elfexec

> Most wars between nations are fought for something like honour:

This is not true. Wars are fought for wealth or to protect wealth ( perceived or not ). "Honor" ( like freedom, human rights, etc ) is the lie the elites employ to sell the war to the public and dupe the masses into sending their sons and daughters to the battlefield.

We didn't fight the korean war, vietnam war, iraq wars, etc for "honor". We fought it for wealth. Every single war we fought ( from the Revolutionary War to the wars today ) was about wealth.

The cost-benefit analysis of war is another thing altogether. It isn't an exact science and it's like playing a game of "what-if". In some wars, you can see clear winners who made out like bandits. I don't think anyone would claim the US didn't come out the big winner of ww2. There are clearly some wars where it was a complete waste of lives ( ww1 ) since no side really won and the only winners were bankers and war profiteers. Most other wars, who knows. The cost-benefit analysis comes down to your own biases and how you perceive a non-military solution would have worked out.

If wars were truly fought for honor, then we'd have a lot more wars and a lot more nukings. Honor is the fake thin veneer of war. Scratch it and you'll find the true cause of wealth - greed.

> Fake news isn't the biggest issue with media. It's obvious and can be easily taken down or discredited.

Fake news can be a big problem. Especially in the short term when it comes to major issues like war. The last two major wars was peddled to the american public with fake news - iraq war 1 ( Nayirah testimony ) and iraq war 2 ( yellowcake ).

We know that major PR firms, news agencies and government officials intentionally lied and created fake news which led to the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Not a single PR person, news person or government employee has been charged. Think about that. Hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children are dead because of intentional lies ( some in front of congress ) and nobody got prosecuted or sent to prison.

> The selective editing of facts by individuals with personal bias inside large organizations that are supposed to be trustworthy

The is the biggest problem with news is that people actually think they were or are supposed to be trustworth.

What I think should be taught in high school/colleges is the "History of News". I think it will be eye opening to anyone. Who created these news organizations, why did they create it, how it was created, etc. From the BBC, reuters, AP, NYTimes, WaPo, etc, you wouldn't label a single on as reliable or trustworthy if you understood their histories.

The ultimate problem is that people trust news organizations. Historically, nobody trusted news. News was maligned as nonsense ( yellow journalism ). It was only recently ( post ww2 ) when PR nonsense like "The most trusted name in news"/etc brainwashed people into trusting news.

The best we can do is do look at a variety of competing news sources. This way, they'll expose what the other side is lying about and you can judge for yourself. Especially when it comes to geopolitics or important news, they all lie, so your only hope is competing news sources.

> C# Nullable<T> is near useless because it only works on value types. I.e., you know, the types that are least likely to generate NullReferenceException for you.

You are completely missing the point of Nullable. It was introduced because databases allowed int, float, etc ( value types ) to be null. It was never meant to be an Option type. Reference types are already "nullable" so the database returning null for strings wasn't a problem. But databases returning nulls for int was a problem. It led to performance issues ( boxing and/or adding additional code to marshal data from one source to another ). If you find Nullable to be annoying then you either don't code in C# much and you especially don't deal with data/databases.

For what it was intended for, Nullable did it's job. And if Nullable is your only complaint, given the extraordinary changes that C# has gone through, I think it speaks well for C#.

Also, why was the guy filming the video in contact with an iranian "journalist" in britain? The right with the right tools at the right time with the right connections. Very convenient.

The entire trump-iran situation is very odd. Trump supposedly takes out a very important iranian leader whose only identification is a ring? They respond with attacks that apparently kill nobody. And then this downed plane? It feels like theater, but that's geopolitics I guess.

I didn't think anything could be stranger than the Trump-Kim on-again-off-again romance, but here we are.

Would love to see the behind the scene truth, but all we get are the media lies.

Same thing with Theranos. It was people on the internet who discovered theranos was shady and WSJ was the one that "broke the story". At least the WSJ acknowledged and credited the people on the internet who first pointed out the shadiness at theranos.

> What useful thing has been produced by the internet?

Is this Hacker News? This is the type of nonsense I expect on the NYTimes comment section.

> I'd much rather have humans enjoy nature than writing about it on the internet.

Why are you here instead of enjoying nature?

> So we won't solve it because we're just not capable of globalism as a species

We already have globalism and globalism is what cause climate change. Economic globalism is why we are where we are. How do you think oil, coal, natural gas, etc from one side of the world gets to the other side of the world? How do you think saudi oil gets to the US or australian coal gets to china or russian gas gets to germany? How do you think mexican avovados gets to france and norwegian salmon gets to japan or argentinian beef gets to canada all the while spewing toxic fumes into the atmosphere? Globalism. How can globalism be the solution when globalism is the cause of the problem.

