[HN Gopher] Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
___________________________________________________________________
Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
Author : vanusa
Score : 974 points
Date : 2021-05-17 18:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| itsbits wrote:
| It can be conspiracy or may be not. For example Indian cities
| doesn't have clear images as US cities. Sometime back, I tried
| finding reason for same. Apparently, Google not just use
| satellite images. It gets aerial images from planes as well.
| Obviously, Google didn't pay for aerial images of Indian cities.
| This can be a reason for Israel as well.
| 2rsf wrote:
| I don't think it's a conspiracy- Israel admit that it requested
| Google to lower image resolution. The question is the reason
| behind it
| smashah wrote:
| The plight and occupation of Gaza isn't a technical curiosity.
| The answer is that there's a campaign of genocide and
| dehumanisation going on that bleeds into all aspects of life,
| that's why.
| egrljerg wrote:
| I find the comments here to be very anti-semitic.
|
| Can we please leave the politics off HN?
| KryptoKlown wrote:
| If you were to look up my address (I wish I could post publicly
| for verification purposes but for security I cannot) it doesn't
| display it. It comes up with "address does not exist" and skips
| from my one neighbor's house to the next completely skipping over
| our house.
| forgithubs wrote:
| On the same note, why is Azeria labs offices blurred on Google
| Maps ? Is it a special feature ? Or just that you need to know
| people at Google ?
| haecceity wrote:
| Why do re-education camps have soccer fields? What kind of weird
| soccer related torture are they performing??
| Permit wrote:
| A small discussion from yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27178589
| fjerljkl wrote:
| I know the twitter lynch mob doesn't understand many things but
| just to reiterate - homosexuality is a crime in Palestine. They
| will kill you for it. You still want to support them?
| bawolff wrote:
| Im kind of confused - they're saying its a problem for reporters
| and people trying to investigate, but also that other providers
| provide high resolution imagery.
|
| I feel like both those things can't be true. How can it be a
| problem if you can just get the needed images from non usa
| companies?
| yomansat wrote:
| They're available but not always free.
| whymauri wrote:
| Probably price as a barrier. Or the background knowledge to
| know which providers are reliable, etc. You could imagine the
| pricing being inaccessible to certain markets (where currency
| is really weak, say Venezuela), whereas Google Maps is free for
| almost all uses.
| willcipriano wrote:
| You expect reporters to go deeper than the first page on
| Google?
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Up-to-date high resolution imagery is quite expensive. Most of
| Google maps imagery is generated from an older database of
| images. Businesses like Maxar (formerly Digital Globe) that
| provide Earth imagery will sell a database of old out-of-date
| imagery for much cheaper. But more recent imagery is much more
| expensive because it is much more valuable. These companies
| will often provide free images that are up to date to help with
| disaster and recovery efforts but that doesn't mean it has been
| put in to Google maps yet, a lot of it just still an old
| database of imagery.
|
| In Summary:
|
| - Old out-of-date imagery: $
|
| - Newer up-to-date imagery that has been captured: $$$
|
| - Tasking a spacecraft to request image of a specific area:
| $$$$
| ideashower wrote:
| random question, but where would one acquire old out of date
| imagery of this part of the world?
|
| For example, I know through Google Earth's timelapse feature
| that Gaza has been consistently scanned by satellites over
| the last 3 or so decades. But the images on Google Earth's
| timelapse feature are of very very low quality. But viewing
| the timelapse is evidence enough that this information is out
| there.
| boringg wrote:
| Like all data -- new and high def data costs a lot more than
| something a couple years old. Data ages out.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| There are a lot of tools built for Google Maps/Earth, and it is
| far more accessible. For a reporter/investigator with an
| unlimited budget, sure, but for most of the real world, if it
| isn't in Google maps it is essentially out of reach.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| This link title is extremely misleading to the point of being
| disingenuous and provocative. The title of the linked article is
| "Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps?"...
| because the entire Israel / Gaza / West Bank region is blurred in
| the exact same way. There is no preferential blurring of
| Palestinian areas. The clear answer is to prevent actors on _both
| sides_ from using Google's satellite imagery to plan attacks
| against one another. But please continue the breathless hot
| takes.
| jussij wrote:
| Israel can get all the detailed imagery it needs by just
| launching a reconnaissance aircraft or drone.
|
| So on that basis I would say it only stops the Palestinians
| from getting imagery of the area.
|
| Now considering the fact Palestine only has rockets and not
| missiles, I doubt that imagery is of much value to them.
|
| Call me cynical, but I suspect the more important reason to
| keep these images blurred might be to stop the rest of the
| world from seeing what is going on.
| MyKneeGrows wrote:
| It's why they target news agencies such as AP. Now you can't
| get pictures on the ground. So we all have to rely on is low
| resolution maps to judge damage. "Security measures", or so
| they say.
|
| If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck....
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I'm not seeing any shortage of pictures from the ground. I
| mean, I agree that targeting news agencies would be a step
| you would take if you wanted to prevent images from the
| ground but you would have to be _far_ more sweeping in your
| approach. If the goal is to prevent news images from making
| their way out of Palestine this may be the most abject
| policy failure the world has ever witnessed.
| jussij wrote:
| The facts remain; Israel did bomb the offices of Al
| Jazeera and The Associated Press.
|
| That action looks a lot like Israel targeting news
| agencies and the two news agencies involved have both
| raised their concerns about that unprecedented action by
| Israel.
| ridiculous_lol wrote:
| More like they bombed a building which has offices of Al
| Jazeera and the AP among other things.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > That action looks a lot like Israel targeting news
| agencies and the two news agencies involved have both
| raised their concerns about that unprecedented action by
| Israel.
|
| They _might_ be targeting those news agencies, but not
| for the purpose of suppressing images on the ground,
| which is what we were talking about. It 's just
| implausible given the totality of evidence that that is
| the main concern. You can't just look at that one action
| to draw a conclusion when there is a massive amount of
| other contravening evidence.
| mslm wrote:
| There is such a thing as being too haughty and thinking,
| "why not?". Given the impunity with which they're
| currently carrying out their massacres, it wouldn't have
| seemed to them that blowing up a media building would be
| problematic. Now they're getting railed even by people
| who would normally not care otherwise.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > you would have to be far more sweeping in your approach
|
| Would you or could it be seen as deterrence?
|
| > this may be the most abject policy failure the world
| has ever witnesse
|
| I mean there are a lot of opeds in Hebrew (some lamenting
| this supposed failure) and Arabic press right now saying
| exactly that, so I wouldn't rule it out entirely.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > Would you or could it be seen as deterrence?
|
| Given we are still seeing plenty of images out of
| Palestine and Gaza, even from news orgs, the current
| approach is plainly and objectively insufficient to the
| purported goal.
| loceng wrote:
| And plausible deniability only goes so far - shallow
| thought, propaganda only goes so far until it meets
| adequate critical thinking; reminds me of Jordan Peterson
| in his last book Beyond Order - it's the intelligent
| ideologue that's the most dangerous.
| Zhenya wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Because no one there has a smart phone. Because they
| actually killed the journalist. /s
|
| Of the course the obvious explanation is the correct one,
| the building housed military targets (Hamas operations etc)
| and it was destroyed.
| runarberg wrote:
| Don't discount a conspiracy just because the conspirators
| are incompetent. In fact, the opposite is usually true.
| Your average conspiracy usually has multiple layers of
| incompetents. If a conspiracy looks flawless, it is
| usually because there is no conspiracy.
|
| Targetting a news organization might be a multi-purpose
| action, including to limit the amount of photos from the
| area. The fact that this action has resulted in even
| worse optics then the photos would have provided, and the
| fact that people on the ground are still a source of
| visual evidence for the destruction does not mean that
| there is no conspiracy, just that they are bad at it.
|
| Given the absence of evidence of any Hamas activity in
| that tower, and given the clear motive improve the optics
| of IDF, I would say that both explanations hold at least
| the same ground.
| M277 wrote:
| I don't understand. AP claims to have been using the
| building for _years_ , and they didn't know that there
| were Hamas operations with them?
|
| Not only that, but what is your proof to call it the
| correct explanation?
| gokhan wrote:
| IDF couldn't provide any evidence of Hamas' existence in
| that building, it was all over the media yesterday.
|
| https://twitter.com/haaretzcom/status/1394287848950427649
| LeoNatan25 wrote:
| IDF provided the evidence to US intelligence, and
| apparently that hasn't made its way to the US state
| department yet.
| sschueller wrote:
| That is absolutely ridiculous. The US state department is
| on top of things. There is no way they do not have this
| information if it exists.
| LeoNatan25 wrote:
| More info was sent:
| https://www.ynetnews.com/article/SJA7sEZYd
|
| "Blinken: U.S. received more info on Gaza tower bombing
|
| American top diplomat says he cannot comment on further
| information received through intelligence channels on the
| destruction of the building that housed Associated Press,
| Al Jazeera offices"
| cnlevy wrote:
| The postman was late. It doesn't mean there's no evidence
|
| https://twitter.com/haaretzcom/status/1394631387265777666
| guerrilla wrote:
| I'm thinking as democracies we should not rely on secret
| evidence. I'll buy it when it's public, until then the
| burden of proof remains on them. It's okay not to kmow.
| mslm wrote:
| There needs to be an independent investigation, as top AP
| people have said. The world won't at this point believe
| any "evidence" because the criminal claims they have it.
| yuvalr1 wrote:
| I wouldn't say IDF couldn't provide. Classified evidence
| takes time to compile when being passed to foreign
| countries. If this was truly a Hamas operations office,
| it changes the whole picture.
| tayo42 wrote:
| If that was the case why stop now? And why did they let parts
| unknown film in Palestine in 2013. The episode wasn't very
| pro Israel either. This a little to conspiracy theory for me.
| [deleted]
| betterunix2 wrote:
| I have learned to demand a very high standard of evidence for
| conspiracy theories, so...let's see the evidence that there
| is some conspiracy between Google and Israel to hide what is
| happening there. For that matter, I am not even sure what you
| think Israel is hiding -- Netanyahu is not at all shy about
| settlements, the IDF calls people up to tell them when a bomb
| is going to be dropped on their building, and there are
| reporters and international observers all over the Israel and
| the Palestinian territories.
| [deleted]
| vanusa wrote:
| _I have learned to demand a very high standard of evidence
| for conspiracy theories,_
|
| Not a conspiracy theory at all - but rather a very sensible
| inference based on how state actors behave in the modern
| age.
|
| _I am not even sure what you think Israel is hiding_
|
| Blurry images make it much harder to assess, and verify the
| extent of the "unintended" casualties and property damage
| the current IDF campaign is causing (the term is in quotes
| because that's the language they rather gallingly use, as
| if they expect you and I to take it face value).
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| The article makes this very clear. There is no google-
| israel conspiracy. The limits on satelite resolution were
| dictated by the US government.
| seagullz wrote:
| And the US government is dictated by a Israel-first
| policy. At least in view of the UNSC vetoes [0] and the
| weapons it supplies.
|
| [0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/43-times-us-has-
| used-veto...
| Udik wrote:
| The idea that a country might pass internal laws
| specifically to favour a foreign country is incredible,
| and gives the measure of how much the US is subservient
| to Israel's interests.
| seagullz wrote:
| Beside the bipartisan powers-that-be in the US
| government, the media landscape is obsequious and willing
| participant too; see 'peace propaganda and the promised
| land (2004)' [0]. For instance, it didn't make it to the
| Paper of Record's newsworthiness that the NSA shares, per
| the Snowden revelations, US citizen's data with Israel
| [1][2]; to their credit, though, they lightly lament at
| occasionally getting used as an accessory to the war
| machine, outside the traditional route [3].
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-2tEmqM1_E
|
| [1] https://www.haaretz.com/report-nsa-sharing-u-s-
| citizens-data... It is hard to miss how the Israeli
| newspaper Haaretz is a lot more no-nonsense in tone and
| coverage than, say, the NYT.
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-
| americans-...
|
| [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/world/middleeast/i
| srael-g...
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| We don't have any evidence.
|
| We do know that Israel has launched 1000 to 1500 missiles
| up until 10 pm pacific time.
|
| Netanyahu has been blatant over taking back "theiir" land
| lately.
|
| Netanyahu is in a very close political race.
|
| I won't say what I thinking though out of respect for the
| rules.
| hereme888 wrote:
| They launched missiles in response to the thousand
| rockets that terrorist Hamas launched against their
| civilians.
|
| Don't be posting such a biased, one-sided story.
| birksherty wrote:
| Which happened in response to waht? Don't be posting such
| a biased, one-sided story.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| In response to an aggressive police action at a Muslim
| holy site, which was in response to rock-throwing
| protesters, who were protesting various civil disputes in
| Jerusalem.
|
| Are you actually suggesting that rocket fire is justified
| because of overly aggressive policing?
| mslm wrote:
| "Civil disputes"? At this point even CNN has broadcasted
| interviews with targets of these "civil disputes" who
| make it abundantly clear that they're being ethnically
| cleansed and forced out of their homes.
| slim wrote:
| They are hiding the scale of it. Destroyed houses, trees,
| farms in Palestine. It is a map, it shows the scale
| immediately
| penagwin wrote:
| I'm not sure about the immediate part. My area only
| updates every few years on Google maps, they don't
| exactly provide real-time data (and never meant to)
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| There was a post about this last week where someone said the
| reason is to prevent the widespread confirmation of Israels
| nuclear program. Everybody knows they have nukes, but
| officially the US denies knowing.
|
| These images would provide fairly strong evidence of Israel's
| capabilities, hell Israel has spent years trying to claim
| satellite images of Iran prove they have a nuclear program.
| kesor wrote:
| here you go, all the nukes are right in here - https://www.
| google.com/maps/place/Negev+Nuclear+Research+Cen...
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| > Now considering the fact Palestine only has rockets and not
| missiles, I doubt that imagery is of much value to them.
|
| A high resolution image would be very useful to anyone who is
| planning a terror attack with suicide bombers, for example.
| rock_artist wrote:
| Just worth mentioning, street view is available and updated
| regularly within Israel main cities.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| not without controversy, apparently: https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/Google_Street_View_in_Israel#I... "There was
| much controversy surrounding bringing Street View to
| Israel. The main one was the fear that terrorists could
| use the feature to plan attacks. Palestinian militants
| have previously admitted to using Google Maps to help
| plan attacks."
| markdown wrote:
| As we've already established, since Israel can and does
| already bomb and slaughter Palestinians wholesale with the
| use of their tech, taking the ability of Palestinian
| suicide bombers to launch their own attacks is basically
| giving one side the upper hand and helping them in their
| genocide.
|
| If we can't stop Israel, we need to arm Palestine so they
| can hit back.
| throwhn331 wrote:
| "genocide"
|
| Patently false claim. About 210 Gaza civilians have been
| killed in this war, out of 2 million, despite efforts to
| minimize civilian deaths. It's definitionally _not_
| genocide.
| eloff wrote:
| Woah, you've gone pretty far off the deep end.
|
| You'd do well to remember there are two sides to any
| conflict (as my parents drilled into us whenever my
| brother and I would blame each other).
|
| In my opinion you can see Israel exercising serious
| restraint, evacuating people from a target first when
| possible, firing warning shots before the real attack.
| Hamas on the other hand is indiscriminately firing over
| 3000 rockets at Israel civilians. That's like what the
| Nazis did to London with their V2 rockets. Now there is a
| big power imbalance here, and I feel for the
| Palestinians, but they're hardly the good guys here.
| That's terrorism, plain and simple. No country would
| tolerate that.
| cutemonster wrote:
| > the Palestinians, but they're hardly the good guys
|
| Do you need to write "the Palestinians"? Sounds as if
| everyone were to blame for the rockets, but less than 1%
| of the people in Gaza, are in Hamas military wing.
|
| Would it be weird to write "Hamas" instead about those
| who fire rockets? Or "terrorists in Hamas". (but please
| don't blame everyone for what a few are doing)
|
| And in the same way, I wouldn't say that the Israelis are
| taking land from Palestinians on the west bank -- instead
| I'd write "the state and the settlers" take land. And
| that's also a small percentage of everyone, .. hmm seems
| it's somewhere between 5 and 10%, so more than 90% never
| did that
| eloff wrote:
| No. I feel for the plight of the Palestinian people. I
| don't give a rat's ass for Hamas.
|
| Don't forget Hamas is the legitimate elected government
| in Gaza, you cannot just say they're a fringe group not
| supported by the people of Gaza.
|
| Now Palestinians also encompass the West Bank where Hamas
| is not the government. But part of the reason for these
| rocket attacks is Hamas trying to demonstrate that
| they're the representatives of all Palestinians in a bid
| to rule both Gaza and the West Bank. Regardless of their
| actual chances of pulling that off, it does seem to be
| part of the calculus here.
| markdown wrote:
| > You'd do well to remember there are two sides to any
| conflict (as my parents drilled into us whenever my
| brother and I would blame each other).
|
| What if the entire world was watching while you shaved
| your brothers head? Your lies would be pointless, because
| the entire world has seen what you were doing.
|
| > In my opinion you can see Israel exercising serious
| restraint
|
| Almost 200 dead in days. If you call that restraint, I
| think it's you who's gone off the deep end. Restraint
| would be doing nothing because barely anything has been
| done to you. Or shooting 10 Palestinian freedom fighters.
| That would be restraint. Firing missiles into a populated
| city isn't restraint.
|
| > Hamas on the other hand is indiscriminately firing over
| 3000 rockets at Israel civilians.
|
| Surely you jest. Those fireworks do almost nothing. A
| single Israeli missile is more deadly than 3000 Hamas
| rockets, so you have it backwards.
|
| > Now there is a big power imbalance here, and I feel for
| the Palestinians
|
| No you don't. Quit the propaganda.
|
| > but they're hardly the good guys here. That's
| terrorism, plain and simple.
|
| How is defending yourself terrorism? They're slowly been
| driven off the map. They should be firing 3000 rockets
| every day, and the world should be sending them more so
| they can fight for their families. Next you'll tell me
| that the Jews who fought back against Hitler were
| terrorists.
| eloff wrote:
| > Almost 200 dead in days. If you call that restraint, I
| think it's you who's gone off the deep end. Restraint
| would be doing nothing because barely anything has been
| done to you. Or shooting 10 Palestinian freedom fighters.
| That would be restraint. Firing missiles into a populated
| city isn't restraint.
|
| It's totally reasonable to attack your enemy with the
| intent of crippling their capabilities of harming you.
| Standard fare in any conflict. Doing that when the enemy
| is using their own population as a human shield and only
| having 200 casualties is an achievement of sorts.
|
| > Surely you jest. Those fireworks do almost nothing. A
| single Israeli missile is more deadly than 3000 Hamas
| rockets, so you have it backwards.
|
| Thank God they only have rockets and not the military
| power of the IDF. I'm pretty sure they'd use those nukes
| if they had them. As I said there's a big power imbalance
| here. But it's not the effectiveness of the attacks that
| determine their morality.
|
| > No you don't. Quit the propaganda.
|
| I don't appreciate you calling my feelings propaganda or
| claiming to understand my state of mind better than me.
| Both ridiculous claims.
|
| > How is defending yourself terrorism?
|
| The IDF only attacked them after they fired 500 rockets
| at Israeli cities, an act of terror in every sense of the
| definition. That's not defending yourself. What the
| Israelis are doing, that is defending yourself.
|
| > Next you'll tell me that the Jews who fought back
| against Hitler were terrorists.
|
| If they were attacking civilian targets with the intent
| of causing innocent casualties - sure, that'd be
| terrorism. I'm unaware of any instances of that
| happening, but I don't claim to know everything.
| Zhenya wrote:
| "slaughter wholesale"
|
| I think we'll need a reference for that.
|
| As far as I can tell, warning civilians to evacuate
| buildings is QUITE the opposite of wholesale slaughter.
| markdown wrote:
| > "slaughter wholesale"
|
| Almost 200 dead in a few days. If you don't consider that
| slaughter than I urge you to ask yourself "WHAT THE FUCK
| IS WRONG WITH ME?"
|
| > As far as I can tell, warning civilians to evacuate
| buildings is QUITE the opposite of wholesale slaughter.
|
| Shooting missiles into densely populated areas where half
| the population is children and their deaths are
| guaranteed isn't the opposite of wholesale slaughter.
| That's guaranteed wholesale slaughter.
| stewx wrote:
| If you read the article, it clearly states that high-
| resolution images are now available and permitted by US law:
|
| > "As a result of recent changes to US regulations, the
| imagery of Israel and Gaza is being provided at 40cm
| resolution," Maxar said in a statement.
| mvzvm wrote:
| > Call me cynical, but I suspect the more important reason to
| keep these images blurred might be to stop the rest of the
| world from seeing what is going on.
|
| No, not cynical. I will call it for what it is - baseless
| conspiracy.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| I'm curious how Palestinian people live. I'd like to see
| the condition of their dwellings, infrastructure and
| resources eg water, roads, rail, ports, public spaces. I
| just want to get a feel for the place, like I can almost
| everywhere else. How can I do that?
| zwog wrote:
| Street View is available in the West Bank area, for
| example in Ramallah and Jericho
| wombatmobile wrote:
| How would Gaza compare with Ramallah and Jericho?
| oldnews193 wrote:
| Come and visit. As far as I understand, foreigners do not
| have much trouble visiting the West Bank.
| ornel wrote:
| Not much trouble slipping into Palestine for a foreigner,
| but you do get interrogated on your way out of Israel
| right at the airport and if you say you went to the
| occupied territories you may get sent to the little room
| for further questioning, search or seizure of your
| belongings, notebooks, laptop, phone, etc. You might also
| get put on a list for secondary screening or outright ban
| if you want to go back. So think it though if you want to
| go to Palestine -- it is indeed considered a theatre of
| military operations by the occupying power
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Tourism in the State of Palestine
|
| From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_the_State_of_Pal
| est...
| loceng wrote:
| It's certainly not baseless - and you provide no evidence
| that it is baseless, instead of finding the evidence
| claimed for it and then somehow proving it's not credible;
| ironic that your response is baseless.
| mvzvm wrote:
| The burden of proof is on the accuser.
| throwhn331 wrote:
| The proof burden is on the person advancing the
| conspiracy theory, not on the person asking for proof.
| Since no evidence was given, it is baseless.
| loceng wrote:
| Just because they didn't write an essay to cite evidence
| doesn't make it baseless. LUL
| mvzvm wrote:
| Please go back to reddit. This is a website for
| intellectual curiosity.
| runarberg wrote:
| Parent provided some (albeit weak) basis for the
| conspiracy. Israel trying to hide the damage it is
| inflicting is a credible motive. Cynicism is a justified
| qualifier for the claim, baseless conspiracy isn't.
| belorn wrote:
| It would surprise me a lot if there were no people inside
| both Israel and Palestinians that has the resources and
| international connections to buy high resolution imagery or
| simply direct access to satellites. Given a few millions in
| capital and a few shell companies, finding a commercial
| entity willing to lend access to a satellite for a few hours
| seems likely, unless control over satellites are much more
| militarized than I might think.
| modo_mario wrote:
| >finding a commercial entity willing to lend access to a
| satellite for a few hours
|
| The vast majority of satellites aren't made for this kind
| of mapping as far as I know. Of the ones that are most
| aren't private commercial projects. Wikipedia lists 6 such
| projects and i doubt their time is cheap enough to make it
| worthwile for Palestinian resistance. Israel is another
| matter but they'd probably just knock on the US door for
| those.
| belorn wrote:
| I think that you are right that the cost is too high
| compared to other cheaper alternatives, like
| reconnaissance aircraft on the Israel side. Keeping the
| images blurred removes the free option so military on
| each side has to spend resources on the problem. I am
| however skeptical that it fully stops anyone from getting
| access to mapping data.
|
| I am a bit surprised however that there would not be more
| satellites that is commercial operated. I keep hearing
| about old weather satellites that gone past their period
| of commercial operation in favor of newer ones, and the
| old ones still having decent cameras and other sensors to
| provide maps of buildings and structures. With about 6000
| satellites currently operating around the earth there
| should a pretty steady stream of old ones being replaced,
| and I would think many of them do get reused for new
| purposes.
| this2shallPass wrote:
| I don't know the technical distinction between rockets and
| missiles. Hamas has some guided explosives that other people
| that know more about this than I do call missiles. They used
| to only have unguided rockets - not anymore, for at least 6
| years.
|
| "The Russian-made Kornet anti-tank guided missile, often
| called ATGM as an acronym, is accurate and effective. It has
| a range of around 5.5 kilometers and has been used by Hamas
| and other terrorist groups for years. In 2015, Hezbollah
| fired several ATGMs against Israeli Humvees on the border."
|
| https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/what-do-hamas-
| an...
|
| https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/why-anti-tank-missiles-
| pos...
| saberdancer wrote:
| Rocket is unguided. Missile is guided.
|
| ATGM are missiles, but they are close range and used to
| attack vehicles (armored usually) - they are not useful for
| attacking long range or building/bases.
| guerrilla wrote:
| IDF doesn't need Google maps to plan any attacks. They have an
| arsenal of remote surveillance methods including 24/7
| monitering by both low and high altitude drones, not to mention
| frequent flyovers in upgraded F-16s.
|
| > But please continue the breathless hot takes.
|
| This part of your comment doesn't belong on HN.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| You're right, my last line was itself provocative and
| unhelpful. Unfortunately I'm unable to edit now. But my point
| is that what also doesn't belong on HN are (a) a blatantly
| editorialized clickbait title and (b) a comment section full
| of knee-jerk reactions seeming to take the title at face
| value.
