> The newspaper also reported, citing another unidentified official, that not all of the undisclosed deaths were directly tied to the months-long conflict but involved US personnel who were in the Middle East amid ongoing hostilities.
If someone dies near a war, but not due to the war, is it really fair to count them as a war fatality?
To get more specific this often means 'suicide' which absolutely is a casualty of war given the strain of war conditions, especially given the logistics concerns and duration of tours that they are forcing right now.
What logistics concerns are there? Isn't the US supposed to be one of the best at managing wartime logistics, which is why they have bases all around the world?
They put an alcoholic fox news host in charge of the military and he fired or otherwise forced out a ton of experienced leaders in the name of "the warrior ethos" and "high testosterone soldiers".
In a completely unrelated development the "worlds best logistics organization" is now having trouble with logistics.
The US has bases around the world because its auxiliary fleet is rather limited. Its always an advantage to have supplies nearby because shipping or flying anything thousands or half way around the world is just too hard.
Lose those advantages and even the US military is troubled and the results are what we see today. It cant invade Iran and it cant even bomb or launch an invasion of Houthi territory.
Did i mention the Ospreys which were built because of the Tehran Embassy hostages from the 1980s are grounded today or limited to very short trips because of constant mechanical failures ?
Smokes and mirrors, its not a smart thing to show your enemy your weaknesses.
Are you, uh, mixing up the term "midrats" with something?
I've not seen this claim. The fact that they sent it immediately home for a port call (and had SecNavy visit for a pep talk) when the news of conditions on the Lincoln broke is probably indicative.
> If someone on a military base with no attacks going on, got a heart attack by watching the news, probably not a war fatality.
Were they at that base as a (say) mechanic servicing aircraft engines for flights over the Persian Gulf? Are the only reasons why the planes (and thus him) are there is because of the hostilities with Iran, as otherwise they would be States-side?
There’s often more ambiguity than that. “Died of a COVID linked complication with COVID and other issue that is also linked to that complication.” You can’t spend endless resources deciding if something is or isn’t responsible.
Systems use arbitrary buckets like if someone commits suicide in less than six months from coming home after a war might count it, while excluding every case after six months. That’s going to misclassify cases in both directions but means you don’t need to track millions of people for decades or look through mental health details.
Obviously people with more data to work with can make a convincing case you’re wrong, but higher levels accuracy get expensive. In the end we know more than 1 million Americans died of COVID for example, how many more isn’t precisely known but ~1 million is plenty useful for decision making around the next pandemic.
> “Died of a COVID linked complication with COVID and other issue that is also linked to that complication.”
Where people refused to acknowledge the "linked complication" part of it at all. Many people refused to consider a death as being due to Covid unless the person literally suffocated, ignoring Covid's clear links to many other cardiovascular conditions.
It's routinely written and recounted that for most wars in history more people died from disease than combat. But we still count them all as war deaths.
yea, good observation, my guess is its the data more than the filter. OSM coastline polygons are generalized to different degrees depending on who traced them and from what imagery, so the fine shape detail a halo check would key on often is not in the geometry at all.
I observed that at the end, didnt push on it further though. It already passed and I was super exhausted
Yeah, like for another example, I'd stumbled across some (probably somewhat obscure) blog/podcast series about Bob Dylan songs some time ago, but had forgotten to bookmark it. A few month later, I tried to find it again using the same search terms, but nothing turned up anymore (only dozens of various song lyrics pages, but not the blog I was interested in). Luckily I eventually managed to retrieve it from some older backup of my browser history…
macOS Codex app is my main agent (its very polished). When it makes changes or code scans i ask it to run claude -p plus cursor-cli plus grok cli for double checking. This way bias of one model can be overruled by quorum.
> If tank fails, you are liable for water damages and home insurance DOES NOT cover that.
Whether an aquarium is covered by home/renters insurance is specific to the policy and aquarium size, not consistent enough to make statements like this. This aquaponics system is essentially a planter on top of a low stock aquarium.
