And lots of high rent to suck it up
The extra among you can earn there more than makes up for the increased rent - I don't live there myself, but I have lots of friends that do.
Fuck you.
You don't have to live there you know, I don't. It is possible to work in the tech industry elsewhere, and if that's the kind of reactions you have to postings on an internet board you may want to strongly consider it.
No, it isn't the lowest number... it is the number of people we killed.
Your number includes people the Taliban killed and people that neither side killed.
I'm not accepting it. And if I see that number cited again in this discussion I'm going to ignore it.
I reject it.
It's the number of additional people that died because of the conflict. If there was no conflict they wouldn't have died.
In fact you just eliminated your argument against autonomous weapons as well. Because if in choosing your course of action you aren't willing to consider people who were killed by the other side they you're not going to consider your own soldiers killed by the enemy. You can't count all the secondary benefits of US military actions without counting the costs!!
As to your argument about unintended consequences, you're attempting to moralize the issue. Moralizing requires intent.
Moralizing requires me to actually moralize. Show me where I moralized.
Will we go to WW3 over Latvia? Funny question. Will Russia? Why do people think nukes are going to fly in a proxy war? Did the US nuke Russia or China in vietnam? We didn't nuke China during the Korean war even though some of our generals REALLY wanted to.
You weren't directly fighting China or Russia in vietnam.
No... there's no WW3 response in Latvia... either from the US or Russia. Russia has said that if pressed by superior conventional forces they reserve the option to use tactical nuclear weapons to break enemy formations. While the US takes the threat seriously, we also have made it known that if he does that it will be an escalation of hostilities that will be met with proportional responses. We have lot of conventional explosives that rival small nukes.
And then they escalate back and you have a Nuclear holocaust. It's not guaranteed nor even most most likely outcome which is part of the problem because Putin thinks he can win a limited Nuclear exchange against a small European nation without drawing a major response.
As to me sounding like an extremist... define what that means. baseless insult are of no value. I could as easily respond that you sound like a space hamster from Neptune who is plotting to steal our peanuts and fresh broccoli.
You're claiming that anyone whom you deem an enemy should die and you're unwilling to consider the cost of collateral damage such actions may incur.
To me that's extreme unnecessarily damaging actions to achieve an objective, ie an extremist.
Your position is an ad hominem. You say because you are X you are wrong. Rejected.
Backwards.
Ad hominem would be if I said your positions were wrong because you were an extremist, what I said is your positions are extremist and you now sound like an extremist.
As to direct conflict causalities being an over simplification... its what we did. What happens when you do what we did in some rube goldberg butterfly effect statistic is not something we have any control over so I'm not going to feel responsible for it.
You did it because it's easy to measure and it's the lowest number.
And the fact that a war could severely destabilize a county is the most predictable consequence ever, the party starting the war absolutely bears responsibility. It's the most basic "you broke it you bought it".
Moral judgement require intent. So you're citing a lot of deaths of people we didn't kill, didn't intend to kill, were killed by our enemies, etc and I think you're doing that just because you want a big number to play pathos games with me on.
The whole crux of the argument is over unintended consequences!
I don't find it to be intellectually honest. Use a number that more closely approximates what we ACTUALLY did not what happened to people we didn't kill but rather who we actually killed.
You don't think the US bears any moral culpability for people who die because they attack a country and cause mass instability and you should only count directly intended casualties.
Yet at the same time you're claiming the US is justified in launching conflicts because they're imposing Western hegemony. And why is Western hegemony good? Because it imposes a particular brand of stability.
And you're accusing me of being intellectually dishonest?
As to nato expansion not necessarily being the right move... and what is? What I find the most annoying about this argument is that you're not owning any course of action. You're basically just undermining and gainsaying things. Which is fine if you're going somewhere. But if you're just shitting all over people without offering an alternative then I don't find the argument to be compelling.
Back the creation of a pact of ex-Warsaw nations minus Russia.
They don't look like a Western expansion so Russia is less paranoid, and as a group they can make believable claims that they will go to war against Russia to defend eachother (is the US going to start WWIII to defend Latvia?).
You do not want us to take more causalities. I say this because I do not want my people to die and because I do not want my people to hate. You have no respect for the life of my people or our souls. But... consider what we will become if we are full of blinding rage? We are not a stupid people. We are not poor. We are not foolish. Get us mad enough and we could rape the world.
