I think you only come out with this type of thinking if you've never really spent much time with people who served in the armed forces. Wars are declared by politicans not soldiers. Soldiers are enlisted to serve (at least in the US and most western nations) at the behest of the democratic body that employs them.
I.e they shouldn't be blamed if politicans force them to fight battles they think are unjust. If they are ordered to they don't have a choice its fight or go to miltary prison per UCMJ. Other jobs (law enforcement) are not like that. Generally speaking its quite unfair to double blame soldiers forcing them to fight unjust wars and than punish them for being forced into stupid wars. They can choose to not be soldiers but not everyone will be in a position economically to ignore the possible benefits. Miltary service is a strong path to escape poverty especially in the US.
Law enforcement is entirely different they are immune to judgement errors they make even if they kill someone. They have little accountablity, and often abuse of the law is just overlooked or covered up because they are the ones who enforce it. They don't even have to know how to do their job or law, if they mess up its someone elses problem due to qualifed immunity. Hence the craziness with the ICE they can violate rights with impunity and much of that has to due with the fact their oversight body is apparently just the president who says don't care about any law breaking.
> They can choose to not be soldiers but not everyone will be in a position economically to ignore the possible benefits. Miltary service is a strong path to escape poverty especially in the US.
Adding to this, if you're in the peacetime military and have a long contract, and congress or the executive orders the military to deploy somewhere, those soldiers won't even have much of a choice. As long as you're under contract, if the military says jump, most often all you can respond with is "how high?"
In that same light, all of us programmers sold our souls for cash to make the Facebooks and Flocks and OpenAI's of the world. Don't throw stones when you live in a glass house.
While I'm some degree of a pacifist, it's tough to argue against the concept of a defense army, in the face of human nature. Defense in the larger sense also has to mean (preventative) intervention, for example world war 2 might have ended very differently unless the US joined.
I also recognize that the US has perverted this concept countless times since with blatant imperialistic motives, it does however still not break the concept of a just responsive military force.
TL;DR: They're not selling their souls if they (mistakenly) trust elected officials to work for the will of the people and only deploy for just causes.
How can anyone look at hundreds of years of US imperialism with rose-colored glasses anymore? Who is really misguided into thinking the US army is defensive in nature? You have constructed a beautiful straw man.
Fortunately the Nuremberg principles rescue us here. Following orders is no excuse for abdicating a moral responsibility.
> How can anyone look at hundreds of years of US imperialism with rose-colored glasses anymore?
I quite explicitly did the opposite of that.
> Who is really misguided into thinking the US army is defensive in nature?
Let me put it this way:
* Had Ukraine not had an army, it would not exist right now.
* Had Ukraine had a bigger army, it might not have been invaded at all.
* Had Ukraine had the biggest army in the world, it might or might not have abused it for nefarious reasons.
The argument I made is that the US (and any country) needs it for case 1 and 2 (can also be solved through defensive alliances, though Ukraine had assurances that were broken), but the US has gone the wrong way for case 3.
This however does not invalidate case 1 and 2.
> You have constructed a beautiful straw man.
I'm unsure how to respond to this other than state that it's ironic.
Honestly I couldn't say this better. I would just go one step further participating in the Miltary does not equal your doing atrocities as a natural conclusion. We want people of sound morals to be in the Miltary because they will make I hope moral decisions when it comes to the conduct of war.
I highly recommend reading On War by carl von clausewitz. He gives a pragmetic opinion on War and being read for it. Along with being ready for general conflict both non-violent and violent
The answer is you can't. They did not reason themselves into their position, and you can't reason them out of it. It's irrational to have rational discussion with the irrational.
This is why derision is a valid philosophical debate strategy if a person refuses to engage in rational discussion. To label GP as an R-word is a social signal and warning to others not to behave similarly. Derision also promotes healthy skepticism of new arguments you hear, lest risk falling into the same trap and have oneself become a laughingstock.