|
| But to your point, indeed the IDF are not going to be
| planning their air strikes via google maps. The violent
| actors on the Palestinian side are more likely to "benefit"
| from publicly available high-resolution satellite imagery of
| Israel than vice versa. However as others have noted below,
| US law (kyl-bingaman amendment) apparently _requires_
| blurring of high-res imagery of Israel, so Israel was going
| to be blurred no matter what.
|
| Which ironically brings us back to the question, why is Gaza
| blurred _as well_? Google doesn't have to do that.
|
| My initial assumption is laziness backed by armchair
| altruism. It's easier to just apply a blanket blur policy to
| the entire Israel-Palestine region to comply with
| aforementioned KB amendment given the dynamic nature of the
| borders. Given that blurring is, at least at face value,
| considered a good thing for security, I could see the people
| in the room thinking "it's easier for us and it increases the
| security of the entire region. We get ahead of any possible
| claim that google maps is enabling attacks on Palestine while
| protecting Israel. Problem solved.".. without thinking
| through the potential negative externalities.
|
| But as you've raised, blurring Palestine doesn't meaningfully
| prevent planned attacks on Palestine, except if they're
| carried out by rogue Israeli actors without state resources.
| In my understanding those are not as common. So then it
| raises the legitimate question, "does the negative
| externality of 'preventing the world from easily accessing
| satellite imagery of Palestine and thus understanding the
| extent of urban destruction' outweigh the positive benefit to
| general Palestinian security"? From an objective perspective,
| possibly, but from Google's perspective, _not_ blurring would
| be a much more politically charged move requiring nuanced
| explanation, so they're not going to risk it.
|
| In the end it's very "damned if you do, damned if you don't,"
| much like every other aspect of the broader conflict.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Israel lobbied for the KBA.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Your opinion is a bit of wishful thinking when compared against
| policy reality and whose side has favor written in law.
|
| As mentioned in the article, Israel specifically is protected
| -- "U.S. law mandates U.S. government censorship of American
| commercial satellite images of no country in the world besides
| that of Israel.":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment...
| .
| vanusa wrote:
| _This link title is extremely misleading to the point of being
| disingenuous and provocative. The title of the linked article
| is "Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps?"...
| because the entire Israel / Gaza / West Bank region is blurred
| in the exact same way. There is no preferential blurring of
| Palestinian areas._
|
| My fault - it was a hasty decision to correct what was
| (perceived) as an error (based on what was perhaps a faulty,
| because hasty, reading of the title earlier). There's a lot
| going on in that region at the moment, and a lot of news to
| catch up on - that's where the haste came from.
|
| _The clear answer is to prevent actors on both sides from
| using Google's satellite imagery to plan attacks against one
| another._
|
| I somehow doubt that the motive is as clear as you suppose -
| but that's an entirely different matter.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| FWIW Bing Maps (not mentioned in article) is also blurry, or
| rather because of their rendering preferences it is pixelated.
| Bing Maps has different and sometimes superior aerial imagery to
| Google Maps, but not this time.
|
| Baidu Maps astonishingly has no roads at all in Gaza; just a
| little bit of data about parks. No aerial imagery for the area
| too. I don't read Chinese so can't tell if they have any
| explanation.
| canada_dry wrote:
| Organizations/NGOs heavily rely on satellite imagery (i) to
| assist in delivering many humanitarian efforts. It would seem
| useful for the UN to strongly prohibit the diminishing of such
| capability.
|
| (i) www.hotosm.org
| randompwd wrote:
| Lol. In what world would anyone accept the UN dictating this?
| 2rsf wrote:
| Generally? maybe, but Gaza is a tiny, urban well mapped place
| bitcurious wrote:
| Should the UN intend for satellite imagery to be available to
| NGOs they can fund the creation and distribution of such
| images, rather than trying to seize the images acquired by a
| private entity. It's not that expensive.
| munk-a wrote:
| That might actually be a really good role for the UN to take
| - satellite imaging and GPS tracking are security issues for
| most countries and companies trying to leverage that data
| have been hit with a lot of regulations and surprises in the
| past. Niantic had to specifically bow to a lot of concerns
| about military personnel being trackable through pokemon go
| when it first came out and private satellite imaging
| companies need to comply with a long list of deadzones issued
| by the US Government and other governments across the world.
| panarky wrote:
| The UN does not have this authority.
| munk-a wrote:
| The UN is less a legislative body and more of an
| international treaty negotiation forum. If all of the UN
| member states agreed to such a thing then it certainly could
| be ratified - it sounds like it might vaguely fall under the
| purview of the first committee DISEC (Disarmament and
| International Security) and Israel might object to it but
| usually there's some bargaining involved in these sorts of
| things.
|
| To my knowledge, there is, in fact, no strict limit on the
| authority the UN can have - but there may be some specific
| carve outs to other international bodies (i.e. laws of the
| sea - the division of antartica), however I think these carve
| outs were mostly made affirmatively by the UN to empower
| other organizations.
|
| There is a separate question on whether the UN has the power
| to enforce legislation it passes, but that's a pretty
| simplistic reduction that can be applied to pretty much any
| governmental body and will almost always result in the answer
| of "It depends".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there is, in fact, no strict limit on the authority the
| UN can have_
|
| There is no strict limit to the authority I can have. That
| doesn't mean I can prohibit Google from doing squat. I
| could theoretically get the U.S. government to pass a law,
| but that's not the same thing as authority.
| pnt12 wrote:
| Google doesn't give a damn about you, but Google would
| very much care about discussions within UN to pressure
| modification of its products.
|
| That's the difference. You can go on technicalities, but
| being technically correctt is the worst kind of correct.
| munk-a wrote:
| I feel like I made a pretty good call out to this in the
| last paragraph of my comment but just to elaborate. The
| UN is an organization with essentially no organic power -
| it has no citizens, nor a tax base, nor an independent
| army. It does collect "mandatory" fees from members that,
| if halted, would likely suspend the membership of the
| nation in question, however even those are only enforced
| by various nation's desires to be a part of the UN. It'd
| be like me selling a Netflix disruptor that collected a
| monthly subscription fee for you to have the prestige to
| be a member and then sending you a card informing you of
| how to sign up for Netflix - literally nothing the UN
| does wasn't possible before the UN, it just centralizes
| where this is all happening. That all said, for smaller
| nations in particular, the membership can come with real
| benefits in terms of peacekeeping forces along with
| financial and humanitarian aide.
|
| At a basic philosophical level laws and police have no
| power, nothing can stop you from committing murder. The
| only thing we can essentially do is give you pain in
| reaction - that pain could be pre-emptively acting guilt
| or fear of the consequences, it could be moral regret, it
| could also be physical restraint or torture. Given
| diseases like alzheimer's and essential tremors or a
| plethora of other physical and neurological ailments the
| list of people who can absolutely control your actions
| might be an empty set[1].
|
| That all said, the UN has been granted some pretty wide
| authority to pass treaties that are generally
| acknowledged across the world - those treaties are
| generally respected and the US might hit you with a big
| stick if you violate them. So, honestly, I think the
| comparison in authority to an individual is pretty thin.
|
| 1. I think that by definition if we're talking in
| absolutes then it is always an empty set because there
| are actions you can't voluntarily execute, like, for
| instance, willing your heart to stop. But let's just
| assume that "absolute control" is a level of control
| achievable for most people at some point in their
| lifetime.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| Does the UN have any authority?
| cdot2 wrote:
| The security council does
| sigzero wrote:
| Not where Google is concerned.
| refurb wrote:
| Only if the member states agree to back it up.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Do they really depend on google maps in particular?
| carstenhag wrote:
| No. Bing Maps allowed to use their satellite views when
| editing OpenStreetMap.
|
| To view the datasets with satellite images, you still need
| another provider (which Google maps isn't)
| Teracotage wrote:
| Google also used to hide this Secret U.S. Drone Base in Saudi
| Arabia, yet MS maps showed it. Which could show who is more
| chummy with the government. 'The image of the airfield, available
| in Bing Maps, would be almost impossible to discover randomly. At
| moderate resolutions, satellite images of the area show nothing
| but sand dunes. Only on close inspection does the base reveal
| itself. In Google's catalog of satellite pictures, the base
| doesn't appear at all." https://www.wired.com/2013/02/secret-
| drone-base-2/
| fireeyed wrote:
| Because it's a dump ?
| zokier wrote:
| tldr: Israeli-US agreement limited resolution until July 2020,
| and Gmaps hasn't gotten around to updating the imagery since.
| SilasX wrote:
| And the US is emperor of pointing satellites at the Middle
| East? There aren't other satellites outside US/Israel
| jurisdiction that can fill it in? Or they're not allowed to
| pass it on?
| lbotos wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27187416
|
| Google being a "US Company" they are following that law.
| skissane wrote:
| KBA doesn't actually apply to Google.
|
| KBA applies to operators of imaging satellites, Google's
| suppliers such as Maxar. In practice, it doesn't apply to
| distributors, only acquirers. (The text of KBA talks about
| issuing licenses for "dissemination" of satellite images,
| but you don't need a license to resell satellite images, or
| buy them then give them away for free like Google does.)
|
| Legally, there is nothing stopping Google from using a non-
| US imagery supplier to get higher resolution images of
| Israel into Google Maps.
|
| In practice, they probably don't want to. It is walking
| into a political minefield, and Google doesn't really gain
| anything for themselves by walking into that minefield.
| vanusa wrote:
| The bigger question of course is why the "agreement" was made
| with the Israelis, and not with the Palestinians directly.
| buserror wrote:
| possibly because the israelis already have all the imagery
| they would want anyway, and the blurring is only a problem
| for people who don't?
| duxup wrote:
| As far as Gaza goes, Hamas rules Gaza but they're not the
| recognized government.
|
| I'm not sure who you would ask to make policy in such a
| situation.
|
| Just Hamas because they rule that area by force? That sounds
| a lot like asking Israel for the same reason.
|
| I don't think there's a good/ automatic answer for these
| situations.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > As far as Gaza goes, Hamas rules Gaza but they're not the
| recognized government.
|
| It's definitely more complicated by that, there is some
| evidence that people in the Gaza area have definitely
| supported Hamas, but of course they're rejected by the PNA
| (which rules over West Bank) and Israel.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > there is some evidence that people in the Gaza area
| have definitely supported Hamas
|
| Such as when they were elected.
| windthrown wrote:
| Playing the devil's advocate, if the US is willing to
| negotiate with both the Taliban and official Afghanistan
| government directly, why not Hamas and Israel?
|
| (I am not trying to equate these groups; just compare the
| official vs force relationships)
| tifadg1 wrote:
| Because they can't win in Afghanistan and are planning a
| retreat, whereas gaza is this way due to historical
| reasons, but mostly because they don't pose a real
| threat.
| zokier wrote:
| Because Israel has more deeper pocketed lobby groups in US?
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Should they have negotiated with the Palestinian Authority,
| which only partially controls the West Bank, or with Hamas,
| which took control of Gaza and proceeded to murder leaders
| from other Palestinian political parties? It is kind of hard
| to know who the "official" representatives of the Palestinian
| people actually are due to the failure to establish a
| functional Palestinian state or government.
| elmomle wrote:
| I wish the recent history of Palestine were different too,
| but it seems unkind to use language that implicitly blames
| Palestinians as a people--or the factions that now hold
| power--for these issues. Literally any people on Earth
| would probably have a similar history, and be in a similar
| (or worse) place with respect to government, if they faced
| similar pressures for such an extended period of time.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| How did I blame the Palestinian people? The fact is that
| they do not have a functioning government, and the
| government they have is not in a position to negotiate on
| their behalf when it comes to Gaza. The faction that
| controls Gaza is not even recognized as legitimate by the
| PA (which is supposed to represent the Palestinian
| people).
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| You appear, and i could of course be mistaken, to be
| blaming the palestinian people for "the failure to
| establish a functional Palestinian state or government".
| As if it the fault of a population that's mostly under 30
| years old that they haven't been able to establish a
| government under the existing conditions. I'm not sure
| anyone else could.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| That was a statement of fact, I was not blaming anyone in
| particular. As I have said elsewhere, if anyone is to
| blame it would be Hamas, whose political campaign in 2006
| was based on delegitimizing the peace process and two-
| state solution and which pressed a war with Fatah that
| greatly weakened the PA. It is not as if the Palestinians
| were told to build a functioning state on their own; they
| receive a lot of help from other countries, including
| from Israel itself (e.g. joint police operations, joint
| security patrols, etc. -- all of which are confidence-
| building and institution-building measures).
| joelbluminator wrote:
| Do you have any examples for that?
| Udik wrote:
| > Hamas, which took control of Gaza and proceeded to murder
| leaders from other Palestinian political parties
|
| You appear to be misinformed. Hamas won regular elections
| (considered such by international observers, who also
| reported obstructions _from Israel_ ). Hamas then kept
| respecting the ongoing ceasefire with Israel and started
| softening its stance towards it, offering a permanent
| ceasefire, while on the other side Israel campaigned to put
| the Gaza strip under the strictest embargo. On June 8th,
| two days before the end of the ceasefire, Israel killed an
| Hamas official in an air strike.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislativ
| e...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Gaza_cross-border_raid
| sigzero wrote:
| Hamas didn't keep the ceasefire. Hamas was behind the
| Qassam attack in early 2006. That's from one of your
| links by the way.
|
| https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3257913,00.htm
| l
| tayo33 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Hamas_political_violen
| ce_...
| rowanseymour wrote:
| > the failure to establish a functional Palestinian state
| or government.
|
| Wonder whose fault you think it is that the Palestinians
| who currently live under what HRW and several Israeli human
| rights organizations consider apartheid, don't have a
| state.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| I think it is the fault of Hamas, which derailed the
| peace process 15 years ago after running a political
| campaign that delegitimized the peace process itself
| (they claimed that it was actually terrorism, not
| diplomacy and negotiated deals, that had caused the
| Israelis to withdraw from Gaza). As I said, their first
| move after taking control of Gaza was to murder political
| opponents. They fought a civil war against Fatah that
| almost caused a total collapse of the PA, and ever since
| the PA has been barely functional.
| mtrovo wrote:
| Sure, because life on Gaza strip on 2006 was all
| moonlight and roses. Hell even going back 30 years ago
| you wouldn't find much difference [0]. I wonder what
| political force or nation could be benefiting from this
| constant chaos.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_(comics)
| golemiprague wrote:
| The peace process was in 1996, not 2006. Hamas doesn't
| accept the partition decision of 1948, even fatach don't
| really accept it because they ask for "right of return",
| meaning all Arabs who used to be in Israel area in 1948
| and their descendant should have a right to go back to
| Israel, effectively destroying Israe as a Jewish country.
| So sometimes this political stance manifest itself in a
| type of violence, like the suicide bombs during the Oslo
| agreement times in the 90', which caused it to derail and
| become more of a war than a peace process. But even if
| they were the most peaceful people in the world, their
| stance doesn't change, that Israel should be another Arab
| country. So the only option for Jews is either to live
| Israel or live under some Arab dictatorship, like any
| other middle eastern Arab country.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Is that supposed to be some kind of excuse for derailing
| the peace process? Are you actually denying that progress
| toward a two-state solution happened between the Oslo
| Accords in 1993 and Hamas taking power in 2006?
|
| Like it or not the government of Israel and the PLO made
| a good-faith effort to establish a legitimate Palestinian
| state. It is not an easy task, the solution is not simple
| and there are a lot of legitimate grievances on both
| sides that need to be sorted out. Unfortunately groups
| like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and various other terrorist
| organizations have derailed that process. There is no
| cabal hiding in the background and pulling the strings to
| sow chaos in Palestinian society (do people really need
| to be told that wild conspiracy theories are nonsense?).
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| The median age in palestine is (was, 2014) 18 years old.
| Compare to 30 in israel or 40 in france.
|
| Like it or not the vast majority of palestinians alive
| today had nothing to do with what hamas did 15 years ago.
| They were mostly children or not even born yet.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| What does that have to do with the fact that Hamas
| derailed the peace process and continues to be the most
| significant obstacle to peace?
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| As far as i can tell you are advocating to punish the
| residents of pallestine because some time ago, when most
| of the current residents were either children or unborn,
| someone else did a bad thing.
|
| To me that seems exceptionally unjust.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| How am I saying anything of the sort? Regardless of when
| the people were born, it is a fact that they do not have
| a functioning government. It is a fact that Hamas
| derailed the effort to establish that government, and
| that Hamas has repeatedly interfered with those efforts
| over the past 15 years and continues to do so now. I am
| not "advocating" anything, I am simply stating the
| reality of the Palestinian situation today and why they
| are in that situation.
|
| You seem to think Hamas is some long-past group. Hamas
| controls Gaza today; they are the ones launching rockets
| at Israel right now. Hamas remains the most significant
| obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians right
| now. As the rulers of Gaza, Hamas has been a brutally
| repressive regime, roughly on the level of the Taliban in
| Afghanistan. Hamas deliberately spreads their military
| assets across densely populated civilian areas in order
| to maximize civilian casualties during war. The Hamas
| charter says that the role of women in society is to
| produce more men. They have cracked down on hip-hop,
| baggy pants, hair salons, and even indigenous Palestinian
| folk tales.
|
| I personally think the Palestinians deserve better than
| Hamas. Why do you keep dismissing the overwhelmingly
| negative impact this group has had on the Palestinian
| people? Why do you keep looking for a way to deny the
| role Hamas has played and continues to play in preventing
| the formation of an effective civil government and a
| functioning Palestinian state?
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| I think Hamas is a horrible organization. But if we could
| eliminate the entirety of the hamas leadership today, in
| a single moment, another similar organization would
| spring up because israel is creating the conditions that
| encourage such an organization to exist.
|
| Israel holds all the cards here, not the palestinians.
| Not hamas. Israel is the party that must step up and
| provide a real solution. Israel's solution over the past
| decade has been to contain the palestinians, lock their
| borders, and knock over their buildings whenever they get
| too uppity. This policy will _never_ result in a
| reduction of terrorists. It will _never_ result in
| removing the conditions that allow hamas to exist.
|
| Imagine if you are a 20 year old gazan (older than the
| average gazan) and all you know, your entire life, is
| israeli control of the strip. The death tolls aren't high
| enough that everyone has a dead family member, but i
| wouldn't be surprised if everyone knows someone the IDF
| killed. This is how america created terrorists in the
| middle east. This is how Israel is creating terrorists in
| their own backyard. Foreign politicians enforcing their
| will, through force, upon a people that don't want it.
|
| Hamas isn't long past, the fact is Hamas is not
| particularly important. Hamas is a symptom, not the
| problem. If Israel had the will to fix their structural
| problems, Hamas would have no reason to exist.
|
| Hamas is throwing unguided missles randomly and Israel is
| hitting them back by leveling buildings. Hamas is no more
| than a small child throwing a tantrum with no possibility
| to actually cause a change. All they can do is scream
| louder and hope someone else will do something. Again,
| Hamas is not the problem, they are a symptom of Israel's
| policy regarding palestinians.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Where are you getting this from? A 20 year old Gazan
| would be old enough to remember the day Israel withdrew
| from Gaza, both its military presence and settlers. A 20
| year old Gazan would also remember that that shortly
| thereafter, when Palestinian businessmen were talking
| about converting former settlements into resorts and all
| the money they would make from tourism, Hamas took over.
| A 20 year old Gazan would remember life before the
| blockade.
|
| Take a minute to think about that. Israel left Gaza
| completely, and then Hamas took over. Are you saying that
| turning over Gaza to Palestinians is the sort of
| restrictive measure that gives rise to terrorist groups?
|
| You are absolutely wrong about Israel holding all the
| cards. The blockade of Gaza is a joint effort between
| Israel and Egypt. The Palestinian Authority in the West
| Bank refuses to pay for electricity in Gaza. Hamas has
| diverted aid shipments to its own military
| infrastructure, preventing Gazans from repairing their
| buildings, and Hamas has previously insisted that
| shipments of fuel enter through the border crossing with
| Egypt because they do not want to accept any help from
| "Zionists." So how does Israel hold "all the cards?" In
| reality the cards are held by Israel, Egypt, the PA, and
| Hamas itself.
|
| Meanwhile, over in the West Bank, Palestinians have
| plenty of legitimate complaints yet the PA manages to
| engage in joint security, law enforcement, and economic
| efforts with Israel. Sure, things could be better for the
| Palestinians in the West Bank, but that is exactly the
| goal of the peace process and all those joint efforts.
|
| You seem to be confused about cause and effect. The
| situation in Gaza today is not the reason Hamas took
| power; Hamas is the reason for the conditions in Gaza.
| Hamas started a civil war among Palestinians, and as a
| result the PA refuses to pay the bills for Gaza, leaving
| them with sporadic and unreliable electricity. Hamas kept
| smuggling rockets into Gaza, then firing those rockets at
| Israeli cities, resulting in the Israeli blockade. Hamas
| kept smuggling rockets into Gaza through Egypt, arming
| Egyptian rebels, and using Sinai as a staging area to
| fire rockets at Israel, resulting in Egypt joining the
| blockade. Hamas spread its military assets across densely
| populated civilian areas, resulting in far higher
| civilian casualties and widespread damage to civilian
| buildings when the IDF responds to the rocket fire. Hamas
| diverted aid shipments of construction supplies to its
| tunnel network, preventing Gazans from rebuilding their
| damaged buildings during the ceasefire. What kind of
| mental gymnastics do you have to perform to conclude that
| Hamas is merely a symptom of some other problem?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Might makes right, as always ...
| dijit wrote:
| USA is the only country on earth that recognises all of
| Israel's territory claims.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Not just that.
|
| https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf
| devmunchies wrote:
| $38 billion. woah. if US continues to give Israel
| unconditional aid then it will start to look like a
| vassal state
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassal_state
| alisonkisk wrote:
| The US needs an ally in the Middle East that is more
| reliable than any of the Arab nations are. Better than
| being even more beholden to Saudi Arabia.
|
| US interests also benefit quite a lot from Israeli
| industry, from Intel to Cellebrite
| iskander wrote:
| It's primarily a subsidy for American weapons
| manufacturers (from whom the Israelis have to make
| purchases), mixed with a hefty R&D budget for new
| military technology like Iron Dome.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly. And it keeps Israel from buying similar
| equipment from Russia or China (and helping support those
| developers).
| vanusa wrote:
| "Primarily" is more than a bit of stretch, here.
|
| All observation of U.S.-Israel relations since 1967
| indicate that it's driven by a very strong ideological
| (and perceived electoral) component. In fact it's hard to
| think of a single case of a ("friendly") country for
| which the degree of U.S. support is _less_ ideological.
|
| Pork barreling plays a role for sure as well, but it's
| definitely second fiddle.
| iDisagreedEar wrote:
| 127$/US citizen tax to murder people you never met.
|
| It's worse than that, you can't even travel as an
| American without people thinking you support murdering
| people.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| While that at a glance looks likr a thorough source, you
| might want to mention that most of that aid was a result
| of the after math of the 1973 war, which led to a
| stabilization of the Suez region militarily, friendly
| relations between Egypt (which also got annual aid from
| the deal) and U.S., the Camp David Accords, and an
| enduring peace that's nearing half a century between
| Egypt and Israel.
| wernercd wrote:
| Because there's never been a country named "Palestine" and as
| such it's hard to make agreements with a country that doesn't
| exist.
| zinekeller wrote:
| ... in the US Government's (and some of its allies')
| perspective (NB: there are definitely some caveats and the
| most "Israel-only" policy is in the Trump era but in
| practice this is how it works). Most Arab countries (for
| some, until recently) have the inverse: they only recognize
| the Palestinian government and never the Israeli
| government. Some governments choose a more pragmatic "both
| Israel and Palestine exists but their land borders are
| definitely not defined well".
| wernercd wrote:
| in the US perspective? Please, show a map that has ever
| had the country Palestine...
|
| I love how a simple statement of fact is getting voted
| down: You can't make an agreement with a non-entity.
|
| https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/139168
|
| > In fact, historically, there was never an independent
| country named Palestine.
|
| > So, the historical record says that Palestine was never
| a country, and was rarely ever an intact entity.
|
| Recognition of... what? a "government" of a country that
| never existed? People can vote me down more but facts
| remain that the country never existed as a real entity.
| Angostura wrote:
| The US seems to manage OK forming relationships with
| Taiwan, for example.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Taiwan has a working government.
| wernercd wrote:
| And, I'd argue, it's willing to negotiate in good faith.
| The PLO, over the decades, has turned down anything that
| doesn't give it 100% of what it wants (basically, the
| destruction of Israel).
| wahern wrote:
| The United States helped establish and continues to
| recognize the Palestinian National Authority, which is the
| recognized governing body of what ostensibly would become a
| Palestinian state. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palest
| inian_National_Authority
|
| The U.S. also recognizes passports issued by the PNA,
| though w/ caveats given the lack of nominal statehood.
| LegitShady wrote:
| The PA has no control over Gaza - in fact they were
| kicked out of gaza by hamas.
| wernercd wrote:
| "what would become" and that changes my statement that
| Palestine has never existed how?
| wahern wrote:
| The point is that the U.S. is fully capable of having a
| political relationship with entities it doesn't recognize
| as a sovereign state.
|
| Take Taiwan as another example. Both the context and
| details are completely different from that of the PNA,
| but it nonetheless contradicts your premise in the same
| manner.
| wernercd wrote:
| Taiwan is a nation with a functioning government and
| actual borders it controls.
|
| Unlike Palestine.
| toast0 wrote:
| Mandatory Palestine certainly existed. Although you may
| argue it wasn't a country, because it was under the
| administration of the British.