Getting us that mad is not in your interest. You think we are unreasonable now? Think again. If the terrorist shit doesn't stop we're going to be frothing. Our rage will turn into black hatred... and then we'll kill. Not to make peace. Not to end war... to kill and destroy.
You honestly sound like an extremist, I would not trust you with autonomous weapons because I feel you'd use them without restraint trying to force change via military threat.
Plain crap. You know not what you are talking about. I've spent years there working as an aid worker and you assessment of the situation on the ground is laughable in its naivete. The reason it is hard to develop a country is because the governments are kleptocracies in almost every case. You analysis is typical lefty conspiracy thinking.
There are countries in Africa where all the citizens belong to the same tribe. And still there are problems.
I mean come on where do you get your information? The Onion?
In your experience why are the government kleptocracies? (not a rhetorical/combatitive question, I'm genuinely curious about your perspective)
I don't how many times I have to make it clear to you that i'm not going to talk about iraq because its a fucking whine and I don't find it useful on the issue of general US foreign policy or geopolitics.
I wasn't talking about Iraq!!
Yes I mentioned it at the end of my last post but the vast majority was about other topics.
Your 250k number was mostly talking about Iraq so far as I know and the methodology on that number is a fucking joke as well. But you know what... I'm not talking about it.
Hmm, what did I say again?
"Afghanistan there's possibly in the range of 250K deaths, and a lot of the country is still under Taliban rule."
So that number is specifically about Afghanistan, your own source that contradicted you was about Afghanistan, the only time I said Iraq was in explaining that I'd already talked about a similar number for that war.
As to excessive deaths... I don't find this to be a useful statistic because it conflates all deaths into one number. Its more complicated than that and I don't appreciate over simplifications.
But taking only direct conflict casualties is a massive oversimplification.
How can you possibly imagine that destabilizing a country doesn't cause excess deaths? How can you ignore that cost when launching a war?
As to NATO expansions, look at what happened to countries under Russia's sway versus our own? I have very little sympathy for the Russians whining about people leaving their sphere of influence. It isn't merely the US and Russia to consider but the people caught between. The Eastern Europeans HATE the Russians. Consider what Poland etc could be today if they had not suffered under Soviet domination? The Russians can frankly go fuck themselves on the issue with a rake. Their management of their terroritory has been incompetent for generations. Look at Russia itself. The country should be extremely rich. Vast natural resources, an impressive industrial base, a generally well educated population, and they're geographically positioned between the biggest markets in the world.
All that is completely true.
But it doesn't mean that a NATO expansion was the right move. If you try to wave a magic wand and make the world a better place you run a very serious risk of making it worse.
As to your desire for Americans to die in wars... No. You can die. Your children can die. Your people can die. I am not sacrificing my people. If you want to sacrifice yours that is your own business. Some cultures worship death and desire it for themselves and everyone. My society desires life. We want to live. I will not send my people to war with inferior weapons because people like you feel it is unfair for us to have such an overwhelming advantage. War isn't about fairness. War is about killing the enemy. Crushing him. Bring him low, looking into his eyes, and watching him break. That is war. And robotic weapons service that function. If you feel that countries without our technological sophistication shouldn't engage in war with us... I agree. Doing so is idiotic on their part. It isn't a fair fight. They can't win. So they just shouldn't. Takes two to tango.
So you love life yet you really want your enemies to die.
Autonomous weapons are kind of like nukes, nice for your side but terrifying for the other side.
When the Western hegemony drops BILLIONS will die. Billions. Civilizations will be snuffed out in days to months. As the global trade networks collapse the global economy will collapse and any country that isn't self sufficient for food will starve. England for example... they rely on food imports. To blockade England is to defeat it... for if she does not surrender she shall starve. And England isn't alone in that. many countries rely on the global trade networks to survive. Just to EAT.
This just sounds like Fox news paranoia, I don't see how a slightly more peaceful US foreign leads to the collapse of western civilization let alone billions of deaths.
Back to Israel, if it weren't for Western nations (primarily England) trying to build a friendly Jewish state in Palestine we may never have ended up with a Muslim extremist problem in the Middle East.
Terrorists attack our country, kill 3000 of our people, say our country is a paper tiger and that the future belongs to a radical throw back death cult... and we're bad people when we track the little fuckers down and burn them out of their holes? I have very little respect for that position. It is not my morality.
A terrible thing, though you must be able to understand how invading and bombing countries can breed more terrorists?
