8 people now have more than 53% of the world combined.

Octopi if the base word was Latin. It’s Greek, so octopodes for plural. Technically.

Because English is a bastard if a language octopuses and octopi are fine too.

Has anyone here read the article?

The foundation donated, not the man. The foundation’s finances are not exactly simple with thousands of organizations getting funds from them at any given time.

Where money is distributed is not a decision specific to Gates. It’s based on the leadership decisions in the foundation to issue grants. The direction of the granting process is at a high level guided by the board of the foundation, that includes Gates, but those directions are at the “focus on medical research grants into Malaria, AIDS, and TB”, not at the individual dispersal level.

The delegation of authority rules would likely place a 3.5 million dollar decision on a VP level in the foundation to approve.

Sorry what do for work helps progress clinical trials for vaccines that eradicate malaria.

What do you do?

You must be real fun at parties.

Perfect is not the enemy of good.

I have a retirement account that invested in broad markets as well, and some of that is in energy for funds that include those stocks in their prospectus.

If that makes me responsible for death while I spend my days working to help save lives, you have a rather lofty set of expectations.

In effect, anyone who takes part in paying for gas, having a target date fund in their 401k, or purchases any product from an energy company is complicit in deaths. No 10 random people in any room live up to this standard.

The transition away from the stranglehold oil as an industry has on the world can’t and won’t happen overnight. He doesn’t run an oil company, he doesn’t work to expand drilling rights, he works to repurpose wealth into human benefit and some of that requires diversification into energy markets.

If that is a step too far for giving away 100 billion dollars, I don’t know what to tell you.

I am being paid by the foundation, full disclosure, but my agreement or disagreement with the man has nothing to do with working to further clinical trials that save human lives.

The foundation has saved tens of millions of lives.

His asset portfolio is invested in everything from energy to farmland.

As far as billionaires go, you could do a lot worse than having a portfolio diversified while saving millions of people by giving away billions of dollars.

It’s sorta bizarre to me.

If he had not given away all the wealth trying to fight diarrheal disease, HIV, TB, and try to source the solutions to the countries themselves… he would have been the richest man in the world even in the 2020s.

Did he fuck some strange? Yeah.

Did he act ruthlessly in business to get ahead? Yeah.

Is he responsible for 80 MILLION lives saved? Yeah.

Guy is doing what whole nations have failed to do and it’s on his back. Somehow that gets so much hate.

As I have stated in other comments:

“To be very clear, we never should have been there fighting in cities in an unjust war or inversion…”I will repeat it over and over again.

I joined the military before it was known where I would go. I joined before we knew about WMDs or the lack thereof. I joined to give to something bigger than myself, and serve my nation. It was an idealistic view of civil service, and I was deployed to a theater I did not want to be in. The military doesn’t choose where we go. Elected officials do. Enlistments are 4-6 years in length. I watched the towers crumble in high school and signed the recruitment documents.

While deployed I rebuilt infrastructure, brought cooking oil to families, created wells for water, rebuilt community, and in 10 months we went from casualties every single day to press being able to walk the streets openly daily without issue. We treated their people with dignity and respect. We ensured women were present to search other women at traffic security points. We took our boots off in reverence when entering homes to speak to leaders. We learned Arabic to ensure communication in stressful situations could be maintained.

I stood on top of IEDs as part of my job, and placed my whole body over a family in a living room of their home when an insurgent was firing into their living room. He was shooting at us because I had rendered safe two blast grenades he stages by the road side to kill people that I was still holding.

So no, I do not want nor justify any use of military force beyond defense of our own sovereignty. Once deployed, enlisted personal are under oath to follow all orders deemed legal by the UCMJ. Which include, killing people who shoot at you, in urban areas, near civilian populations.

A CWO5 ordered me to shoot a child while deployed. He was running towards our vehicle with a bulky vest under his shirt. 2 weeks before that the parents of a child rigged a suicide best to him and detonated it to kill marines. I shouted in his language and mine. I tried desperately to think of something as this kid was not stopping and the crew served weapon on top was rotating to mow him down. I ran at the kid and hugged him, picked him up, and figured if I was wrong it would just be me as I carried him away. Kid had had a back brace for spinal deformity. I would rather be wrong, and die, than be wrong and kill an innocent person.

