A few other circumstantial things lightly hint at the twins not being typically American:
1. Obliviousness to local laws and oversight (and the combination of severity of punishment + likelihood of getting caught); most Americans of their intelligence would be aware, and would not engage in the sort of hijinks they did.
2. Working with sibling (anecdotal, but seems slightly more common among immigrant families than locals, which would make sense since, on average, immigrants have fewer local connections than locals so the likelihood of working with siblings increases)
3. Loyalty to family (evidenced through the brazenness in the way they helped each other in criminal acts without a second thought). Americans, on average, are more individualist and hesitate more when asked by family to do something criminal
4. A lot of immigrants eventually adopt anglicised names, which neither of these two did
If a detective looked at these facts, they'd keep an open mind as there's nothing definitive above, but it would be equally ignorant to ignore the circumstantial evidence.
Having said all this, do we care where they're from? (unless it's a potential case of foreign interference or theft from an untouchable overseas company, which doesn't seem to be the case here)
> "most Americans of their intelligence would be aware"
that would still leave up to 49% Americans not being aware. so how did you conclude that they were not Americans? Also, how did you measure their intelligence?
> "slightly more common among immigrant families than locals"
even if true, how did you conclude that these were not Americans?
> "Americans, on average, are more individualist and hesitate more when asked by family to do something criminal"
even if on average Americans are more so, how did you conclude that these were not Americans?
> "A lot of immigrants eventually adopt anglicised names"
from your sentence it seems a lot of them don't. so how did you conclude that these were not Americans?
It would be a disaster for immigrants in your area if you were ever hired into some kind of investigative/law enforcement role.
> that would still leave up to 49% .... how did you conclude?
This fundamentally misunderstands how predictive models work. A parameter is a potentially useful predictor if it's better than excluding it 50.000001% of the time (high frequency trading is good evidence of this).
> conclude
Conclusions? Absolutely not. Higher statistical probability? Yes. Based on evidence. To state your point, which is bleeding obvious, of course you cannot know how recently someone or their family came to America based only on their behaviour with regard to the law. But their behaviour with regard to the law absolutely can be a useful predictor.
(in fact, it's precisely this rationale that justifies in some cases giving foreigners lighter sentences where 'their culture' allowed for xyz but the local jurisdiction doesn't - roadrules in the UK is a pretty good example: local truck drivers get the full penalty; those from continental Europe often do not, since road rules are less likely to be known by them)
Alternate example: ask a Western drug smuggler busted in Indonesia or Vietnam how long they expected their jail sentence to be if caught (spoiler - it's a trick question: they'll say 3-5 years and instead are met with the death penalty; whereas most locals are well aware of this) - ignorance to local laws and customs does correlate with how long someone (or their family) has lived in the area, if at all.
I take it you're not in HR at the CIA or FBI, which vet applicants' families for a reason. i.e. how long ago applicants and/or their families came to the US does help predict their loyalties... It might not be a strong nor fair predictor, but it's not zero either.
>> what's the claim, really? That western powers intentionally struck a school and killed these kids
Israel or US or both struck a school and killed these kids. Nobody knows whether it was intentional or not. And this is not the first time Israel bombed schools or hospitals.
nzrf wrote: "Do you really believe killing 175 children[0] will bring peace and prosperity to the Iranian people?"
The implication is that someone thought that it would. I am saying nobody in the US or Israel thought bombing a children's school would bring peace to the iranian people. In fact, both the USAF and IAF deny they hit a school. There is no evidence the IRGC has put forward to support its claim. Without such evidence, it doesn't make sense to believe it.
Also, you talk about mental gymnastics while defending IRGC propaganda and spewing nonsense like "Israel bombed hospitals." If you're so confident that Israel has bombed hospital buildings, can you tell me which they bombed, when they did this, and any OSINT details like the munition used?
You're just linking me to lists from highly unreliable sources. I'm a simpleton, make a claim like this: "I think Israel bombed this hospital building on this date using this ordinance. Here's the evidence."
You are being bigoted (“evil, evil people”) and if you believe what you say you can just answer my question directly. You won’t because it hasn’t happened.
Actually a simple statement you can actually support would: Israel bombed this hospital building on this date using this munition. You can’t meet that simple standard because it never happened.
This is great. Especially for people with disabilities that prevents them driving a car. Hopefully, coverage area will increase exponentially over time..