If you take their cookie for dropping their bombs - it seems like you’ve earned whatever blame comes your way for the people you kill. It never seems like much blame makes it back anyways
In the case of the US, this view is pure propaganda.
Peace from who? Mexico? Canada? Which country is going to invade you?
All the American military does is bomb Middle Eastern countries and leave a huge mess. I do not believe US security is helped by bombing weddings and schools. I would even argue that it worsens it, by creating a bunch of people that lost their loved ones to those acts and that then turn to terrorism as a means of revenge.
"we don't need military because we live surrounded by peaceful neighbours"
yes and the world was once nonstop warfare among tribes. it's child like to think peace just arose magically and does not need to be protected
Why stop there? Include Russia in the EU. Surely they'll be impressed by your maturity and cooperation and be inspired to maturely cooperate. Then you can rely on them to protect you from the US, instead of the opposite situation that you've enjoyed for 80 years.
I agree. The most painful mistake of European foreign policy in the last decades was not swooping up Russia in the 90s.
Again, the idea of "military protection" is overly primitive and simplistic. If we had integrated them in our system, we could've given them rule of law as we have done with many an applicant state (think other post-Soviet countries!) and nurtured peace through fostering mutual dependence.
We failed to spread the values of enlightenment and now we are paying the price.
The whole protection racket thing that's now exploding in our face would've been unnecessary and could've been avoided.
Violence is the language of the weak.
We've seen time and time again how ineffective it is, most recently when y'all tore up the deal the EU negotiated with Iran and instead went back to more primitive ways, with predictable results. Before that, in Afghanistan, where after countless dead the same group is in power again. When even is the last time your approach worked? WW2? Might be time to move with the times.
The times today are built upon yesterday's times. You can't arrive where you are without passing through where you were. Could the EU have even formed if it hadn't had a nuclear power protecting it from 1945 to 1993 and beyond? We'll never know. But I'm sure you would've had to waste money on an arms race with the Soviets, as the US did.
I'm explicitly not talking about all the Middle-Eastern misadventures here, I find those as baffling and unjust as you do. I'm only referring to defensive and deterrent effects of having a military, which as I said, is the true portion of the propaganda you pointed out. (Good propaganda is always partly true.) The assertion that it doesn't exist and that the US military is only for war crimes is demonstrably false, and to prove it you need only (as I said to someone else) try to fly an airplane into US airspace without announcing yourself.
Is it primitive and juvenile? Absolutely! It comports with those particular traits of homo sapiens, an ape species. Any country big enough, or rich enough, or strategic enough for some other reason, is a target for invasion by the immature and non-cooperative. Furthermore if all the countries of the world were to join in one big cooperative union (which they already do in the realm of trade and commerce to some degree), I sadly don't think it would take long for someone to betray it, the way Trump (Russian asset) is betraying it now.
Amazing insight. If only you could go back in time and tell those early tribes that cooperation is all you need we could have saved millenia of warfare.
The whole point is that we have moved on from the early tribe stage and have figured out better ways, ways that actually work and protect peace.
Well, some of us at least.
It is telling you have not been able to engage with the point at all and choose to bury your head in ancient history instead of confronting the present day.
I'm afraid we are the same people we always were. We have not figured out ways to protect peace that don't involve having a bigger stick than the other guys. If you think we have it's because you have buried your head in the illusion of peace without power.
It's propaganda, but also true. If the US or any other country had no military, ANY country could invade it. This is why they all tend to have militaries. Also it doesn't have to be Canada and Mexico, this is not a Risk board. The army men have big army boats, toot toot goes the horn on the big army boat! And they have big army planes too, zoom zoom go the army planes!
Then Andorra would not meet any military resistance. If you're saying Andorra can't do anything because their military is small or non-existent, you're just proving the point that armies that exist are the ones that do things. But is Andorra defenseless? No, it's protected by all the military force of the EU, and, ironically, allies like the US.
