Where would the million mercs come from ?
Is there even a million of mercenaries available around the entire world ?
How would you make them even work together ?
A million people is huge.
16,803 karma · joined May 21, 2012
Phone + not being an english native speaker can result in serious comment injury.
Is there even a million of mercenaries available around the entire world ?
How would you make them even work together ?
A million people is huge.
7 millions people in Honk Kong cannot win against 1.3 billions of people from main land, no matter how many weapons you provide.
"Making a second Tiananmen Square painful for Beijing is not" could be a good strat, but something tells me they learned from that one and have a plan for it this time.
Honk Kong, population 7 millions.
Give them all the weapons you want, they will get crushed.
I don't think you can:
- China has the nuclear weapon, a space program, allies and no ethics or politics to slow them down.
- nobody won the cold war, and Russia was way less economically viable than China
- China has 1.3 billions people it is willing to sacrifice while the US has 4 time less, half of it being obese, plus they must censor the pics of coffins coming back from war because dying americans is not acceptable.
- China host all the factories, and provide a huge chunks of primary resources to the US.
- China is capable of being self-sufficient rapidly, as they have the land and the capabilities of going back to manual labor.
- China army has millenias of terrifying history. It may very well be still here in 10000 years. The US has 500 years of history, total.
- The US never entered a war that would affect their borders. Up till then, they brought the fire far from home, giving a false sense of indestructibility to their population. China is your neighbor.
- Attacking China means WWIII, it's not sure humanity can even survive it.
EDIT: damn it, Irak (french) is spelled with a q in English.
You are yourself against slavery (I hope:)), while typing this comment on a machine with some parts made by slave children.
If you go that way, everybody is an hypocrite, and we are loosing the sense of the word.
We should not thrive to protect those people from their own stupidity. We are short in resources, I'd rather see those invested in schools to provide education to their children.
It doesn't matter. Customers call it nut milk. Recipes call it that. Restaurant menus as well.
It will be the same with burgers. It doesn't matter, and it's just a waste of time and resources.
When Napster came out with an alternative to the CD, the industry mocked it, then attacked it, but never tried to learn from it. As a result, GAFAM arrived and took the whole market.
When youtube came out, TV did the same. As a result, the Valley arrived an took the whole market.
The meat industry is doing the same with vege alternatives. They first mocked it. Now they are in the fighting phase. But these products are already as tasty as the average meat (not speaking of high end steaks, but that's not what people eats every week). The difference is that IF and BB can provide consistent quality across the entire production. And since it's made from plants, it will scale way better than real meat, from sourcing to production, so it will get cheaper. Because of the green trend we currently got, not to mention the ethics surrounding the topic, it will be an easy way to get a guilty pleasure while feeling you are doing the right thing.
I understand why Gates has invested in it.
Just like I have heard about muslim or black stereotypes a lot.
I've not met any of them.
Sure, I saw them online.
Youtubes and "influencers" on instagrams are a terrible, terrible way to assess a population. Take any topic, soon the algo recommendation will make you cringe.
But IRL ?
A good third of the people close to me are veggies/vegans, me included. I've never seen anybody trying to convert anyone, preach, signal value or guilt trip others. We participate in BBQ, find workarounds and make sure everybody is happy when we invite people at diner.
In the mix I have 2 nurses, a person still paying her student loan, a young couple with a new born and an old person earning minimum wage: they do have "real time / money / convenience constraints".
And we talk regularly about "what [we] are actually eating instead of not eating meat". Recommending products and places, reading product compositions, and adjusting diets according to the new studies we came across.
Now I understand that "the caricature is the stuff of comedy". Vegans are a good topic for laughing. I mean, we do weird stuff, it is indeed funny. Sometime I look at my day and think how much crap my teenage self would have given me if he saw me doing that.
But I've yet to meet the vindictive ignorant proselyte vegans you are describing. I'm sure they exist. There are assholes everywhere, but I don't think eating meat or not conditions it. Statistically, there are smug aggressive idiots, and again, statistically, some of them must be vegan. Correlation. Not causality.
I disagree: my mother spent her entire life living with the minimum wage or less. She always had a very balanced diet, eating mostly veggie organic food, often from the farmer market.
