My own experience was that we took our boots off and helmets off when entering homes to meet with village elders. We did not talk to nor break customs around interactions with their women. I built wells to give communities water, ensured they had cooking and fuel oil, repaired infrastructure, and I placed my body over a family to shield them when the house I was in was getting shot at.

There were 237 casualties on my battalion, but by the end of our tour the place that was mired in firefights every day became peaceful enough that the press could walk about with officers and not even wear body armor.

We played soccer with kids, gave out food, ran electricity to homes, and made the best of what we could.

I have done humanitarian aid for NGOs in the years since and worked on mission trips. Neither experience has come close to the magnitude of elevating community needs as my time in the military did for those we were trying to help.

Just my own personal experience, but felt it was worth sharing.

I work on side projects for people with woodwork.

My day job that makes up the majority of my income is in software.

I wouldn’t call myself a woodworker over a software engineer.

You are calling yourself a content creator instead of a prostitute when that’s your primary profession. Nothing wrong with either profession, but that context is relevant.

It is not that I don’t want her in the White House. It’s that I know in the current electoral college, she is unelectable.

Principles, morals, and virtue are great. You have to fucking win to govern.

Jeff Jackson is a much better choice IMO as about the furthest left young actually electable official you can tap in 3 years.

That’s the whole point of gas masks, yes.

Sad, cause it was a great scene by him

I need you to stop doing that.

Answering more than was asked.

You can in fact, simply give up US citizenship.

If own the lottery tomorrow, and needed a “no capital gains taxes” state to be a citizen of, this would be sorta tempting.

Also noteworthy, the IRS doesn’t come after international citizens. Sure they can go after you domestically, but if your accounts are not American accounts and your assets are in other nations, you can just live your life not filing taxes without going back to the US as a citizen.

I don’t want to type for ages here, but as someone who has been a sufferer and then medical patient for chronic daily migraines for decades; it actually is pretty nuanced.

For people like me, their chronic migraines are triggered as a secondary effect from the primary source. My headaches are called cervicogenic headaches, and migraine abortives like Obrelvy or Triptans are often used to arrest the storm. However, they are caused in origin from the occipital nerve, of which there are 3 branches in the neck.

An occipital nerve block is one commonly used tool, but it is often down blind without ultrasound. It is effective as hell at stopping migraine pain, and headache pain from what is the irritation or entrapment of occipital nerves. It has been common practice for several neuro and pain clinics I have seen for the last 2 decades. Problematically, they are not often offered in the emergency room setting because they are rather specialized procedures that usually are done by a neurology or trained pain physician. So that makes the emergency department a place that you go when the pain has overwhelmed all your other medications and resources, only to be met by not being able to get the one procedure that offers guaranteed relief for up to 2 weeks if given the block with steroids as well as local anesthetic. Frustrating to say the least, since you can plan on when you will get a massive headache, but you have to schedule to procedure weeks to months out with specialists.

Other migraine or occipital neuralgia triggering migraine treatments include other more invasive procedures to the nerves called ablations. Because cutting he nerve or surgically modifying them would result in scar tissue that would cause more problems or block regrowth, occipital ablations involve a needle slowly guided into the nerve under ultrasound imaging, and then they push electrical current into the needle while it is moved around by the provider. These can’t be numbed because you have to give feedback on where the currents are flowing in order to get it properly placed. Hurts like medieval torture. Then once placed they turn in ultrasonic pulses that heat the tip of the needle inside the nerve. This gets the tip hot enough to denature the nerve cells and kill them without harming the nerve sheath and allowing regrowth without nerve pain. It’s torture though and must be scheduled every 6-12 months. It doesn’t treat acute attacks, and can’t help with all types of headaches.

So offerings in the medical community pushed from specialized scheduled care to the responsive emergency providers as accepted medical interventions can be a massive improvement in accessibility to a treatment that can offer relief when no other physical interventions are reasonably possible for rapid abortive relief.

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.