It's a preposterous idea with the size of the military forces of US currently. It would not be preposterous with 0 military force.
And to be clear, the US has abused the army for half a century for unjust causes, and I'm not defending that, but the concept of an army can be moral in the context of rivalling aggressive nations.
You are defending that. Because the US military does those awful things and has done forever.
There is no US military that's a defensive force. It is a war crimes machine.
You might think you are defending the idea of a peaceful defense force in the US but that's never existed and probably will never exist. So we all read your posts as if they were talking about the US military that exists.
> You are defending that. Because the US military does those awful things and has done forever.
I both acknowledged and specified the difference.
> You might think you are defending the idea of a peaceful defense force in the US but that's never existed and probably will never exist.
Let me ask you this instead: What do you see as an alternative? Abolishing the entirety of all military force, or electing officials that do not abuse the existing or reduced scale military force for unjust causes? Or some third option?
I'm saying the idea of a US military that exists in only a defensive capability is as realistic a possibility as no military and trusting the world to be chill.
They are both zero percent likely to happen. So why hypothesize and carry water for either idea? Like, "the US military should have peace beans that rainbow blast everyone into loving each other" is as cromulent a position as "if the US military were defense only, they'd be really good actually".
> I'm saying the idea of a US military that exists in only a defensive capability is as realistic a possibility as no military and trusting the world to be chill.
> They are both zero percent likely to happen.
You didn't provide a third option.
> So why hypothesize and carry water for either idea?
If all possible ideas are completely unrealistic, why comment at all? What could they do better?
The third option is the us military is and will remain an imperialist war machine. So trying to carry water for a fantasy version of it is just carrying water for the imperialist version.
To assert that the US military has no defensive or deterrent effect whatsoever is at odds with reality, and to prove it to yourself you should try to fly an airplane into US airspace without announcing yourself, and see what happens.
Should we have let the Nazi's win because the risk of the US killing 1 German civilians was greater than 0? I just find it very fake and mind broken to conclude the only evil empire is the US and that we need to beat them over the head endlessly without also calling out the other genocidal wars and empires that the US found itself existing among. The US army and its troops do have a deep shame for when they kill civilians. But don't act like the the US is some unique civilian killing machine. We infact are pretty good at not killing civilians as a ratio civilian per combatant than basically any army we've ever fought against or with. Certainly since WW2. Vietnam being particularly poor ratio but still far better than Viet Congs civilian to enemy combant ratio.
The matter of fact is that war is messy especially guerrilla warfare which is the only war that basically exists today and in that context what's an acceptable ratio? 0 means surrendering or being stepped on ask Ukraine but is it 1/5, 1/10? Ideally you have zero but to have total disregard of the service members life doesn't cause there to be less war or civilian death. Just more onesided brutal wars. These are hard questions but to paint the people that fight in wars in democratic societies as just souless sellouts is reductive and its the type of thinking that leads to mass murder by political groups. Souless people don't feel PTSD for what they did they are souless. PTSD is incredibly common in the services because we don't want empathless murder machines. Because when it comes to wining wars (wining a political objective ultimately) generally speaking civilian deaths don't help political goals which is what the elected officals ask the miltary to do. But most importantly the elected bodies are the ones asking for invasion.
I think these are hard questions that good solutions from the miltary side of things don't exist but most importantly I really think we as a society need to have more serious talks and rational conceptions of how war and conflict works. I can't recommend On War by Clauswitz enough, but acoup also has a great primer on it [1]
I guess we agree to disagree here. This America which Uniquely evil is ahistoric. It is a worthless category to create to beat a nation on the head with. When you look at all of its peer nations which have committed far more war crimes and crimes against humanity and conclude America is evil. It just seems untethered to reality. Which nation which finds itself in conflict should the US be more like?