|
| The current State of Palestine exists, and is recognized
| in many forums, although not by all participants; but it
| doesn't have de facto sovereignty as it's essentially
| occupied.
| _delirium wrote:
| Perhaps pedantic, but it wasn't an agreement per se, just a
| regular domestic U.S. law, although Israel did indeed lobby in
| favor of the law. See:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment
| iDisagreedEar wrote:
| I wouldn't mind other countries paying us bribes (lobbying)
| if that money went to the taxpayer, but instead it goes to
| the politician that can brainwash us with that same money.
|
| Side note, does anyone have any great works of political
| theory that talks about how to deal with bribery?
| saltmeister wrote:
| because fucking jews
| neiman wrote:
| Am I the only one thinking it's not a bug, it's a feature? Please
| also blur all the Google Maps satellite images of where I live.
| Took me ages to get the ones of Google Street View blurred lol.
| Where do I sign up?
| deadalus wrote:
| Is it possible to have real-time live-feed of the entire planet?
| If cost isn't an issue, would something like that be possible?
| manquer wrote:
| Technical issues apart , there are whole host of privacy issues
| with that kind of data. Stalking, theft to national security
| problems.
|
| Imagine if there is real time /continuous feed of your house,
| it would be very easy to know when you are there and not by
| just looking for cars parked in the driveway.
|
| Controlling access would be quite challenging.
| tpmx wrote:
| Maybe Starlink satellites should also feature a camera? They've
| already got the connectivity. You'd need a large constellation
| and this one seems like it will become huge.
| wongarsu wrote:
| They could do something like Sentinel's 10m/px, but looking
| at those images [1] I don't see the advantage of updating
| that more often than the once every few days we already have
| from Sentinel.
|
| To make near-realtime interesting you need something closer
| to 1m/px where you can clearly make out cars. But at that
| point the optics and camera take more mass than a normal star
| link satellite. They would become earth observation
| satellites with an internet uplink, not the other way around.
|
| 1: https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/
| tpmx wrote:
| Yeah, I guess it would require a breakthrough in
| optics/lenses to become feasible. Sentinel-2 is ~1000 kg,
| and each Starlink satellite is approx 250 kg.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| At 1 px/m2, the Earth's surface is 5x10^14 pixels, so with
| the full constellation of 10,000 satellites and 1 fps that'd
| be 5x10^10 pixels/satellite/second (about a
| terabit/satellite/second uncompressed). If you can shoot 30
| images per second, you'd need a 1.6 gigapixel camera.
|
| It's technically possible but not feasible.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "It's technically possible but not feasible."
|
| Not to mention that earth imaging satellites require
| approval by the government and, I believe, compliance with
| international regulations.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Why downvote?
|
| It's really frustrating to see people downvote a factual
| statement (as opposed to opinion) without giving any sort
| of correction to that information. If I'm wrong - show
| me! I don't need this sort of crap after working all day
| at a job I hate where my voice is basically worthless and
| a legitimate debate can't take place.
| tpmx wrote:
| It would be quite useful at lower resolutions too, I think.
|
| Edit: The uncompressed bitrate comment is a bit like saying
| 1080p network video streaming will take decades to become
| feasible, because the incompressed bitrate is 1.485
| gigabit/s...
| bzbarsky wrote:
| The obvious first bandwidth issue here is through the
| optical sensor, which is definitely pre-compression, no?
| bhouston wrote:
| We will have this eventually. Piggy baking on STarlink next gen
| or similar should make this possible.
| mvanaltvorst wrote:
| planet.com can get you a ~12 images per day [1] for a
| reasonable price. If cost really isn't an issue, I'm confident
| you could strike a deal with planet.com to place their next few
| new satellites into the specific orbit you want to up the
| frequency even more.
|
| [1]: https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-
| announcement/, as of June 2020.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Could you divulge what you use the images for?
|
| Or, anyone who buys satellite images?
|
| I know about real estate, navigation, and I've heard that
| some business use them to forecast retail sales.
|
| I curious about other uses.
| rsync wrote:
| What is that reasonable price? It is not given on the page
| you linked...
| op00to wrote:
| Are you looking at a 7-8 figure upside to your deal? It's
| reasonable. Are you looking for fun? Unreasonable.
| johnmcelhone wrote:
| I believe 3m res data from them is around the $2 per square
| kilometre mark, however varies wildly depending on scale
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Clouds would be a challenge.
| zacharycohn wrote:
| Zoom.earth is great for weather.
| jq-r wrote:
| Try https://www.windy.com then. Will blow your mind.
| billfruit wrote:
| Even for emergencies like flooding where it is very important
| to know which areas are flooded and which are not, I think
| presently there is no satellite based system which can give
| this information anywhere near realtime with anything close to
| the required resolution. So in the absence of such I assume the
| information will have to be gathered from ground reports and
| areal surveys, which I would think will be extremely time
| consuming and labour intensive to gather and collate and form a
| full picture of the flooding.
| casefields wrote:
| Even the biggest of floods is a localized problem. A fleet of
| drones can give you live feeds of the entire thing. The
| caveat is of course the military has the best ones, and
| there's an uneasy balance of allowing military use on home
| soil.
|
| Baltimore has been leading the charge on aerial surveillance:
| https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-cr-
| aerial-p...
| billfruit wrote:
| I doubt drones could be a solution for flood monitoring
| presently, flood events could last days, endurance could be
| an issue. Floods could affected regions of several hundred
| square kilometres, I think it might be impractical to cover
| that much area by drones.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://planet.com
|
| (planet customer, no other affiliation)
| 5etho wrote:
| >contact sales
|
| thank you company, I'm gladly calling to check your services
| now
| [deleted]
| ajcp wrote:
| I think OP was asking more for a live-stream type service,
| where this appears to be static imagery.
| shalmanese wrote:
| This is the best that's currently available.
| ajcp wrote:
| No doubt, a great resource, was just trying to help get
| to the meat of the comment :D
| paxys wrote:
| Not really feasible at a usable resolution. The number of
| satellites required to do this as well as the data bandwidth
| needed far exceeds our current capacity.
| aeroman wrote:
| One other thing to add - the Earth is really pretty cloudy. If
| you care about the clouds, new geostationary satellites are
| pretty good - (e.g. https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/).
|
| If you care about the surface, a lot of places are really
| cloudy, including some that are cloudy basically all the time -
| https://www.cloudsandclimate.com/blog/where_is_cloudiest_par...
| Cd00d wrote:
| Think of each pixel. If you want 1m resolution, you need at
| least one pixel for every meter of the planet. And, satellites
| can't be told to stay over land only. So, how many satellites
| do you need in your constellation to keep a 1s refresh time?
|
| The earth is 200 million miles^2 surface area.
|
| So, no. I sorta remember 4 day refresh at 3m resolution was the
| "wish I could get to" goal.
| grayfaced wrote:
| Rough numbers, back of envelope calculation: 500 trillion
| square meters on earth * 50 pixels per square meter * 3 byte
| pixel depth = 75 petabytes uncompressed. Assume 90% image
| compression and remove the 71% of earth that is oceans and
| you're down to a little over 2PB.
| codeecan wrote:
| this exists for city-wide using planes,
|
| from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p4BQ1XzwDg
|
| from 4 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRa-AucbN6k
|
| makes you think what they're doing today
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| In addition to cost, there are various national laws that
| restrict satellite imagery with resolution better than various
| thresholds.
| yaml-ops-guy wrote:
| Which the article indicates, at least as it relates to the US
| and her companies, is no longer the case:
|
| > In July 2020, the KBA was dropped, and now the US
| government allows American companies to provide far higher-
| quality images of the region (so that objects the size of a
| person can be readily picked out).
| skissane wrote:
| KBA wasn't dropped, it still applies. The law is still on
| the books.
|
| KBA gives the regulator (NOAA) the authority to set a
| resolution limit for images of Israel. They are supposed to
| set it to be the best resolution commercially available
| from non-US providers. In 1998, NOAA set it at 2 metres. In
| July 2020, NOAA dropped it to 0.4 metres. NOAA had been
| dragging their feet about that - in 2018, evidence was
| presented to them of commercial availability of sub-2m
| resolution images of Israel from non-US providers, but they
| didn't accept it. Their argument apparently was that even
| if sub-2m resolution was commercially available, it wasn't
| "commercially available enough". One factor that changed
| their mind this time is widespread resale of foreign
| imagery by US resellers (the KBA only applies to sale of
| US-acquired imagery, US companies are legally free to
| resell foreign-acquired imagery.)
|
| KBA still limits US providers to a 0.4 metre resolution of
| Israel. When foreign commercial providers start offering
| better than 0.4 metre resolution of Israel, NOAA may drop
| the limit again. But they may drag their feet that time
| too.
| yaml-ops-guy wrote:
| I appreciate the clarity and correction offered!
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| That's one such agreement between two governments; there
| are numerous other laws and agreements that would impact
| anyone attempting to provide real-time imagery of
| substantial portions of Earth.
| yaml-ops-guy wrote:
| I thought the KBA was an amendment to US statutory law,
| not an 'agreement' between nations? What are the other
| laws and agreements to which you're alluding to, but
| weren't referenced in the article?
| hhjinks wrote:
| How far into the atmosphere does a nation's air space
| stretch? Would I be breaking a country's law by picturing
| said country from orbit?
| wongarsu wrote:
| That's an unsettled question. I think most would agree that
| a nation's airspace extends at most up to the Karman line,
| which is 100km above sea level (except in the US, where
| it's 80km or 50 mi). But there is no international treaty
| or anything that settles this.
|
| In practice, as a satellite operator you are bound to the
| laws of the country where your company resides, the country
| where you launch from, the countries where your ground
| stations are, and any country that has political sway in
| any of the previous ones.
| caymanjim wrote:
| The short answer is no. High-resolution imagery comes from low-
| orbit satellites, which make a complete orbit about every two
| hours, and image long, narrow strips with each pass, taking
| days to image the whole planet. There are many of these
| satellites: commercial, non-military (publicly-accessible)
| governmental, and governmental (secret), of varying
| resolutions. These are also supplemented by aerial (plane)
| imagery.
|
| The net result is that updated-daily imagery exists, but real-
| time does not. While I'm not privy to the capabilities of the
| US military, the kind of real-time planet-wide surveillance
| that movies like Enemy of the State suggest doesn't exist
| planet-wide.
|
| The highest-resolution images on e.g. Google Maps are from
| planes, rather than satellites, and aren't imaged anywhere near
| daily. The only way to have constant, real-time imaging of a
| fixed location is with a geostationary satellite, which will be
| so far away (22,000 miles) that the resolution will be low.
|
| Given an unlimited budget, a huge constellation of hundreds or
| thousands of satellites could come close to real-time planet-
| wide imaging, but even then, you'd be getting views at
| different angles as various satellites took images, and you
| wouldn't ever have a clear directly-overhead view of people
| walking around.
| notJim wrote:
| Couldn't starlink do something like this theoretically? Seems
| like it checks several of the boxes.
| [deleted]
| yabones wrote:
| There are also surveillance blimps, which I believe would be
| closest to a real-time feed. Some can apparently stay up for
| 30 days at a time. These have been tested for domestic
| intelligence, and radar (rather than optical) systems have
| been deployed overseas.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/blimplike.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_System
| manigandham wrote:
| A fleet of drones that stay airborne can provide real-time
| feeds of a regional battlespace for military use. Cheaper,
| lower latency, higher quality data - but vulnerable to enemy
| airpower.
| Macuyiko wrote:
| Since you know what you're talking about. Say I'm willing to
| accept the updated-daily or even weekly high-res imagery of
| the whole planet. Any idea what the cost would boil down to?
| How many parties are involved?
|
| Just wanting to learn more about this.
| johnmcelhone wrote:
| Want medium res (10m), Sentinel-2 imagery is your best bet.
| Won't cost you a penny. https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-
| browser/
|
| Looking for higher resolution (3m), the only viable option
| really is Planet. Even at that, they're pretty iffy with
| their pricing models and distribution. I think they range
| around the $2 per square kilometre mark.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| for the whole planet, the jump between $0 and around
| $2/sq.km. is, what, $1 billion/update difference?
| s0rce wrote:
| Sentinel imagery is weekly and is quite good. I use it to
| see snow melting in the mountains when planning hikes.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| There's a company called PlanetLabs (or just Planet) which
| aspires to this.
| CallMeMarc wrote:
| I'm no expert but there was an Ask HN about new APIs[1]
| recently. One answer linked to Albedo[2] which seems quite
| interesting.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067945 [2]
| https://www.albedo.space/
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| What limits the field of view of these LEO satellites? Why
| can we not have high resolution images of wider swaths? Is it
| something like the number of "receptors" on an imaging cell,
| or would wider angle lenses significantly distort the
| imagery?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| The curvature of the earth is gonna be a limiting factor
| for satellites in LEO. IIRC at 500 miles up you can only
| see (roughly) 1500 miles away. And realistically your range
| will be less than that because something that far away will
| be at a very oblique angle, which means more atmosphere in
| the way and more distortion
| therein wrote:
| Even though it would be neither covert nor cost-effective,
| couldn't you use a constellation like Iridium and add some
| auto-compositing capabilities?
|
| The resolution and angles for your point of interest will
| change but you should be able to keep a near-constant
| coverage.
| 7952 wrote:
| Obviously different to optical images. But I wonder if this
| kind of live view would be more possible with SAR at higher
| orbits. And with enough signal processing may actually be
| more useful for automated analysis than cloudy images.
| [deleted]
| berkes wrote:
| And even with such a budget: geostationary satellites over
| the poles are not possible[1] and really hard anywhere but
| over the equator, really.
|
| So that means most of the south and north part of the earth
| cannot be covered with such a constellation; they would need
| to be orbiting satellites, which makes "real time" even
| harder, because it would require an enormously complex
| choreography to ensure there's at least one satellite
| covering each square meter, at all times.
|
| [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71582/is-it-
| poss...
| munk-a wrote:
| But, we could always construct a dyson sphere around earth
| and rely on the rigidity of the structure to provide
| accurate polar images.
|
| That said, it would be really difficult and quite likely
| not at all worth it.
| recursive wrote:
| > But, we could always ...
|
| That's a very bold claim with no support provided.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Should be feasible at very high altitudes where gravity
| is low.
| recursive wrote:
| On the other hand, I think it should not be feasible. How
| many kilograms of raw materials would be required? And at
| what altitude? I don't think there's enough propellant on
| earth to lift that much stuff.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Pun aside, this is the more in the realm of
| "theoretically possible" rather than possible right now.
| And people don't consider sun-sized Dyson spheres
| impossible, so a planet-sized one should be a piece of
| cake.
|
| Though the live imagery would now need night vision
| cameras, as we blocked out all our light with our camera
| support. But one has to take the good with the bad ;)
| munk-a wrote:
| Hey, you asked me to solve your mouse problem. How was I
| to know you were allergic to cats!
|
| I think most accepted approaches to constructing a sphere
| involve first building a series of structural components
| to form a stable net - as such we could stop the process
| when we've got just enough structure in place for
| stability and not so much that we need night vision
| cameras buuuut... I typed that before buying a bunch of
| night vision stock so please disregard the first portion
| of this paragraph - we would absolutely need night vision
| cameras from every angle.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Molniya orbits[0] can provide continuous coverage of the
| poles if you've got a couple in orbit. The orbit has an
| extremely high altitude apogee and low altitude perigee.
| The high altitude apogee gives it a long dwell time (from
| the perspective of the ground).
|
| It wouldn't be the most practical orbit for narrow FOV
| imagery but for polar weather, communications, and
| monitoring for things like over the pole missile launches
| they're pretty useful.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Disagree. The Iridium phone constellation covers the entire
| planet (which means it has line of sight to the entire
| planet) and has for about two decades. Starlink will, soon,
| as well. They've already solved the choreography issue you
| mentioned.
|
| The entire globe has about 500 billion square meters. 24
| bit uncompressed imagery is thus 1.5TB per global image.
| With some modest compression, you could get a video stream
| of that from the Starlink network, although the current
| design of Starlink would make it hard to have room for an
| aperture with better than, say, 3 meter resolution.
| riffic wrote:
| are your examples geostationary?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Starlink is not geostationary. It is a very high density
| low altitude system.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Correct. And with a wide field of view (45 degrees),
| they'd allow a real-time view globally.
| jandrese wrote:
| You aren't taking high res imagery from Geo sats--they are
| much too far away.
| cryptoz wrote:
| It seems like the answer is actually yes, then? Seems like it
| would be expensive but that is no issue with this thought
| experiment. OP didn't require High-res or directly-overhead,
| some caveats you added which constrain the problem more. But
| either way, it totally seems possible.
|
| Heck, put up 100,000 satellites and use the same kind of tech
| Apple/Google/MS use in their 3D views of cities (it, they do
| take airplane and satellite photos at various angles, and use
| software to stitch together the separate pieces).
|
| Seems totally possible to meet OP's request given money not
| being an issue.
| panarky wrote:
| Starlink is seeking approval for tens of thousands of low-
| earth-orbit satellites. Each one will have high-bandwidth
| network connections. It doesn't seem intractable to put
| cameras on each one and stitch their feeds together for
| imagery that's maximum 30 minutes old for any arbitrary point
| on the globe.
|
| And the market for near-real-time imagery might be even
| larger than the market for internet connectivity.
| ddalex wrote:
| There is a huge difference between a comms relay sat
| (basically a transponder, a battery, and solar panels ) and
| an imaging satellite , which needs a huge collector mirror
| that coats O(billions) to polish.
| adolph wrote:
| The next generation of LEO ground imaging satellites will
| be significantly larger than Starlink units.
|
| _Now, with the resolution relaxation from the United
| States Government that went into effect on February 21,
| 2015, you have access to an even clearer view of the ground
| with 30-centimeter resolution commercial satellite
| imagery._
|
| https://spacenews.com/a-detailed-view-of-the-ground-
| with-30-...
|
| _WorldView-3 is the industry's first multi-payload, super-
| spectral, highresolution commercial satellite. Operating at
| an altitude of 617 km, WorldView-3 provides 31 cm
| panchromatic resolution, 1.24 m multispectral resolution,
| 3.7 m short-wave infrared resolution, and 30 m CAVIS
| resolution. WorldView-3 has an average revisit time of less
| than one day and is capable of collecting up to 680,000 sq
| km per day, further enhancing the Maxar collection capacity
| for more rapid and reliable collection._
|
| https://www.maxar.com/constellation
|
| WorldView-3: Mass: 2800 kg (6200 lbs) Power: 3.1 kW solar
| array, Altitude: 617 km
|
| Starlink: Mass: v 1.0: 260 kg (573 lb) Power: 6 kW solar
| array, Altitude: 550 km
|
| https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-
| dim...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Constellation_design
| _...
| [deleted]
| redfern314 wrote:
| This is more or less the business model of Planet [0],
| which is imaging the whole Earth every day with around 200
| satellites. (No affiliation, but I previously worked for a
| different smallsat company.) It would be possible to get a
| higher visitation than that with more satellites, but it
| may not be cost-effective (e.g. someone might be willing to
| pay $X for a subscription to daily images, but not $(48*X)
| for half-hour images).
|
| I also doubt you could just slap a camera on Starlink
| satellites. Even ignoring payload size/weight, power
| consumption, etc, you're typically fighting 3 different
| constraints when you decide which way to rotate your
| satellite (sun exposure for power, antenna direction for
| high-bandwidth network, payload direction if you have
| cameras or other directional sensors). They're not going to
| want to try to deal with that for the first iteration of
| their fleet.
|
| [0] https://www.planet.com/products/planet-imagery/
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I can't help but be excited by the possibilities of tech
| like Planet, so many interesting applications for their
| data.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Excited? Maybe I'm just getting old but it terrifies me.
| klyrs wrote:
| Agreed, and the terrifying use-cases aren't hypothetical,
| they're the raison d'etre. There are some good
| "plowshares" type projects out there, but I'm not sure
| those ends justify the original and ongoing ones
| csteubs wrote:
| I'm the founder of a company working to solve this exact
| problem. Revisit rate of Planet's 200+ Dove satellites are
| quite good (multiple/day) but are comparatively low-res
| compared to their Rapideye satellites, of which there are
| fewer. There are a slew of others (Maxar is the next biggest
| name that comes to mind) but the thesis is low earth orbit is
| getting crowded, satellites are incredibly expensive even
| with off-the-shelf parts and falling launch costs, and
| hardware capabilities are locked-in at launch.
|
| We're taking the approach of using "free energy" in the form
| of 100,000+ daily commercial/freight/general aviation
| aircraft to crowdsource aerial imagery using mobile phones to
| start. Passengers who opt-in are rewarded with free in-flight
| wifi (where equipped), and we use the device to do
| orthorectification and photogrammetry at the edge before
| transmitting it back down via satellite internet. I'm
| glossing over much of the actual process, but this frees up a
| ton of computing that would otherwise have to be done on the
| ground. In the event the flight is not internet connected, we
| cache previous images based on flight path and upload the
| difference after comparing old vs. new on the device once
| signal is restored. End result is a massive boost in both
| temporal and spatial resolution at a dramatically lower cost.
| Think Google Maps, updated every few minutes.
|
| We're on IG @notasatellite if you're interested in looking at
| some samples.
| cornellwright wrote:
| Does this really work?
|
| 1. Cell phones from 30,000 ft are going to produce
| incredibly low resolution images, especially when taken
| through the window of an airliner. They're also all going
| to be oblique.
|
| 2. If you use real camera rigs, you're going to have to pay
| a fortune to outfit enough planes. Given that you don't
| control where the asset goes, this seems really
| inefficient.
|
| 3. Does the entire US actually get covered by all those
| flights? While ATC tries to give direct routing a lot more
| than they used to it still seems like you're going to end
| up with areas where planes hardly ever fly. I'd be really
| curious to see for a given swath what revisit rate you
| could get with what confidence from historical ADS-B data.
|
| Please don't take this negatively. I previously cofounded
| an aerial imagery company and have designed aerial camera
| systems for a large aerospace company. I came up with an
| idea like yours, but wrote it off for the reasons I
| mentioned. It's really cool to see someone pursuing it.
| Feel free to reach out if you'd like. My email is cornell
| at cgw3 dot org.
| csteubs wrote:
| I think it does for a few very specific reasons. I'll
| answer your questions in order:
|
| 1. Resolution is a function of altitude, atmospheric
| conditions, and camera capabilities. At 30,000ft with
| zoom, we can get results around 10cm/px on an average
| smartphone (iPhone SE 2). That's still pretty sharp but
| we can further enhance the image using satellite base
| maps, upscaling, and other inference techniques. Obliques
| can be corrected and used to assemble a "full image" when
| the opposite oblique is captured, but remains useful (to
| a certain point on the horizon--right now about 15 miles
| at cruising). There's still a vast amount of information
| we can obtain at higher altitudes including crop yield
| data, snow pack, reservoir/lake water levels, forest
| density, etc.
|
| 2. The physical device we're prototyping is about the
| size of a headphone case--I actually used a Bose QC25
| headphone case to cast the model! There are a few
| potential avenues to deploy physical sensing hardware on
| flights including revenue sharing with airlines, using
| passengers to deploy, and other partnerships in the
| general aviation space. The DoD in particular has
| expressed interest in a purpose-built device for aerial
| sensing but for now, mobile device crowdsourcing in the
| commercial markets is the focus.
|
| 3. There are huge spots in and around US airspace where
| planes cannot (or generally do not) fly. Satellites will
| remain the key players when optimizing for coverage, but
| the high-frequency revisit I believe is best obtained
| using aerial imagery. I always like to tell people that's
| why we're "Not A Satellite" instead of "Anti-Satellite".
| There's more than enough room for both, and we see a huge
| opportunity to increase revisit and provide a
| complementary offering to satellite imagery.
|
| We've looked at revisit frequency against ADS-B data and
| about 80% of the US sees at least 2 flights within a mile
| each day, exponentially more so around cities and
| developed areas. Many of our customers are interested in
| monitoring sites within 15 miles of a major international
| airport, so we're able to obtain high-resolution images
| using mobile devices because aircraft are typically below
| ~8,000ft within that radius. LAX for example can see as
| many as 500 takeoffs and landings each day, and there are
| hundreds of industrial sites (ports, fulfillment
| warehouses, other infrastructure) within the approach
| path.
|
| I genuinely appreciate your questions. We're still early-
| stage and the discussions I've had on HN alone have
| vastly improved the quality of our pitch, business plan,
| and exposed major blind spots. Thanks again for the kind
| words, and I'll be sure to drop you a line!
| newman8r wrote:
| Are you talking about passengers taking photos/video out of
| windows?
| csteubs wrote:
| Correct. It sounds a bit far-out (and it is) but we've
| proven the feasibility with a testing group of around 300
| passengers using a multitude of different
| phones/altitudes/conditions/routes. GPS works in airplane
| mode, so we pre-cache target coordinates based on the
| filed flight plan and alert the passenger to hold the
| device to the window when overflying the target. The
| gyroscope is used to provide feedback on phone
| orientation so we can get as close to nadir as possible,
| but we're still able to correct for obliques at around
| 20miles on the horizon using some general inference.
| Resolution is a function of altitude and device, but
| upscaling techniques enhance the images even further
| after they're transmitted.
|
| We've also developed our own sensing device prototype we
| call "The Box" that's equipped with a much more powerful
| array of sensors, but the mobile device-sensing approach
| makes the most sense for a scalable MVP.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| What's the user experience of this and what are the
| incentives for users to do this? How much are they paid?
