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Comment by wilg | Hacker News Reader

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Every day you decide not to donate a fraction of your income to medicine in Africa. How many deaths are you responsible for?

having the power to destroy a government agency that provides aid and actually going through with it is not morally equal to not donating a few dollars of your income

1 - the moral calculus is different if you were already doing so and then suddenly shut it off

2 - i was happy with the arrangement of the government doing it on my behalf, and in doing so making the united states stronger and have allies around the world

3 - elon musk did this illegally

4 - elon musk also caused additional deaths by virtue of supporting trump, rfk, and these other lunatics which he was definitely affirmatively a part of doing

You are. We are. With our powers, and money is one of them, comes responsibility. We can decide how and if you respond, but it's still ours.

That article cites nothing other than someone's model. There is no hard evidence in what you linked.

Someone's model says that if you detonate a nuclear bomb in Manhattan, millions will die. There is no hard evidence tho.

While the quantification isn't inherently reliable, the reality of many dead at the hands at Elon Mush is a simple fact that's not up for dispute. The only question is how many he's killed so far. He cut off life saving meds to sick kids and food aid to the areas with food shortages, the deaths are known and reliably reported.

Then it should be easy to prove, instead of saying "it isn't up for dispute" or citing a person's model.

It is easy to prove, it is shown in the linked model. The model is simple. If I spend X amount of dollars feeding people, I can save Y lives. Since this model is obviously bunk, I'm sure you can easily articulate why this model is inaccurate, untrustworthy, or otherwise unhelpful.

True, feel free to Google "deaths attributed to end of usaid", lots to read and learn about there. Have at it.

You’re implying that you have evidence to support your argument without actually providing any of it.

nemo literally just supplied it. But since you insist:

https://www.google.com/search?q=deaths+due+to+end+of+usaid

Technically his department produced and advised on the data. It's just a government BI team. This is like blaming the BI team for the CEO's decision to fire people. Part of the process, sure. But this a decision made by the majority of Congress. Let's not forget who the bad guy is.

We're not. Blame and guilt are not limited resources; more than one bad guy exists.

Absolutely true. But it's certainly not the bad guy with no power to do what parent accused him of that deserves blame. It's a logical impossibility. We still follow logic, I hope.

> a simple fact that's not up for dispute

We used to say the same about the male/female binary.

> He cut off life saving meds

Sophistry. Forcing charity is literal enslavement. Withholding charity is not homicide.

So the kids died as a result of the action taken (withdrawing meds from impoverished children), but the person who took the meds away from the sick kids who then died as a result is innocent? I feel like you might want to look at that word "sophistry" long and hard, and do a bit of soul searching.

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