War is a horrible practice. It should never be entered lightly, as no conflict will avoid harming innocent people fully. They are the monument to all our country’s sins, but in the case of Platner he did his job and did it with more than enough due diligence to say with certainty it was not a war crime.

I don’t know how so many keep missing the point here.

Routinely, one weapon system is not authorized for use, when another of lesser explosive yield is authorized for use.

They did not, due to concerns for collateral damage, want to use the higher powered indirect fire option (mortars). So the marines created a way to calculate trajectory for use of a lower powered option (40mm grenades).

Every single conflict in the last 100 years occurred with noncombatants in the theater of conflict. None, I repeat none, hold themselves to the standard of never using a munition is it could harm a civilian at all. We try like hell to avoid it, and you do due diligence to target attackers embedded in civilian infrastructure as precisely as possible.

In the very same deployment, in the very same AO, the same command team did change authorization later for the larger indirect fire munition (mortars). There was no evacuation of civilians. Decisions on what weapon to employ are made based on ground conditions at the time.

Tell me this; what is the standard of when you can use a munition? 90% confidence no civilian casualties? 99%? 99.99999%? If it is 100% no military force could ever fire a shot, so why does this use of force in a calculated way to avoid civilian collateral damage not make the cut but other instances do?

Alright, so again, I didn’t just randomly google these topics. I was in Iraq at the same time. I was a marine. I am deeply intimately familiar with the system in question. I currently synthesize high explosives. I have participated in ballistics research and high explosives effects research in Aberdeen proving grounds.

I was there, and used the weapon system in question.

That out of the way, here is some nuance.

Marines taking indirect fire were authorized at the time to use indirect fire weapons to suppress that indirect fire. By definition, indirect fire lands on a target you cannot observe. When an infantry rifle squad employs indirect fire from say, a M203, it is because you cannot hit the target with direct fire of a rifle or cannon.

A mk19 is simply a larger version, but the rounds almost universally issued as HEDP. The majority of their utility is in being light armor penetrating because they are constructed with an inverted cone that is base detonated. It sends the majority of its energy into the direct front of the impact in a focused plasma from the explosive detonation in the projectile. It is surprisingly ineffective as an area fragmentation weapon, even when labeled as dual purpose. I watched them get fired at attacking insurgents where the grenades detonated right next to them along a wall and do no damage to anything but the small hole in the wall of that explosive jet. On multiple occasions.

As for employment, we used indirect fire, regularly, in theater against incoming indirect fire. This was done in often, urban environments and cities. Most of all the fighting in the country after the initial invasion weeks occurred inside those cities, because no real point in fighting in open desert for nothing.

So to be very clear, mk19s were employed OFTEN in operations in urban areas, against indirect fires, as indirect fire suppression.

Further still, it is the literal smallest indirect fire weapon option to exist in the arsenal, so you could not be more judicious to respond to incoming fire than the use of a 40mm grenade.

I personally watched firefights where we used them to similar effect though not anywhere near as much advanced planning was used as he described in that Reddit post. Using the marine corps published calculations for trajectories, mapping out impact areas in advance to ensure accuracy to the limits you can within a remote FOB, is the work mortar men do to ensure accurate fire returned.

So if every single incident of returning indirect fire is a war crime, then there are a hell of a lot more war criminals in the military that need prosecution.

To be very clear, we never should have been there fighting in cities in unjust war or inversion, but it is incredibly clever ingenuity that chose the minimal explicit yield possible, with lots of effort specifically to avoid collateral damage when used. The pre-sighting described and calculating trajectories is not the work you spend weeks on if you intend to harm the wrong person.

You can believe no indirect fire weapons should ever be used in cities, and that is a fine enough opinion. You would be saying that in he face of everyday single conflict in the history of warfare in the last 100 years though and all people involved in indirect fire in places not entirely around military occupants as war criminals. Done enough opinion, but that is a vastly different interpretation that what is currently followed as a war crime in ANY modern conflict.

I have addressed this before.

Nothing about that post is a war crime.