It's like fuel causing your house fire, so you want to throw more fuel on the fire.

> Not sure about the first example

If you are that well versed in the lives of weinstein and peterson, you most definitely are aware the first. But being as woke as you are, you probably can't admit it to yourself.

> but Bret Weinstein was fired because his behaviour didn't reflect his employer's values, not because of the science he was doing

Weinstein wasn't fired, he resigned after getting a settlement from his university since the university couldn't provide for his safety from racist mobs.

> I also don't think Peterson is having particular difficulty doing scientific work, nor is the actual research he does "taboo".

You don't think? I suspect Peterson would disagree. You sure his research into political correctness, authoritarianism, identity politics, evils of postmodernism, etc aren't "taboo"? If it wasn't taboo, jordan peterson wouldn't be so well known. He'd be just another no-name professor somewhere in canada.

Instead of saying racism, hate and cancel culture is bad, you are defending racism, hate and cancel culture. Which may get support and upvotes in echo chambers online, but is laughed at in the real world. Reality will ultimately trump fantasy.

> What I wrote does not enjoy the benefit of citations, which I don't have handy.

It's something that's uncitable so I don't think anyone holds that against you. It's really a discussion on human nature. I can't cite anything to defend my position either.

> Would Oliver Cromwell have just nuked Ireland?

Though he was a religious zealot who did bad things in ireland, I doubt he'd nuke the entire irish peoples - certainly not the protestants. Also, technically, ireland was part of his domain/kingdom back then. Cromwell would probably have nuked the kings and leaders, but not the people. Just like jefferson davis would have nuked lincoln and the union leaders, but not the american/northern people.

> But, of course, I could be wrong. I don't think humans are inherently better now than 500 years ago.

I agree, but I think societal norms and beliefs guide how we behave and think - not just in civilian life but in military and political life. I think human beings are just as evil and selfish as in the 1800s, but most of us wouldn't support racial slavery. I don't think we are innately better than we were 150 years ago as human beings. Deep down we are the same, but the societal mores has changed. Particularly the scientific white supremacy which allowed for total genocide ( men, women and children ) in much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

I don't think cromwell would have seen a school with 1000 kindegarten irish kids and nuked it. But the US and Britain certainly would have if it were 1000 native kids and nazi germany would nuked 1000 jewish kids.

I suspect in the future, once a real war begins, nobody will think twice about civilian casualties as the precedent has been set and the stakes would be so high. Most importantly, nobody responsible for nuking hiroshima or nagasaki was prosecuted. Nobody responsible for dresden or tokyo was prosecuted. The lesson is that no matter what, you have to be on the winning side. But only time will tell.

> It's not cherrypicked at all. 1980 is an ideal date to refer to.

Stop with the strawman. My issue wasn't with the date. It obviously was with the nations you chose. You only selected nations who declined relatively to the US, you didn't choose any that grew relative to the US. The definition of cherrypicking data.

> PPP terms are worthless at best and wildly and entirely inaccurate at worst. They barely even qualify as guesses.

What? Do you even know what PPP is? I wonder why HN has so many people who insist on being right even when they are absolutely wrong.

> That's how you get Puerto Rico with a PPP GDP per capita equal to New Zealand and just below Japan in 2018 per the IMF (and far above Portugal; absurd).

What is absurd about a US territory having a higher PPP than new zealand or japan?

> Taiwan has a PPP per capita higher than Austria, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, Canada. Yeah, sure.

Taiwan is a first world developed "nation"/island. What is so shocking about that? They have some of the largest companies in the world and are amongst the leaders in the semiconductor sector.

> And Russia almost has a PPP per capita as high as Portugal and just a bit below Israel.

Yeah? And?

> That's a small example of what makes PPP laughable.

No. It makes you laughable. You don't understand what it means.

I point out how absurd your cherrypicking of data is and yet you attempt to do it again and even poorly at that because you don't even understand the economic conditions of any of the nations you listed. If PPP is laughable then so is nominal because PPP is pretty much nominal adjusted for cost of living...

Of course you completely ignored my assertion about EU and China vs US. The main point that made your first comment absurd, you conveniently ignored with some nonsense about things you don't even understand.

> So how far would the US have to fall economically (the base of its military power is its economic output, the ability to tax & fund it), compared to where it was at in 1980 versus other powerful nations, to no longer be considered a global superpower?

You are cherrypicking data. Sure, the US has done well compared to france, italy, uk and japan. What about the EU and China.

