pluto9
> We've been through this argument, recently, and I'm a little disappointed that you're framing this observation as if that discussion hadn't occurred already.
I think people give too much credit to the government for being a rational and calculating actor. I don't find it difficult to believe that they attempted a "men who stare at goats"-style program. They are absolutely not above throwing a billion dollars worth of shit at the wall just to see what sticks. These are the same people who thought they could implant cats with listening equipment and train them to eavesdrop on Soviet officials, which went about as well as you'd expect.
> There are literally infinite ways to create equations that satisfy measurements.
There really aren't. You seem to be thinking of something like in the movie The Number 23. But we're talking about equations, not numbers. Take Newton's Second Law (f = m • a). What equation can you write that expresses that relationship that can't be simplified to f = m • a?
> Suncell® directly generates electricity from reaction of hydrogen to dark matter using water freely available in the humidity in the air.
Lol
But since we're being legalistic, yes, we signed the convention. But we did not ratify it. It is not legally binding on us.
I think it made me more mature, or at least less naive about certain things...eventually. The experiences were valuable but it took a long time for me to fully reflect on them and extract that value. I was 22 when I got out, barely past being a teenager.
Money wasn't a factor for me. I had 96% of my tuition to a good engineering school paid for by scholarships, which I gave up to enlist. My reasons were a combination of things. I had a lot of friends who enlisted and I felt bad that they were risking their lives and I wasn't. I was also sick of school and saw war as an adventurous alternative, and a way to prove myself as a man. And I genuinely believed in the mission at the time.
I think the influence of money on soldiers going into actual combat is overstated. It's true that there are a lot of people who enlist for a paycheck, vocational training, or as a way to pay for college. But you get to choose your job. I was in the infantry, and pretty much everyone I knew legitimately wanted to fight, which is the only reason to join the infantry. If you're after job security or education benefits, you can be a clerk or a mechanic or a thousand other things that will generally keep you away from enemy fire. There's an idea floating around that the government keeps people poor so it'll have an endless supply of desperate peasants to feed into the meat grinder, but that doesn't hold up in my experience.
Certainly there's propaganda that goes into recruiting naive young people in the US, but it's quite a stretch to equate that with child soldiers. I chose to enlist and so did everyone I served with. The vast majority of us do not regret it or feel that we were conned.
Have you looked at the actual numbers? I said usually. The veteran suicide rate is roughly double that of civilians [1]. Obviously that's a problem, but it's still a very small minority. Veterans are not dropping like flies.
In retrospect, I realize that guy was probably much like me. A young guy, full of testosterone and looking for adventure, with notions of being part of something grand and heroic (repelling an invader) and a certain naivete about the larger forces and agendas that were using him. We'd probably get along if we met now.
Awhile back I saw a conversation on Reddit between an American soldier who fought in Ramadi (or maybe Fallujah, I can't remember) and an Iraqi soldier who was there at the same time fighting against the Americans. There was no ill will at all, just storytelling and reminiscing, and talking about the courses of their lives, families, and careers since then. The fact was that these guys had almost everything in common about that time in their lives, and had similar motivations for taking part in it. The only difference was that they happened to be on opposite sides.
It's also a mistake to think that every time a soldier shows an ounce of humanity, they're only doing it to "help their conscience". Soldiers are usually not the tortured individuals Hollywood portrays them to be. Why should these two men's consciences bother them? NATO troops thought they were defending the oppressed, and Serbian troops thought they were defending their sovereignty.
It's also what happens when socially clueless strangers interrupt your conversation to make rude comments and you have the good sense not to waste your time on them. Idiotic comments don't deserve well thought out replies.
This is giving the market a lot of credit for being a rational and well-informed actor. The market is not full of people who calmly evaluate a short seller's argument and make a logical decision. It's full of people who lack the time, experience, and confidence to question the "financial expert" making dire predictions on the morning news and think "I should get out of this stock just to be safe".
Even living in the city doesn't necessarily help. I once called the police because a guy was in my apartment complex looking for me with a gun. It took them 45 minutes to arrive, and this was in the city only a mile and a half from the nearest police station.
