> Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gutted a program that's designed to limit the number of civilians killed by American forces. He did that over unanimous objections from top commanders after polling them, according to reporting from ProPublica.
Any given policy choice we make results in bad things happening to someone. War is just politics by other means. If we stand around and do nothing, maybe Iran kills 5000 kids for being homosexual over the next few years? If we close all the coal mines a whole entire state goes on an opioid addiction. If we don’t close the coal mines the environment suffers and people die from pollution. If we don’t kill millions of Japanese soldiers maybe China is still a Japanese colony.
Life is tough. There aren’t perfect answers. Cackling criticism from the safety of the couch doesn’t solve anything.
"We got rid of the people who prevent civilian casualties and a bunch of civilians died shortly thereafter" isn't the unpreventable random act of God you're trying to make it out to be.
There are often not perfect answers in life. But there are definitely some wrong ones.
They aren’t the only people who prevent civilian casualties though. It also doesn’t prevent civilian casualties generally given that civilian casualties have occurred prior to this organization being disbanded.
Anyway let’s talk about the 30,000+ people Iran has murdered. Should they set up a board that prevents their military from killing protestors in person with machine guns?
> Anyway let’s talk about the 30,000+ people Iran has murdered.
Iran is already one of the most heavily sanctioned countries on the planet. Do you want us to bomb them? Maybe kill their leadership? I'm sure it'll help.
If you're genuinely interested in preventing mass civilian casualties, I can think of a country doing such a thing we've got a lot more leverage over, with quite a bit of weaponry we supply. The casual dismissal of Hegseth's clear actions to deprioritize civilian protection hints, I think, at how genuine that is.
> The casual dismissal of Hegseth's clear actions to deprioritize civilian protection hints, I think, at how genuine that is.
Why does it matter if a poorly made point is casually dismissed? Some drummed up organization isn’t in the room doing the drone strike or gathering the intelligence or making the call in the heat of the moment. Those folks have responsibility too, but mistakes in war happen.
> Iran is already one of the most heavily sanctioned countries on the planet. Do you want us to bomb them? Maybe kill their leadership? I'm sure it'll help.
Well we could spend more time focusing on their crimes. Countries around the world could contribute to defeating their autocratic regime.
> Anyway let’s talk about the 30,000+ people Iran has murdered
If America wants to play World Police they need to be squeaky clean. Nobody likes a dirty cop. That is the point that's being made, that is the standard America is falling further away from, and that's why Whataboutism isn't the strong argument you think it is.
Whataboutism is a sign that you've lost the argument in the best of cases, but it's particularly disgusting to attempt to use it to distract from the blood of a hundred murdered children on your own country's hands.
Hilarious that you don't see the hypocrisy in your own post. I have plenty of judgment for Iran's regime, it's a pity you can't bring yourself to condemn child murderers who happen to be from your own country.
I live in the real world where we follow the law because otherwise some of us might end up in jail and all of us will be out of a job. We pick and choose through our elected officials here.
Nobody invented writing. Various people probably independently started making marks on things to signify amounts of stuff. Some people drew likenesses of things. This continued for millenia and became more and more elaborate. It wasn’t born from someone’s head on a single fateful day. All human endeavor is like that, from the most minute thing like carpentry nails to the most elaborate. All of it is the result of collaboration between us and our ancestors.
you restated "humans learn from other humans, and slowly at that" so I guess you are indicating that computers do it faster, this activity of learning from other humans.
I said the same thing you mean, "no human will invent writing, they can only use writing as a productivity tool because they learned it from other humans. Therefore, in the context of my comment, saying "they learn from humans" is not a valid criticism of LLMs because humans also learn from humans, or live like cavemen"
you are agreeing with me, just hot under the collar about it.
An HOA has a lot more leeway to do whatever it wants than other local governments. They get to act as government sometimes, then as a corporation sometimes, and then as a group of amateur lawyers sometimes. They can both pass laws and try you for violating them without recourse. And IME only the most toxic people stay on the board for very long.
Well they tend to optimize heavily by discouraging things like bathroom breaks, and I’ve seen evidence of this thinking in how they treat their drivers. I’m not sure why this would be extraordinary? On its face those incentives don’t sound bad except that they will incentivize unsafe behavior in edge cases like this.
I think it matters a lot because Amazon doesn’t have their own airline. They contract out their aviation to multiple companies.
The incentive is to pick the lowest bid and that could be a company whose culture creates indirect pressure on pilots to be on time. All it takes is a dispatcher in a small company that is constantly irritated when things are late. Knowing that the other people are going to be angry with you for being late can make you hesitant to go around, causing exactly this type of accident.
Is this what happened? Probably not. Pilots get tunnel vision for any number of reasons.
6% or better white vinegar in the rinse cycle removes exercise smell from synthetic clothes too. IME it’s cheaper and better than the sanitizer. I just put a cup of it in the bleach cup in the washer. It vaporizes in the dryer. I wash everything in cold water with mild detergent and vinegar.
You can also soak clothes in it to remove concrete/cement.
Unfortunately vinegar was unsuccessful for me. I tried that, borax, and baking powder - all on different washes of course without any change. The laundry sanitizer immediately fixed the problem.
Yeah the writing tastes like processed food. There’s no substance just “here’s some stuff people do” but nothing about why it works or where you could learn more.
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