I post this as I saw a basic humanitarian essay "flagged" by one of our less enlightened fellow readers.
The humanitarian essay that was "flagged" is the following link:
Criminalizing basic humane behaviors (such as saving drowning people, or giving water to a dehydrated person at risk of death) is making things worse and strips us of our very humanity.
We wring our hands and move on, preferring to not know about it, instead.
be prepared for rich nations/people to aid poor ones.
there can be no winners in such a disaster, let's stop jostling for position.
(We, the USA, are literally the only unilateralist nation with regards to this issue. We are an outlier, some would say a criminally negligent outlier. Time to make up for past misdeeds!)
Indeed. There are still plenty of people spreading doubt and nonsense about the climate emergency not being real or not being caused by our industrial-scale burning of stuff for "energy".
We unequivocally NEED to stand behind a singular message:
1) it IS our activities causing it
2) we can and should curtail these activities IMMEDIATELY
3) while we can't avoid the effects "in the pipleline", we can prevent further effects from piling up.
4) number 3 is our duty to the children and their children, it's our legacy.
Let me guess: you are American, and you are trying to defend the indefensible?
We are locked in an existential battle for the soul of our nation, founded as it was in the ideals expressed in this essay.
I do believe you are trying to justify the unjustifiable.
Shall we begin your remedial history lessons with the Monroe Doctrine, or perhaps start with United Fruit in Guatemala, or perhaps discuss Kissingers role in overthrowing the democratically elected Salvador Allende and assisting a certain General Pinochets rise?
Our crimes in Latin America are numerous and our neighbors were not plopped next door to us yesterday.
We are actively involved in their continued instability and impoverishment (See Guatemala, see Honduras, oh and LOOKEE HERE Venezuela and 30+ years of sanctions, or shall we mention the drug war and it's biggest client?)
What is missing from any discussion of our bad attitude ("Keep out" says a nation of immigrants!) is HUMANITY.
Where is your humanity? Do you have no sense of right and wrong?
Is a Mexican not your brother?
What is being proposed here is not what you suggest is being proposed, although I will remind you that all nations and all borders are fictatious entities.
What is being proposed here is the radical idea that border-crossing human movements need not result in the deaths of human beings, seeing as how our entire species has always migrated.
Are you 100% Native American? No? Then you are a descendant of migrants!
"OH but they did it LEGALLY" yeah and slavery was legal and so are American cops shooting black people with impunity.
Your point?
The nation state system will not likely survive the 21st century. Mark my words.
So, I can't think of other nations where border crossing result in deaths, legal or otherwise.
I can't think of a single other nation in which such a double-standard of borders exists:
Americans can go party in Mexico for the weekend, so it's not like we are at war with Mexico, but then this border is militarized like Gaza or the Korean DMZ... hmmmm kinda odd buddy.
No, once again, I reject the notion that our financial prosperity is in any way linked to the evil protection racket that only protects SOME (evil) businesses as the expense of
1) world peace
2) our limited political capital and limited good will
Our so-called allies like Saudi Arabia are as bad as any regime we denounce, and our much vaunted "security umbrella" is a lie.
We have more in common with China and Russia than with Switzerland, as such large nations are basically just giant bullies that make-up whatever nice-sounding rationale for any unilateral action they feel like and no one can do anything about it.
We are a force for evil in this world, since World War 2.
That must be aknowledged, or I shall give you a history lesson.
So, this "more pollution than 140 nations" description encapsulates 2 fundamental truths, IMNVHO
1) That the USA spends more than the entire rest of the world combined in it's "defense" budget, as having more than 700 bases in more than 80 countries has a price.
2) That it's considered above-sacred to allow this military machine to do literally anything it wishes to do, including treating the ocean as it's dumping ground.
(is now a good time to mention the Bikini atoll?)
Unilateralism is literally only followed by a singular large country.
The entirety of the rest of the world, real-politik-inclusive as it may be (like we aren't LOL) accepts a multi-polar world as a reality.
It's very ironic that this same nation has ANYTHING to say about anyone else, not that we need to bring up Egypt or Saudi Arabia or our unusual orange king that loves Duterte more than Trudeau...
Look at all the fake patriots rushing to defend the very thing that is undoing the basic tenets of the USA's founding political philosophies.
The articles point is being wantonly ignored by turning this into yet another debate on whether God appointed the USA to defend the world against itself.
The US military machine pollutes more than 140 countries!
May I suggest that:
1) large powerful countries tend to bully and act pushy and attempt to coerce the smaller and/or poorer countries into doing their bidding
2) nation states as a global system won't likely survive this century, as they are largely squandering what little time we have left to confront the single largest threat humanity has ever faced in it's self-aknowledged history:
human caused climate change.
Hello 45 degree France in 2019
(celsius, my fahrenheit friends... you know: the system the entire rest of the world uses: where freezing of water is 0 and the boiling point of the same is 100... part of the metric system... in which 1 cubic meter of water is 1000 liters, in which you can convert from driving/flying distances to microscopic ones by shifting some zeros... that's another clue that you are actually doing the Devils work rather than Gods, but I digress...)
I tend to think that Google is rather bigger than any one nation-states ability to contain it, at this point, which makes comparisons to Apple somewhat funny.
Amazon appears to be desperately seeking to connect with the funding channels this article highlights.
Overall reaction: meh, the entire tech sector has always played this role in any society since inception.
Silicon Valley, ARPA, and later, DARPA seem to seamlessly fit with such a vision as outlined.
No disputing anything here, it's simply that we aren't in any position to assess what Google wants, really, are we?
A document database? Whenever I wanted to lump certain "tables" worth of data together literally ALWAYS (as in modeling many real-world entities) in my CRUD operations.
Literally the opposite use case of what the person below me outlined with "whenever the data structure may change too frequently" as I see relational-dbs directly applicable to aggregations (data analysis/metrics) and frequently-changing amorphous data structures in which various concretely and atomically known entities have their interactions and composition fleshed-out.
When you need to take that and run and run hard, documents make sense, then you can look at turning that into primitives (key:value mapping like ohm...?)
Incidentally, there are decent commercial MongoDB SAAS vendors, but running your own replica-set is somewhat cumbersome, and I've personally experienced data-loss suddenly on a self-hosted system after 1 year of flawless operation and 5 nines of uptime...
Perhaps you are referring to my comments on other posts?