It was pretty clear to me after they arrived that since I lived in a bad neighborhood, they didn't want to deal with the situation. They figured they could wait, let whatever was going to happen happen, and then roll in and take statements.
Your first article is someone criticizing prior efforts by others to reduce public education funding. The only person using the word "defund" is the author. Though interestingly, there is a mention of conservative attacks on programs like sociology, anthropology, minority studies, and gender studies. I assure you that many conservatives really do want to abolish funding for those programs.
The second article is a single person using the word "defund" to describe Obama's reduction of military spending. Again, somebody using the word to describe somebody else's actions.
Interestingly, both of those articles are by people who oppose defunding. Perhaps they used that word precisely because it implies "remove funding entirely", which has an exaggerated emotional impact?
In any case, neither example is the same thing as a large social movement using it as a slogan, especially when that movement publishes things like "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
When things like that appear in the New York Times, is it so unreasonable for people to take their word for it? Or should we keep insisting that they don't really mean it?
And before you tell me that that's just one person's opinion, I'll just point out that so were both of your references, and those are the opinions of people who aren't even supporters of those movements. The "defund the police" movement has its own people using the term and saying "yes, we mean literally abolish the police".
I used to work at a kiosk manufacturer that would do the complete hardware design, fabricate it, put it on a truck and drive it around the city for a week straight, and then make sure nothing was broken. This was to ensure that it wouldn't break during shipping to the customer. After that, not even a zip tie was allowed to be changed.
In our case, our development process was such that the software engineers didn't get ahold of it until afterwards. One time we built a machine with an internal cable that was too long and so its baud rate was too slow to perform to the customer's spec. Rather than incur the cost of re-testing with a different cable, the company spent two years trying to get the customer to accept a slower machine. Fun times.
Yes, our military does not do that. That is the job of law enforcement. Look up the Posse Comitatus Act.
There's a lot to be said about the evils of the military industrial complex, but you're making that point in the worst possible way. Complaining that your tax dollars are being wasted because the military is too lazy to perform duties that they are explicitly not allowed to perform for very good reasons does not bring anything to light.
> An actual alternative narrative is that the executive branch willfully did not defend the capital.
It isn't a matter of narrative, it is a simple fact that the executive branch chose not to authorize an exception to Posse Comitatus in this case, which is what the National Guard does and requires specific authorization each and every time. Without that authorization, the military has no more authority in D.C. than the NYPD does. It's quite simply outside of their jurisdiction.
It would sure be nice if these kind of histrionics stayed off of HN.
> Supervision and control of D.C. National Guard was delegated by the president to the defense secretary pursuant to Executive Order 10030, 26 January 1949 with authority to designate National Military Establishment officials to administer affairs of the D.C. National Guard. The Army secretary was directed to act in all matters pertaining to the ground component, and the Air Force secretary was directed to act in all matters pertaining to the air component.
> The National Guard may be called into federal service in response to a call by the president or Congress.
So control is apparently shared in some way between the president, secdef, congress, and secretaries of the army and air force. But it does seem that the Army secretary's authority is delegated by the president, who remains the "commander in chief" of the guard unit.
Of course the president is commander in chief of all guard units when they're called into federal service, but I wonder if service in DC is considered "federal" in that sense. DC is a federal entity, but a guard unit serving its home jurisdiction isn't usually what's meant by "federal service".
Military organization is weird.
In any case, it's not controlled by the mayor of DC. She can only request an activation (which she did).
No. National Guard units are normally controlled by state governors, but since DC is not a state and has no governor, the DC National Guard is the only guard unit that reports directly to the president [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_National_...
FWIW, I've quit jobs on short notice because of poor conditions like this, and my leaving increased pressure on those who were still there. These are good things to keep in mind:
- They are free to resign too.
- Their predicament is entirely the fault of the employer, not you.
- Employees are often willing to soldier on out of a sense of duty to their coworkers, which gives the employer no incentive to change. To the company, it's a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
A former employer of mine once had all developers working 60 hour weeks because "this is what it takes to be competitive in the industry". The staff grumbled and complained, but it wasn't until there was a mass exodus of senior developers that they suddenly discovered the value of happy employees. That company is actually quite a nice place to work now. Some executives are incapable of seeing the error of their ways without real consequences.