Its difficult to name a war in which the American miltary has killed, even close to the number of civilians as its opposition. WW2 germany? Japan (remember china). the USSR? the PRC today. North Viet Government? North Korean? Afganhstan? (yeah the Tailban killed more civilians) All of these war/conflicts the US kills far less civilians. Is that ideal no civilian dies but the conduct of the opposition in this war maximizes civilian causulty often but no one says anything about those and people led with the Armed Service is just all murders.
You are simplifying the horror of War to some ideal where people don't have to die. It just doesn't exist and just comes across as Russian anti-liberal rhetoric. The structure of our miltary and its actions are not poor or unprofessional espeically when you look at literally any other peer nation.
> When you look at all of its peer nations which have committed far more war crimes and crimes against humanity and conclude America is evil.
Any nation that commits war crimes is evil. What is this nonsense like, some amount of war crimes is fine actually as long as we're not in the top 10 war crimes last?
Also, even still, I think the US would make that top ten list. Let's take some examples from your list.
North Korea -- a brutal dictatorship that has killed countless people in North Korea, and inflicted significant suffering on South Korea. Disgusting and reprehensible regime. Truly evil.
The United States -- imperialist nation that has caused incalculable damage to Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Congo, Chile, East Timor, Angola, El Salvador, Grenada, and Nicaragua.
They've also hurt Ukraine, Palestine, Hawai'i, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.
Then, you know, there's The United States, where the indigenous people were killed. 95% of their population eradicated in the run up to the Declaration of Independence, and 50% of the remaining population in the 1800s.
Woof.
Need me to continue with more? These are all places where the US military ...
Oh shit, wait. I haven't even started on nuclear warfare and testing. Or testing on minority troops.
Ok. I think I got it out of my system. American Samoa. Sorry had one more. Whew.
Now you see why I don't play the moral relativism game, and simply say any war crimes is an unacceptable number of war crimes. Because if you hold up American military history against any single nation, the sheer quantities just don't stack up. Tens of millions of innocents dead, either through direct or indirect action. And it's continuing. North Korea is evil AND the US military has uncountable war crimes. Both are bad. Trying to compare two countries like this forces you to juxtapose a small but intense evil against a staggeringly large sustained but maybe less acute evil.
So no, you are probably right, I probably am over simplifying. I'm sure Pinochet's victims would love to hear how it was actually ok because the US soldiers who installed him were professional and had good structure.
Read more history. Understand the US place in the world. I'm sure there are many upstanding, kind, loving, wonderful soldiers in the US military. The institution, however... the institution has hundreds of years of imperialist violence.
If you invade Ireland or France, you are invading the EU, which has military capability, and has other allies like the US that also have military capability. Ireland is probably not big/rich/strategic enough to warrant taking on those costs. An invasion doesn't pass a narrow cost-benefit analysis. Throw in the diplomatic costs and it looks even worse.
Edit: I suppose I've stumbled on some kind of economic or game-theory angle here - Militaries exist to impose costs. They tip the balance of potential invaders' cost-benefit analyses. They also impose costs on their owners though. But I guess the idea is that the benefits (avoiding the costs of being invaded) are supposed to be greater than the costs of the defense force.
Some people are evil, e.g., Hitler. All the moral grandstanding in the world isn't going to help if you're invaded and they slaughter you and everyone with your morality out of existence.
I'm not being condescending or rude or otherwise out of line here saying your position is genuinely stupid.
These are independent events someone saying something about something else does not influence the probabilty that something was malicous. The event already occured. I think the original person is just question the probability of something malicously being 100% to be flawed thinking/misattributed. :)
It might just be a job but someone living happy in good conditions that feels like the rug might get pulled under them for something they cannot control for is a lot more unerving even if your material conditions work out just fine in the end.
Also I think your being a little atomizing in the impact here. 1 Person losing a job is their problem, I agree. 60 thousand people losing there job is a problem for the government and society. 60K people is a lot and it has a ton of consquences. This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries. Its atleast in the billions which is small in the total Federal revenue but if this is a sign of whats to come we have problems. Maybe those people go to different employment but change will effect a lot of local economies.
Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I like your comment but I think you're generalizing too a bit in a different way. It's 60k people spread in different countries, at least four. It is still a big problem, but it's not "the tax implication of losing 60k salaries" for a single government
I do agree maybe its a over generalization but I am trying reading the waves
If Microsoft is 40% based in the US the US probably would see 20K people in high salery positions get cut if its somewhat evenly leveled. They are still okay with reducing 1/4 people (they are offering a buyout so I am holding off on the F bomb).
The invest into AI is something like $6T if it hasn't produced $6T in value it better produce it in cuts. If you expect its just going to Microsoft laying off great the government is fine but if other companies in the next months cut high paid position it hits the country in non trivial ways. But You are correct its not just going to effect the US it and that dampens the magntitude but its still a massive reduction of force for a major company
> This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries
Muh job creators! You can't tax your way to growth!
Well actually, they are now job destroyers. Tax the fuckers.
In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month, ~4.8M/year. 60k workers leaving Microsoft is a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking. But of course, they should still get as much support as possible via the packages they accept, and getting to retirement (Social Security and Medicare benefits) as pain free and least uncertainty as possible.
> Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I vote for and support Democratic Socialist candidates, who would implement and maintain more humane and pro worker economic systems, I'm doing my part at system levels. But systems will take decades to change. It took decades to get here from Ronald Reagan and his policies. Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
(and if you think there is a problem with corporate earnings vs what workers take home, again, that is a political and labor organizing problem to solve for)
Listen I am not even 30 yet its a big deal when an industry leader reduces work force by 1/4. It absolutely number yeah no company ever really matters but in agrogate the little loses can be devistating for the people and the boarder economy. 4M Boomers retire is a problem if we cannot replace them and want the same set of services as before. Not nearly as many people are entering as leaving right now which makes wage pressure up but if there isn't people the business moves.
I don't really think DSA had much that would help the economy beside the basic mainstream democrat tastes. Democrats generally speaking want less monopolies, better healthcare insurance (mostly a public option) and reasonable taxation but the DSA takes things to 11 with just politically unviable rhetoric in my opinion. But most of all, I think the ideas from the DSA that work doesn't matter as long as people are taken care is likely to cost a lot people.
The Mechanic takes pride that he can fix stuff. The engineer takes pride that they can design a system. Doctors take pride that they are the reason people don't die. If you take away pride you harm a lot of people this is arguable what got the democrats (republicans voted for this too) where they are today in that they embraced Free Trade regardless of the cost. It created a rust belt that is brain washed into blaming Democrats for 100% of the harm. Fox news helps in accomplishing that that too but I think a lot of the DSA is steeped in that MAGA like style of never engage in what harms the ideology thinking and that spooks me away from that group agressively.
Enron saw 20k workers let go in 2001, Arthur Andersen saw 85k jobs evaporate when they collapsed in 2002. Yellow Corporation caused 30k union freight jobs to be lost when they failed in 2023. 33k Toys "R" Us workers lost their jobs when the company liquidated in 2017. These events happen, and the economy will carry on. Notably (and for comparison and counterexample purposes), the US.
government bailout of General Motors (GM) in 2008 and 2009 saved an estimated 1.2M jobs (with up to 2.6M total jobs preserved across the broader auto industry and supplier network in 2009 alone), according to studies by the Center for Automotive Research. When we want to save a lot of jobs, we can when there is political will.
There are labor shortages throughout the developed world, due to structural demographics. This will not change in our lifetime due to global demographic trajectories. This will push wages up. This is good. Wages paid are shareholder returns not paid.
We agree to disagree on DSA policies. I want the Scandinavian model to protect people. IDGAF about profits, people first, full stop. Their support is very high amongst the under 35, and 2M 55+ voters age out every year. Progress is a function of time and electorate turnover. Old people with old ideas die out, and are replaced by young people with different ideas.
