If you’re a billionaire intent on becoming even wealthier, that usually implies that you really enjoy being a successful businessman. I don’t see why business success for its own sake would be inherently less satisfying than other sorts of accomplishment.

Don’t forget about device drivers. I can’t even install a newer version of Android on my Android phone because the community never managed to get the antenna to work after upgrading the OS.

Most financially secure people still work full time. I suppose that in theory, they’re able to quit their jobs without suffering immediate, catastrophic consequences but if they actually did that sort of thing, they wouldn’t be financially secure for long.

(In my experience, many financially secure people actually work much more than full time. I think they would be better off if they didn’t because at some point time becomes more valuable than money, but they have the sort of personality that compels them to. This is often related to starting out without financial security.)

The very rich can do crazy stuff without consequences but they’re such a small part of the population that I don’t think comparing oneself to them is useful.

The US has never sent soldiers to fight for Israel during any of Israel’s previous wars, even when Israel’s continued existence was in extreme danger. Therefore I think American boots on the ground are very unlikely. Even in the case that the US military intervenes directly, that intervention will probably be limited to long-range aerial attacks.

It’s funny to me that in the USA the people with the best access to healthcare are often either the richest or the poorest.

Children are killed even in a just war, so morality on the scale of nations is necessarily different than morality on the scale of individuals.

That’s true; I am assuming that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the overall age distribution of civilians. Maybe efforts to minimize child casualties skew the actual distribution one way, or maybe children’s greater frailty skews it the other way. I don’t know but I think that my assumption is reasonable as a rough estimate.

Let me try to explain it another way.

We know that 1/3 of the dead are children, according to the headline. We also know that children make up about half the population of Gaza. We assume that none of the combatants are children.

If a person is killed, that person is either an adult combatant, an adult civilian, or a child civilian. Since child civilians make up 1/3 of the dead and there are as many adult civilians as child civilians in Gaza, adult civilians therefore make up another 1/3 of the dead. That adds up to 2/3 of the dead being civilians. 2/3 civilian dead and 1/3 combatant dead is a 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed.

That’s not what I’m saying - I don’t have a term that represents “#deadKids/#allCivilians”.

If I were to use your notation, I would write:

#deadKids/#allDead = #deadCivilians/#allDead * #allKids/#allCivilians

I recognize that it’s macabre to treat this as a word problem, but the math works out if you do. If out of 100 dead people, 33 are combatants and 67 are civilians (the 2:1 civilian to combatant ratio I have calculated) and half of the dead civilians are children, then there are 33 dead children, which is the “one third” in the headline.

That’s not what I am assuming. My assumptions are only that none of the dead combatants are children and that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the age distribution of the civilian population.

If we assume that (1) the civilian population is 50% children and (2) none of the combatants are children then:

(fraction of the dead that is children) = (fraction of the dead that is civilians) * (fraction of the civilians that is children)

(1/3) = (fraction of the dead that is civilians) * (1/2)

(fraction of the dead that is civilians) = (1/3) ÷ (1/2) = (2/3)

This is where my 2:1 civilians to combatants number comes from.

The fact that among the dead, the ratio of civilians to combatants equals the ratio of adults to children is a coincidence.

Many people seem to think so but the evidence doesn’t support their argument. A 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed isn’t particularly low but it is far closer to the best that Western armies have been able to accomplish than it is to the ratio seen from armies that are not trying to reduce civilian casualties. For example, Russia’s ratio in Mariupol is approximately 8:1 and that was against Ukrainian soldiers in uniform who weren’t deliberately hiding among civilians. Urban warfare always involves heavy civilian casualties.

About half the inhabitants of Gaza are under 18 years old, so 1/3 of the dead being children corresponds to a ratio of two civilians killed for every combatant. This is not out of the ordinary for urban warfare conducted in a manner intended to reduce civilian casualties.

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I understand that that’s the intent. The problem is the methodology, which is as I said just multiplication by five. Calling it a gold standard implies that there’s actually some sophisticated analysis going on, and there isn’t.

The “gold standard in the field” is apparently to multiply the Hamas numbers by five. I’m not kidding. That’s where the 186,000 number comes from. This is low-effort bullshit.

Edit: Also this article is just wrong about what the 335,500 number is claimed to be. It is what you get if you extrapolate the 186,000 number to the end of the year, not to September.

What makes you an actual libertarian?

I don’t have anything to suggest on Lemmy. There’s so little activity that I participate in every community where I see an interesting post, except for those communities which are specifically for people with some particular set of beliefs which I don’t share.

If you’re looking beyond Lemmy, there are are the comment sections of the SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen blog and the blogs it links to as well as some associated forums and subreddits. You’ll find plenty of liberal libertarians and the comments tend to be polite and high-effort, but keep in mind that a dedication to free speech means that people with opinions that can’t be discussed elsewhere participate too. It’s a bit much for me sometimes.

I acknowledge that almost all people (including me) couldn’t survive on their own. Even those that could survive (let’s say that their bunkers have robust long-term life-support systems) still couldn’t live completely alone for many years without going crazy.

I don’t reject relationships with other people, but I think they should be between independent individuals who associate with each other only because they both want to. (Violating this principle is sometimes necessary but always undesirable.) You appear to think otherwise, and I suppose that’s a fundamental value difference that can’t be resolved through debate. I do want to point out that if I were in charge, my rules wouldn’t prevent you from voluntarily living life your way. I suspect that your rules wouldn’t leave me the analogous option.

Edit: I suppose that I do feel like I have some obligations to my family members despite being related to them through no choice of my own. Is that how collectivists feel (to a lesser extent) about everyone else?

The preppers are different because they want to be left completely alone. They don’t see any acceptable role for government in their lives. I don’t think they’re being realistic. Freedom isn’t free, as the saying goes.

The techno-libertarians are much more engaged with society and do see a role for government, even if that role is small and (at least according to some of them) bizarre by conventional standards. I’m not going to deny that the bunker-building types are involved in the movement. I often don’t agree with the weirder people involved, but I like that techno-libertarians are willing to hear people out and judge their ideas rationally rather than shunning them for being weird.

(I think I might have a bunker built if I was rich enough. The expected utility of it is higher than that of, say, a second yacht. Human guards are a dead end. Probably the best thing that can be done if civilization totally collapses and you manage to get inside is blowing up the entrance so that anyone who wants to get to you has to move a thousand tons of rock first. You probably won’t ever get to leave, but it’s better than what would happen if you did.)