Oh, and Al Queda's actual plan was to draw the US into a messy war in Afghanistan, rile up Muslims all over the middle east, and get his caliphate.
A plan that's actually gone a fairly long way to succeeding except the messy war is the one you don't want to talk about and the caliphate is ISIS.
quote tags would be so much easier to read.
""No I didn't, I was doing it in the context of the Iraq war where they're understood to be excess deaths.""
excess deaths?
First, we're not talking about Iraq. I told you that.
I wasn't talking about Iraq, I was referring back to a previous statement I'd used that happened to include Iraq.
Second, we're talking about Afghanistan.
Third, "excess deaths" what does that mean?
Exactly what it sounds like, the additional deaths that occurred because of the conflict.
Fourth, your cited kill number did not include context, it did not separate out people that would have died if there were no war, the actual causality figures are actually highly estimated and no one really knows what they are, you conflated people killed by the enemy with people killed by the US, you conflated soldier deaths with civilians, deaths caused by famine or disease were conflated with deaths from weapons, etc etc etc.
It's approximate, which is why there are large ranges given in the estimates (I've actually chosen conservative ones), but wars can certainly cause famine and disease and those deaths matter.
Anyway, we've come to the part of the discussion where I have to start looking things up.
In regards to the Afghan war, wikipedia puts the number at:
26 thousand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Alright lets look at that source:
During the war in Afghanistan (2001–present), over 26,000 civilian deaths due to war-related violence have been documented;[1]
Hey! It's right there in the first sentence! That's actually a pretty good sentence.
29,900 civilians have been wounded.[1] Over 91,000 Afghans, including civilians, soldiers and militants, are recorded to have been killed in the conflict, and the number who have died through indirect causes related to the war may include an additional 360,000 people.[1] These numbers do not include those who have died in Pakistan.
So your source gives a bigger number than I do!
Counter the USSR's attempt to conquer europe and the world actually.
We did what we could to make the Russians feel comfortable.
The NATO expansion was a tough call, I might have actually done the same, but it would have been very threatening to Russia.
Look how the US reacted to potential communist states in South America. How do you think the US would have felt if they joined the Warsaw pact, if Canada started discussing it?
The opposition to the anti ICBM technology was also taken as bad faith. Why does Russia want the US to stop developing it unless Russia wants to intimidate the first world with nuclear weapons?
Because it changes the equation from MAD, where no one will fire their nukes, to the prospect of a winnable nuclear exchange. And that tech won't stay with the US, it will spread to places like India and Pakistan.
You don't know what the internal dialog is... you just know what is in the media. Furthermore, when has the US ever talked about invading a country like it was no big deal?
Granted that was a bombing campaign not an invasion, but anyone who was paying attention heard the neocons itching for an Iran invasion to follow up Iraq and the rumour is that it was only the higher ups in the Pentagon that managed to talk them down.
That's how EVERY country in the middle east got its current territory. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, etc. Not one of them got it any other way.
I don't know about others but Iran's borders have been stable for a very long time, and I think the others were fairly static outside of the Ottoman breakup and certainly since WWII since the UN tries to be very strict about maintaining borders.
Btw, I assume that's your argument in favour of the Settlements? In that case by claiming Israel is in a war of conquest you're pretty much legitimizing every Palestinian terrorist attack and all the support that countries like Iran give them.
So again... if you want to question the legitimacy of Israel, then you have to question the legitimacy of all those countries.
Did you even read the whole thing where I explained how I wasn't questioning the legitimacy of Israel?
In WWII the axis powers inflicted a 3-1 civilian-military death ratio, and that includes the holocaust.
The 10-1 ratios in drone strikes that I cited, which are the only decent estimate I could find, are not something to brag about.
And even if they were lower than usual they're only acceptable if the acts themselves are necessary, I find it dubious that these actors in other countries are particularly legitimate terrorist threats.""
Citation. That's complete bullshit.
Uhh the wikipedia WWII page? Look at the casualty figures, and I already cited the drone figures.
""Re-read what I said, I wasn't 'm not appealing to your heart strings, I was talking about the bigger picture.
The drone strikes are counterproductive because of the ill-will they inflict by causing mass collateral damage.""
Citation needed.
Common sense?
Maybe it doesn't actually create more terrorists on balance but that's a very difficult variable to unravel, your opinion on the matter isn't any more valid than mine (and vice versa).