Compare china's economy in 1980, 1990, 2000 against the US. Compare the EU's economy with the US. In PPP terms, China and EU outstrip the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

In nominal terms, US and EU are near equals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

And all projections are for china to overtake the US in nominal GDP within this decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_...

I wouldn't call china a superpower. A superpower is just more than the economy.

Aren't a lot of topics already taboo in science/academia? I'd say cancel culture has been in science for a while now. Afterall it is part of academia.

Didn't a female brown university professor's study on transgenders get "canceled" because it offended some people not too long ago?

Didn't Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, at some college in oregon get "canceled" not too long ago?

Didn't Jordan Peterson get "canceled" not too long ago?

Academia and journalists have been canceling people for a while now. Was WSJ asleep for the past decade?

> The US has had plenty of moral lapses in its military adventures, but one suspects that the powers of the past 500 years would have been far more willing to obliterate entire nations without concern for civilians.

Simply not true. There was a reason why european wars were fought in the fields and not in cities/population centers in the past. Also, past powers tended to conquer nations/cities in order to subjugate the population for exploitation. After all, humans were valuable resources back then. It is very rare that a military/government/nation would simply choose to exterminate the inhabitants of a continent ( 100 or so native nations that were wiped out ) or set entire cities full of civilians ablaze ( dresden, tokyo ) and nuke two civilian cities ( hiroshima, nagasaki ).

Pretty much the US and our side kick britain are the only ones to be guilty of the first two. We are still the only ones guilty of the 3rd.

But precedents being set, your assertion is likely to be truer in the future. I suspect that in the next 500 years, powers would be more willing to obliterate entire nations without concern for civilians, especially if technology and automation make humans a less valuable commodity.

> After WWII, the US had confidence in its own system of government, and imposed it on Germany and Japan with a sizable occupation force.

Neither Germany or Japan's governments are modeled after the US system of government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_system#/media/Fi...

We helped impose a system of government in both nations after ww2, but neither is our system of government. They have a lot of similar parts, but it isn't our system of government.

> It worked.

The marshall plan worked in germany. As for japan, they didn't receive any marshall plan. It wasn't until the korean war that "it worked" for japan. But both germany and japan were major modern powers before ww2 so they would have reverted back to it if left to their devises. The US didn't create the success in germany or japan, the germans and japanese did that themselves.

> The US underfunded the post-war period of round one in Afghanistan, after kicking the Soviets out. In Iraq, the occupation was botched. Paul Bremer is generally blamed for this.[1]

No amount of funding was going to save afghanistan. The same goes for iraq. You need a nationalistic centralized power to stabilize and grow a nation - especially a war torn one. Something Germany and Japan had and aghanistan and iraq don't.

> Blowing the aftermath of a war leads to big trouble. See: WWI.

Aghanistan and Iraq wars are nothing like WW1. Nearly 40 million people died in WW1 and it involved all the great powers at the time. WW1 and WW2 are fairly unique went it comes to wars. Maybe vietnam or algeria are better comparisons, but even then, aghanistan and iraq are not even vietnam or algeria.

For the US, the iraq and afghan wars were more skirmishes than wars. The military casualties are 4,497 and 2,216 respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

To put this into perspective, quite a few cities in the US experienced more gun related homicides than the US military did in iraq or afghanistan. So nothing like ww1.

> Its a difference of belief

It isn't a matter of belief. It's a matter of history and society. The proles don't have the capacity to do what you claim they can. Individually, a clever prole can rise up, but not collectively.

> and if i may, you sound a little bit depressed and nihilistic.

I'm neither. You might be projecting. Maybe a few more peterson videos that you will misunderstand/misinterpret will cure you?

> Maybe you need to realize your own agency in the story. You are a part of that machine too.

You seem to think I am part of the proles. I'm certainly not.

> Id recommend jordan peterson and his take on hierarchy, its very eye opening.

Nothing jordan peterson has stated is new. His take of hierarchy isn't his. It's been around a long time, even before peterson was born. But I agree that many could learn a thing or two from peterson. Unfortunately, it looks like some aren't able to understand him.

Anyways, if you provided any evidence to your claim, maybe this discussion would have been worth it, but I can see it's simply a misguided belief, so I'll leave you to it.

> Currently, my simplest definition is "any self-aware organism capable of predicting the future to some degree."

Frogs and certainly embryos are not self-aware.

> I think we are rapidly getting to the point where we will be able to sustain ourselves effectively with non-animal foods in a way that will be more nutritious, more sustainable, and more environmentally friendly.

Nothing more nutritious than animal foods. This is basic science and evolutionary truth. The only other alternative to fit your description is the environmentally ruinous vegan diet which is terrible for humans.