| csteubs wrote:
| UX on the flight contributor side is currently a low-
| touch app that accepts the user's flight number and
| prompts for their seat selection (assuming a commercial
| flight). We load an image correction profile based on
| whether the seat is fore or aft of the wing in order to
| correct for the blur caused by engine exhaust, after
| which we cache the image task coordinates we anticipate
| they'll be flying over. We provide a code for free in-
| flight wifi (actually 2--one for each side of the plane)
| that can be redeemed after completing a simple
| calibration task while taxiing or shortly after takeoff.
| The calibration looks at window opacity, occlusions, and
| considers atmospheric conditions for each leg of the
| flight.
|
| In order to maximize battery life and prevent user
| fatigue, we only alert the user to begin recording when
| they're approaching a task coordinate by referencing the
| cached coordinate with the current GPS coordinate which
| is readily available even in Airplane mode. The
| "workload" for test users so far averages about 5 alerts
| per flight or 5-10 minutes of "recording", typically
| shortly after takeoff and prior to landing. We're using
| Lobe to train an ML model with the image feeds, so we're
| working on implementing a Captcha-style post-flight
| survey where a few sample images taken in flight are
| presented to the user for first-pass labeling. If a user
| completes this survey, they're rewarded with additional
| airline miles as a thank you
|
| There are plenty of other opportunities to gamify the
| recording process and we've been taking cues from apps
| like Waze and OpenStreetMaps to inform some of these
| potential reward features. Possibilities include revenue
| sharing, free flights after reaching milestones, travel
| gear, etc. I remember flying Spirit years ago and they
| always had a fun way to reward the unlucky souls in the
| middle seat by putting a sticker on one of the tray
| tables. The passenger sitting in the "lucky" middle seat
| got a free round-trip ticket which I've always thought
| was really cool, so perks like those are top of mind as
| well.
|
| Tl;dr - we're intent on keeping the UX transparent,
| engaging, and unobtrusive for the recorder--point, shoot,
| disembark--while rewarding them in kind for their time
| and effort.
| protomikron wrote:
| Do you have an example of the final (aerial) imagery
| result?
| csteubs wrote:
| We do, search 'Not A Satellite' and our social accounts
| will pop up. Instagram has the most descriptive
| content/examples.
| fallat wrote:
| This is the real seller. No response to this is a massive
| red flag.
| csteubs wrote:
| Check our Instagram for examples: @notasatellite
| newman8r wrote:
| Interesting approach, I can see how that's the easiest
| path to an MVP.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| https://zoom.earth/
|
| not quite real time (I'm not sure if that's even possible) but
| this is quite up to date. I used to to check out the smoke from
| last year.
|
| edit: you get pictures every 10 minutes of the whole globe, but
| the resolution is pretty bad, good enough to check the cloud
| coverage though
| Toxygene wrote:
| YMMV, but I just checked my neighborhood out and the
| satellite image is ~5 years old.
| kylebarron wrote:
| Once you pass a certain zoom (looks like zoom 11.5 here)
| the imagery is no longer recent. You can see the copyright
| statement change to "Microsoft", where it presumably just
| loads data from Bing maps.
|
| At lower zooms, where the copyright is something like
| "GOES-East", that's more real-time data because it comes
| from geostationary satellites that can take (low
| resolution) images every few minutes.
| erk__ wrote:
| There is also https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-
| playground/ which seems to be a bit higher resolution, I
| think they are imagin the whole earth every other day.
| kylebarron wrote:
| The two Sentinel-2 satellites together cover all land area
| of the Earth every 5 days, but are only 10-meter pixel
| resolution.
|
| > 10 days at the equator with one satellite, and 5 days
| with 2 satellites under cloud-free conditions which results
| in 2-3 days at mid-latitudes
|
| https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/missions/sentinel-2
| nikisweeting wrote:
| The imagery on here is 5-10 years older than the imagery on
| Google Maps for much of Quebec, not sure about other areas.
| grawprog wrote:
| >but this is quite up to date.
|
| It's up to date zoomed out, but zoomed in seems to be similar
| to what google maps provides. The picture of the area I live
| is the same 10 year old picture on google maps, complete with
| a house that hasn't existed in almost as much time.
| yosito wrote:
| One of the closest public things you'll find to this is
| https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/
|
| It's only medium-range and only updated once daily, with some
| missing spots due to the coverage of satellite tracks, but
| there are hundreds of different data layers which can be really
| interesting to explore.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Usually what I do in these situations is jump to Yandex maps, but
| they're the pulling the same censoring in Gaza and surroundings.
|
| Here's a French prison blurred out on Google Maps, but uncensored
| on Yandex:
|
| https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Prison+%22La+Sant%C3%A9%22/...
|
| https://yandex.com/maps/org/tyurma_sante/117105575064/?l=sat...
| nyolfen wrote:
| i am guessing that the israelis approach governments or
| corporations with the request to reduce the quality of imagery
| of israeli territory in order to hinder hamas' OSINT efforts,
| and include the caveat that gaza etc be blurred out as well to
| preserve the appearance of neutrality; obviously the israeli
| state has access to high quality imaging outside of google maps
| et al
| tareqak wrote:
| The article mentions the Kyl-Bingaman Agreement [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl-Bingaman_Amendment
| Juntu wrote:
| Smoke is telling the truth that blurred on gg maps can be fixed
| by an update.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's usually called satellite imagery, but isn't most of the
| high-resolution, closest photos actually aerial imagery, not from
| satellites? In that case I would understand if there isn't that
| much coverage.
| ska wrote:
| These days a lot of it is satellite. Sub-meter commercial
| imagery from satellites became first avaiable some time in the
| 90s I think, and pretty cost effective in the last decade or
| so.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| No; at least per the providers, actual low-orbit satellite
| imagery is available to the (paying) public at 50cm resolution.
| jtsiskin wrote:
| That's a little scary. If those covered the globe, you could
| see and track anyone anytime they left their house. This gets
| dystopian fast. Imagine the ad targeting. Or "sorry, we
| notice you haven't been to the gym all month, we have raised
| your insurance premiums 10%"
| ska wrote:
| The temporal resolution isn't great, and you don't have
| much control over timing. Also 50cm is too coarse for much
| people-sized activity to be really identifying.
|
| So; great for seeing how a property has been developed over
| time, not so great for seeing who is going the gym or not.
| Cd00d wrote:
| These scans don't update with much frequency.
|
| That's like using Google Street View and noticing an
| unknown car in your driveway and assuming your partner is
| having an affair. Much more likely, the image is old, and
| that car belongs to the previous tenant.
| Laforet wrote:
| You don't even need satellite to track people, the FBI has
| been getting really good results with a small fleet of
| Cessnas.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/02/fbi-
| surveill...
|
| Not to mention you already carry a mobile phone with both
| Bluetooth and wifi turned on. You gym plus others _knew_
| you have not been there since February.
| avdlinde wrote:
| 50cm is not really good to identify a person. And it's not
| real time at all. You'd be better off calling the gyms
| directly.
| aembleton wrote:
| Google already knows this if you have an Android phone.
| beerandt wrote:
| It's _available_ , but by far the actual high quality (<1m)
| data used/publicly available was taken by aircraft, not
| satellite.
|
| This is usually a result of the data set already being paid
| for, either via the local assessor's office or the USDA. This
| doesn't mean it's always available for free, but that the
| economics means it's usually available for less than the
| actual cost.
| aembleton wrote:
| I don't they'd be able to get high resolution photos of
| Pyongyang without using satellites.
| avipars wrote:
| Also look at the azrieli mall in tel aviv...
|
| there is a huge military base there which is blocked/blurred
| mgerullis wrote:
| I am curious and looking but I cannot find it, you think you
| can drop a pin and share that link?
| azernik wrote:
| Look here. The pin is at the western side of the base.
|
| It's IDF headquarters, used to be bigger (from an old British
| camp, back when Tel Aviv hadn't grown to swallow it up), but
| the army has been steadily selling off the valuable urban
| land and relocating functions to less central locations.
|
| I'm not seeing any notable degradation in satellite imagery,
| specific to that area, though.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mahane+Rabin+(HaKirya),+Te.
| ..
| azernik wrote:
| Blurring military bases is pretty common - also done in the US,
| for example.
| vultour wrote:
| I've never seen a US military base blurred on Google Maps.
| azernik wrote:
| Has to be particularly sensitive ones, apparently - and
| more common for US bases in Europe?
|
| See https://fas.org/blogs/security/2018/12/widespread-
| blurring-o... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sat
| ellite_map_images_w...
| Aissen wrote:
| I know satellite photo-imagery has greatly improved, as seen
| recently by the flex satellite companies showed on the Ever Given
| incident, but I'm a bit tickled by the conflation of satellite
| and aerial imagery. The later is the one we think of the most
| when thinking of Google Maps high-res "Satellite" view:
|
| https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370129089941505
| ZebusJesus wrote:
| Probably so they can't be blamed for giving intel aka maps to
| Palestinians fighting for their lives
| DSingularity wrote:
| The motivation should be obvious to everyone here: to stop the
| public from directly seeing the Israeli war crimes. That way the
| propaganda machine coming from the American authorities can
| continue to be swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| This makes no sense whatsoever, regardless of what side you are
| allowed with. Satellite imagery is inferior to simple cameras
| at documenting what's happening in Gaza, war crimes or not.
|
| You are not improving the reputation of Palestinian concerns
| with your post, so you if you want to help them, rethink your
| approach.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Satellite imagery can be damning when it comes to documenting
| genocide. See this article for a modern example[1] or this
| article for another example from WWII[2].
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
| report/muslims-...
|
| [2] https://blog.historicenvironment.scot/2020/01/holocaust-
| evid...
| azernik wrote:
| This is the result of historical blurring of _all of Israel_
| and _all of the Territories_ , by US law. The goal was
| preventing intelligence gathering against Israel in general,
| not anything specific to Israeli action in Gaza and the West
| Bank.
| slim wrote:
| Is there an alternative (european?) source with higher definition
| ? Even outdated imagery would be useful
| einpoklum wrote:
| tl;dr: Because Israel wants this, and the US has forced that wish
| on commercial companies like Google.
| devmunchies wrote:
| > US has forced that wish on commercial companies like Google
|
| Not necessarily. Google has R&D in Israel[1]. Sergey Brin and
| Larry Page are both Jewish. Not that all Jews support Israel,
| but typically the case.
|
| 1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multinational_companie...
| einpoklum wrote:
| The regulation applies not only to Google; plus, your
| reservation seems to regard the linked article - I was just
| trying to extract the essence of its answer to the question.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Because of a lack of resolution.
| [deleted]
| manquer wrote:
| There is perhaps an interesting machine learning application
| here.
|
| There are higher resolution images available at lower frequencies
| and low resolution images possible with high frequency.
|
| Would it not possible to "zoom and enhance" a low resolution
| image to higher resolution one using historical high res data of
| the location and learning from object types and classification?
| bombcar wrote:
| The more sources of information you have the better you can
| collect and correlate it - especially if you have various low-
| resolutions taken at different times but still able to be lined
| up.
| agnokapathetic wrote:
| Yes: https://medium.com/the-downlinq/super-resolution-and-
| object-...
| gruez wrote:
| You're basically letting an AI to hallucinate details, which
| looks good in most cases but in edge cases may cause
| unintended results:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196650
| jjgreen wrote:
| Kind-of anticipated by Antonioni in _Blow Up_.
| vinhboy wrote:
| Yo. That was crazy. So the whole "zoom and enhance" thing
| they do on TV is no longer science fiction. That meme is
| dead judging by what I am seeing in that thread.
| fwip wrote:
| We can get computers to make things up, sure. But usually
| when they "zoom and enhance" on TV it's because they want
| to see what's really there.
| gruez wrote:
| Yeah, if you used this sort of upscale AI on a pixelated
| picture of a suspect, you'll just end up arresting some
| guy who's face looks most common in the training dataset.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Would it not possible to "zoom and enhance" a low resolution
| image to higher resolution one using historical high res data
| of the location and learning from object types and
| classification?
|
| Sure. Probably provide pretty convincing high-detail images.
|
| For the cases of most interest--i.e., when the new activity is
| unusual and unexpected--it will often be detailed, convincing,
| and _completely wrong_ , though.
| manquer wrote:
| There are definitely applications where those details don't
| matter , that is why low res services do exist after all.
|
| It would be nice UX enchantment if you will to what is a low
| res product.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It is absolutely possible and there are plenty of ML and non-ML
| solutions for this or similar problems.
|
| A set of useful keywords would be "image sensor fusion".
|
| Of course there would be limitations and most of the image
| updates would be boring (all the buildings and streets are
| still there) or lacking enough information to retrieve anything
| (new set of cars parked on the street) so you'd end up with
| highlights and uncertainties for changes overlaid on top of
| high confidence existing infra.
| qart wrote:
| I zoomed into random areas like Chekka, Lebanon and Kumasi,
| Ghana. I hadn't heard of these places before today, but they
| looked big enough on Google Maps. Zooming in, the mosaics
| appeared as if they were shot years apart, with noticeably
| different resolutions. Could Gaza just be one such scan, rather
| than something sinister?
|
| > "Considering the importance of current events, I see no reason
| why commercial imagery of this area should continue to be
| deliberately degraded,"
|
| Yeah, no. That does not answer the question right before it.
| What's with these sinister edits?
| areoform wrote:
| It's one of the most heavily imaged areas in the world - on the
| ground, as it's an active conflict zone. In space, satellites
| will pass over the region every X hours no matter what.
| Planet's satellites have a fresh, high resolution map of the
| Earth ~3.5 hours. Google had, at the very least, 7 satellites
| imaging the Earth in 2017,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySat.
|
| The question isn't whether the data exists. It does. The
| question is, why isn't it being displayed?
|
| Correction: Google now consumes data from Planet -
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/googl...
| qart wrote:
| > The question isn't whether the data exists. It does.
|
| What is your basis for this claim? However many satellites
| Google has, why are the regions I named blurry too? Lebanon
| isn't that far away from Gaza. Cars at Chekka looked like
| specks. Across the sea, in Cypress, I could make out the
| front and rear windows of cars.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| >> The question isn't whether the data exists. It does.
|
| > What is your basis for this claim?
|
| This is a really surreal response, given the part of _that
| same comment_ that you seem to have forgotten to read:
|
| >> In space, satellites will pass over the region every X
| hours no matter what. Planet's satellite have a fresh, high
| resolution map of the Earth ~3.5 hours. Google had, at the
| very least, 13 satellites imaging the Earth in 2017,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySat . It is unclear, to
| me, how many space assets they do have, but I'm guessing
| they image the entire globe every week, at the very least.
| qart wrote:
| I asked another question too. Why not answer that, then
| we can discuss surrealness. Ironically, my second
| question was right after my first question.
| azernik wrote:
| If the data exists for one place at a similar latitude,
| then it exists for every other place at a similar
| latitude, by the simple laws of orbital dynamics.
| qart wrote:
| You have a completely wrong idea of the laws of orbital
| dynamics. If satellites don't want to keep burning tons
| of fuel, they will orbit the center of the earth, not its
| axis. The only situation where your comment could apply
| is if the satellite is orbiting only above the equator.
| All of this, completely disregarding the economics of
| satellite mapping, their operational limits, etc.
| areoform wrote:
| I believe you have an incorrect mental model of orbital
| mechanics. I would recommend playing with KSP to more
| intuitively understand the concepts, and then reading
| resources like, http://www.braeunig.us/space/orbmech.htm
|
| For now, here's a video that might help you get a clearer
| idea, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_jM_BxQGvE - as
| you can see there's no fuel required. It's all about the
| inclination of the orbit (i.e. the angle it makes with
| Earth's equator).
|
| At a 85@ to 98@ inclination, the satellite will pass over
| every to _almost_ every point on the Earth (save for some
| bits on the poles depending on where you are on that
| spectrum.
|
| There is no fuel required to make passes over Gaza. The
| satellite does that naturally, as a matter of course.
| qart wrote:
| The video shows a polar orbit. How does this address
| azernik's point that "if the data exists for one place at
| a similar latitude, then it exists for every other place
| at a similar latitude"? With a polar or near-polar orbit,
| you'd get the densest (fewest stitches) and freshest data
| near the poles.
|
| > as you can see there's no fuel required.
|
| Like I wrote before, no fuel is required if you're
| orbiting the center of the earth. No one orbits the axis
| of the earth (other than orbiting above the equator). I
| was only responding to what azernik wrote.
|
| Here's what I _am_ saying: 1. the resolution of the
| images on Google Maps varies a lot from place to place.
| Not just Gaza, but other places too. I mentioned specific
| places too. Please verify that for yourself. 2. Orbital
| mechanics is the wrong explanation to reach for to
| account for the disparities.
| azernik wrote:
| Note I said "at a similar latitude".
|
| A satellite at a given inclination will trace out a
| ground path oscillating back and forth between D degrees
| north and D degrees south, where D is its inclination,
| with latitude varying sinusoidally with time. So it will
| spend different amounts of time at different latitudes,
| hence choice of inclination depending heavily on
| observation/communication target.
|
| However, for any given latitude it will spend an equal
| amount of time at each longitude (east-west location) as
| the Earth rotates under its orbit. See e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_track
|
| So for example, any satellite that images Georgia (the US
| state) or Taiwan will spend an approximately equal amount
| of time over Lebanon and Israel.
| qart wrote:
| There are so many incorrect and vague things here, but
| rather than listing them out, I point back to my counter
| examples. Zooming in on Kumasi, Ghana should show you why
| you're wrong. Look at the mosaic lines. There are both
| N/S lines of disparity as well as E/W lines of disparity
| of resolution.
|
| Use your own example, if you wish. Zoom in on Taiwan, and
| look at the cars. Next, zoom in on King Abdullah Economic
| City, Saudi Arabia at the same latitude. Look for cars
| there.
|
| Verify if your explanation fits the data.
| slg wrote:
| >The question isn't whether the data exists. It does. The
| question is, why isn't it being displayed?
|
| I just took a look at the Google Maps for Midtown Manhattan
| and they appear to be from around August 2019. Google surely
| has newer satellite images available for NYC. What is the
| reason they aren't updating them?
|
| I think current events are making everyone a little too
| paranoid here. The images were required by law to be of lower
| resolution until mid-2020. The law changed and Google hasn't
| gotten around to updating the images yet because there is
| always a lag in imagery being updated. No real conspiracy
| theory needed.
| garmaine wrote:
| Because until very, very recently it was illegal to provide
| commercial high resolution images of this area:
| https://spacenews.com/u-s-government-to-allow-sale-of-
| high-r...
| merth wrote:
| my guess would be that they dont want clear image of slow
| destruction and take overs also before after pictures.
| [deleted]
| azernik wrote:
| In Gaza? There are no takeovers there, just a DMZ and
| periodic shooting.
|
| The original Israeli ask, accepted by the US Congress, was
| for _all of Israel_ , including the Territories, to have
| degraded satellite imagery - as a defensive measure against
| foreign intelligence-gathering and targeting.
| [deleted]
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| The article mentions the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment once around the
| middle, that's the main reason. The wikipedia article is short
| and covers it well enough, but in short:
|
| > The Kyl-Bingaman Amendment (KBA) prohibits US authorities
| from granting a license for collecting or disseminating high
| resolution satellite imagery of Israel at a higher resolution
| than is available from other commercial sources, that is, from
| companies outside of the United States. An exception exists if
| this is done by a US federal agency, or if it is done in order
| to abolish the secrecy of such recordings.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment
| stewx wrote:
| TLDR: it used to be illegal under US law to distribute high-
| resolution images of Israel and Gaza. Now it's not. High-
| resolution images are available for purchase from satellite
| imaging companies but they haven't made it into Google Maps yet.
| oblak wrote:
| Pretty asinine if your claim about it being illegal in the pas
| is true. Making it illegal to know the truth about genocide...
| That's on a whole new level than turning Manning into Chalsea
| for revealing to the world how much US army cares for the
| conquered people
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Not really related to the article at hand, but I've been on a bit
| of a Google Maps binge the past couple weeks. I learned a few
| interesting facts, blurry Israel being one of them.
|
| Another strange thing I found that might not be super well known
| (I didn't know about it) is that all GPS data in China is offset
| by a nonlinear psuedo-random amount. If you turn on the satellite
| view in Google Maps and look at various cities in China, you'll
| see that the road and business overlay is off by anywhere from
| 50m to 500m. And the strangest thing is that it's not a
| consistent offset from place to place.
|
| Turns out this is very intentional, and China uses a different
| geographic coordinate system than the rest of the world. WGS-84
| is the most common coordinate system, but China uses GCJ-02,
| sometimes called Mars Coordinates. Part of GCJ-02 is an algorithm
| that obfuscates the results. So applying any GCJ-02 coordinate to
| a globe using WGS-84 coordinates gets distorted like a funhouse
| mirror.
|
| It's easy to find open source libraries to convert WGS-84 to
| GCJ-02 and vice versa. But Google Maps doesn't do it, for
| political reasons I suppose? I've read that if you open Google
| Maps within China the mapping data is correct, but have no way to
| test that.
| js2 wrote:
| Recently, I discovered Street View sometimes captures car
| crashes:
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/kJdgWQUU3eUMReUE8
|
| https://ibb.co/x18fy3s
| joering2 wrote:
| Two years ago when I saw Google car in front of me about to
| pass, I sure as hell opened the window and give it a bird,
| Maverick style. And sure as hell some 6 months later punching
| the address of my encounter, there I was in my car, with
| blurred face showing a middle finger that was surprisingly
| not blurred. So I showed it to all my friends all proud and
| stuff. Sadly a few months later the photo was replaced by I
| guess another drive-by. I imagine for many reasons since they
| already have a car in place, I'm sure they take few takes
| when passing by and someone must have reported me.
| fy20 wrote:
| Well they knew the photo had a face, so maybe their
| algorithms simply prefer photos without people. There's
| plenty of reasons why you should prefer a photo of a
| location without a person, even if blurred - this being one
| of them!
| robotastronaut wrote:
| Nitpicky, but useful for anyone interested in spatial data:
| WGS-84 is not a "GPS standard" but rather a geographic
| coordinate system and is usually paired for consumption with a
| projection like wgs 84 web mercator to view those 3d
| coordinates on a 2d plane. Super interesting stuff and
| reconciling these standards across the globe is a really fun
| problem, and one you'll likely run into if you ever find
| yourself dabbling in remote sensing pipelines.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I don't know if I would call it nitpicky for this example :P
| Thanks for correcting me, I've edited the comment.
| randomluck040 wrote:
| I'm also working in the field and the Friar thing that came
| to mind was https://ihatecoordinatesystems.com haha
| qwertox wrote:
| I hate them too. It's the worst to have to reproject an
| image or GeoJSON and overlay it onto a map. Very satisfying
| one you've managed to do it, but it's a pain nonetheless,
| at least if you don't work in the geospatial field and
| rarely use tools like GDAL.
| gsich wrote:
| Openstreetmaps works correctly.
| neumann wrote:
| Really silly question - but can't they correct for this without
| the GCJ-02 by just correlating the mutual of the map
| information with the satellite information? It seems like if
| you can have all the information provided to you, just randomly
| warped by some deliberate obfuscation you could 'trivially'
| (aka primitively) correct for it by using the available data of
| the satellite and the maps by feature matching and non-rigid
| registration?
|
| edit: updated silly question after reading more on this
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Circumventing the obfuscation is a crime.
| dehrmann wrote:
| In China? Is it a violation of the data source license?
| andi999 wrote:
| Isnt it that all google services are not available in china, so
| it might not be possible to use google maps inside china.
| fps_doug wrote:
| When it still was available they had a license, but only when
| using Google Maps _in_ China.
| mayli wrote:
| See the explanation on Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| My memory says that US government GPS at one point
| intentionally introduced reduction in accuracy/resolution as
| well, but they stopped, which was part of what led to the
| commercial GPS revolution (along with cheaper tech of course).
|
| Let's see... Wikipedia seems to confirm:
|
| > During the 1990s, GPS quality was degraded by the United
| States government in a program called "Selective Availability";
| this was discontinued on May 1, 2000 by a law signed by
| President Bill Clinton.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
| tomerv wrote:
| Interesting to note that the removal of selective
| availability enabled the creation of Geocaching (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching#History ).
| askvictor wrote:
| There were already workarounds in place before they
| switched off SA - the introduced error was consistent
| within a given area, so provided you had a fixed location
| that broadcast its coordinates, you could correct for the
| error. I believe there were products and possibly even
| standards that did all of this; would have been even easier
| in today's world of mobile internet. I have suspicions that
| this was a large reason for disabling SA - your enemy can
| work around it, so it's not much use, but if you get your
| enemy hooked on it without the work-around, you can turn SA
| back on in a war situation.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Also, WAAS https://www8.garmin.com/aboutGPS/waas.html
| [deleted]
| yborg wrote:
| It also enabled the modern mobile navigation industry. I
| was working on automotive navigation systems in the early
| 90s and SA was a killer for the product, options were
| various dead-reckoning and inertial sensors or differential
| GPS, both of which ended up being cost-prohibitive. But you
| can't do usable route guidance with a 100m CEP in an urban
| area.
| londons_explore wrote:
| With modern high powered CPU's, more detailed maps, and
| particle filters (which require all that cpu), dead
| reckoning has become much more viable.
|
| I suspect you could go hours driving round a city with
| the GPS and WiFi location turned off before losing your
| position - simple wheel speed, gyro and compass is
| sufficient for most stuff.
| NickNameNick wrote:
| You'd also need to account for slope.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| When turn-by-turn directions specify traveling 1 mile
| down a very steep grade, do they mean 1 mile along the
| slope, or 1 mile along a flattened map?
|
| Only the former would match the car's odometer, of
| course.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| I'll be overjoyed the day that the compass in the vehicle
| can tell my phone what direction the vehicle is pointed
| to avoid making a left instead of a right out of a
| driveway. Yes, there are solutions to these problems in
| theory, but in real-world application today they're still
| pretty lame / inaccurate, and the solutions still seem
| far away (try getting a few auto mfgs to agree to a
| standard way of communicating a compass heading to a
| phone over CarPlay or Android Auto)
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I've used a phone that didn't have a built in compass and
| one that does. The one that has an actual compass knows
| which direction I'm facing even without moving. The one
| that didn't would usually have no idea until I started
| moving.
|
| They make external GPS units that plug into your car and
| connect to your phone wirelessly for example Garmin GLO
| that are supposed to improve accuracy although I haven't
| used one myself and thus can't vouch for it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The built in compass in a phone is pretty inaccurate for
| driving because it can't compensate for the unknown shape
| of the body shell of the car it's in.
| exikyut wrote:
| Hmmm. What about the sensors on my phone? For a while now
| I've wanted to know my realtime speed in the underground
| sections of the local rail/metro network.
|
| I suspect the most accurate measurements would be done
| using wideband SDR, iff I were able to acquire absolute
| position references for the signals I was seeing. Not
| likely, especially for something I might like to let
| others play with and/or generalize.
|
| Everywhere I read about the subject the general consensus
| is that using accelerometer and gyro data from the
| average phone is a fool's errand. I have zero experience
| with the field so I wouldn't know if failure was
| incorrect signal processing or just had sensors.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Without wheel speed sensors, distance and speed errors
| quickly accumulate.
|
| With a particle filter and enough computation, that error
| can be eliminated _after the fact_. Ie. At the time you
| won 't know where you are, but after you get out of the
| metro and the particle filter reconverged you'll know
| where you were with more accuracy at some point in the
| past.
| acomjean wrote:
| When I was a civil engineer last century gps accuracy was an
| issue because people wanted to use gps for surveying. They
| came up with a system that would use 2 receivers and a radio
| between them to get much higher accuracies.
|
| https://www.e-education.psu.edu/natureofgeoinfo/book/export/.
| ..
|
| I think the US Government can also shut it off at a moments
| notice.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| Those two radio systems are still used. Just that many
| states have CORS sites that post correction information.
| salty_biscuits wrote:
| There are two frequencies (sometimes three) transmitted by
| the satellites. Using two frequencies allows certain
| atmospheric delays to be accurately estimated. Trouble is
| only one code is available for civilian applications. The
| trick with two receivers is to solve for the phase of
| secret signal (rather than decode it) by solving an integer
| least squares problem. This allows accuracy of the order of
| +/- 5cm
| myself248 wrote:
| There are multiple civilian frequencies available now,
| and cheap receivers for 'em. I have a pair of F9P's
| running at present, and just received some GT-U12's for
| testing.
| sorenjan wrote:
| Mobile phones use dual frequencies now. Some use the
| Broadcom BCM47755 chip, but the most common ones are
| various Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs.
|
| https://www.broadcom.com/products/wireless/gnss-gps-
| socs/bcm...
|
| https://www.euspa.europa.eu/newsroom/news/qualcomm-
| launches-...
|
| https://www.gpsworld.com/qualcomm-launches-3-dual-
| frequency-...