You say I don't care about the enemy? This is incorrect. I actively want them dead.
You say I don't care about civilians? This is incorrect, my people spend more money and energy trying to avoid civilian causalities than any other power in history.
That doesn't help if the war is unnecessary in the first place.
As to your desire to have some sort of philosophical revelation in the middle of a battle... that is not the point of the battle. The point is to kill the enemy, secure the objective, and limit the losses to our own forces either in people or other resources so that we can continue to prosecute the war.
If you want to have a philosophical discussion about war... that is not the place to do it. You can have it with me here and now. This is an appropriate place.
Which is why you go away from autonomous weapons, because soldiers won't restrict their usage once the war starts.
What is more, taking deaths of our own simply makes us hate the enemy. That IS human nature. If the enemy kills our robots we won't feel a sense of loss and we won't hate the enemy as much or at all.
That is plausible and one argument in favour of robots. However, in the best analog we have, the drone strikes, we don't end up hating the enemy, we just end up ignoring them, and all the civilians who get caught in the crossfire. If you have autonomous armies you may end up in wars that the general public doesn't even realize you're having.
I do not want that for my people. I want my people to be kept safe. I want them to maintain their kindness. And i want them to not hate. Your idea will backfire.
War is horrific. With autonomous armies you just blind your own side to the actual horror. Maybe it still helps your interests on balance, but the ability for the US to push a button and wage a war without any casualties is bad. I know you didn't want to talk Iraq, but the reason they were willing to walk into a needless war is because they thought it would be essentially bloodless. You get autonomous weapons you'll get a lot more Iraqs.
Sure the chances are, as you say, low that the company you join will IPO and/or make it big.
That doesn't mea it doesn't happen though, and that the company you are joining might have an idea you like enough that you want to push to make it succeeded.
But even if you are just being cynical, there are still a lot of rewards to be had from joining a startup as (at least in CA) the pay is still really, really good thanks to large pools of VC money sloshing all over the place. There's a lot of room to navigate there in ways that mean your own personal success even if the company never hits it big.
Well shit, did you even need to mention your internally-developed CAD system? I mean, that's such a vital part of everyone's software needs, I thought it went without saying.
So at the end of the day: if these populations wish to enter the first world, the first step to take is to assert their ownership of the land they occupy on the continent, decide on their own borders
Bad borders are bad, but trying to redraw borders? That can be much, much worse.
One of the big rules in Africa (and pretty much everywhere) is you don't change national borders because that introduces massive stakes and is a recipe for wars and rebellion since every group decides they want their own country comprising of every bit of land they think their group is entitled to.
or (like other countries in the first world), abandon tribal identity so they progress on to greater things like indoor plumbing and medical research.
That's the solution but I think it's far from simple. Look at the US, there are two parties sharing a white Christian base and the political system has been deadlocked and dysfunctional for half a decade.
What do you think would happen if half the country was Protestant and the other half Muslim, or New Jersey was 50+% Italian descent, Michigan 50+% Nigerian, Texas 50+% Mexican, etc. Getting people to cooperate in a political system is not simple.
I'm sure that some people will still blame "colonialism", although that hasn't even been an issue for generations now.
Even then, we've seen many other regions, like most of Europe, China, Japan, South Korea and even Vietnam, go from total devastation due to war to modern societies capable of producing such research, over roughly the same period of time. Why isn't Africa progressing when so many other nations, often with much fewer resources and far less support, and coming from a much worse situation, managed to turn things around?
Colonialism is still a huge issue because the colonial borders are still in place, the borders were designed to keep them weak by putting rival tribes in the same country.
In Europe and Asia a government can get reasonable levels of support across most of the country because they figure they're all on the same side, so you get investment in the future and a generally functional society.
But in Africa it's really hard to develop a country when a government can never get real support outside of their ethnic group, everyone ends up playing a zero-sum game and you end up with corruption and violence. All that's going to fix it is a lot of time until African's start thinking of themselves as primarily members of their country and not of a tribe.
"Performance per watt" is a bullshit metric...until you have to pay the electric bill.
You're implying that we just killed a quarter million people with no context, reason, and that we did so intentionally.
No I didn't, I was doing it in the context of the Iraq war where they're understood to be excess deaths.
You're also attributing all deaths to our actions when the responsibility has to be spread around to include the taliban, various terrorist sponsors, and natural forces like famine etc that kill people without any direct human volition.
