Have advancements in precision bombing technology ever led to an overall reduction in collateral damage to civilians? Is that even an argument defense contractors make, or are you just making it up?

Or has every study shown the exact opposite, that “precision” bombs actually cause more civilian deaths?

those bombs will kill far more than just a hundred people, far more than he can ever conceptualize. the consequences of those deaths will shape the world more than the extra microsecond an engineer could shave off of an internal Amazon function

The number of people defending Lockheed Martin here is staggering, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given the apparent makeup of Lemmy’s population

I’ll make this very, very simple: working for a well-known defense contractor who brags about making bombs is bad. Working for Lockheed Martin is unethical.

Working for a large corporation (Microsoft) that funds or supports wars (Israel) is also bad, but not as bad as Lockheed Martin, the company that actually builds the bombs that are bought with the dollars that Microsoft sends to Israel

Working for any company that could theoretically contribute economically to a war is bad, but not as bad as the previous two examples and is more or less unavoidable for working people

Paying any kind of tax (especially in the US) ultimately funds wars, and so isn’t good either, but it’s not as bad as any of the three above options, and no one can avoid it (except billionaires of course)

The “right targets” tend to be innocent lives as well. Besides, who said anything about precise weaponry? These days, it’s all about AI, where precision is actually not the goal

Hobbies, classes, sports teams, volunteering

If you want to meet women, take a pottery class, join a softball league, take knitting lessons, join a book club, volunteer at a local animal shelter, go to the library regularly, join a protest, join a running or biking group, or even look around on one of those meetup apps for activities in your area

Maybe your problem was that you only went to your gym and your bar, instead of trying to meet new people? The point is, it’s easy to get stuck into a routine, and swiping on Tinder often becomes part of the routine

actually, fair enough

sea shanties and gregorian chants are the fedoras of music genres

Just trusting them to pay you out of their own pocket?

actually the opposite! everyone here just expects to never see their deposit ever again

Here are some of the real, actual and totally-not-biased questions asked in this survey. There are no alternatives to these questions, these are the only ones asked about particular policy positions:

DJT08 Do you support or oppose each of these policies:

• Deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes
• Undertaking a full—scale effort to find and eliminate fraud and waste in government expenditures
• Closing the border with added security and policies that discourage illegal crossings
• Banning men who have undergone operations and hormones to become women from girls sports
• Declaring that there are only two genders male and female in all government forms and programs
• Eliminating all preferences by race in the hiring and awarding of government contracts
• Freezing and re—evaluating all foreign aid expenditures and the department that handled them
• Placing reciprocal tariffs on countries that have tariffs on US goods

https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Feb2025_HHP_Crosstabs.pdf

This is quite possibly the worst-designed and loaded poll I have ever seen

You must not hang out around trans people IRL then. Whenever I’m out with my friends, someone usually has to make a comment about or to one of my trans friends, just to be mean I guess? I don’t even understand why people feel so happy making her upset

in this case you would just overwrite the existing row, you wouldn’t use de-duplication because it would do the opposite of what you wanted in that case.

… That’s what I said, you’d just update the row, i.e. replace the existing data, i.e. overwrite what’s already there

Definitionally, the actual identity of the person MUST be unique, otherwise you’re going to somehow return two rows, when you call one, which is functionally impossible given how a DB is designed.

… I don’t think you understand how modern databases are designed

i genuinely cannot think of a single instance where you would want to delete one entry, and replace it with a reference to another

Well, there’s not always a benefit to keeping historical data. Sometimes you only want the most up-to-date information in a particular table or database, so you’d just update the row (replace). It depends on the use case of a given table.

what elon is implying here (remove “duplicate” entries, however that’s supposed to work)

Elon believes that each row in a table should be unique based on the SSN only, so a given SSN should appear only once with the person’s name and details on it. Yes, it’s an extremely dumb idea, but he’s a famously stupid person.

There can be duplicate SSNs due to name changes of an individual, that’s the easiest answer. In general, it’s common to just add a new record in cases where a person’s information changes so you can retain the old record(s) and thus have a history for a person (look up Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)). That’s how the SSA is able to figure out if a person changed their gender, they just look up that information using the same SSN and see if the gender in the new application is different from the old data.

Another accusation Elon made was that payments are going to people missing SSNs. The best explanation I have for that is that various state departments have their own on-premise databases and their own structure and design that do not necessarily mirror the federal master database. There are likely some databases where the SSN field is setup to accept strings only, since in real life, your SSN on your card actually has dashes, those dashes make the number into a string. If the SSN is stored as a string in a state database, then when it’s brought over to the federal database (assuming the federal db is using a number field instead of text), there can be some data loss, resulting in a NULL.

Your “strongest ally” just removed 20% of its troops and wants to extort you for the other 80% in its obligations to said alliance

It’s especially funny since HIV now affects more straight people than gay people

Time to invade Greenland to protect a prosecuted, democracy-loving minority!

Yeah, and we commit loud genocides, what’s the difference? Is it just because China doesn’t like to talk about their camps, that’s somehow worse than exclusively sending foreign aid to and directly funding Israel and its genocide?

If they expect to end the war by negotiating with both parties, they kind of need to force them to negotiate

removes biggest negotiating chip immediately

Cool! Do you have any links to those protests?