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| They could, but multiple governments now publicly broadcast
| from similar constellations, so it wouldn't have nearly as
| much benefit for them to do so.
|
| Modern dirt cheap receivers can pick up European, Chinese,
| Russian, etc. constellations for location just as well as
| the American one.
| cookguyruffles wrote:
| Always wondered about this, can overlapping systems be
| used simultaneously for higher reliability or precision?
| Badfood wrote:
| Surprisingly the answer is most often no, however in poor
| signal areas like in a city or under canopy the answer is
| yes as you are more likely to get a signal from the
| remaining bits of sky view.
|
| The other benefit is when doing PPP the convergence time
| is dramatically shorter with multi constellation.
|
| When doing RTK most receivers will use only GPS, as it is
| generally the most accurate, but it can and will use
| GLONASS occasionally. I have never seen one use beidu or
| Galileo
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| What is the accuracy of GPS surveying?
|
| I briefely looked through the pdf, and probally missed it?
|
| I live in the Bay Area, and homeowners are concerned over a
| few inches.
|
| (There's a huge need for cheap surveys. Until GPS gets it
| to under a inch, traditional surveys will off pipes, and
| landmarks, is here to stay? Or, am I wrong?)
| stonogo wrote:
| Civil and mining engineers have been making use of
| centimeter-accurate GNSS configurations for years now.
| The equipment necessary costs a few thousand dollars,
| more if you need even more precision. Most major civil
| and mining engineering projects use self-guided earth-
| moving equipment, not feasible without this technology.
|
| The problem for homeowners is that surveys aren't enough.
| The vast majority of land titles are not registered in
| precise coordinates; they're registered in terms of
| landmarks, benchmarks, and so forth. This is changing at
| a glacial pace, but for now, the tech isn't the problem.
| ac29 wrote:
| RTK has an accuracy of around 1cm. Its widely used by
| surveyors (and other things like agriculture,
| construction machine control, etc).
| nurgasemetey wrote:
| As I recall, it was due to plane crash and US had decided to
| make precise GPS available to public
| khuey wrote:
| After KAL007 was shot down by the Soviet Union in 1983
| Reagan announced the fuzzy GPS signal would be publicly
| available. The US government didn't turn off Selective
| Availability until the late 90s.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That's weird though as a reason. KAL007 was so far off
| course that the distortion of SA wouldn't have mattered.
| It only distorted location by a couple hundred metres at
| most.
| austinprete wrote:
| I read the GP as saying that SA GPS was originally made
| available as a result of the KAL007 crash, so presumably
| they didn't have access to GPS at all on the flight? Then
| much later the SA restriction was removed, unrelated to a
| plane crash.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Though KAL007 deviated from course not because of some
| INS fault but just because autopilot didn't switch into
| INS following mode at all. Most likely crew just forgot
| to flip the switch, so GPS availability wouldn't have
| helped anyway.
| moftz wrote:
| Being out in the middle of the ocean with only INS
| supposedly keeping you on track is different than a GPS
| receiver that you can look at and see that you are not
| where you should be. Obviously the same thing would
| happen if no one was paying any mind to the cockpit
| instruments but at least a GPS receiver offers a solid
| reference to compare against. I really can't imagine how
| nerve wracking it would be trying to fly a plane without
| INS or GPS over an ocean. Your navigator would do their
| best to keep track of location but you'd probably end up
| way off course by the time you saw land.
| [deleted]
| khuey wrote:
| Exactly.
| hlasdjlfhalwjk wrote:
| IIRC civil GPS chips won't work above a specific altitude or
| when moving above some speed limit. I think the idea was to
| prevent people from guiding missiles using those chips.
| Ndymium wrote:
| Seems this is an ITAR restriction and only applies to chips
| exported from the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_
| Positioning_System#Rest...
| liversage wrote:
| I've heard that just before Operation Desert Storm began in
| 1991 the reduced accuracy that affected civil GPS was
| temporarily turned off. This was a result of not being able
| to procure enough military grade GPS devices for army
| vehicles etc. If this is true it may also have had an effect
| on the decision to completely turn it off.
| URSpider94 wrote:
| This is different but related. China has no ability to
| influence GPS accuracy within its borders. What they do is
| manipulate all of the authoritative maps available so that
| GPS coordinates won't map cleanly to the digital waypoints in
| the map. The GPS locations are very precise, they are just
| off by as much as a quarter mile in varying directions
| depending on where in the county you are.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > This is different but related. China has no ability to
| influence GPS accuracy within its borders.
|
| FYI: And even far outside of them too
| virtue3 wrote:
| I don't think so Tim.
|
| https://spacenews.com/pentagon-report-china-amassing-
| arsenal...
| URSpider94 wrote:
| At this point, destroying the positioning network/s would
| be mutually assured destruction. Pretty much every
| country relies on those networks equally for controlling
| their own vehicles and weaponry.
| virtue3 wrote:
| Some of those systems do. Not all.
|
| " It is an Inertial Guidance System with an additional
| Star-Sighting system (this combination is known as astro-
| inertial guidance), which is used to correct small
| position and velocity errors that result from launch
| condition uncertainties due to errors in the submarine
| navigation system and errors that may have accumulated in
| the guidance system during the flight due to imperfect
| instrument calibration. GPS has been used on some test
| flights but is assumed not to be available for a real
| mission. "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(missile)
|
| Tomahawk missiles are also fed a navigation package
| before launch which allows them to navigate without
| additional signals (I'm sure accuracy goes up if they do
| have GPS available). I believe it's something akin to
| terrain maps that it can use to navigate to it's target.
|
| I would argue that any nation that is reliant on those
| public networks to be effective are going to lose within
| minutes of an actual conflict.
|
| I believe it's already established that the Russians are
| capable of completely blocking out GPS signals.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/vladimir-putin/russia-
| spoofing-...
|
| So no, I don't think we'd be facing mutually assured
| destruction.
|
| Now the impact on civilian life if some nation decided to
| start the space wars? Catastrophic. We'd basically block
| off space for the next 100 years because of deadly debris
| in orbit :/
| ls612 wrote:
| The current ASAT weapons can only hit targets in low
| earth orbit, and the GPS sats are way above that.
| Anything that high up that is military run also likely
| has capability to maneuver to avoid something shot from
| the surface (which will take a lot of time to get up that
| high even if it has enough energy).
| virtue3 wrote:
| "China already has operational ground-based missiles that
| can hit satellites in low-Earth orbit and "probably
| intends to pursue additional ASAT weapons capable of
| destroying satellites up to geosynchronous Earth orbit,"
| says the Defense Department's annual report to Congress
| on China's military capabilities."
|
| The problem with defending a satellite is the missile
| really only needs to get kinda close. And yeah,
| relativistic speeds and distances in space are huge, but
| I would find it hard to believe we could defend our
| satellites in any meaningful way against a nation-state
| level threat.
| skyfaller wrote:
| Can OpenStreetMap or someone make non-authoritative maps,
| or is this impossible without the cooperation of people on
| the ground who cannot operate safely within the borders of
| China?
| Uberphallus wrote:
| It's "impossible".
|
| Private, independent geographical surveying is illegal in
| China. [0] So technically you can't do it even in the
| local coordinate system.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geograp
| hic_dat...
| Closi wrote:
| But I guess to OPs point, you could make a non-
| authoritative map based on satellite imagery, it just
| wouldn't be legal to use in China.
| fps_doug wrote:
| OSM has an extensive article about mapping in China.
| Generally it's not allowed. Still, in the bigger OSM is
| quite accurate. :>
| Uberphallus wrote:
| Anything that can be seen from a satellite is quite
| accurate, that's true, but oftentimes things like number
| of lanes, type or direction of the roads is unknown,
| footpaths in rural areas are very spotty. Basically
| anything that requires local human verification
| (addresses, business location, etc) is off limits and
| accuracy in those points comes from pre-ban times (or
| illegal activity).
| [deleted]
| catillac wrote:
| At one point we spent some time reverse engineering the
| Chinese coordinate system, it's actually quite
| fascinating. So terrible though.
|
| But OSM actually doesn't use that system! They use the
| normal coordinate system, which makes them unique across
| mapping services (and also a good tool to use to RE
| geojson away from chinas system).
| klyrs wrote:
| Circa 1999, I was a member of a search and rescue team
| through the explorer scouts. We got to carry milspec GPS
| devices on a hike once, because the forestry service wanted
| accurate maps of some trails. We were under strict orders not
| to deviate from the trail or tamper with the devices. Very
| fun cloak&dagger atmosphere for what was otherwise a lovely
| walk in a park. Hilarious that the need for such missions was
| obviated a few months later
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I love walking around with purpose. Like when my car didn't
| have a tire iron in it, so I walked home and walked back in
| ratty clothes with a tire iron through a couple miles of
| nice neighbourhood.
| joshuaheard wrote:
| Yes, when it first came out, it was a boon for cruising
| sailors such as myself who were using radio-based Loran up to
| that time. If I remember correctly, the civilian resolution
| was originally 50 meters, then lowered to 10 meters. I
| believe it is 1 meter today.
| captainmuon wrote:
| I've found that the maps match the GPS of my phone exactly, but
| the satellite pictures are shifted.
|
| Does that mean: 1) My GPS module also gives out obfuscated
| coordinates when in China or 2) Google uses shifted satellite
| images?
| gruez wrote:
| Neither. The satellite images are accurate, and so is your
| GPS readout. What's shifted is the official data that the
| government provides (eg. location of roads).
|
| more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964450
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I've found that the maps match the GPS of my phone exactly
|
| I can use OpenStreetMap fine in China. But that's not Chinese
| data.
|
| If a Chinese person sends me a location marker on WeChat, the
| marker will show up (for me, in WeChat) at some other,
| unintended, location; I can't use that feature at all.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I wish I had saved some of the links I had found, one source
| I read said that the non-satellite map data was actually
| correct, and it was the stitching of the satellite imagery
| that was incorrect. I had no way to test this and no other
| source mentioned this, so I ignored it. But it's funny you
| mention this, #2 might be the case.
|
| robotastronaut also corrected me that it's not actually the
| GPS that is being obfuscated, but the map coordinate system.
| So your GPS device is probably receiving correct results, but
| on an improperly projected map.
| SECProto wrote:
| > one source I read said that the non-satellite map data
| was actually correct, and it was the stitching of the
| satellite imagery that was incorrect
|
| The opposite is true: If you look at areas like the Macau-
| Zhuhai border or Hong Kong-Shenzhen, you'll see that the
| satellite imagery is continuous but the mapping data has
| discontinuities at the border (some zhuhai streets are
| halfway across the water to Macau!)
| baybal2 wrote:
| > But Google Maps doesn't do it, for political reasons I
| suppose?
|
| FYI: Google has never really quit China. It has running offices
| in Beijing, Foshan, and, recently, Shenzhen.
| nroets wrote:
| All Google products except the Google Translate App are blocked
| in China. So no Google maps.
|
| I spent 2 months cycling China from Hong Kong to Beijing.
| Despite only using Chinese characters, Baidu maps worked very
| well for me. I copied the characters I needed (Hotel,
| supermarket) into it from the translator.
|
| Here's my journal https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/5000years
| woutr_be wrote:
| Regarding the "foreigners can't stay here", from what I know,
| this is because it requires extra work for hotels, they need
| to report your stay to the local police station, so usually
| smaller hotels, or the ones in non touristy cities just don't
| do that. (And I believe that any tourist, needs to report
| their address to the local police station within a few days)
| 3v1n0 wrote:
| Something similar happens in Cuba as well.
|
| There are cheaper places where only locals can go (and till
| some years ago, also the other way around was true)
| Insanity wrote:
| Really nice photos, must have been quite the trip!
| zmk_ wrote:
| They work very well via VPN. I used Google's navigation in
| Shanghai.
| yannis wrote:
| Thanks for posting it. Very interesting to read.
| systematical wrote:
| I learned earlier today that the little google street view man
| nopes the fuck out of Kabal.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > But Google Maps doesn't do it, for political reasons I
| suppose?
|
| Or whoever is in charge of importing the data simply doesn't
| know that different coordinate systems is a thing. You'd be
| surprised how many GIS professionals are oblivious to this,
| especially ones in charge of things that tend to spill large
| amounts of oil into the environment when they get it wrong:
| https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/london-club-warni...
| camillomiller wrote:
| Can confirm, the map in China is correct, but completely
| useless. Most addresses are not recognized or easily mistaken
| for other similar ones. Plus, the entire layer of business and
| POI listings that give GMaps its competitive edge are not
| there. It feels like using a foldable paper map.
| azidemakes wrote:
| When I last went in late 2018, it was not corrected for on the
| satellite maps. Google maps was still usable for walking
| directions, however.
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| I can't wait for the BBC to publish an article about the
| inaccuracies in China ...
| dirtyid wrote:
| Have you checked out South Korea?
| varenc wrote:
| South Korean on GMaps feel likes a snapshot of 2009. Whereas
| the rest of Google Maps has switched to something vector
| based, South Korea still has tiling based map images with
| different images for different zoom levels and the place
| names just baked into the image. Any idea why? Apple Maps is
| great in comparison.
| xxpor wrote:
| It's a similar law to what's discussed here. The
| justification is protection from NK.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Could it be a licensing issue?
|
| Naver Maps has really good street view and very accurate
| maps in SK.
|
| https://map.naver.com/
| xxpor wrote:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/goo
| gle...
| AYBABTME wrote:
| My reading of the situation is that it's a convenient
| "national security issue" which happens to favor SK
| companies and insulate them from having to compete head-
| to-head with Google Maps.
|
| Turn-by-turn navigation also doesn't work using Google
| Maps. Meanwhile SK navigation apps like Naver Maps or
| Kakao Maps have really poor navigation features if you
| compare to what you'd have using Google Maps on an
| American road.
|
| The end result is that consumers suffer, since artificial
| market protection leads to an inferior product and no
| real need to improve and compete by players on the local
| market.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Some more info: https://ogleearth.com/2012/07/constraining-
| online-maps-the-c...
|
| >Why is Google's Korean map behaving this way? In short,
| because of Korea's Spatial Data Industry Promotion Act from
| 2009, specifically Article 7, which states that:
|
| >Spatial data business operators may produce and distribute
| any processed spatial data. In such cases, processed
| spatial data shall not include any spatial data on any
| military base provided for in subparagraph 1 of Article 2
| of the Protection of Military Bases and Installations Act
| nor on any military installation provided for in
| subparagraph 2 of the said Article.
|
| >And considering the existence of the most heavily
| militarized border on the planet between North Korea and
| South Korea, this means a substantial part of South Korea
| is riddled with military installations.
|
| >By limiting the maximum resolution of its Korean imagery
| on maps.google.co.kr, Google appears to have satisfied
| Korean regulators that it is obeying the relevant Korean
| laws. Thus, Google avoids having to blur or otherwise
| censor the satellite imagery base layer for Korea --
| something which it has successfully managed to avoid in
| China, India and elsewhere.
|
| Write up about Apples courser application
|
| https://ogleearth.com/2012/07/apple-censors-ipad-maps-app-
| ov...
| neycoda wrote:
| > China uses GCJ-02, sometimes called Mars Coordinates. Part of
| GCJ-02 is an algorithm that obfuscates the results
|
| Why would a space agency use a coordinate system to obfuscate
| results on another planet?
| ryandrake wrote:
| My understanding is that all agreements with Chinese map data
| providers require that map software implementors only display
| data projected into the "obfuscated" coordinate system, and the
| agreements forbid un-projecting back into "real world" WGS-84,
| regardless of how simple the algorithm is. So, it's more of a
| business agreement and less of a political thing, but with
| China there isn't much of a difference.
| freewizard wrote:
| What I learned a few years back about this is the official
| (un)obfuscating implementation was distributed to licensed
| companies in binary .dll/.so/.a , and not allowed to be
| redistributed or reverse-engineered. Licenses are only given to
| local companies, and foreign companies may only buy service
| from them. That's why if you reverse engineer Google Map or
| Apple Map app, they all make real time API calls to do the
| conversion on servers. Those contracts may also limit the end
| user who can consume these APIs to be in China, hence foreign
| users will see the shifts of roads/etc.
|
| The open-sourced implementation one may find on the internet
| are probably thru sth like curve fitting by sampling many data
| points. It may have good enough approximations but may not work
| one day if the gov agency decides to change the algorithm.
| Changing algorithm is a backward compatibility hell but not a
| big problem for the industry actually, because most Map apps
| are owned by big corp which has resource and motivation to
| comply.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| > distributed to licensed companies in binary .dll/.so/.a ,
| and not allowed to be redistributed or reverse-engineered
|
| Such irony in CCP using licensing to protect their IP
| seniorivn wrote:
| only if you have misconception about what ccp and other one
| party states actually are
| mastazi wrote:
| > you have misconception
|
| and what's the "correct-conception"?[1]
|
| I'm curious because I get what parent means in terms of
| intellectual property issues in China but I don't get
| what do you mean from your comment, especially the fact
| that you include "other party states" - is it some sort
| of general rule that you're hinting at?
|
| [1] funny, I just realised that there is no antonym of
| "misconception"
| iratewizard wrote:
| Maybe he means that China is less like a country and more
| like an organized crime syndicate wearing a nation's
| clothes?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Like US during McCarthy era.
| mastazi wrote:
| I had the impression that parent was implying that it's
| not surprising for China to invoke IP protection - which
| is not the case with crime syndicates for obvious
| reasons.
| mncharity wrote:
| Verconception? - truth, 7 hits on google.
| Orthoconception? - straight, also 7 hits. Benconception?
| - good, 80 hits off topic. What else...?
|
| At least in science education, misconceptions are so
| vastly more common than correct conceptions, that it
| makes sense there's a compact negative form but not a
| positive one. /s
| [deleted]
| leephillips wrote:
| Not really funny, as nouns in general do not have
| antonyms.
| mastazi wrote:
| Generally nouns prefixed with mis- do; sometimes you just
| remove the mis- part eg. understanding vs
| misunderstanding, management vs mismanagement etc.
| [deleted]
| leephillips wrote:
| You make my point. Your examples are not pairs of
| antonyms. Management is not the opposite of
| mismanagement.
| [deleted]
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| If you think you know better what the CCP is, why don't
| you educate us?
| rhizome wrote:
| Hey, I'll bite: they are a thousands-year old country who
| has seen nations like the US and protectionist strategies
| like IP law come and go for centuries. They probably know
| what the US is going to do before the US knows what
| they're going to do, and certainly before the US knows
| what CCP is going to do.
| chii wrote:
| > they are a thousands-year old country
|
| china, the ethnicity, is indeed thousands years old. CCP,
| however, is barely over 70 yrs old.
| Xixi wrote:
| Nickpicking: the CCP foundational congress was held on 23
| July 1921, making it 100 years old in a couple of month.
| The Red Army was founded on 15 July 1927, which is why it
| is generally assumed (seriously or not, I don't know)
| that China aims at reuniting with Taiwan before 2027.
|
| But the CCP has been controlling mainland China for a
| little bit over 70 years, indeed.
| dronesoul wrote:
| to be even more correct, china isn't one culture or one
| ethnicity. it covers a huge area, and especially before
| modern times, it was composed of a lot of different
| cultures and ethnicities, with a shitload of different
| languages and customs. CCP and other earlier powers
| (Emperors?) just brought them all, or large chunks, under
| a common flag.
| yakubin wrote:
| Most importantly, a common writing system, common to a
| huge area. One that mathematicians successfully took
| inspiration from and repeated the success of universality
| at an even greater scale.
| eruci wrote:
| It is fun to see such a discussion - I've been working on my
| own implementation of de-obfuscating Mars Coordinates since
| January 2021 with very good results. And Yes, some curve
| fitting is involved.
|
| At the end of the day they may obfuscate coordinates and blur
| maps, but the truth will eventually come out.
| humaniania wrote:
| "they all make real time API calls to do the conversion on
| servers"
|
| Can't imagine why anyone would want that to happen.....
| sneak wrote:
| You seem to be implying surveillance. I think the actual
| answer is "because if the library were downloadable, the
| algorithm used for military physical security would be
| quickly reverse-engineered."
| supernova87a wrote:
| _> I learned a few interesting facts, blurry Israel being one
| of them._
|
| Yes, Israel specifically has favor from the US government that
| satellite imagery of that country is allowed to be blurred:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment...
| .
| duckmysick wrote:
| The BBC article in the submission mentions this restriction
| and the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment.
| mavhc wrote:
| https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@42.4300052,130.6278764,3096m/...
| China's roads appearing to cross into Russia.