Can you stop big companies from making these cuts? No, at least not without unions and laws to make it harder. So, in the short term, help these people land softly and in the long term, build better systems so that people who want to contribute have some place to from a place of economic security. That’s it’s. Feelings are irrelevant, only outcomes matter (imho).
> In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means...
Sure, from a raw numbers perspective it's a drop in the bucket. But not all numbers are created equal. How does the pay of these employees from Microsoft compare? You mention those of the baby boomer generation, but are all employees who may be leaving Microsoft of the same age range? What about their skillsets and the investments they and we as society of spent in their education? Those other factors matter quite a bit, so you can't just do a simple 1-1 analysis of "people".
> Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
Why? Which evidence? I think more people could have more meaning if they were self-employed, were craftsmen or artisans, and such, but this nihilistic viewpoint (which is a hallmark of anti-social/authoritarian ideologies like DSA and others) not only doesn't reflect reality but seeks to belittle those who do in fact find meaning and joy in their work. I for one like my job and have liked most of the jobs I've had. Just because an organization no longer needs you, or you no longer need it, doesn't mean that the job all of a sudden "doesn't matter".
If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
If the org can operate without you in the role, or without the role itself, the job does not matter. The human always matters, the job does not.
> If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death. If it is your job, and you are involuntarily retired, my condolences. I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
Society, broadly speaking, runs on everyone doing just good enough in the aggregate to keep the system running. Some systems are better than others (Japan institutionalizing perfectionism, for example).
Look, I'm all in favor of fully automated (gay, space) luxury communism, but as long as work remains a major component of civil society, one of the few truly social institutions left, people will identify with it. Which makes it a problem that while a vocation needs to be lifelong to justify the time-investment of cultivating skill and experience, employment has become a rather short-term, feast-or-famine phenomenon.
> If the org can operate without you in the role, or without the role itself, the job does not matter. The human always matters, the job does not.
Blueberries grow in the wild, ergo farmers don't matter.
> Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death.
So why are you prematurely defining what meaning should be for everyone? That's one of the problems with these authoritarian ideologies.
> I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
I don't understand this at all. Clearly they care a lot or else these planes would be crashing and stuff. If you think they don't care and you're saying flying on the aircraft sucks because they don't care, then maybe they should care more about their jobs and then it would be a better experience, which sort of runs counter to your thesis here.
But like if your company is making money hand over foot you didn't typically cut staff by 25%. You could just as easily do a hiring freeze and get out ahead of it. I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)
> I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)
Yes, it's cold, but in the grand scheme of things, it's good for the society if companies are efficient and the economy is efficient. An efficient economy means that we can produce and consume more per hour worked.
Such behavior by companies may not be in my self-interest but that's another matter.
They aren't cutting staff because they made a ton of money. They are cutting staff because they see trouble on the horizon and are positioning themselves for that. Layoffs are rarely lagging indicators. They are more often predictors of trouble coming. This bubble will explode, MSFT wants to survive it. Thats all there is to it.
This may be so but what others in this thread are trying to point out is that this is a relative novelty. Decades ago, layoffs were something that hapened at struggling companies trying to stave off bankruptcy (or already in it). It is a major cultural change to treat employees so casually as fat to be trimmed.
I don't think people have sex or not because the cost of living. Poor people have had plenty of sex in the past. I think modern society is more occupying and people just interact less in a romantic sense because they are getting attention drained, in the same way a vampire drains your blood. We relieved the hard labor from peoples life but we also replaced it with attention suction devices that occupied peoples hours at much higher rates.
