Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of people including two families in both Gaza and Lebanon, while Hezbollah fired a volley of 55 rockets into northern Israel in response.
World leaders urged restraint and tried to frame the ceasefire negotiations as heading in a positive direction.
But in an interview with Sky News, the leader of Hamas in Lebanon told us no progress had been made so far at the talks and the two sides appear to be just as far apart as ever.
Hamas is not at the negotiations but messages and updates have been passed on to them on the sidelines.
When I was maybe 10 years old back in the 90s I asked my Dad why we put a bunch of people in a heavily populated area “when Montana is just sitting there empty. I mean, someone uses the land and we get like, taxes and museums and maybe an amusement park, right?”
He seemed genuinely poleaxed.
I still don’t have an answer to this day!
It’s an easy question so I’ll answer it: there are no resources for people or there.
Lots of these places don’t even have roads to access them. Meanwhile, the roads that we do have are in a state of catastrophic disrepair.
If you spread everyone out evenly, the resources would also be too spread out. It doesn’t do any good to have one hospital say every 100 or 200 miles because then the resources have to be spread out as well. It makes more sense to have one large hospital in the city that has all the specialty, doctors and equipment, and then smaller medical centers outside the city. And it’s that way with everything from food production to car repair to retail.
You’d get a museum out there in the middle of nowhere, and there would be less traffic at the good museum in the city where they have the rarest largest exhibits. Instead of having some good museums and some less good museums, you’d have a bunch of mediocre ones. Let your dad know!
He’s dead? So tell him yourself I guess lol.
Anyways, why would you “spread everyone out evenly?” We stuffed them into a tiny space that was already occupied. One assumes they’d be plopped into a town, which would centralize creating things like roads.
And the roads in Montana might suck, but there should be some kind of domestic package at play that would help from the federal level to create things like roads and water treatment and all that. Compared to how much we give Isreal now… could’ve put that money into development somewhere stateside.
Sorry for your loss. Maybe I misunderstood your hypothetical. For what we’ve paid Israel, it seems like we’ve gotten a war that has killed ~50,000 people. I would argue that it also gets us an order of peace in the middle east which so far has avoided a wider war involving larger regional powers that might kill 50 million people. There are more countries in Europe, Asia and North Africa than not which are likely to collapse if faced with tens of millions more more war refigees fleeing the Middle East. The world doesn’t want another failed state in the Middle East, let alone multiple additional failed states in the Middle East and North Africa. I agree with your sentiment but it’s not black and white.