front, but the Iranian regime has been waging proxy warfare since the early 80s. They also attempted to assassinate our president. It's misleading to paint US/Israel as the aggressors for occasionally responding to years of indirect or unsuccessful attacks.

To look at it another way: if US/Israel hadn't responded directly, but instead paid Erdogan a large bribe to strike a list of coordinates in Iran, while also supplying the missiles and the training, would that get around your concern? Probably not.

They just want to raise families [...]

Most ordinary Iranians, sure; certainly not the Islamic regime. It was their decision to train, fund and supply weapons to terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ and the Houthis since the early 80s.

this with an American flag and its hull number in open display

Soldiers have uniforms with distinguishing colors/marks in open display, yet millions of soldiers have died by friendly fire. Lots of friendly planes have been shot down too despite IFF. No system for identifying friendly (or neutral) assets is foolproof.

the U.S. makes excuses for Israel's attack on its own USS Liberty in 1967.

It's strange how this 59-year-old incident keeps getting brought up. Friendly fire happens all the time, and Israel apologized and paid reparations ages ago.

You said "the evidence is there" about Israeli rape dogs, not some other allegation. An incident that has nothing to with rape isn't evidence, nor is an incident that happened in an entirely different country.

The first link is about a dog attack, but absolutely nothing about dogs being "trained to rape". The second link is nothing specific, just an entire subreddit devoted to anti-Israel propaganda.

So where is this evidence that you say exists?

Even the NYT recently published an article about how the israelies use dogs to rape Palestinians.

They published allegations from a questionable source with no evidence. I think most people would agree that "Israel trains dogs to rape on command" is rather absurd and implausible on its face.

terror attacks on civilian targets

This is a very weird way to frame a highly targeted attack against Hezbollah, which achieved a far better civilian casualty ratio than what's possible with conventional warfare.

Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon [...] which Israeli historian Ilan Pappé said was unprovoked

"Unprovoked" is wildly inaccurate, and not even the most anti-Israel historians like Pappé claim that. The provocation was very clear: the PLO paramilitary bombarding Israeli towns from southern Lebanon.

If Mexican cartels started bombarding San Diego, would anyone say that a US response was "unprovoked"?

Why is it that when someone points out anti-Israel disinformation, the topic suddenly changes to some other anti-Israel talking point? If Israel and its supporters are super evil, shouldn’t its critics be able to pick a point (such as the headline claim here) and defend it as truthful, rather than repeatedly shifting as we see here?

If Israel "smears itself" by being super evil, then why do we constantly see its critics resorting to disinformation? Shouldn't there be plenty to criticize while sticking to the facts?

TRNN is another outlet with an explicit anti-Zionist stance, and they seem to be just summarizing this Jewish Insider article [1] while adding some anti-Israel spin.

Considering the extra details in the Jewish Insider article, what he said was basically "if someone rejects the Jewish peoples' right to self-determination and rejects Israel's existence, then we have a fundamental difference in values, and they might decide that working here isn't a good fit".

That's pretty far from the MEE's dishonest summary of "support Israel or resign", or TRNN's dishonest summary of "demands allegiance to Israel". One can criticize a government without rejecting the country's very existence. Israelis themselves do it all the time.

[1] https://jewishinsider.com/2026/04/politicos-owner-axel-sprin...

The headline seems pretty dishonest. It seems like what he actually said was along the lines of "if someone isn't aligned with our values, they might decide that working here isn't a good fit."

There's no transcript though, mostly paraphrasing from an outlet whose almost sole focus is smearing Israel, so it's hard to know what was actually said.

It's not like it's designed to be discriminatory. In practice it's Jews that are most affected (if they don't conform to strict Orthodox rules), so if anything it's discriminatory against Jews, which wouldn't make much sense.

For a much more serious example of lack of religious freedom, we could look to Palestinian law, which only permits Islamic or Christian marriages. Not to mention that selling land to a Jew is high treason.

They can just get married abroad. There are even online ceremonies now.

A decent number of Israeli Jews have to do that as well, since Israel recognizes Jewish marriages only under orthodox rabbis. Some Israeli Jews are not even considered Jews under strict orthodox rules.

You're listing a lot of standard anti-Israel talking points which aren't relevant to the thread. Setting aside all the tangents and returning to the topic at hand -

if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say

You're not making an argument here. Again, do you think the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War, considering the 1:100 or so ratio there? How about when NATO bombed Yugoslavia, with an "infinitely bad" casualty ratio of 1:0? Does that make NATO infinitely evil?

Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this.

The principle of proportionality has nothing to do with how many of their own civilians the military in question has lost.

the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison

What's unfair about it? In both cases, one side suffered less civilian harm because there wasn't much fighting in its own territory.

I think the point stands that "Israel must be bad because it only lost 2 civilians" makes as little sense as "the Nazis must be good because they lost a lot more civilians than Western allies".

If a framework for trying to judge morality penalizes states for effectively protecting their own civilian population, then it's a very bad framework.

What is the alternative that Israelis could support instead? Just ignore Hezbollah's attacks? Give up on returning to their homes and schools in northern Israel?