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/oDwCuGhxxZVSj7nJ6 Hong Kong/China border
| bridges
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| Indeed, there's a Half As Interesting video talking about this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Di-UVC-_4
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > Turns out this is very intentional, and China uses a
| different geographic coordinate system than the rest of the
| world. WGS-84 is the most common coordinate system, but China
| uses GCJ-02, sometimes called Mars Coordinates. Part of GCJ-02
| is an algorithm that obfuscates the results. So applying any
| GCJ-02 coordinate to a globe using WGS-84 coordinates gets
| distorted like a funhouse mirror.
|
| A lot of countries use their own coordinate systems, that make
| their countries look flat on a x/y plane. Eg. my country -
| slovenia.
|
| Usually those coordinate systems are easy to calculate to wgs84
| or web mercator projection[0], compared to the chinese solution
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection
| xikrib wrote:
| So that Israel can draw its own borders without the criticism of
| 'international treaties' or 'human rights'
| hereme888 wrote:
| Israel gets criticized every day, and often at the UN. Most of
| it is unfair criticism.
| 2rsf wrote:
| Did you even tried to open Google maps on the area? even at the
| lower resolution you can clearly see houses and roads
| askvictor wrote:
| Here's an interesting article I came across last month concerning
| a couple of archaeologists bumping against this problem (tldr -
| some non-US companies take hi-res satellite photos, and provide
| them at a cost)
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-05/archaeologists-accide...
| caf wrote:
| Wikipedia (of course!) has a list of locations intentionally
| blurred on public satellite map services:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w...
| alluro2 wrote:
| That's interesting - the one in Antarctica, for example, really
| tickles the fantasy, doesn't it.
| slim wrote:
| This declassified video is maybe relevant
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ujx_pND9wg
| circularfoyers wrote:
| Not really. The reason seems pretty straight forward to me,
| "The vast majority of Antarctica is also in low resolution
| due to the bright, often featureless, ice and snow making
| high-resolution imaging both difficult and largely
| unnecessary".
| flyGuyOnTheSly wrote:
| If they were truly hiding some secret villain's lair, why
| wouldn't they cover their tracks by making it look like any
| other expanse of white snow?
| cutemonster wrote:
| Why not do both
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Whoa that is pretty interesting.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| That's where they activate the portal duh. Don't tell anyone,
| lives depend on it, human and non-humanoid.
| andyxor wrote:
| probably for the same reason Israel is blurred, to protect it
| against terrorist attacks, and the algorithm is probably dumb
| enough to bundle Israel and Gaza into one territory in some geo
| index
| 2rsf wrote:
| I bet on that although this is really stupid since houses and
| roads are clearly visible and most of Israel is mapped at
| street level as well
| KryptoKlown wrote:
| My address actually isn't even listed on google maps. I tried to
| rectify the situation but they wanted proof which baffled me
| because how do I prove where I live when they're the ones with
| the damn satellites?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| They probably just wanted a proof of residence such as a
| Utility Bill.
| sumedh wrote:
| Give them your utility bill with your address?
| sequoia wrote:
| Tangentially related but where does this come from and why is it
| so widely repeated (as in this article):
|
| > ...Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world
|
| I've seen this claim (both in the "one of the most..." and "
| _the_ #1 most... " forms) many times and I don't know where it
| comes from. What am I missing?
|
| Here[0] wikipedia says Gaza Strip has ~5,046/sqkm. I thought
| maybe Gaza City was meant, it's density is 13,000/sqkm[1].
| Neither of these come close to ranking on wikipedias list of
| cities by population density[2], and I haven't been able to find
| any "most populated places" lists that list anything below 15,000
| people per square kilometer, which Gaza city is well below.
|
| Is the BBC just plain wrong here or am I missing something? I
| hope it's me because if it's the former, that says something
| really bad about their fact checking and would suggest that BBC
| is not a reliable/trustworthy source, at least on this topic.
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip 1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_City 2: https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density
| jcranmer wrote:
| You're probably missing this listing:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
|
| Where Gaza listed as its own country, it would be one of the
| densest, since it's basically a city and its urban sprawl and
| nothing more (like the other densest entries on the list). Of
| course, Gaza is itself arguably only part of Palestine, but the
| West Bank itself is pretty dense (see how high Palestine ranks
| on that list).
| sequoia wrote:
| Looking at the country list, I see Israel is the #5 most
| densely populated country in the world. And Bnei Brak is the
| #5 most densely populated city, far more densely populated
| than Gaza. Bnei Brak was hit by rockets this week.
|
| Can you link me to some articles that refer to "Hamas firing
| rockets on Bnei Brak, one of the most densely populated
| cities in the world"? Or "on israel, one of the most densely
| populated countries"?
|
| If not, my question for you is: why do we see this phrase so
| commonly in reporting on Gaza but not on other _more_ densely
| populated areas?
| nl wrote:
| > And Bnei Brak is the #5 most densely populated city, far
| more densely populated than Gaza.
|
| This is only because the term "city" is used inconsistently
| around the world. Bnei Brak is part of the district of Tel
| Aviv, and most geographers would consider it part of the
| Tel Aviv-Yafo urban agglomerations[1].
|
| The absolute size of an area puts a ceiling on the density
| - roads etc take up space, and the larger the area the more
| likely it is to include freeways, or hit geographic
| features that limit density.
|
| It would be better to think of it as a 7 sq km district,
| and as such its density (29,345 people per square km) isn't
| particularly high[2]. Looking at districts with similar
| geographic size Imbaba in Cairo is 8 square km and has a
| density of 177,038 per square km, or Gungoren in Turkey is
| 8 sq km and has a density of 41,349 people per km. If we
| look at similar populations (204,639) then Manhattan
| Community Board 7 (population 207,699) has a density of
| 42,387 people per sq km, or Zaveri Bazar (pop 202,922) has
| a density of 114,001 people per sq km.
|
| So yes, Bnei Brak is dense, but not especially so by
| comparable urban area standards.
|
| [1] https://www.intechopen.com/books/urban-
| agglomeration/charact...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_city_districts_by
| _popu...
| smileybarry wrote:
| Bnei Brak is part of the "Tel Aviv metropolitan area" but
| it's not part of the _city_ of Tel Aviv, in the classic
| meaning: it has its own municipality, budgets, taxing
| system, etc. Counting it as the same city in any meaning
| would be wrong as the two have very different goals re:
| neighborhood design, density, commercial business focus,
| events, city services, etc.
| nl wrote:
| It's part of
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Aviv_District
|
| Many "cities" have political structures similar to what
| you describe.
| golergka wrote:
| Same reason that this conflict always gets the same optics
| in international media -- jewish lives are worth less. At
| first, as you don't want to believe it, you argue, you
| investigate, you really try to find any sane reason that
| while these things are happening on ground with you and
| your family, everybody else still sees a different picture,
| and then you just come to realisation that there's no other
| explanation for it.
| kennywinker wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear you're living through violence. That
| sounds horrible, and I hope you and your family are safe.
|
| I see you conflating criticism of the actions of the
| Israeli government with opposition to Jewish lives. They
| are not the same. I oppose the Israeli government's
| policies and actions towards Palestine, but that does not
| mean I wish harm on you or your family, nor does it mean
| I don't see and value the Israeli lives lost during this
| conflict. There ARE other explanations for it.
| golergka wrote:
| > I see you conflating criticism of the actions of the
| Israeli government with opposition to Jewish lives.
|
| No. I'm saying that putting israeli government under a
| completely different set of standards than any other
| country in the world cannot be explained with anything
| else rather than pure anti-semitism.
| M277 wrote:
| What different standards do you mean?
| golergka wrote:
| I've never, in any other conflict, witnessed a public
| opinion on the side of the aggressor. I've never, in any
| other conflict, seen an army that's not fighting
| overseas, but is desperately trying to prevent massive
| loss of life in it's own population, accused of
| "disproportionate" response -- even though it would take
| measures to prevent any casualties that are completely
| unprecedented in world practices and makes achieving it's
| goals (see above) significantly harder. I've never in my
| life seen calls for genocide of entire nation (that's
| exactly what "from the river to the sea" means, if you're
| not aware) widely supported through out the world.
|
| Every time this conflict happens again, I can't help but
| realise that if it was not for IDF, my family would have
| long have been brutally killed, and all those first-world
| liberals who're so busy fighting for their causes
| wouldn't even mind.
| 34679 wrote:
| If you lock a dog in a cage and starve it, who's the
| aggressor when it eventually bites you?
| betsushikime wrote:
| Yes, the coverage of the conflict is one-sided and
| popular opinion is on the side of the Palestinians. The
| reason for that is that the conflict itself is one-sided.
| Gaza is occupied by Israel.
|
| Further, Israel has the overwhelming advantage in
| military power and the Palestinians suffer the
| overwhelming majority of casualties every time there is
| conflict.
|
| In the 2008-09 war, the total number of Israeli citizens
| killed was 13, 10 of whom were combatants and 3 non-
| combatants (according to the IDF, see [1]). The total
| number of Palestinians killed was, depending on the
| source, between 1166 (IDF estimate) and 1440 (Palestinian
| ministry of Health, Gaza) [1].
|
| The IDF protects your homes and your families, yes. It
| also crushes the lives and obliterates the houses of the
| Palestinians. Public opinion is against Israel not
| because the IDF protects Israeli citizens, but because
| the IDF kills Palestinians.
|
| Finally, the IDF can protect your families and your
| homes, but there is nobody to protect the lives and homes
| of the Palestinians. Public opinion is their only shield
| and it doesn't stop bombs.
|
| My comment is by way of explanation, not by way of
| accusation.
|
| ____________
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_
| War_(20...
| bronzeage wrote:
| Gaza is literally not occupied by Israel. Israel withdrew
| all troops and even banished their own citizens from
| Gaza. All the Palestinians had to do was not be absolute
| savages and attack Israel after being given their land
| with no strings attached.
|
| Every single restriction put of Gaza was a direct result
| of the Palestinian's abuse of the disengagement to fire
| rockets and kidnap soldiers. All they had to do was
| simply live in peace, instead they proved to every
| watching Israeli that Palestinians are bloodthirsty
| savages. After the result of the disengagement from Gaza
| being this, only radical left in Israel even contemplates
| giving Palestinians sovereignty.
| sequoia wrote:
| @dang how do you "report" comments?
|
| BronzeAge: a lot of the facts you are reporting are true
| and you're sharing an important perspective that's
| missing in this conversation but your comment is turned
| into complete garbage by the fact that you're
| dehumanizing the Palestinians and making yourself look
| like a genocidal idiot. Stop!! If you have useful
| criticisms and perspective to add (as you clearly do),
| add them, and leave out the racism and bloodlust. I don't
| care how "accurate" the rest of your analysis is you
| can't call a whole population savages, it's the
| dehumanizing precursor to mass violence.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I'll point out that bronzeage's comment strikes me as
| stage 4 of genocide (see
| http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/
| for a description of the different stages).
|
| And of the various stages, stage 4 is the most critical
| one to me: the prior stages are all things that exist in
| generally healthy societies, because it's really, really
| hard to stamp out discrimination (that doesn't mean we
| shouldn't try!), but stage 4 is where the rhetoric about
| outright extermination is built. Everything that comes
| afterwards is more or less about turning the slaughter
| from one-off incidents into a systematic slaughter
| machine.
| golergka wrote:
| There is nothing racist or inaccurate in the comment
| you're replying to. I understand why you might think so,
| but I can assure you, it just means that you dramatically
| misunderstand the situation.
| betsushikime wrote:
| I can't reply to bronzeage's comment above so I'm adding
| my comment here.
|
| > Gaza is literally not occupied by Israel.
|
| That is according to Israel and I believe also the US.
| Everyone else, including the UN, most world governments,
| international organisations etc consider Gaza to be still
| occupied, despite the "disengagement".
|
| In practical terms, the "disengagement" means nothing.
| Gaza is penned in and the Palestinians have nowhere to
| go. The IDF goes in anytime it likes.
|
| More accurately, Gaza would be described as a vast
| prison, but I think "occupied territory" is a milder and
| less shocking description, so actually kinder to Israel.
| In truth, what Israel is doing to Gaza and its
| inhabitants is unprecedented in world history and will
| drag Israel's reputation to the gutter for generations to
| come.
| gataca wrote:
| How do you explain the same exact global reaction in
| 2006, when Hezbollah started a war by kidnapping and
| killing Israeli soldiers on the border and firing
| missiles into Israel? Massive protests, 'Israel is
| committing war crimes/genocide', followed by
| international condemnation.
|
| OP that you're responding to is exactly correct - there
| is zero outrage against the Syrian or Yemen Civil war
| (where Iranian-funded troops have starved thousands of
| people to death). Same goes for the war between Armenia
| and Azerbaijan. Same goes for Ethiopia vs Tigray.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| While I agree that there should be more outrage about
| other tragedies, "Better than Syria" is not the standard
| that I want to hold my country to, so I don't engage in
| such arguments. We (Israel) consider ourselves to be a
| western nation, with western ideals and standards. And so
| it is reasonable that we'd be called out if we fail to
| live up to the standards of the crowd we want to hang out
| with. I'd be disappointed if we started to be grouped
| along with Syria and Yemen.
| gataca wrote:
| I wasn't referring to Israeli actions vs Syria, which are
| clearly not comparable, but the difference in reactions.
| If you think that the protests calling Israel an illegal
| state are just trying to hold Israel to a higher standard
| then you are clearly misinterpreting what is happening.
| They're chanting "From the river to the sea" not "Hold
| yourselves to a higher standard".
| names_are_hard wrote:
| Fair enough, I think there are a lot of protestors (in
| real life as well as on Twitter) that have entirely
| unrealistic goals, hoping for an ideal situation but not
| really thinking through what the ramifications of their
| plan would be. I've seen this among "Greater Israel"
| Israelis as well - I once had a long chat with a settler
| in the Jordan Valley region about how he envisions
| annexation working out, the best he could come up with
| was "all the Palestinians will voluntarily move to
| Canada, which will take them in because Trump is going to
| broker a deal". Not exactly the strongest answer to
| accusations of ethnic cleansing.
|
| To be clear, anyone hoping for "from the river to the
| sea" is not in touch with the reality in the region. The
| only way that could happen is with a terrible war that
| would make the current war look like a small scuffle. I'm
| pretty sure there's no diplomatic path from where we are
| today to a one state solution of any kind that doesn't
| take several generations, and we're not moving in the
| right direction.
| betsushikime wrote:
| Just to clarify, my comments here are no endorsement of
| calling Israel an illegal state in any way, shape or
| form.
| banannaise wrote:
| re: outrage at Israel and not at Syria, etc.:
|
| 1. Israeli bombings, unlike actions in Syria and Yemen,
| are directly funded by the United States, which makes
| them a highly relevant issue for Americans and for people
| concerned with America's role in geopolitics.
|
| 2. Visibility. Israel is given extreme favor in US
| political circles, but that ironically works against it
| in this case. Their struggles are highly visible, but as
| a result, so is their aggression.
|
| 3. We're working on it. International solidarity protests
| have seen a dramatic rise in recent years, but we can
| only learn so quickly.
| gataca wrote:
| Will start with point 1: Take Europe instead of just the
| US - protests in Europe against Israel with no equivalent
| against Iran or Russia, both of whom funded and sent
| troops to Syria where Assad has committed _actual_
| genocide leading to displacement of millions. Europe
| trades with Russia and Iran and could apply economic
| pressure. Where were the mass protests in the face of a
| humanitarian catastrophe or nerve gas attacks against
| civilians? No calls for the end of Russia or Iran as
| countries. Why do you think this is?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Take Europe instead of just the US - protests in Europe
| against Israel with no equivalent against Iran or Russia,
|
| The protests are because people are upset not simply at
| Israel, but at their own governments for not devoting
| energy to constraining Israel.
| betsushikime wrote:
| I don't remember the reaction to Hezbollah's attack. I
| remember the incident, but not the reaction in the news.
| If you felt that was one-sided, then I will defer to your
| opinion and accept that I don't have an explanation for
| it, other than the fact that news organisations are very
| often prejudiced and their reporting is dictated by their
| political affiliations.
|
| Regarding Syria, Yemen, Armenia and Ethiopia, perhaps you
| are right that the atrocities committed there are not
| given the same atttention in the news (it depends on
| where you are; in my country, Syria received the same
| amount of coverage, mainly because we received a large
| number of refugees from the war).
|
| However, even if those atrocities were given the same
| attention as the atrocities committed by Israel against
| the Palestinians, that would not necessarily mean that
| the latter atrocities would somehow be considered less
| severe, or that public opinion would turn against the
| Palestinians. Is that what you would expect?
|
| I should also say that the Palestinian issue has been
| going on for more than 40 years now without resolution
| and it's natural that there is more attention paid to it,
| if nothing else because everyone would like to see the
| end of it.
|
| In any case, realistically speaking, the occupation is a
| cause celebre and there's nothing anyone can do about
| that, except perhaps ending the occupation.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| Some of the things you're saying are true, but I think
| you need to make an effort to put yourself in the mindset
| of the other side. I live in Tel Aviv, I am sympathetic
| to the way you feel and know many fellow Israelis who
| feel the same way. But it's not an absolute, universal
| truth that the Palestinians are the aggressor. Just as
| convinced as you are that they are evil, bloodthirsty
| people hellbent on killing you, many of them are
| convinced the exact opposite - that you are all of those
| things toward them.
|
| I say this to everyone reading: if you can't understand
| your enemy, if you cannot fathom why they act the way
| they do, if you cannot get into their heads and hearts
| and empathize with them, you ought to wonder if you
| simply lack imagination or are living in a bubble.
| mcguire wrote:
| Israeli lives are worth at least $400 / year each to the
| United States, given the $3.3B annual aid and a
| population of 9M. Since 2007, when the US stopped
| economic aid, it's been entirely military aid.
| (https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/ISR)
|
| In total, Afghanistan gets more, $4.9B, but that only
| comes to $129 per Afghan. (That's the "you break it, you
| bought it" plan, I guess.) The next highest is Jordan,
| $1.7B or $170 per each. (Yeah, we're paying for both
| sides of this dust-up.) So I think we can agree that
| Jewish lives are worth quite a lot. Just wish they could
| get along with their neighbors.
| golergka wrote:
| This narrative about "aid" misses so much context that I
| it's almost the same as outright lying.
|
| Most of this "aid" is military equipment that sits unused
| in warehouses, and it's point is job programs for US
| defense industry. The rest is investment in military R&D
| that US will have access to, and given how good Israel is
| at R&D in general, and military R&D in particular, ROI on
| it is quite high.
| sequoia wrote:
| Just to clarify: these are the neighbours that expelled
| all their Jews leaving them refugees in Israel and also
| tried to destroy the country and many of which have not
| stopped trying for its entire history. Getting along
| takes two.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Just to clarify: these are the neighbours that expelled
| all their Jews leaving them refugees in Israel and also
| tried to destroy the country and many of which have not
| stopped trying for its entire history. Getting along
| takes two
|
| Sure, if you decide to start there. If you start a little
| further away, around WWI and before WWII, you have Jews
| settling lands where they were a small minority _en
| masse_ , and after WWII mass migration there ( for very
| good reasons), and active Jewish and Arab boycotts for a
| UN proposed and unfair towards the Arabs partition of the
| land ( like murdering the UN negotiator by Jews).
|
| Israel doesn't help its case for peaceful coexistence, if
| there is even such a case, by illegally occupying, ethnic
| cleansing and resettling Palestinian lands. If Israel
| wanted peace, it is the main party that can actually do
| something about it, but they do the opposite, up to and
| including that Israel is a country for Jews in their
| constitution, while refusing to acknowledge Palestine is
| a thing. Where should the Palestinians go?
| sequoia wrote:
| > Sure, if you decide to start there.
|
| You seem to imply that the ethnic cleansing of the Jews
| from Arab Muslim countries was "caused" by earlier
| events. Are you suggesting that the ethnic cleansing of
| Jews in all Arab-Muslim states was justified by some
| other Jews buying land?
| sofixa wrote:
| I'm saying the sectarian violence, including massacres
| and ethnic cleansing, on both sides, were caused by the
| mass Jewish migration, Zionist pretentions and ambitions,
| British policy in Palestine, among others.
|
| "Buying land" is a drastic simplification. When an ethnic
| group moves _en masse_ to a location inhabited mostly by
| another ethnic group, and claim the generic land around
| for their own religious and ethnic group, how can that
| not cause problems ? Why would the majority ethnic group
| in the location sit idly by while they get replaced?
| Especially when the colonial power in charge promises
| them independence, and also to give their homeland to the
| other ethnic group, and encourages their migration there?
| gataca wrote:
| What does Jews buying swamps in pre-state Israel have to
| do with Iraqi or Egyptian Jews, for example, who were
| ethnically cleansed? I'm not seeing the connection
| sofixa wrote:
| The connection is that once Zionism was an actual threat
| and Jews were trying to get the whole of Palestine, and
| massacres started on both sides, Muslims around the world
| took the side of their "brothers" in the "war".
| tomcooks wrote:
| Lol right, the rapist and the raped need to find a
| compromise
| names_are_hard wrote:
| Jordan isn't really the other side in this dust-up.
| Jordan and Israel get along these days (more or less),
| and I speculate that the money they both get from the US
| actually plays a part in that. The money the US gives
| countries around the world isn't just charity. It buys
| influence and the ability to decide who fights with who
| and when, among other things (like who buys what
| weapons).
| gataca wrote:
| looks like you hit a nerve by correctly diagnosing the
| situation.
| golemiprague wrote:
| Indeed, there is also the discussion on "proportionality"
| or "civilian buildings" which never appears in any other
| conflict. When proportinality is discussed it is always
| some demand from Israel to equal number of total killed,
| not the actual proportion of militants killed vs.
| civilians. Nobody suggest that Israel should kill 10
| civilians for each militant , which is the rate of
| Israeli killed by Gazans, one soldier and 10 civilians.
|
| Note also the diversion from "civilians" to "civilian
| buildings". Since the Gaza militant are operating from
| positions which are not distinuishable from regular
| civilian building the media now complains why those
| position are bombed. So now Israel is not allowed to kill
| militant because of the way the balcony looks. The more
| accurate and careful Israel become the media narrow the
| definition of what is a military target.
|
| Basically they demand different standards from Israel
| than from any other country, which is discrimination and
| therefore when directed to only one nation, racism.
|
| I am not surprised, media and politicians must cater for
| the growing Muslim population in western contry and to
| the overwhelming majority in social media, a billion
| Muslims vs 10 million Jews. Every claim by the Muslims is
| multiplied and reverberating by the echo chamber. So the
| media just follows to cater for them, it is a bit of
| decision besuiness and a bit of a political belief
| peppered with classic racism against Jews.
|
| If google had an option they would have been on the
| Muslims side with no hesitation, it is just the current
| laws that prevented them.
| deanCommie wrote:
| But more Palestenian lives are being lost. Purely from a
| numbers perspective if you put aside all other variables
| or blame, wouldn't that explain why one side is being
| criticized extra right now?
| LeoNatan25 wrote:
| How about criticizing Hamas, a terrorist organization,
| for shooting rockets at civilian populations of a country
| with one of the most advanced armies of the world?
|
| How about criticizing Hamas for shooting these rockets
| from civilian centers?
|
| Seems like the media is willfully ignorant here.
|
| Then you have nonsense like:
| https://www.vox.com/2014/7/17/5912189/yes-gaza-militants-
| hid...
|
| Clearly this smells foul.
| banannaise wrote:
| Are you asking Hamas to walk out into the desert and
| build a base there? This is equivalent to the
| Revolutionary War-era Brits telling the colonists to
| fight fairly instead of hiding in the woods. Fighting
| fair is for fair fights. In unfair fights, people use the
| tactics available to them. If Hamas were to build a
| purely military base, it would be leveled and everyone on
| it would be dead within two days. One might suspect at
| that point that they weren't seriously trying.
|
| It is not the Palestinians' job to submit quietly to
| gradual but violent displacement by an occupying outside
| force. It is also not the Palestinians' job to make a big
| show of getting murdered in an open field with honor.
| Those are not the requirements for a people to be
| defended from ethnic cleansing.
| runarberg wrote:
| > How about criticizing Hamas for shooting these rockets
| from civilian centers?
|
| Looking at google maps it sure seems that the IDF does
| the same, keeping their headquarters in the middle of
| densely populated center of Tel Aviv. Between a large
| hospital and a shopping mall.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/Israel+Defense+Forces/@
| 32....
|
| If you are gonna both-sides this, you should commit to
| it.
| sofixa wrote:
| > How about criticizing Hamas for shooting these rockets
| from civilian centers?
|
| How about criticizing Israel, a country with one of the
| most advanced militaries in the world, for bombing
| civilians that can't defend themselves, in retaliation
| for very basic level attacks by a terrorist group Israel
| is perfectly capable of defending itself from?
|
| Hamas are the bad guys, Israel are even worse because
| they could show restraint and not murder civilians, not
| evict Arabs and resettle their lands with Jews and all
| the other war crimey shit they do, yet they still do
| that, under a very corrupt leader that mostly stays in
| power with nationalistic and proto-fascistic rhetoric.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| How about criticizing both Hamas and Israel for shooting
| rockets at civilians? Blame can go both ways.
|
| On top of that, many people, me included, criticize
| Israel for illegally occupying Palestinian territory,
| stealing houses from Arab Israels, and generally treating
| Palestinians as second-rate citizens and worse. There's
| simply no excuse for that.
|
| Imagine yourself in a situation like that. Whatever you
| do, whoever you complain to, the situation only gets
| worse. You're helpless against enormous injustice. While
| I don't condone violence, I do understand why people
| resort to violence when everything else fails.
| golergka wrote:
| > Purely from a numbers perspective if you put aside all
| other variables
|
| Why would you put aside variables that are more important
| to casualty numbers? It's not a symmetrical situation.
|
| One side tries to increase casualty numbers on both sides
| of the conflict.
|
| The other side tries to decrease casualty numbers on both
| sides of the conflict.
|
| How would comparing casualty numbers in this situation
| tell you anything about the conflict?
| deanCommie wrote:
| First of all, Israel's goal is not to decrease
| casualties: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/an-eye-
| for-a-tooth/
|
| Second of all, even if I accept your premise, that "One
| side tries to increase casualty numbers on both sides of
| the conflict. The other side tries to decrease casualty
| numbers on both sides of the conflict.", then clearly
| it's not working, right?
|
| Regardless of motivations, the outcome is Palestinian
| lives are being lost at a disproportionally higher rate
| than Israeli. That must be understood.
|
| The standard Israeli response to this is "Hamas uses
| human shields." OK....so you know this, and are still
| shooting missiles. That means you are knowingly killing
| human shields.
|
| OK, so maybe these human shields are protecting military
| equipment. Military equipment that is primitive and is
| completely neutralized by the Iron Dome.
|
| The point I'm making is that even if you accept ALL of
| Israel's narratives about Hamas, about IDF's strategy
| (which have all sorts of other problems, such as when
| they get caught sniping civilians and medical personnel),
| you still wind up in a situation where you have a massive
| power differential and one side knowingly killing
| civilians.
| golergka wrote:
| > That means you are knowingly killing human shields.
|
| That means that you decrease amount of your citizens that
| will end up dead.
|
| > Military equipment that is primitive and is completely
| neutralized by the Iron Dome.
|
| It's not. IDF and official Israelis obviously want
| everyone to believe that, but in reality, Iron Dome is
| not limitless, and can simply run out of ammunition, if
| Hamas launch sites are not counter-attacked. Which means
| a couple of thousand, or tens of thousands, of dead
| israelis in a few hours.
| banannaise wrote:
| Bombing civilian buildings is not a way to decrease
| casualty numbers on both sides of a conflict. The more
| peaceful alternative to bombing civilian buildings is not
| _sending leaflets and then bombing civilian buildings_ ,
| it is _declining to bomb civilian buildings_.
|
| Using slightly less violence than is available to you
| does not make you the good guy, especially when the
| violence you use is drastically higher than the violence
| that is even possible from the other side.
| golergka wrote:
| > civilian
|
| Citation needed. If a building is used for warfare, it is
| not civilian building.
| banannaise wrote:
| > If a building is used for warfare, it is not civilian
| building.
|
| Citation needed! Show that all the buildings Israel has
| bombed were being used for warfare.
| bronzeage wrote:
| This is a war where one side, Israel, attempts to
| minimize both sides casualties, while the other side,
| Hamas, tries to maximize both sides casualties, including
| their own people. Purely from intentions perspective,
| it's clear who should be criticized.
| throwaway5412 wrote:
| > If not, my question for you is: why do we see this phrase
| so commonly in reporting on Gaza but not on other more
| densely populated areas?
|
| One difference is that most of its residents aren't allowed
| to leave, from my understanding.
| banannaise wrote:
| On top of that, most of its residents, whether they are
| allowed to leave or not, are also stateless, which
| essentially locks them out of much of the developed
| world.
| Siira wrote:
| Because most people are stupid, and this level of truth-
| bending will not be punished.
| woodpanel wrote:
| Since this question revolves around words and their
| effect...
|
| "most populated" > "crammed" > "jailed" > "the new warsaw
| ghetto"
|
| there must be a word that describes your question of _why_
| :
|
| The word you're looking for also describes what's enabling
| the cognitive dissonance of putting Gaza in the same
| category as a Singapur, a Tokio or Hong Kong without
| blinking: Economic powerhouses that draw talent from
| developing and developed nations worldwide vs. a town with
| an economy that only consists of NGOs, the Hamas and UN-
| Organizations (The wage gap between ordinary gaza citizens
| and those working for the state is 50%).
|
| But instead of owning that word, it's easier to just keep
| uttering "Israel is bombing one of the most densely
| populated places in the world".
| [deleted]
| nl wrote:
| @dang there is something odd going on here.
|
| The comment I'm replying to from user woodpanel says (in
| part):
|
| ""most populated" > "crammed" > "jailed" > "the new
| warsaw ghetto"... The word you're looking for also
| describes what's enabling the cognitive dissonance of
| putting Gaza in the same category as a Singapur, a Tokio
| or Hong Kong without blinking... a town with an economy
| that only consists of NGOs, the Hamas and UN-
| Organizations"
|
| This dead comment[1] from user idownvoted says:
|
| "You're missing the intention of those pushing this
| claim: Painting Israel as running a prison intentionally
| bad, or vice-versa making Gaza the new Warsaw-Ghetto.
|
| If other commentators can't note the rediculousness of
| putting Gaza next to Tokio, Singapur or Hong Kong, I
| will: A place with virtually no economy outside of NGOs,
| the Hamas and UN-Orgs vs. economic beacons that draw
| talent from all over the world."