I will say that the shelf supporting the aquarium seems inadequate to the job, increasing the risk.
The Iranian regime killed in a matter of days approximately the same amount of civilians as the IDF killed in Gaza over the course of their entire operation.
That’s just the tally from this year, they are also responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths across Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Ukraine.
How do you actually know that? Do you fully believe the media and media-adjacent NGO reports of these numbers? You need to understand the level of manipulation going on here. Are you aware that Mossad and Mossad/CIA backed armed revolutionary groups were involved in the protesting, likely with orders to engage in violent resistance. I'm not doubting many were killed, but the "30k+" numbers are clearly garbage. I don't have a side here btw -- I don't like the IRGC one bit. But we have been hearing about "Babies being killed in incubators" since 1990s, one should understand one's own government.
.. as opposed to the tens of millions the Western 5-eyes nations are responsible for, since 2003 .. and the 36 million refugees from our wars .. and the hundreds of thousands murdered in Gaza during the worlds latest preposterous genocide ..
I think the moral altitude you are looking for doesn't exist.
How many Gazans are left in Gaza? How many Jews were left in Ukraine? Hell, how many Ukrainians remained? About 15% of the Ukrainian population was slaughtered, and the Nazis failed in their war aims. The Israelis succeeded, there is no force stopping them except their domestic politics.
Even if you for a second ignore the blatant nazi apologism and focus on the core claim of cruelty, the Nazis committed every one of those atrocities you’ve named, on a scale multiple orders of magnitude greater.
We've banned this account because (1) it has been using the site primarily for ideological/political battle, something we don't allow here*, and (2) it has been posting extreme flamebait, something we also don't allow here**.
Hn is a goofy place. It feels like on odd days we see posts like this, about the EU creating this legal framework for the destruction of privacy. On even days we see posts about quitting American saas in favor of Europeans on the basis of privacy. Somehow the dots never connect.
Doesn't the mere fact that the EU is trying to pass laws to erode privacy indicate that there is privacy to erode? The US doesn't need to pass such laws because there are no protections.
> The US doesn't need to pass such laws because there are no protections.
The US desperately needs fundamental definitions and protections in regard to privacy, but the fact that it is extremely common for European countries to prosecute illegal speech and associations is a big difference. Americans are trying to defend themselves against the secondary effects of surveillance. Europeans can just jail you for saying magic words, or associating with organizations that have been proscribed.
Also, as of a day or two ago, Europeans can be prosecuted for sharing any RT (Russia Today) content, even in private, regardless of content. These are things that the Bill of Rights makes unthinkable in the US. We can bring assault rifles to anti-government protests; if they're seized we can sue to get them back, and to be compensated for being bothered.
The constitutional documents of European countries and supranational institutions might have been largely cribbed from the US's set, but anything like the Bill of Rights in them is virtually never written as an absolute right. It's stuff like Citizens are guaranteed freedom of expression except in cases where it is necessary to prevent expression to maintain safety or the public order.
> Also, as of a day or two ago, Europeans can be prosecuted for sharing any RT (Russia Today) content, even in private, regardless of content.
If you mean the July, 2 ruling of EU CoJ, I don't see anything there about "even in private". What they said is that if you have a website and put RT videos on it, it's "broadcasting" regardless of whether the website is freely accessible and/or run by a non-profit. Which sounds reasonable to me. The original ban on RT is still silly but that's a separate story.
EU has stronger protections against large private entities. Some people care more about that than they do about government (FWIW I think those people are wrong and the end result is the same, but it's a complicated subject).
> Citizens are guaranteed freedom of expression except in cases where it is necessary to prevent expression to maintain safety or the public order.
in practice thats how the US ends up working as well - with fenced in protest corners and the like, and police declaring protests to be riots and then moving in to stop the expression
If someone dies near a war, but not due to the war, is it really fair to count them as a war fatality?
reply