If you were a peasant in 1300s you worked hard probably 8-12 hours a day but once it was dark or the winter what you did radically changed because you couldn't see. It was just hanging out with people or going to bed, or other indoor task that usually involved other people or being around a limited light source. Those were the options of which one is kind of boring after a while. You'd thus interact with people and by interacting you'd end up having sex because it was fun when compared with doing anything else. Porn also didn't really exist so that as an outlet was basically zero so I'd attribute that to part of the attention occupying culture we have today
I don’t think it’s video games though, they tend to be intensive experiences that are only sustainable for a few hours at most - I don’t think most young adults are whiling away their lives playing GTA (although some certainly do). I think the constant dopamine microdosing from social media that’s the much larger issue - it makes everything ever so paler in comparison, especially over time. Porn is a similar kind of dopamine hit (maybe akin to a vodka shot while social media is a dripfeed of wine), so I do agree with you there.
Honestly R*pon*blity is probably not the word I'd use (but i get it) because, the addiction we are describing is stocastic. The timings between notifications for activity x/y/z is engineered to break down people. And it really is X/Y/Z not just porn or games, I was trying do draw the abstract idea of attention drain specifically engineered and designed. Dopamine micro dosing definitely reinforce that behavior. I don't know the solution is.
I didnt censor it, i juat suck at typing (n a phone. I think you underestimate how much sex happens because there isnt something else eat*ng up the time, especially in a m(nogamousish relationship over age 25.
I am fine with content policeing actions from being legal but I think we content enforcement of this nature on platforms that live on freedom of press and speech should be forced to publicize when that take action against accounts. Publicize the lists for bans, and reason for it. Here the reason is given but its not account linked so its hard to say if the reason is justifed with the accounts histories.
Maybe the government needs a meta organization that upholds freedom of speech enforcement from platforms and companies that get broad Section 230 protections. I.e Facebook, X, Twitch, Youtube, etc. If a company can just purge you soruce of speech entirely the country protections seem lacking for the public welfare. Curious what other people think. I know an agency like this is rife to partisan infiltration but if its roll is to for unbanning rather than banning I think the scope of its potential abuse would be extremely narrow.
Why would putting data center in space solve these problems? I feel like this is a total non sequitur. The solution is pay for more substations and power generation. This problem exists there regardless of space based compute and let me tell you the space based compute would 1000000x more expensive because you still need to build everything required in the current solution except in space! Its just not a real response to a lack of investment into infrastructure. And that means asking business to pay for the infrastrure they need as a collective industry.
I think they are thinking of something of a poorly designed Dyson Swarm, the plebs who came up with it think that with "cheap" launches, no permits really, and free* power, it might really come out in the wash and be easier to scale.
Is it a good idea? Most likely not, the amount of issues they are going to have is going to be amazing.
I'd say the alternative is the rust approach. of debug mode always doing checked div and checked add ops. this prevents a large class of issues which you can find in debug mode. In release mode those UB checks are dropped. You of course can specify the type of add you want i.e saturating or wrapping etc. But yeah it makes things slower but the alterative is the code potentially doesn't work. Linux is funny in this regard which i think is why Linus allows rust and not c++ because potentially not working is a big deal in a kernel. C++ doesn't address this issue and of course C does not C++'s potential UB space is so much bigger because of alliasing issues and object patterns exposing more chances for UB.
Regardless you are right there is a cost is it worth paying hard to say
> of debug mode always doing checked div and checked add ops. this prevents a large class of issues which you can find in debug mode. In release mode those UB checks are dropped
Checked divs are present in release mode too. Omitting them would be UB.
Other checks (e.g. for additions) are omitted in release mode, but they were not preventing UB in the first place because they guard a wrapping addition, not an unchecked one (the kind that's UB in C).
You ever hear the state if you owe the bank a 1000$ you have a problem, and if you owe the bank 100,000,000$ they have a problem? I think if a majority of students end up without basic skills the genius students will have problem. Will LLMs do that i don't think so but if you think its an acceptable outcome thats also not okay.