I glibly dismiss the question because it isn't intellectually valid.
If you want to talk about death tolls in war zones we can do that. But laying all the death's at our feet like we intentionally killed all those people, had no reason to in, and we are solely responsible is invalid.
It's a standard methodology. Over the period X deaths would normally be expected instead Y occur, Z=X-Y is roughly the number of excess deaths attributable to your actions. You're not as nearly guilty as someone who pulled the trigger but in a debate of whether an act contributed to the greater good the fact remains that Z lives were lost due to that act is completely relevant.
Wrong, we tried to actually rehabilitate Russia. We would not have funded their space program or made so many diplomatic gestures if we wanted to treat them like an enemy.
There was even serious talk about inviting them into NATO.
As to surrounding them with enemies... all we wanted to do was secure the self determination of past victims of their aggression. Our intention was not to threaten Russia but to give other nations a chance at freedom, modernity, and prosperity.
NATO was an alliance formed to counter Russia, it's easy to see why inviting former Warsaw pact members into NATO would be viewed as a hostile act.
So your suggestion when NATO members invoke our aid to deal with a relevant operation in their territory and put diplomatic pressure on the US to provide logistical and tactical support... we should do nothing?
It's not just the conflict itself but the internal dialogue. You don't think other countries are listening when presidential candidates talk about invading other countries like it's no big deal?
As to the legitimacy of Israel... it is no less legitimate than any other power in the middle east.
I didn't say it was illegitimate, I said that its creation was a legitimate target for criticism as a very ugly form of colonialism (lets treat the land owned by these brown people like they're not even there and let some white Europeans settle it). And their current settlement policy is so indefensible I don't know that I've actually seen anyone ever defend it.
What nation do you hail from?
Canada
As to innocent people getting killed in a war... that is not unique to the drone strike.
As to collateral damage ratios... we spend more money and effort avoiding collateral damage than any other power in world history.
In WWII the axis powers inflicted a 3-1 civilian-military death ratio, and that includes the holocaust.
The 10-1 ratios in drone strikes that I cited, which are the only decent estimate I could find, are not something to brag about.
And even if they were lower than usual they're only acceptable if the acts themselves are necessary, I find it dubious that these actors in other countries are particularly legitimate terrorist threats.
What is also plain to me is that our heart strings are being played upon here. You say what you think will effect us emotionally and psychologically.
Were I a soulless monster you would not be telling me these things. You cite civilian causalities because you know it effects me and you know I care.
See, I am aware of myself. I don't cite this becuase I don't care but because I make a point of stepping outside myself and getting the bigger picture. You are attempting to manipulate me with pathos.
I don't like it when people use arguments on me that are designed to work on a child or a peasant. I am neither.
Re-read what I said, I wasn't 'm not appealing to your heart strings, I was talking about the bigger picture.
The drone strikes are counterproductive because of the ill-will they inflict by causing mass collateral damage.
In war, you use the best tools your people have to execute the missions. Our enemies have large numbers of deluded religious zealots. I will not casually sacrifice my own soldiers just so you feel some "fair" ratio of kills to deaths is met.
Ideally I want 100 percent of the enemy dead to 0 US soldiers lost. That is my ideal in war.
Many of the people upset with the US use of drones wants something like a 1:1 ratio of US dead to enemy dead. I completely and categorically reject that as being an acceptable goal.
Anything that improves the US K/D ratio in combat without other serious and reasonable issues should be employed. If we send our people to war, we owe it to them to give them the best chance to complete their missions and come home to enjoy the peace.
If we can use killer robots that will engage the radicals largely mitigating US troop losses... then I will do it.
You're still missing the point I'm talking about... which is kind of my point in arguing against the drones and autonomous weapons.
It's not just US dead vs enemy dead. It's US dead vs all the different categories of people who are killed or harmed by military action. Because you dehumanize the enemy (not a criticism, just human nature) you don't really give those other people the proper weight and are way too eager to deploy military force.
The point of having US military personnel in harms way isn't to have them harmed, it's to have people realize their at risk and so give some consideration as to whether the conflict is actually worth it.
Glass, it seems to me, is inherently far more limited than actual VR systems like the HoloLens. With the HoloLens you could choose where to put the small square of information you can see, plus of course there are all of the options of overlaying more info on top of physical objects you can computationally recognize...
I guess one big draw would be battery life, Glass you would think would be a lot better in that regard than the HoloLens.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