Self-driving jitneys will be able to extend public transit into the cul-de-sac subdivisions that are impervious to useful bus service. Let little 8 seat shuttles bring people out to the main line for trains or full-size busses to carry away. It is terribly inefficient to run a 50 person bus with 3 people in it, one of whom is a paid driver. See https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/autonomous-driverless...
Or try this - Waymo giving a discount for pickups at station. I used to use the Toronto subway this way - take the subway as close as I could get, and then take a taxi the last couple of kilometres. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/clean-rides-clear-benefits-wa...
Strongly agree. The future is what we used to call "share autos" in India. It's a small vehicle that can transport some 6-8 people. Currently these aren't feasible for the public because driver operational cost dominates, but once driver operational cost is near zero, we can bring much more public transit online. One of these vehicles is 4x-8x as dense as a car, and with America's relative lack of density, it's the only realistic way to have widespread public transit.
Particularly useful with dynamic dispatch and dynamic routing is that the vehicle's stopping can be much more infrequent, leading to lower total trip time and greater frequency. San Francisco is very dense but is also very old, so large 40-60 person busses stop every block forcing low throughput high latency rides. As a consequence, I prefer an e-bike over a bus everywhere in SF.
Taxi services make going carless more feasible, this isn't a net negative to public transit, rather a positive: you mostly use transit for your daily routine, and use a taxi/ride share/autonomous car for those edge cases where transit or biking makes little sense.
Except that isn't what really happens. We've been over this with uber rollout. It legitimately captures ridership from transit rather than supplementing it.
It works that way in Asia. You have taxis but really bad traffic jams drive you to subways during rush hour. On the weekend you might have a few taxi trips for shopping and going out. I can’t really comment on uber, but in Seattle they are too expensive to be considered in competition with transit, although personal safety issues on Seattle buses makes the value proposition weird.
A few autonomous taxis in each of the 1000 most sparsely populated counties would dramatically improve the quality of life for those people, particularly for the elderly. No bus line in the world can do that - not in places like Idaho or Western Kansas. I think they should be government funded as soon as it's feasible.
If the goal of the pardon was to handle a corrupt Judicial branch, then a better answer would have been for the Executive branch to nominate someone for a pardon to the Legislative and require a 2/3 majority of the Legislative to approve.
But something like that would fly in the face of the "Unitary Executive" insanity and would (I suspect) require a constitutional amendment, which is no longer remotely feasible.
A first comment said "without saying why". The second comment just says that this is blatantly not true, and that the rationale presented has been since confirmed as a very accurate prediction.
On Israel/Palestine issue, it was not a "tiny misstep". I will remember Joe Biden as "Genocide Joe" for the rest of my life. My perception (naively) of both parties has changed, but I don't trust Democrats anymore because of this issue. They are all the same..
I just now remember Joe Biden openly taking bribes in the office, on camera. I remember his "Joe for Life" jokes as he paraded "Joe Biden 2028" hats. I remember his attempted coup on January 6th. I remember him deploying the military on domestic soil against US citizens and proclaiming random tariffs across our allied countries that change on a weekly basis.
I remember him being found civily liable for the rape of a woman. And referred to in multiple court documents on the rape of a 13 year old girl. And in the flight records and friend circle of a child sex trafficker. And that he tried to cover that sex trafficking ring up.
I remember him denying Fox news access to the White House or pentagon. And his administration's overt threats to take news stations off the air or deny them business mergers for not covering him in positive light.
And I definitely and absolutely remember him publishing an AI video on Twitter of a purged, captured Palestine turned into a gaudy gold resort for rich Americans.
How in the world is that whataboutism? You said they were they same, this is a direct retort by enumerating a mere fraction of the enormous list of behaviors enacted by an actual fascist takeover of the US government.
Biden did not handle the Palestine situation appropriately, but the utter audacity to claim the solution is the death of tens of millions of people through the demolition of aid and trade and the total regression of all climate change mitigation and global stability policy by aiding the installment of an outright, self-stated dictator...
I am so utterly tired of this rhetoric. It's like looking at Hitler or Stalin and saying "well... His opponent wasn't Christened by God himself."
Maybe, just maybe, we should aim for "basic decency and operating in the same objective reality to keep the basic tenants of peaceful society operating" before "go to war with a nuclear power over their religious jihad."
Not sure what you are referring to in your last sentence.
Democrats enabled genocide just like Republicans are doing the same now. I don't like or endorse current government and Trump but saying that we should support democrats because they are "decent" and talk in a politically correct way is wrong as well.
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