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27188683
| user982 wrote:
| Don't look directly at the hasbara.
| woodpanel wrote:
| Of course, I'm a typical German troll farm run by the
| mossad. You clearly have incorporated the word I was
| hinting at.
|
| Why not own it?
| geofft wrote:
| What's the phrasing you'd prefer? "Children were once
| again murdered in cold blood in Gaza, a metropolis that
| could be just like Singapore, Tokyo, or Hong Kong given
| its dense population and prime geographic location, were
| it not under constant military oppression from a country
| whose illegal nuclear weapons program is more successful
| than that of North Korea"?
|
| I think a lot of people would find that uncomfortably
| partisan, so news organizations tend to self-censor,
| unfortunately.
| [deleted]
| three14 wrote:
| Whatever criticism Israel may or may not deserve over its
| current bombing campaign, you aren't going to convince
| anyone if you misuse phrases like "murdered in cold
| blood". That's just not what those words mean.
| runarberg wrote:
| We like arguing in hypotheticals here on HN so lets bring
| a modified trolley problem into the discussion:
|
| This modified version has the trolley heading steady on
| course to the next station, there is nobody on the track
| and nothing will happen if you leave it alone. However
| you stand next to a lever, and if you pull the lever you
| will divert the trolley and it will hit 200 people (some
| are criminals but most aren't). You have ample time to
| think it over. If the trolley passes, you still have the
| option to pull the lever and the next trolley will hit
| those 200 people. You know full well what happens if you
| pull the lever. You also know you will not be punished if
| you do.
|
| Say you are an observer in this modified version, and you
| observe me pulling the lever. 200 people are now
| unessisary dead because of my action. Do you consider me
| a cold blooded murderer?
| three14 wrote:
| This is not a good-faith simplification of the situation
| in Gaza.
| runarberg wrote:
| I know its not, that was sort of the point here. I made
| sure to qualify this with _arguing in hypotheticals_
| before coming up with the scenario.
|
| Starting this sub-thread with a debate about _what makes
| a cold blooded murder_ is another way of taking the
| debate into arguing hypotheticals and is not a good-faith
| tactic. What I did here is simply taking the bait and
| continuing to the logical next step.
| sofixa wrote:
| What do you call it when a military air force with
| enormous reconnaissance capabilities bombs civilian
| targets and civilians, including children, die?
| three14 wrote:
| I don't understand your argument. You want to point out
| that this is terrible, and in an ideal world, no one
| should be bombing anyone? Of course! That doesn't mean
| you should say, e.g. that Israelis are cannibals just
| because cannibalism is bad.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| How is it not cold blooded murder then? The bombing is a
| killing. It is deliberate. It is done with ample
| preparation time and not under fire. You said it was
| misuse of the term. What keeps it from being proper to
| not call it cold blooded
|
| The nations can do what they want special pleading is the
| only argument I can see against murder but it would be an
| inconsistent one. Fiven the sheer number of state acts
| called murder completely unchallenged as such. Since WWII
| at least "at war" isn't an excuse for murder. While they
| may have called retaliatory executions for partisans war
| it was never called anything but murder in WW2.
| ehvatum wrote:
| > While they may have called retaliatory executions for
| partisans war it was never called anything but murder in
| WW2.
|
| You're completely unaware of the indiscriminate aerial
| bombing that typified WW2, or you're entirely dishonest.
| geofft wrote:
| Can you explain why I am misusing the phrase? I believe
| it to be objectively accurate.
|
| Again, that phrasing might make people uncomfortable. as
| I wrote above. I understand that, and I understand why
| people desire to censor it. But I don't believe it's
| incorrect, which is another thing entitely.
| three14 wrote:
| I'd like to think I would have resisted responding, but I
| see another response that doesn't answer your question,
| so, oh well-
|
| The dictionary seems to use "murder" for premeditated
| killing. Even if you think Israelis are the devil
| incarnate, killing children doesn't serve their
| interests. You have to go pretty far into conspiracy
| territory to believe they secretly _want_ those children
| to die, and then turn around and explain to everyone how
| they try to prevent those kids from dying. It certainly
| serves Hamas 's interests more than it serves Israeli
| interests.
|
| Google's dictionary returns "without emotion or pity;
| deliberately cruel or callous" for cold-blooded. See
| above. Any reasonable pro- or anti-Israel position would
| concede that Israelis would be happier without civilian
| casualties.
| geofft wrote:
| Is it a conspiracy theory, then, that the US engaged in
| the premeditated killing of hundreds of thousands of
| civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deliberately
| obliterating an area much wider than the legitimate
| military targets in those cities - that they in fact
| wanted a large number of civilians to die - and then
| turned around and argued (almost certainly correctly!)
| that they were actually trying to minimize civilian
| casualties by not bombing Tokyo or mounting a land
| invasion? Is it improbable to believe that an entire
| chain of command authorized those deaths without emotion?
| Does it require believing that Americans, as a whole, are
| the devil incarnate for such a thing to have happened?
|
| Like I said, maybe the words make people uncomfortable.
| But I don't think they are untrue.
| perl4ever wrote:
| Phrases like "cold blooded murderers" or "baby killers"
| or "war criminals" are _never_ applied by _anybody_
| equally to _everyone_ they could logically apply to.
|
| Everyone uses them selectively and thereby demonstrates
| their political positions. So, fine. Maybe your political
| position is correct. But applying words with different
| connotations according to some pattern is not explaining
| the basis of that pattern. It's circular.
|
| There is some reason that emotional words that apply to
| any significant group of military personnel make you
| think of Hiroshima and not Nanjing.
|
| I agree with those who say the US should not provide aid,
| whether in the form of weapons or "humanitarian" aid,
| because any form of resources frees up capacity for
| conflict.
|
| My idea of the right course of action is to avoid
| hypocrisy. If we do not believe in the cause of either
| side enough to die for it, we should not encourage them.
| If we _would_ fight were we in their places, then we
| should not condemn them. I think that would cover 99% of
| Americans and Europeans were we honest.
| toyg wrote:
| _> You have to go pretty far into conspiracy territory to
| believe they secretly want those children to die_
|
| Not really: it's well-reported that Israeli policy
| reasons about Arabs primarily in _demographic_ terms. A
| stated Israeli priority is to keep low the number of
| Arabs in its territory. It 's not even a secret.
|
| You might find this so abhorrent and morally indefensible
| to be unlikely, but really it's just another day in the
| Middle East.
| three14 wrote:
| You are arguing that bombs killing less than 0.02% of
| Palestinian children is going to solve Israel's
| demographic problem and Israel would like to do that
| despite all the abuse they will receive from the rest of
| the world for doing so? Like, fine, assume absolute evil,
| why not, but evil _and_ stupid simultaneously? Hence
| "conspiracy territory".
| toyg wrote:
| _> You are arguing that bombs killing less than 0.02% of
| Palestinian children is going to solve Israel 's
| demographic problem_
|
| No I'm not, I'm just pointing out that this sort of
| attitude is obviously a natural result of their stated
| intent.
|
| _> evil and stupid simultaneously?_
|
| Stupid is a given, considering Occam. Asymmetrical
| warfare in general has been "propaganda-stupid" ever
| since Jewish tradition popularized David and Goliath. Yet
| armies still routinely engage in it, because propaganda
| is only one dimension of a conflict. Being stupid,
| however, doesn't exclude being anything else.
| woodpanel wrote:
| You can have your beliefs, but that doesn't make them
| facts.
|
| Meanwhile a cleptocratic regime is firing missiles at
| civlians using as launching pads hospitals, kindergartens
| or office buildings housing international journalists.
| modo_mario wrote:
| >office buildings housing international journalists.
|
| Weird how those journalist agencies themselves missed
| that.
|
| What's the slow colonisation with settlements about?
| Liberation of land controlled by evil terrorists?
|
| Also as far as Israel is concerned there is no recognised
| regime or other such government there. It's apparently a
| stateless area with stateless people to be slowly
| ethnically cleansed.
| 34679 wrote:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-57136883
|
| "Israeli PM Netanyahu defends Gaza press building bombing
|
| Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that destroying the Jala
| high-rise block in Gaza on Saturday was justified."
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that destroying the
| Jala high-rise block in Gaza on Saturday was justified
|
| There's a pretty big difference between a politician
| (even one less flagrantly corrupt than Netanyahu) making
| a claim about their conduct of war and that claim being
| true.
| 34679 wrote:
| I agree. I unsuccessfully tried finding an article I read
| a couple days ago that contained quotes from the head of
| the BBC office declaring that Hamas had no presence in
| the building. They said they actively check to the best
| of their ability because Israel is known to bomb media
| buildings and blame it on Hamas' presence. They also
| stated Israel has provided no proof of its claims.
| bronzeage wrote:
| You mean that land which Israel withdrew from
| unilaterally, let it have a chance at prospering and
| instead of minding its own business they elected a
| terrorist organization, turned it into a millitary base
| and concentrated on firing rockets and kidnapping
| soldiers instead of showing they can responsibly control
| their land?
|
| Gaza is prime example of where Arabs and Palestinians
| tendencies lead them when left alone. Every single horror
| coming from there they brought upon themselves. They
| proved they are incapable of civilized behavior. All they
| had to do is behave like rational human beings after the
| disengagement. Palestinians aren't rational human beings
| like you would expect. Every chance they get at peace
| they will intentionally ruin, even if all they have to do
| is absolutely nothing.
| sequoia wrote:
| Downvoting because this is dehumanizing rhetoric, the
| kind used to rationalize all kinds of violence and
| oppression of a group of people. This kind of demonizing
| of one side or the other is exactly what I'm objecting
| to; _both populations_ should be humanized and considered
| with empathy, neither side should be characterized as
| demonic or subhuman.
|
| No progress will ever be made in resolving this conflict
| if one side or the other is dehumanized and has all the
| blame heaped on them. It is unfortunate that Gazans
| elected a party with an explicit platform of genocide
| against the Jews, yes. Its still not appropriate to
| dehumanize them is and it's definitely not productive.
| bronzeage wrote:
| But it is productive. It reminds you what happens if you
| are accidentally naive enough to give Palestinians a
| chance to hurt you. They will take that chance at any
| cost and price because they do not care about their own
| wellbeing. And they did well in brainwashing the rest of
| their people into being bloodthirsty savages, the damage
| is already deep in their minds and hearts. Just taking a
| look at their schools and propaganda.
|
| The Palestinians already chose to dehumanize themselves.
| They choose to teach their own children that nothing
| matters more than killing Israelis. They choose to raise
| their children into a brainwash of shahids. Nothing short
| of a massive generational counter-brainwash can fix this
| problem. It's damage rooted deep in the minds of
| Palestinians and no leader can fix it because no peaceful
| leader can arise and lead people who have been
| brainwashed into war since they were born.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Looking at the country list, I see Israel is the #5 most
| densely populated country in the world.
|
| You're looking at the second table, which includes only the
| 100 most populous countries. If you look at the main table,
| which includes all countries, Israel is #17.
| sequoia wrote:
| Good point, thank you.
| djhn wrote:
| That sounds like "technically correct with caveats".
| Kranar wrote:
| So does OPs entire post. Gaza is, by all reasonable
| accounts, among the most densely populated areas in the
| world. There's no real reason to start questioning the
| credibility and trustworthiness of a news organization over
| the fact that Gaza is referred to as such, it's a very
| bizarre thing to fixate over.
| sequoia wrote:
| Your point about my argument regarding BBC's credibility
| based on this one point is fair, I can see how my
| argument can reasonably be considered overstated.
|
| Your point about "fixating" (assuming you're referring to
| me) is not fair. If you want to accuse someone of being
| fixated on this point, please direct your critique at the
| BBC and other media outlets who repeat the phrase about
| Gaza _and only Gaza_ (not all of the other more populous
| places) constantly.
| mcguire wrote:
| Perhaps you are overly sensitive to this issue? I've more
| often heard the phrase from the BBC in regard to
| Singapore or Hong Kong.
| astura wrote:
| In this case it makes perfect sense to mention how
| densely populated Gaza is because the reader probably
| doesn't know much about Gaza other than it's occupied by
| Israel. Every other area with the population density of
| Gaza looks very different on Google Maps.
| faizmokhtar wrote:
| See OPs above comment and you can see where his
| standpoint is so it's not that surprising.
| [deleted]
| tryonenow wrote:
| Palestinians and supporters of their side of the conflict have
| incentive to exaggerate their plight, as does Israel. When the
| media is sympathetic to one side (as it has been increasingly
| and especially during this latest conflict), it will rarely
| fact check its own. So certain white lies and embellishments
| are repeated and collectively they distort reporting without
| necessarily being outright false. This is not unique to
| reporting on the West Bank. And it's a major problem with US
| media especially - but you're not likely to find any
| "reputable" sources on the subject.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Articles citing articles citing articles... aka cliche. They're
| not really wrong. The definition of "place" is just arbitrary,
| so it's always "debatable.^"
|
| Bnei Brak, incidentally, is also often described as the densest
| place in the world. It's just in other contexts that don't
| interest an international readership. It was mentioned often,
| in covid related contexts.
|
| ^Meaning, pointlessly debateable.
| exegete wrote:
| It must just be something that gets repeated without
| verification at this point. For comparison Gaza City has a
| slightly higher population density than NYC (but less than
| Hoboken, NJ) while the entire Gaza Strip has the same
| population density as Boston (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L
| ist_of_United_States_cities...).
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > For comparison Gaza City has a slightly higher population
| density than NYC (but less than Hoboken, NJ) while the entire
| Gaza Strip has the same population density as Boston
|
| Comparing Gaza to Boston is a bit misleading. Boston is
| closely integrated into an entire metro area, and the city
| limits of Boston are artifacts of history. Comparing to NYC
| is even less meaningful, because NYC is part of an integrated
| tri-state area and also the geographical center of a larger
| connected megopolis that contains 1/6th of the population of
| the entire US.
|
| Gaza, on the other hand, is a strip of land the size of
| Queens (New York), and it is entirely cut off from everything
| around it (both land _and_ sea). People who live in Gaza
| never leave, and nobody else enters. There 's no "commuting"
| to or from Gaza.
| mhb wrote:
| So maybe the wordsmiths in the media could select a more
| descriptive adjective than _most dense_.
| ac29 wrote:
| > People who live in Gaza never leave, and nobody else
| enters
|
| The border crossing with Egypt is (or was) open earlier
| this year.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_Border_Crossing
| exegete wrote:
| I'm sorry if I came across as trying to minimize the dire
| situation those who live in Gaza are in. You're right -
| people in NYC don't have a foreign power controlling their
| airspace and shoreline as well as the numerous other
| differences. I was responding to the idea that it has a
| higher population density than most other cities and giving
| some comparisons solely on that metric.
| bombcar wrote:
| The closest comparison that leaps immediately to mind
| would be Hong Kong.
|
| But I think the underlying theme is that descriptive
| words can editorialize - which is pretty obvious.
| Kranar wrote:
| Can you find a single reference stating that it's the most
| dense city or area in the world? I tried looking for one but
| failed.
|
| There are well over 10,000 cities in the world and Gaza City is
| likely among the top 500 for population density, which would
| put it in the top 5%.
|
| Do you generally call things out as being untrustworthy for
| claiming that the top 5% is among the highest in a rank?
| sequoia wrote:
| Here is a single reference:
| https://www.middleeastobserver.org/2016/07/12/pcbs-
| reports-g...
|
| "Do you generally call things out as being untrustworthy for
| claiming that the top 5% is among the highest in a rank?"
|
| The reason I consider this claim "misleading" is that I never
| see the "one of the most densely populated..." phrase on
| stories about Paris, Kathmandu, Seoul or any of the hundreds
| of more densely populated areas, yet I _constantly_ see it in
| reference relatively much-less-densely-populated Gaza. When I
| start seeing news stories that read "The mayor of Hoboken
| NJ, _one of the most densely populated areas of the world_ ,
| opposes a measure that would increase affordable housing..."
| then the phrase won't make me scratch my head anymore.
|
| Why does this phrase always come up in relation to Gaza and
| not the hundreds of other cities/regions that are more
| densely populated?
|
| If we're trading references, can you show me some where the
| BBC refers to Paris as "one of the most densely populated
| places in the world?"
| runarberg wrote:
| Since the original post is about Google maps, lets use that
| as a tool for a moment:
|
| Gaza city and Tel Aviv have about the same population size
| according to Wikipedia (about 590,000 and 460,000
| respectively). The Tel Aviv metro area is about 1,500 km2
| which is almost 3 times larger then the entire Gaza strip
| (365 km2). The Tel Aviv urban area has about half the
| population size of the entire Gaza Strip while the Tel Aviv
| Metro area has almost double the population size as the
| entire Gaza strip. Both Tel Aviv and Gaza city border the
| coast, both are somewhat bounded by borders to the East.
|
| So Gaza and Tel Aviv should be somewhat comparable when we
| look them on a map. However if you take a look at this:
|
| First Tel Aviv:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@32.0703502,34.8333795,11.38z
|
| It looks pretty normal, a dense urban core with some sprawl
| around it.
|
| Now lets look at Gaza City with the same zoom level:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@31.5083142,34.4330704,11z
|
| Now this looks odd. There is only the dense urban core and
| then some nothing and then some borders. This is not how
| cities grow naturally.
|
| Look at a zoomed in level of Gaza City:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@31.517549,34.4848539,13.55z
|
| And the same zoom level of Tel Aviv:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@32.0641297,34.8076298,13.55z
|
| Notice how abruptly the Gaza City ends, while Tel Aviv
| looks like a city. Clearly there is something going on
| there. Looking at the map alone I would not guess that Gaza
| City was a city the same size as Tel Aviv. I think it is
| worth reporting this fact given the anomalous nature of
| Gaza.
|
| Another--and a more important--reason this is worth
| reporting is precisely the fact that Gaza is a densely
| populated area that is abnormally bounded in growth. This
| makes Gaza unique (except maybe Singapore and Hong Kong;
| but I do recall news media like mentioning those as being
| densely populated as well).
| astura wrote:
| If Hoboken NJ was blurry on Google Maps they would also
| describe it as "one of the most densely populated areas of
| the world" because it's fucking weird that a place with
| such a population density would be blurry on Google Maps.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Are Paris, Kathmandu, Seol, or Hoboken under blockade by a
| government that claims their land but makes the people on
| that land stateless, and also periodically bombs their
| urban infrastructure?
|
| It's possible that the density of gaza is in some way
| relevant to the current events taking place there in a way
| that it might not be for the other places you've listed.
| [deleted]
| flyinglizard wrote:
| That's very disingenuous - there are zero territorial
| claims against Israel in Gaza Strip. Israel unilaterally
| withdrew from Gaza, dissolving all settlements in the
| area, back in 2005.
|
| The blockade is simply an ongoing state of war between
| Gaza and Israel. Gaza also borders with Egypt.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Israel recognizes no government in Gaza (neither the
| Palestinian Authority, which has no power there, nor
| Hamas, which they recognize as terrorists not a
| government), claims control over entry and exit to the
| territory of goods and people, including by sea, and
| claims the right to enter the territory at any time to
| carry out military activity.
|
| Israel also does not recognize a Palestinian state in
| general to be at war with to begin with. There is some
| lip service to an eventual two state solution that gets
| less and less paid to every year, but as it stands
| there's no one to be at war _with_ , as far as Israel is
| concerned. There's just a bunch of stateless people stuck
| in a postage-stamp-sized jurisdiction that they've left
| in a lawless state.
|
| "Disengagement" is not devolution is not autonomy. The
| idea that this is a war is a convenient PR fiction.
| avip wrote:
| Were you using the term "claims control over entry of
| goods into the territory" instead of "claims their land",
| there would be much less to argue about.
|
| "claims their land" sounds like Israel would like to
| annex Gaza and make it part of Israel - which is
| ridiculous and patently false.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Is it? Certainly, there are political factions within
| Israel that claim it should be part of Israel -- that's
| why there were settlements _to remove in the first
| place_. It would be ridiculous to deny that, honestly.
| Those factions seem to continue to grow in influence
| every year as well.
|
| The idea that Israel should be one state that covers the
| entirety of the former mandate of Palestine seems to
| actually be pretty popular in Israel right now. It may
| not be the official policy, but it is a very real
| possibility.
|
| Regardless, if a country exerts every measure of control
| over a territory it can including entry and exit from it
| along international borders, it's really hard imo to
| argue that it sees it as sovereign in any way. Israel
| clearly does not see Gaza as an independent state. So if
| it's not an independent state _what exactly is it a part
| of if not Israel_.
|
| Or, to put it a little bit more snarky: you can't neglect
| your way out of an occupation. Neglect is, in fact, a
| weapon in cases like this.
| avip wrote:
| Does Egypt also claim their land?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Does Egypt also claim their land?
|
| Nope. It (or rather the United Arab Republic, of which
| modern Egypt is a successor but not the sole successor)
| temporarily occupied it (officially, pending resolution
| of the Israel/Palestine issue, but terminated early by
| force) from 1959-1967 without claiming it.
|
| There was some ambiguity about Egypt's stance between
| 1967-1978, but after 1978 they unambiguously had no
| claim, even administrative, over Gaza.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Not as far as I know?
|
| Egypt does control access in and out along their own
| border, as every country does, but afaik the nature of
| that control is at least somewhat dictated by agreements
| between Egypt and Israel.
|
| As far as I know Egypt does not do any of the other
| things I listed, like controlling _what_ can go in and
| out of Gaza through borders that aren 't their own, nor
| do they make military incursions into it or bomb it.
|
| Also, and I think this is actually pretty key to the idea
| that Israel believes the land of Gaza to be part of
| Israel, if Egypt _were_ to invade Gaza do you really
| believe that Israel would allow that to stand? If Israel
| truly considered Gaza a state not under its jurisdiction,
| Egypt annexing Gaza would likely be a welcome outcome.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| _> "claims their land" sounds like Israel would like to
| annex Gaza and make it part of Israel - which is
| ridiculous and patently false._
|
| It very much is not. A recent a Netanyahu election ad
| showed a map of Israel without Gaza and the West Bank cut
| out, overlaid with the words "one state". Among other
| examples. https://twitter.com/jewish_worker/status/139403
| 6492213833728...
| sequoia wrote:
| There are plenty of stories where this would be relevant.
| "Many refugees are landing in suburbs of Paris, _one of
| the most densely populated_... " "...rural Korean
| population is flocking to Seoul, _one of the most_... "
|
| Anyway it's clear that Gaza is a densely populated area.
| I still consider the _highly selective_ use of the "one
| of the most" phrasing curious. For the record I think
| it's bad to drop bombs onto (or fire rockets into)
| civilian areas even if they are only sparsely populated,
| for what it's worth.
| stormbrew wrote:
| > There are plenty of stories where this would be
| relevant. "Many refugees are landing in suburbs of Paris,
| one of the most densely populated..." "...rural Korean
| population is flocking to Seoul, one of the most..."
|
| I mean, is it? The suburbs of Paris and Seoul are
| relatively unbounded in size, if nothing else. Gaza has a
| hard line on how many sqmi it is in a way very few other
| jurisdictions do. The density of Gaza is _particularly_
| relevant because the situation makes that density a
| _problem_ in ways it isn 't really for Paris or Seoul, as
| they are not being bombed, blockaded, or subject to
| limitations on when they even have power or water.
| trainsplanes wrote:
| They're referring to the fact Gaza/Palestine is one of the
| densest countries in the world.
|
| Gaza is also completely surrounded by sea and another
| country, so it's an incredibly dense place with no room to
| grow. Seoul and Paris are also dense places, but you can
| keep walking and eventually you see it thin out without a
| clear border on city limits. Put a fence around Paris city
| core and fire a missile on the city center--news will talk
| about one of the densest places on earth being blown up.