> I want humankind to prosper longterm and I think our most immediate challenge to that is our violence towards each other and towards our environment;

I want humankind to prosper as well. Look how virtuous, caring and good we both are. Aren't we great? The immediate danger is the messianic lunacy being spread by traditional media and social media.

> If the majority of us adopted a view that intelligent life at all levels should be protected

Sadly, I don't think you could convince those militant and violent vegans set on destroying as much intelligent plant life as possible. But maybe you, caring as you are, can single-handedly stop them.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-01-09/new-research-plant-in...

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170109-plants-can-see-hear-...

If intelligent life must be protected then I guess we have to take dogs and cats from their owners since these animals require meat to be healthy ( for cats to live since they are obligate carnivores ). I don't know how you sleep at night knowing that trillions of animals are being killed and eaten by other animals every day.

Also, the most environmentally friendly diet is the hunter-gatherer diet, which you in your immense wisdom probably reject in support of mass agriculture - the worst thing for the environment.

> I prefer to see us pursue technologies that don't require the harvesting of parts from intelligent life, even if we deem that intelligence to be low or embryonic.

How do you define "intelligent life"? If frogs and embryos are considered intelligent life, then you really are painting yourself into a corner.

> Yes, I am aware that we are omnivores, but I believe we can make ourselves into something better.

What's better than omnivores? Evolutionarily speaking, that's the best out there. Not sure we can do better, but I'd love to hear what you had in mind.

> Each part of society is trying to maximize for its own good.

No. Only the elites are even capable of reasoning about their own good nevermind trying to maximize it. The vast lower class are incapable of even formulating a concept of "their own good". As orwell so cleverly put it, the proles are pretty much animals, they aren't able to organize and think about their own "good" no more than livestock in an industrial farm are able to think about their own good. If the proles were capable of maximizing their own good, they wouldn't be proles, they would be the elites.

"As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals are free.'" --1984

> I dont define good and i dont even try

Neither have I.

No. I understand perfectly what "toxic masculinity" and its political/social/cultural agenda is. That's your problem. And sadly for you, more and more people are waking up to it and virtue signaling has a very short half life. Did you know that I predicted someone like you would write precisely your comment? You're so predictable. Maybe a few years ago, you might have duped enough people. But I think the tide is turning. Only time will tell.

Library data could easily be anonymized, especially for what we are doing looking to do here. We wouldn't even need account info, just information on books ( category, author, etc ) and the dates it was checked out.

Or why not release the data so that we can run queries on it ourselves? I doubt the entire dataset would be larger than a gig. Then we can run queries on top 10 by genres, by authors, by decades, by age group, gender, etc. Whatever we want.

> Unfortunately, the two causes the article cites (dissolution of family structure and rise of single male households) are unaddressed.

It's unaddressed because it's the journalist class and their kind that has waged a war against family, gender roles, gender itself and males. At least since the 90s as far as I remember, the predominant message in media is fathers are bad, males are bad and family is bad. Media has discouraged men and women from getting married, having children, encouraged divorce, abortion, etc. When a nation's media pushes nonsense like "toxic masculinity", isn't it about time to declare the media the enemy of the nation? But what's interesting is that the media are just propaganda of the elites. The elites decide the media campaigns and trends which transform and socially engineer society. The question is why? After all most of these elites and many of these journalists are males themselves.

One solution is the diversification of the elites, media and society in general. Not in superficial aspects like race, gender, etc, but ideology, thought and values. Seems like there is a lot of incest within the elite/media class. They all seem to think alike and that's not a good thing.

Also, these attacks on men are also ultimately attacks on women as well. Ignoring the fact that half of a woman's genetic history comes from a man ( their father ), the attacks on men ultimately harm their future prospects of a husband, family and kids. And their future hopes of happiness.

Men's suicide is increasing and women's happiness has been plummeting.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w14969

Add to that the below replacement birth rate of american born women, you'd think there was a crisis in america. But we can't really discuss the real issues here because it's verboten.

> we select for what we think is right as a social collective/organism.

This is simply not true. Our values are something the elites ( not all necessarily but enough ) bestow or force upon us with either carrots or sticks. Look at any cultural, social, legal, etc values in society. It wasn't the "collective" that decided it, it was the few elites who convinced us to believe in it. Like Moses coming down the mountain with those tablets, we are told what is right or wrong, we don't decide it.

Do we really want something fundamentally important as the foundations of physics to progress or change quickly?

History of science and the philosophy of science has shown that the foundations of sciences progress a little here and a little there until these "little progresses" gain enough momentum to create a paradigm shift. And we only recognize these "little progresses" in hindsight after the paradigm shift.

