Yovel Rom

• Yovel RomOct 10, 2023, 6:43 PM

  5 points

  −4

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: I’m a Former Is­raeli Officer. AMA

  We have been keeping peace and nation building in the West Bank in the last fourty years or so. It’s far from perfect, but the places didn’t go up in flames in the last 20 years or so. We have less options than the US in Afghanistan so we learn through trial and error. Also the EU tends to send experts to try and help (whether they do is a diffferent question, for which I don’t actually know the answer).

  The problem tends to be not that we don’t know how to nation- build, but that we don’t want to. When we tried to build an actual Palestinian country in the 90′s it kinda blew up in our face. The Palestinian Authority became a terror nation which we had to weaken a lot in Operation Defensive Shield back in 2002. It remained a weak, unelected government ever since (last elections were back at 2006, when Hamas started taking over). Nobody knows what will happen when the current president will die and it’s A Problem.

  In conclusion: Yes, better that the US did but not very good objectively. We muddled through so far, so… fingers crossed?

• Yovel RomOct 10, 2023, 6:28 PM

  12 points

  1

  in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: I’m a Former Is­raeli Officer. AMA

  Haha not that different from data science in other large organizations, but from time to time you do gruard shifts because it’s the army.

  People try to make you do research on problems with next to no data, and there are literal human lives on the line, but you have to convince everyone it’s not possible and you should focus on other, more approachable problems.

  Let’s take, for instance, a non classified problem: Automatically detecting people trying to sneak towards you. Seemingly easy: computer vision is a solved problem! However, sneaking tends to happen at night. While wearing camouflage (Out Of Distribution!). Sometimes your cameras are on a plane (OOD!) and/​ or cover a large area (very small humans!). Also, there are only a few terrorist attacks a year, only some of them properly saved (until the one that literally kills a thousand people in one day), so almost no test data, not to mention training.

  In conclusion: lots of fun, lots of action, but I enjoy civilian life better. It has better data!

• Yovel RomOct 10, 2023, 6:11 PM

  12 points

  2

  in reply to: Erich_Grunewald’s comment on: I’m a Former Is­raeli Officer. AMA

  Sorry it took me some time.
  I agree with your asessment. I did say Israel tried to do that, but it’s a hard problem. I didn’t want to elaborate on this point in the original comment since it felt off topic, so here goes:

  TL;DR: Blockade is the baseline from which we try to improve, since Hamas are genocidal terrorists and use any aid to military needs. Under that constraint Israel has supplied water, food, electricity, and tried to build more generators and let palestinians work within its borders.

  Some links will be in hebrew, sorry in advance. I’ll only use major newpapers, wikipedia or large think tanks.

  First of all the background assumption is that Israel is trying to improve the situation in the stip within the constraint “a genocidal terror organization is in reign, and they’ll abuse any aid”. The original raional behind the Separation in 2005 was to let the Palestinian Authority control a relatively large piece of land with a port. All that went to hell after Hamas won the democratic elections in 2006, then killed all other political parties in 2007. Since then work visas from Gaza to Israel were stopped, and the blockade started.

  1. Concrete steps are, for instance:

     1. Letting money donations from Qatar into the strip, which was used to pay Hamas officials and pay for social needs

     2. Providing work permits for 15,000 palestinians in the last years, with hopes of giving more in time. There are 150,000 palestinians workers in Israel from the west bank, 10% of its workforce. Gaza could (and have, before Hamas) have similar proportions.

     3. Provide basic human needs such as electricity, even though the Palestinians don’t actually pay for it.

  It is not much. However, keep in mind that everything that entered the strip was used for military needs first, and civilian second: cement for bunkers and offensive tunnels, iron for rockets (couldn’t find a good link, but they’re produced locally and the iron comes from somewhere), and sandbags for bunkers. And that’s the stuff we actually let through, not the military equipment they are constantly smuggling inside, some in civilian guise.

  In conclusion: It’s hard. There are no good solutions. We are trying. It’s not optimal, or even the best we could concievably do, but nothing ever is. We are trying to manage our own potential genociders, backed by popular support. It’s an impossible situation, and everyone suffers, but we’re triying to make it better than baseline.

• Yovel RomOct 10, 2023, 9:18 AM

  15 points

  −1

  in reply to: winstonBosan’s comment on: I’m a Former Is­raeli Officer. AMA

  1. Thanks for your concern! Thankfully I’ve been impacted very little personally. I live in the center of Israel which “only” gets bombed once a day or so. My room is a bomb shelter (as is required by Isreali law to be available in every apartment), so I don’t even have to get out of bed if there’s an alarm during the night!
     However two of my cousins are in combat, have enlisted as resrves and will go into the Gaza strip if it’s invaded, so I’m worried for their safety.

  2. In two word: Yes, exactly.
     Israel’s strategy since the Hamas took the strip over in 2007 has been to try and contain it, and keeping it weak by periodic, limited confrontations (the so called Mowing the Lawn doctorine), and trying to economically develop the strip in order to give Hamas incentives to avoid confrontation. While Hamas grew stronger, the general feeling was that the strategy works and the last 15 years were not that bad.
     I think the genral concensus in Israel right now is that Hamas proved this strategy does not work, and we have to re- occupy the strip and topple Hamas’s regime, then maybe try to establish a non- terrorist regime (maybe by some UN force or the Palestinial Authority). All that might not be possible. We’ll have to live and see.
     

I’m a Former Is­raeli Officer. AMA

• Yovel RomFeb 28, 2023, 10:29 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: Fer­til­ity Rate Roundup #1

  I would look deeper into Israel’s policy around cash transfers per child to see how big is the effect. We used to have extremely generous transfers for families with four or more children (veryuch non optimal, it was the result of pressure by the Ultra- Orthodox parties), so generous that families literally lived off of them. They stopped after 2001 for being unsustainable, and you can clearly see fertility rates taking a hit. If I remember correctly Kohelet Forum published a research about it a few years back.

• Yovel RomMar 11, 2022, 9:47 AM

  2 points

  on: Ukraine Post #2: Options

  For what it’s worth, I got to Kameel independently, from an Israeli East Europe expert.

• Yovel RomJan 19, 2021, 4:23 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Jacob Falkovich’s comment on: What trade should we make if we’re all get­ting the new COVID strain?

  I did similar trades to yours- call on VXX, and put on JETS (nothing on USO, as I don’t think it can get much lower than it already is). As the market doesn’t react to the rising case numbers in the US (and maybe more importantly, in Ireland, where they have a horrible outbreak), do you think the market might just factor the coming outbreak as a net positive, since everyone will be either vaccinated or immune after it? Also, vaccine distribution in the US seems to be accelerating, the British strain seems to be a bit less contagious than thought in December, and otherstrains that might or might not be affected by the vaccine were discovered. Have you changed any of your investment plans? Personally, I have options for both March and June, so I will either sell in a COVID related crsis, or sell the March ones at the first reasonable opportunity after March 1st, and the June ones at the first reasonable opportunity after May 1st, but I’m not sure how optimal that is.