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| Gaza actually has borders with two countries.
| nl wrote:
| > If we're trading references, can you show me some where
| the BBC refers to Paris as "one of the most densely
| populated places in the world?"
|
| "Tricks from the most densely populated city... Paris is
| one of the most densely populated city in the EU with
| relatively few green spaces."
|
| https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p06sbtzz/tricks-from-the-
| most...
|
| > The reason I consider this claim "misleading" is that I
| never see the "one of the most densely populated..." phrase
| on stories about Paris, Kathmandu, Seoul or any of the
| hundreds of more densely populated areas, yet I constantly
| see it in reference relatively much-less-densely-populated
| Gaza.
|
| War in dense urban areas is a special kind of hell.
|
| And it's not particularly rare to note dense population
| when it is especially relevant.
|
| > Officials in Bangladesh, one of the most densely
| populated countries in the world, have said the country is
| overwhelmed with the Rohingya population that has emerged
| in the Cox's Bazar area.
|
| https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/stateless-
| persecuted...
|
| > At first, Rwanda's president, Juvenal Habyarimana,
| refused, protesting that Rwanda was among the most densely
| populated countries in the world
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/sep/12/americas-
| secret...
|
| > For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in
| Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely
| populated capital of the Islamic State.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/21/americas-
| war-o...
|
| > Withholding of more precise data raises eyebrows as
| rights groups remain sceptical of geographic coordinates in
| densely-populated areas.
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/27/us-led-
| coalition-a...
| sequoia wrote:
| From your examples only Bangladesh is referred to by
| reporters (not as a quotation) as one of the most densely
| populated in this case "countries" (which is much easier
| to count than "places") _in the world_. ("Most densely
| populated places" means something different as of course
| cities are "places" and the definition of place is highly
| debatable as this thread shows.)
|
| Kudos & good examples. I still think this meme is
| attached particularly to Gaza but clearly it's not
| exclusive.
| nl wrote:
| > From your examples only Bangladesh is referred to by
| reporters (not as a quotation) as one of the most densely
| populated in this case "countries"
|
| Not true. Only is a quote (the Rwanda one) and two of the
| four quotes are not about countries (Raqqa - a city, and
| "densely-populated areas").
|
| I partially deal with your quibbles on the definition of
| "place" here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27190788
|
| But I think it's fair to compare similarly geographically
| sized areas, preferably with somewhat similar political
| status (ie, there's a big difference between a very dense
| city surrounded by countryside to support it, vs a city
| state with no surrounding support area)
|
| It's hard to find many places as big as the Gaza Strip
| (365 sq km) that are as densely populated (5610 people
| per square km).
|
| Dhaka is the most closely comparable city: 306 sq km with
| a density of 29,069 ppl/sq km. But a city isn't
| comparable to a territory like the Gaza Strip. That is
| more similar to islands, enclave or isolated country.
|
| On Wikipedia's list[1] Singapore (722 sq km, 7,894 ppl/sq
| km), Hong Kong (1106 sq km, 6781 ppl/sq km), Bahrain (778
| sq km, 1,982 ppl/sq km), and Malta (316 sq km, 1,633
| ppl/sq km) seem the obvious comparisons.
|
| The Gaza strip obviously sits right up there amongst
| them. It is difficult to argue it isn't one of the most
| densely populated places in the world looking at
| comparable "places".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_d
| ependen...
| idownvoted wrote:
| You're missing the intention of those pushing this claim:
| Painting Israel as running a prison intentionally bad, or vice-
| versa making Gaza the new Warsaw-Ghetto.
|
| If other commentators can't note the rediculousness of putting
| Gaza next to Tokio, Singapur or Hong Kong, I will: A place with
| virtually no economy outside of NGOs, the Hamas and UN-Orgs vs.
| economic beacons that draw talent from all over the world.
| avip wrote:
| Gaza would have ranked 5th on population density, or 3rd if you
| remove places with tiny population (i.e take a "pop > 1MM"
| threshold).
|
| It's basically after Singapore and Hong-Kong.
| sequoia wrote:
| Can you walk me through your thinking here? I don't quite
| follow. I _am_ listening and open to being wrong.
| avip wrote:
| Thinking? I didn't do any. I divided the #pop by #area in
| units I can relate to (Km^2), then looked at the table and
| figured out it would be #5.
| sequoia wrote:
| Ok I think I'm able to piece back together what you're
| talking about: it sounds like you're ranking Gaza on the
| list of most densely populated "Country (or dependent
| territory)" but excluding cities. The article refers to
| it as one of the most densely populated "places" in the
| world.
|
| What's the reason for excluding cities when ranking the
| most densely populated places in the world? When I
| imagine "the most densely populated places in the world"
| I think first of cities, I assume most people do.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Because Gaza is, for all intents and purposes, a city-
| state, like Singapore or Hong Kong. It's not really one
| part of a larger nation, so it doesn't make sense to
| compare it to places that are.
|
| It's also being blockaded by its neighbors, so there is
| no freedom of movement in or out. If rockets are fired at
| Bnei Brak, the residents there can flee to the rest of
| Israel. If rockets are fired at Gaza, the residents have
| nowhere to go.
| sequoia wrote:
| > If rockets are fired at Bnei Brak, the residents there
| can flee to the rest of Israel.
|
| When rockets rain down on their homes, citizens of Bnei
| Brak can flee from their homes in car or on foot, go ???
| somewhere (where exactly?) and hope they're not blown to
| bits along the way. Wow, those privileged Israelis. The
| very lap of luxury.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Israel isn't big, but there are plenty of less likely
| (and less dense) targets than the Tel Aviv metropolitan
| area. Israelis can also leave the country. That's not
| "luxurious", but those are privileges that residents of
| Gaza don't have.
|
| I'm not sure why you're responding so aggressively; you
| asked why Gaza is singled out as densely populated, and
| that's the answer.
| sequoia wrote:
| I'm responding with derision because you're so casually
| hand-waving away attacks on Israel as no big deal or not
| the same because they are "able to flee" (you still
| haven't specified where is the safe place they can flee
| to). Have some empathy for Israeli civilians, just as you
| have empathy for Gazan civilians.
|
| As for the technical question of "most densely populated"
| or "more densely populated" I don't know why people keep
| bringing up stuff like supposed "ability to flee"
| "bordered by other countries or by the sea or surrounded
| by countryside" when arguing about population density.
| None of these things change the population density.
| Otherwise I could say "Hawaii is extremely densely
| populated by virtue of the fact that it's really really
| really far from continental mainlands" which makes no
| sense.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| The fact of the matter is that _Israeli civilians have
| options that Gazan Palestinians do not_. I 'm empathetic
| to them as well -- it's horrible that _anyone_ has to
| fear being killed in a conflict. But there is absolutely
| a disparity, and it 's not "hand-waving" to note that it
| exists without qualification.
|
| That disparity, by the way, is exactly why it doesn't
| make sense to compare Gaza to cities with regard to
| population density. It's technically a city, but that's
| really not an apples-to-apples comparison. For all
| intents and purposes it's a country/territory, by which
| standard it _is_ one of the most densely populated in the
| world.
| sequoia wrote:
| Gaza is not technically a city. I encourage you to learn
| more about the fundamentals and history of this situation
| before making broad assertions about it.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Curious that you keep trying to compare its density to
| cities rather than other territories, then.
|
| Anyway, we're clearly talking past each other. Have a
| nice day!
| eightysixfour wrote:
| They are not removing cities blindly, they are only
| including cities with more than 1m people. That removes
| places like Pateros which, while incredibly dense, are
| not particularly populous.
| sequoia wrote:
| Avip is not including cities when s/he ranks Gaza #5,
| s/he is only including countries. If I asked you "what's
| the most densely populated place in the world?" you would
| probably answer with the name of a city. Avip is
| excluding cities from his "densely populated _places_ "
| ranking. This doesn't make sense to me. If you say
| "world's most densely populated places" of course I'm
| going to think of cities, as anyone would.
| markdown wrote:
| > Neither of these come close to ranking on wikipedias list of
| cities by population density
|
| > Is the BBC just plain wrong here or am I missing something?
|
| What you're missing is that you don't have to be anywhere near
| that list to be one of the most densely populated places in the
| world. Most of the world is empty.
| smolder wrote:
| It's maybe worth noting that objective metrics of population
| density are generally by land area and subjectively, density is
| about floor space or even volumetric. Building size could have
| a big impact on what is perceived as population dense.
| nextstep wrote:
| Semi-related: Jillian C. York's recent book "Silicon Values"
| talks a bit about the "digital apartheid" in Palestine. Media
| companies like Facebook often have no presence in the occupied
| territories and let the Israeli office and policies apply to
| Palestinian accounts, often resulting in censorship of war
| crimes.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Values-Future-Surveillance-Ca...
| Trias11 wrote:
| The questions are:
|
| - Does Google deliberatly blurring Gaza strip?
|
| - Who benefits by artificially degraded quality of Gaza maps?
|
| - Does Google quietly taking political sides?
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| You forgot:
|
| - Did I fix my tinfoil hat?
| oogabooga123 wrote:
| JIDF in action, ladies and gentlemen
| DSingularity wrote:
| - Yes.
|
| - Israel.
|
| - Yes, see how they took a position on the heart of this issue
| -- the occupied territories themselves. They literally erased
| Palestine from the map.
| hereme888 wrote:
| Palestine is not a country. Never has been. Its just a
| geographical area first established by the Romans, and always
| handed down to another country.
| slg wrote:
| >- Yes, see how they took a position on the heart of this
| issue -- the occupied territories themselves. They literally
| erased Palestine from the map.
|
| The US government doesn't recognize Palestine. Therefore
| displaying the occupied territories as a distinct state would
| be the _more_ politicalized option compared with displaying
| them as they currently do. Either way, it just goes to show
| that the idea of a company being apolitical becomes more
| difficult as it grows and eventually becomes impossible when
| you reach Google 's size. There is no potential choice here
| that isn't going to be viewed politically.
| nashashmi wrote:
| The UN recognizes Palestine as do many other countries. The
| US was motivated not to recognize it because of the Israeli
| diaspora in America.
| vanusa wrote:
| _The US was motivated not to recognize it because of the
| Israeli diaspora in America._
|
| There isn't much of an "Israeli diaspora" to speak of the
| the U.S. At most it makes up 2-3 percent of the Jewish
| descendant (or identified) population.
|
| "Pro-Israel sentiment in Congress; more specifically, a
| sentiment favoring the current political status quo in
| Israel in regard to this particular issue" would be a
| better description of the proximate cause behind the
| current US policy, here.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| The United States worked with Israel for years, and has
| continued to some degree even now, to establish a
| legitimate and functional Palestinian state. The reason
| the US does not recognize Palestine is that right now
| there is not a fully formed Palestinian government. The
| PA never fully exerted its influence or enforced its own
| laws in the West Bank and has completely lost control of
| Gaza to a terrorist organization.
|
| I know it does not neatly fit your narrative about a
| Jewish conspiracy in America ("Israeli diaspora?"
| really?), but US support is one of the reasons there is
| any Palestinian self-governance at all, limited as it may
| be.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Conspiracy? None whatsoever. Support for Israel is public
| and apparent even from politicians and lobbyists. This
| has guided US votes and vetoes in the UN. This is not a
| "narrative" nor a hidden story.
|
| As far as PA exerting control, Israel has actively worked
| to keep the PA weak and frowned to recognize any
| sovereignty, even to this day keeping occupation forces
| inside and protecting illegal settlements.
|
| > The reason the US does not recognize Palestine is that
| right now there is not a fully formed Palestinian
| government.
|
| This is a funny narrative. Afghanistan does not not have
| a full government but that does not mean they are not
| recognized.
| bostonvaulter2 wrote:
| The list of states that recognize Palestine was very
| surprising to me. Basically it seems like only the
| "first-world" nations that do not recognize Palestine: ht
| tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_
| t...
| DSingularity wrote:
| Ie the colonizing powers of this planet
| sien wrote:
| Thanks for that link. It's remarkable.
| slg wrote:
| The reasoning behind the government's decision is
| irrelevant here. Google is a company headquartered in the
| US. Going against the official policy of the US
| government is a more politicalized move than going with
| the status quo.
|
| Side note, you should be careful using Israeli and Jewish
| as interchangeable terms. There is no such thing as an
| "Israeli diaspora".
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _Going against the official policy of the US government
| is a more politicalized move than going with the status
| quo._
|
| How can this be when the policy of the US government is
| itself determined by politics in its original, non-
| metaphorical form?
| slg wrote:
| I don't understand what you are getting at. If the US
| recognized Palestine that would also be a policy
| "determined by politics in its original, non-metaphorical
| form". There is no apolitical answer to the question of
| whether to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If there's no apolitical answer, then going with the
| status quo isn't an apolitical answer.
| slg wrote:
| It seems like you agree with me but are framing your
| comments as if you disagree. In my first comment I said:
|
| >There is no potential choice here that isn't going to be
| viewed politically.
|
| Maybe the two negatives in that sentence are throwing
| people off, but I can rephrase it to say "There is no
| apolitical choice here."
|
| However any choice that goes against the status quo is
| going to be perceived as more political than a choice
| that accepts the status quo. That is just a general
| statement and isn't specific to the debate about
| recognition of Palestine.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Jews and Israeli are distinct. Maybe diaspora is
| incorrect word, but those who call Israel their home
| country and reside in the US are of the diaspora of
| Israel.
|
| Google has headquarters in many countries including
| Israel. They use various Sources to create maps. And some
| happen to show Palestine as a separate country. Using one
| source over another is not a politicized move. But since
| the recognition of Palestine is recent, ignoring a UN
| resolution is politicized, more than following an archaic
| policy of a home country.
| slg wrote:
| >Jews and Israeli are distinct. Maybe diaspora is
| incorrect word, but those who call Israel their home
| country and reside in the US are of the diaspora of
| Israel.
|
| There are something like 100k Israelis is the US. They
| have virtually no political power. If you want to say
| "Jewish Diaspora" say "Jewish Diaspora". It really seems
| like you are using "Israeli Diaspora" in order to avoid
| accusations of anti-Semitism. My comment was simply
| pointing out that using Israeli and Jewish
| interchangeably is probably a more worrying indicator
| than just saying "Jews have influence in US politics"
| which is at least true at some level. Although nowadays
| Evangelicals play a bigger role in determining the US's
| political stance on Israel than Jews as evidenced by
| Jewish people being overwhelming Democrats while the
| Republicans are viewed as the pro-Israel party.
| toyg wrote:
| This actually leads me to wonder why US Evangelicals are
| so utterly pro-Israel. Christians have a long history of
| discriminating against Jews, but surely this modern
| development is not about over-compensating for that...?
| Is it just a "the enemy of my (Arab) enemy, is my
| friend"...?
|
| I don't find particularly puzzling that the US, as a
| whole, might have pro-Israel policies for historic and
| strategic reasons; however, the intensity of sentiment,
| particularly on the Christian right, still baffles me.
| slg wrote:
| The numbers I have seen is that somewhere between a third
| to half of Evangelicals support Israel specifically
| because Jews controlling The Holy Land is seen as a
| prerequisite to the End Times, the Second Coming of
| Jesus, and all the stuff from the Book of Revelation.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Google did not erase Palestine. You can search "Palestine" on
| Maps and be shown Gaza Strip and West Bank, areas that were
| named before Google existed.
| shaya wrote:
| Well, you actually don't know the facts. Palestine is a land,
| it was called that way even when the time of the British
| mandate, before WWII. Are the arabs that lived there are
| Palestinians? Yes. But what you don't mention is that also
| the jews that lived there were called Palestinians. The land
| of Israel and Palestine are exactly the same thing. There are
| arab Palestinians and jew Palestinians. They were not so
| smart to not take the UN partition plan for Palestine, which
| the jews accepted. So, right now the entire land is part of
| Israel :) Here's an explanation of past Israel prime minister
| Golda Meir, which has a statue in Manhattan.
| https://youtu.be/lhjB9W8UEgk
| DSingularity wrote:
| Well, you actually don't know the facts. Did Jews live
| there before the British? Yes. But what you don't mention
| is that they were under 8% of the total population. Of
| course, given what you already omit, you also omit that
| those 8% owned only 2% of the land. So tell me, why would
| the 92% accept that so much of what is rightfully theirs
| would be forcefully taken from them and given to a minority
| population? Especially when, at this point in 1947, so many
| of them were settlers who emigrated from Europe to colonize
| Palestinian land.
|
| But you know, for someone who claims to know the facts, it
| sure seems like you are purposefully spreading
| disinformation.
| slg wrote:
| I don't know where your numbers are coming from, but they
| are at the very least misleading because the population
| was not exclusively made up of Jews and the group we now
| call Palestinians and not all land was privately owned.
|
| EDIT: I rephrased this to more clearly explain my point.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I don't understand your argument. Jewish Palestinians
| plus non-Jewish Palestinians do make up 100% of
| Palestinians.
| belorn wrote:
| You would have land owned by Jewish Palestinians, land
| owned by non-Jewish Palestinians, and land cooperatively
| owned by both Jewish and non-Jewish Palestinians. Jewish
| Palestinians plus non-Jewish Palestinians do _not_ make
| up 100% of Palestinians, but rather the result of 100%
| minus land cooperatively owned by both Jewish and non-
| Jewish Palestinians.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| You're confusing land and people here.
| belorn wrote:
| DSingularity above is talking about 2% owning 8% of the
| land, with "92% accept that so much of what is rightfully
| theirs would be forcefully taken from them".
|
| If you are saying I am confusing land and people, what is
| the 2% and 8% number referring to in the above comment?
| People and land? If so, what people, and what land?
| [deleted]
| DSingularity wrote:
| At the time of the British mandate the Jewish minority --
| 2% of the population -- owned a total of 8% of the land.
| So, my point was, why do you blame the Arabs for not
| accepting the partition plan which came to impose a
| forceful transfer of land from the majority to the
| minority. When you consider the facts you can clearly see
| why the Palestinians opposed the initial partition plan
| of Palestine.
| belorn wrote:
| Yes, but then my initial comment above about the Jewish
| population and the arab population is not confusing land
| and people. The Jewish population owned 2%, and the arab
| population owned X amount of land, while Y amount of land
| was owned cooperatively by individuals of both. It would
| be interesting to know what X and Y is.
|
| The partitioning of land was obviously unfair after world
| war 2. I doubt anyone actually disagree with it. Land
| getting repossessed and captured during wars is never
| fair, and it was not the only border change that occurred
| when the world war ended. The allies did not just keep
| the borders at they were at the beginning of ww2, through
| much of the land grabs has been mostly forgotten outside
| of people studying history. The Israeli-Palestinian
| conflict is one of the few remaining land conflicts from
| the war.
| slg wrote:
| Oops, I made that more confusing by trying to note
| everyone was a Palestinian when the place was called
| Palestine. By "non-Jewish Palestinians" I was trying to
| refer to the predominately Muslim and predominately Arab
| group that we now just call Palestinians. There was and
| still is a population of Christians in the area and there
| presumably was some larger population of foreigners in
| the area when it was under foreign rule. I edited that
| comment to clear things up.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Everyone is still a Palestinian nowadays though.
|
| The reason why there are less Christian Palestinians is
| because a lot of them were deported or fled shortly after
| the Nakba.
|
| A lot of them would come back if Palestine was restored,
| but most of them are legally prevented by Israel from
| coming back.
|
| Not even Hamas or Hezbollah wants Palestine to be a
| single religion or single ethnicity state, so I don't
| really understand what you were trying to convey.
| js4ever wrote:
| Christians are killed in palestinans parts like in most
| Muslim countries ... So clearly you are completely wrong
| and partisan
| slg wrote:
| I'm not going to get that deep into politics here. You
| are basically arguing for a one state solution except it
| is Palestinian run instead of Israeli run. HN probably
| isn't the place to have that debate.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I wouldn't care if it was Palestinian run or Israeli run,
| if it was one or two states, as long as its peaceful and
| democratic.
|
| What I care about are factually wrong and misleading
| statements.
| benja123 wrote:
| The Christian population in the Christian towns of the
| Westbank (Bethlehem) and in Gaza have been decreasing
| steadily for the past 70 years - this has nothing to do
| with the occupation of the Westbank and Gaza and
| everything to do with persecution by the local
| population. This trend is not confined to just the
| Westbank and Gaza and is in fact a trend that is
| occurring across the entire Middle East where in the past
| 100 years the Christian population has decreased from 20%
| of the population to approximately 5% of the population.
| DSingularity wrote:
| If by persecution by the locals you mean the Jewish
| Israelis -- sure. But if you are trying to imply that the
| Muslim Arabs persecuted the Christians get out of here.
|
| By wide margins the European Christian crusaders killed
| more Arab Christians then any other ethnic group.
| Palestinian Christians and Muslims have coexisted for a
| long, long time. To the point that the holiest of
| Christian churches are often entrusted to Muslim
| custodianship. How else would you explain that?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Indeed. The majority of Palestinian Christians left due
| to their ethnic cleansing by Israel in 1948.
|
| It's not Hamas that destroyed a Christian church and
| orphanage a week ago. It was an Israeli bomb.
|
| There were two or three attacks of Christians in
| Palestine by Muslims, however them being religiously
| motivated is doubtful and the perpetrators were condemned
| and prosecuted by everyone, even Hamas.
|
| The vast majority of persecution of Christians in
| Palestine for their religion was by Jewish extremists,
| overwhelmingly. Let alone ethnic persecution of
| Christians.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Have you ever been in Gaza or the Westbank?
|
| How these places work is that if you leave, you can never
| come back.
|
| These places are awful to live in. The only people that
| stay there stay because they don't have a choice or for
| ideological reasons. That's why Christians leave moreso,
| they often have family that left and can get refugee
| status more easily.
|
| The trend of Christians leaving is a highly localized
| trend. The greatest number of Christians left not
| everywhere in the Middle East, but in Iraq, Syria, and, a
| while ago, Turkey.
|
| The events in the last sixty years that contributed the
| most to Christian emigration were the Lebanese civil war,
| the Iraq war, the Syrian Civil War, and the Nakba of
| 1948.
| slim wrote:
| Palestine was a Nation. Not merely a land. It had autonomy
| and governance all through history
| 2rsf wrote:
| Palestine with it's borders comes up perfectly with my Google
| maps
| f430 wrote:
| Not sure about sides here but if you launch rockets into cities
| indiscriminately and then the building where you keep your
| weapons, communication center using human shields after warning
| residents well ahead of time that the building will be blown
| up, actually gets taken out who is at fault here?
|
| Why are people even defending Hamas???!
|
| Does Israel not have right to defend itself? Is Israel like
| South Korea who gets attacked regularly and does nothing and
| opens itself up escalating levels of attack?
| hereme888 wrote:
| It's crazy how you got downvoted. Shows how much bias and
| misinformation exists even in HN.
|
| What you said is plainly obvious.
|
| If US mainland were ever attacked, no one here would object
| to a similar response.
| f430 wrote:
| There's a certain country that competes with US that has
| interest in stroking flames in a very clear cut rules of
| engagement. That said country also invests in YC companies
| hence the censorship against criticisms of that country on
| HN. I know dang is just doing what he's being told so I
| don't put this on the moderators.
|
| If you attack Israel, don't be surprised when you get hit
| back. It's not like I'm oblivious to the sufferings of
| Palestinians either. They are in a bad place and paying the
| price of Hamas suicidalism.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/17/palest.
| ..
| f430 wrote:
| curious but how many alt nick accounts do you have on this
| website?
| slacktide wrote:
| 42
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Huh? The parent seemed to be oblivious as to the reasons
| why some people would have sympathy for the Palestinians.
| I posted an article giving the perspective of a
| Palestinian in the midst of the situation.
| loceng wrote:
| They're avoiding engaging in critical thinking,
| compassion, so they can maintain their ideologue-blind
| hate.
|
| You must be an anti-semite because you're having
| compassion for all sides. /s
| alisonkisk wrote:
| This is an unnuanced take that ignores the complexity of the
| issue and provacative actions taken by Israel.
| f430 wrote:
| Self defense is provocative?
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Forgive me the joke, but maybe it is because the borders are
| dynamic.
| [deleted]
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