Several reasons:
- education. Our current generation has zero food education. They have no idea how to cook, choose a product, where to buy stuff, etc. Things like dried beans/peas, full grain rice, sunflower seeds, whole potatoes, green leafs, tomatoes, brassicaceaes, onions, apples, bananas and carrots can all be obtained at a fair price. You can cover a lot with those.
- life choices. She lives in the country side, not in a city. Doesn't have a smartphone or a TV. She takes enormous care of her things (she had the same washing machine and fridge for 20 years, I gave her a laptop 7 years ago, she still uses it). She buys most stuff second hands, including the totality of her clothes. She trades stuff/work with neighbors/friends, and borrows from them. She has free pleasures: going to the library, hiking, etc.
- she lives in France. The US makes it very hard. I went in the valley several times for work, and damn those fruits and vegetables suck. Even the expensive ones. So how do you want people to eat that and not a cheap delicious burrito at the local fast food ? It's hard enough in my own country, but in yours, feeding yourself properly is a part time job.
- people think too much about extremes. You don't have to go full throttle vegan to start making a difference. It's a spectrum. You can adjust depending of your resources.
- priorities. It's not that much a problem of the cost of a vegan diet than a problem of what you think is important in life. It takes a lot of dedication to change what you eat, and if your life is already hard, I understand you don't want to focus on that. As a Python dev freelancer, I have plenty of energy to think about stuff like that. My Levoritox dependent unemployed depressed friend ? Not so much.
It's the same thing. You are not a bad person for not giving, but your brain notices a problem, and you do not act on it. Whether it makes sense or not makes no difference: it makes you feel bad, and your mind associates this unpleasant sensation with the person you crossed path with at that moment. Then you react: mocking, irritation, etc.
We all do it all the time. It's not about being veggie, or giving money. The topic has no importance at all. In fact, morality has no importance at all. It's the same thing when you don't take the garbage out or have a huge pile of emails, except you got a person to blame other than yourself.
Why do people mock geeks ?
Why do people mock iron pumpers ?
Part of it is because it reflects something you know you could be doing.
Part of it is because anything that is not on the center of the Gauss curve tingles our brain.
Part of it is because they do weird sh* and it's good sport to make fun of that.
As a veggie geek meditator that spends time in the gym, I certainly understand how goofy this stuff is. Better laugh at it.
I mean, come on...
This morning I ate spirulina, watched a Paul Stamets conf on psylo, took a Wim Hof style cold shower, stored away my vibrams five fingers and took 20 minutes of Vipassana meditation on a red dedicated cushion.
You could write a TV show episode with less material.
No uuid, no hashing, no zipping, no threading, limited random generation, super basic data structures...
So I have no hope for better date handling.
Set and setting is very important.
It helps with making friends, negotiating, having sex, taking care of your health and overall improves the feeling of well-being. After all, if you perceive the world through mostly logic, it's easy to become cynical or be overwhelmed.
Meditation and psychedelics can help learning that if it's something you wish to invest in. Psychoanalysis as well. They all have different time frames, costs and shapes, so it's worth testing all of them. From several sources, given the huge difference in nature and quality of the providers.
It's a long process anyway, but 10 years in, I found it worth it for myself.
- sexual frustration, which is already booming in India, could increase tenfold. Sexually frustrated males can lead to being apathetic or aggressive, none of which is good for society.
- more competition means bigger delta between the winners and the losers. And they already have a large money gap. Making this difference wider can only build more social tensions.
- not a biologist, but I imagine this affects the gene pool, and overall (including social) diversity as well. -
They have 1.3 billions of people, living under an unbelievable social pressure (casts, diversity, religion, money...), on a land saturated by pollution with less and less water to drink.
Reading this article, it seems possible they are running toward a gender crisis as well. Sex frustration is already a terrible thing there, and a big source of trouble. If this proves right, I don't see a way for it to end well.
Now add on top of that they have very unstable borders and the nuclear weapon, and we got all the ingredients for something bad to happen.
I'd imagine it's either very late abortion, or straight post delivery murder. Which is more problematic.
Hence we must produce crappy food to get that quantity for everybody. And of course as a consequence, we have a lot less resources for growing things for human.
Also, because animals are higher in the food chain, they concentrate all the active products we give to them directly (hormones, antibiotics...) or indirectly (pesticides, herbicides...).