I mean you need to show that trail Covid was very infectious even before it mutated more. It's been estimated to have a R-naught above 2. It seems incredulus that their is a hypotehtical lab worker who is infected who takes the train 7 miles to the wet market (distance from lab) infects no one, but than infects 1 person at the wet market. Than goes home on the train, infects no one afterwards after proving they have virulent infection. It seems to go against how virus work. Because they need to not only infect anyone after the ride home but also no infect anyone ever again execpt at the wet market. You need to show evidence of or you are just engaging in conspricy thinking
Also we don't have the Zoonosis of the plauge, or the spanish bird flu but we are very confident they came from animals because we can tell that. So that claim we always now is just dumb we are mising many origin animals for many diseases because can back generate dieasese lineages from the DNA of the disease sometimes we can't and I am sure there are some back traces that just go to the wrong animal.
China didn't help with the fact they killed and bleached every animal at that wet market but that is documented to have happened but that is not proof of lab leak.
-- There's so much heated speculation in this thread as to make all arguments worthless. What isn't speculation however, is that the international treaties against bio-weapons are a joke that can result in a global tragedy at any moment.
Bio-weapons are untraceable, one side can seed an infection in a way to frame another player, and all that could be done about it, would be heated but fruitless speculations. There's no point in arguing about "who's done it", actually that line of argument is a huge distraction causing a lot more harm than good.
Learn and argue about the dysfunctional internal and international bio-regulations, they are the reason for the uncertainty and lack of accountability which enable and invite truly global and truly disastrous villainy.
Yeah, it would have killed a friend or relative of the lab worker, or someone living in the same building as the lab worker, and then you would have your smoking gun of a lab leak.
Going from infecting a lab worker to a high-precision spillover in a wet market, without leaving a trace anywhere else, is just not how a viral infection is likely to work.
SARS-CoV-2 has relatively low IFR, especially among younger people, and a mild case is easily dismissed as a flu or cold. Transmission is also heterogeneous, with most patients infecting no one while a few infect huge clusters; R = 2 absolutely does not mean one patient infects two, who infect four, who infect eight, etc.
> An important feature in this distribution, consistent with earlier findings (4), is that the majority (76%) of infected cases shows no evidence of onward transmission amongst any of their contacts.
So there's no reason to expect that the first cluster that generates enough sickness and death to attract official attention will occur near the point of introduction. If we look at North America, then it in fact did not--the introduction must have been at an airport or seaport, but the first large clusters were in nursing homes, church choir practices, etc. This is different from SARS-1 or MERS, which were deadly enough to make that cryptic spread much less likely.
Can you clarify your point? Crowded, poorly-ventilated wet markets like the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market are quite different from American (or Chinese) supermarkets, and uncommon in the USA. American-style nursing homes are likewise uncommon in China, where it's more common for elderly parents to live with their children.
The conditions for a super-spreader event can arise in many different ways--before the contact tracers gave up, they found clusters in that wet market, those nursing homes, cruise ships, meat processors, migrant worker dormitories, and many other types of venues. I don't see why we'd ever expect the first cluster in the same type of venue in both countries, except by chance.
I.e they shouldn't be blamed if politicans force them to fight battles they think are unjust. If they are ordered to they don't have a choice its fight or go to miltary prison per UCMJ. Other jobs (law enforcement) are not like that. Generally speaking its quite unfair to double blame soldiers forcing them to fight unjust wars and than punish them for being forced into stupid wars. They can choose to not be soldiers but not everyone will be in a position economically to ignore the possible benefits. Miltary service is a strong path to escape poverty especially in the US.
Law enforcement is entirely different they are immune to judgement errors they make even if they kill someone. They have little accountablity, and often abuse of the law is just overlooked or covered up because they are the ones who enforce it. They don't even have to know how to do their job or law, if they mess up its someone elses problem due to qualifed immunity. Hence the craziness with the ICE they can violate rights with impunity and much of that has to due with the fact their oversight body is apparently just the president who says don't care about any law breaking.
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