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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • mkwt@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldLife goals
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    1 month ago

    This response is based on the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea.

    If Israel is conducting a lawful blockade, then they can intercept neutrals who have expressed intent to run the blockade. It doesn’t matter whether the events happen in Israel’s territorial waters, international waters, or the territorial waters of Israel’s enemy.

    A blockade is an act of war, and war doesn’t respect territories, and it’s not always respectful to neutrals.

    Now, there is a decent argument that this particular blockade is unlawful for a different reason: it is a collective punishment of Gazan civilians. Collective punishment of civilian populations as a whole was made illegal after WWII.

    Secondly, the blockade is unlawful if its only purpose is to starve the enemy population of food (102). Israel must be getting some proportionate military advantage out of this blockade besides the starvation for it to be lawful.

    And finally, regardless of whether the blockade is legal, Israel has to let the humanitarian supplies pass through (103-104). And I’m not sure they did that. They will say that they let these things through on the (heavily regulated) land route, but the book here doesn’t say that land route is a substitute. Also, they are not using an impartial Protective Power to distribute the aid. This is why they offered to reroute the flotilla’s supplies on to the land channel.

    Note: the rule is they have to let the supplies through, not the people or vessels. If they’re running a legitimate blockade, they can capture neutral vessels that are running it, and they can capture the neutrals on board and subject them to legal process, or maybe even intern them for the duration of conflict





  • If you’re getting into private jets, you should also know that brands have reputations even there.

    Gulfstream is a luxury brand within the private jet world. You can easily get a comparable product from Bombardier or Cessna Textron that performs equivalently, but only pay half as much operating costs as Gulfstream. Like Gucci, you pay a lot of money just for the Gulfstream name.

    At the low end of the market, Honda makes a small jet. (This is in the Very Light Jet category which bumps up against the turboprop market).

    At the very high end of the market you get into Boeing Business Jets, and the Airbus equivalent. These are converting airliners to your exact interior design specifications. Airliners are like another order of magnitude higher cost to operate.


  • There’s a class of orbits called “polar orbits” that are sideways and perpendicular to the spin of the earth. These orbits are useful for satellites whose main job is taking pictures of earth, because they will cover nearly all of the earth’s territory over time. You get into a polar orbit by launching to the north outer south.

    Aside from that, nearly all launches go towards the spin of the earth, because it’s a free boost. The fancy rocketry word for this is “prograde”.

    The sun appears to traverse from east to west in the sky. This means that the earth is moving the opposite way: west to east. So if you want to take advantage of the free boost, the rocket needs to take off in an easterly direction.

    The amount of spin you get is greatest if you launch from the tropics near the equator, and it falls off at greater north or south latitudes. In theory, if you set up a launch pad at the north pole, the spin boost would be zero in all directions, because you’re just rotating in place. At the equator, the free boost is around 1000 mph or 1600 km/hr.

    So the ideal launch site is as close to the equator as possible, and it has low population off to its east, in case the rocket blows up or crashes. The United States has two sites that meet these criteria: one in Florida and one in extreme south Texas. Both of these face an ocean to the east. Europe launches Ariane rockets from French Guiana in South America. Russia uses Kazakhstan, which is on the southern ends of the old Soviet Union.