At that time, the BC did not want to authorize mortars for returned fire when getting hit with indirect fire, that was detected by acoustic sensing to translate the source firing positions.

So the marines created an even less explosive yield return fire solution that he is talking about. A 40mm HEDP grenade has a smaller blast radius substantially than a mortar. They are authorized to use indirect fire weapons when attacked. They spent a lot of time and effort to calculate exact trajectories and angles needed to return fire to the calculated coordinates.

In sum, he created a less harmful indirect fire solution with a lot of due diligence to make it accurate to the threat.

It not a war crime.

From the inside, let me tell you how this would go.

You are a marine on the gun line. Call you a lance corporal. You refuse a lawful and direct order according to the UCMJ. You would be subject first to a guaranteed NJP, which requires no jury and only commander’s discretion. You could be facing confinement, extra duty, docked or complete removal of pay, informal hazing, and you would be treated like a shit bird by everything walking for the next 4 years. You would be organizing pine cones by shape or color while doing mountain climbers and planks every day until you could retain consciousness. Your life would be over in the military at best.

If you are informed enough and smart enough to then demand a trial by court martial your life just got even worse. You would be brought before a court martial in a few months, but until then would likely face being put in the brig or confined until trial. All the above would apply, and now you risk a criminal conviction for refusal to follow orders and I would expect charged under several other articles of the UCMJ. They would find you guilty, as there is no leniency to jury interpretation here, you did in fact disobey a lawful order.

It was a monumentally stupid order, but it was lawful to the UCMJ.

If you did refuse and you were a SNCO all the above are true, but you would be facing even worse treatment.

As an officer all the same, 100% imprisoned, and would be dishonorably discharged after being removed of your command and spent time in the brig without pay. You would be made an example out of, and the military would be ruthless in this manner.

So in any part of this, up to the division commander, your life is straight over.

Now what did you gain?

Someone else from another fun line would follow the order seeing what’s happening to you and it would still happen. You would have thrown away your employment chances for life, endured prison, endured hardship someone outside the corps cannot fathom, and made no gain.

If you suggest they were to conspire with others to prevent execution of the orders, that’s punishable as even worse and could be up to execution or death if charged with sedition or mutiny.

For this? lol. Ok. Didn’t see you standing in front of the impact area as protest.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ATC/s/K9KxRNLr0k

Safety is absolutely being impacted.

The leaves have begun to change in the south eastern US.

It is with two separate ZFS pools mirroring one another.

Why in gods name would anyone not be running RAID or virtual disk pools for important storage?

It’s 2025.

Free speech is rooted in the founding idea that you can speak or print your opinion about a government without a government’s reprisal.

Like most rights, these are codified and then matured or refined over time in the form of amendments.

I would very much like to change the name of the 14th amendment for all that it matters, since it now protects corporate personhood over individuals, but I digress.

Free speech is, again like other rights, not to be enshrined where it would allow you to do harm to others. You have the right to preach in an airport or say the government is hiding aliens or that the president is a shit bird. You do not have the right to cause a panic by screaming fire or bomb, as this had the very real harm to other’s safety in crowded public places. You can’t scream fire in a theater, for the same reason.

The most simple way to put this is that your rights end at your nose, not other people’s noses.

You can’t harm other’s freedom to operate unmolested, and where we draw that line is the foundation of English law.

No, it wouldn’t.

Jesus Christ has no one taken a civics class or studied how your government works?

Free speech limitations are clearly set with multiple case precedent. You would be arrested, convicted, and banned from ever flying. Full stop.

Phenotype vs biological normative.

Deaf people will decry “fixing” a person hearing impaired in the womb. Yet, it’s a correction to biological normative.

Adjusting a gender to a different one in the womb would not be.

Adjusting physical traits for looks wouldn’t be.

Adjusting a physical trait like spinal deformity would be.

Adjusting for general height would not be.

If there is something diagnosable in the ICD-10 codes we have, and it’s preventable in a population, it would not be eugenetics. Remove gene editing as the tool, but just say “magic” a cure. Cures apply to diseases, not traits.

You don’t cure being black. You CAN cure sickle cell.

I think the line is pretty clear.

You simply use existing diagnostic criteria of deviation from biological normative function.