Technological advances also tend to progress science. We tend to believe that advances in science lead to advances in technology but historically, it's the other way around.

More likely than not, there are man "little progresses" being made toward an eventual paradigm shift, but until it happens, we won't recognize how important those "little progresses" are.

> The target here is China.

Welcome to the trade war.

> They alone are responsible for the largest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen (Trillions $$ in IP theft from western tax payers).

The largest transfer of wealth was either from china to europe/america ( opium wars ), colonialism in africa/india and the confiscation of land in the americas ( particularly the US ). If your assertion were true, china would be ruling the world and their economy would be bigger than US + EU combined. China's economy is only 1/3rd the size of US + EU while having 300 million more people. Not quite the largest of wealth transfers. Also, wealth transfers normally happen via war. Don't recall china winning a war recently.

> You're making misleading use of language so it's hard to believe you're arguing sincerely.

Misleading? I thought I was being straightforward and honest, hence "stolen".

> Offering someone compensation for doing something for you is not what most people would consider "theft".

It all depends on perspective. Hence "stolen". If you were "compensating" someone "$0.10" for something worth "$1000", a lot of people would consider it "theft".

> You can't just take a word meaning one thing, change its meaning, then assume all the judgements about the old meaning also apply to the new meaning.

But that's not what I did. The reason why I wrote "stolen" is that this is complex issue that isn't black or white. The only people who think so are agenda driven opportunists. Slaves were compensated with housing and food, I'd consider it "theft".

As I said, you have an agenda and your agenda drives you thinking. Not rationality. That's the problem. As I recommended before: "Look at the problem from afar."

Probably not too well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

There are documentaries of wolves and wild dogs hunting large prey by chasing them until the large prey is so exhausted and overheated that it collapses.

> This ignores the fundamental insight of economics that people can cooperate motivated entirely by self interest.

How is that a fundamental insight of economics. It's the insight of the smallest group all the way to cities and civilization. Self interest, by definition, motivates cooperation.

> From this traditional perspective the "common good" is a result of insufficient property rights: if everything is owned by something, then by everyone looking after their private good, everything will be looked after (because all "common good" is somebody's "private good").

What you are describing isn't "insufficient property rights", you are describing "insufficient property".

> It also ignores that redistribution results in less "private good" (GDP) for everyone, because by definition it's taking wealth from people who on average have demonstrated more ability to grow wealth and giving it to people who have demonstrated less ability to grow wealth.

Wealth is always "stolen". Behind every great wealth is a great crime. Wealth is generate by theft of assets ( land, oil, resources ) or theft of labor. Bill Gates didn't generate his wealth. His workers generated the wealth, he and the shareholders just siphoned the largest part of it. Look at the fundamental wealth of the US - the land and resources that provides unimaginable amount of wealth. All stolen from the natives.

Wealth = clever robbing the less clever with the protection of the law which they created. And it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

> If they both start with the same endowment

What an ideal world you must live in.

> More practical example: imagine if after Paypal, Elon Musk's entire wealth had been redistributed to all Americans.

Who is even advocating for taking all of anyone's wealth?

> and the world has no Tesla or SpaceX.

Why not? Using your argument, PayPal couldn't exist since Musk didn't have that PayPal money to fund his business.

You have an agenda and you are using obvious extremes and lies to push your agenda. The other side does the same. Instead of being driven by agenda, try to think objectively. Look at the problem from afar.

Extremes in either direction is bad for the individual and society.

> From memory, most of these casualties are from landmines that are still planted in South-East Asian countries during the Korean and Vietnam conflict?

What is South-East? Did you mean Southeast-East? Korea is an East Asian nation. Vietnam is a Southeast Asian nation. South Asians are indians, pakistanis, etc. As to your point/question about landmines casualties in korea and vietnam, you are incorrect. The landmines in korea are in the DMZ ( demilitarized zone - which is the misnomer as it is the most militarized zone ). As for vietnam, laos, etc, most of their deaths are likely due to unexploded bombs.

> I am thinking that Afghanistan etc. may also figure quite high in the statistics.

Most landmine casualties are probably in afghanistan, iraq, etc. Current or recently active war zones where the situation hasn't be pacified or settled.

As another commenter pointed out, this seems like dollar stores' competition with deeper pockets just trying to get rid of them.

If cities truly cared about their residents'poor diets, they would ban the foods these people are buying ( soda, junk food, microwavable garbage, etc ).

Once the dollar stores close, then their customers would have to buy their junk food at a supermarket.

Also, I'd suspect that Costco, Walmart and large supermarket chains lead far more to poor diets and especially obesity than dollar stores.