Which amounts to the same thing. The market is more crowded with taxi drivers, the competition being fierce, eventually, some taxi drivers will be force out of work if they cannot keep up.
We're talking about a country which dropped two nuclear warheads on civilian areas. It's a shame and a delusion to even think that the US even once were a symbol of "moral leadership" with "consideration for human life".
Edit: I know this sounds like a cliché and a simplistic point of view, but I think it's quite interesting to look at the US history with this in mind.
[Flamebait warning]
There's an ongoing discussion whether the use of nuclear bombs resulted in more casualties than a ground operation with conventional means would. Read about Iwojima, about Japanese schoolchildren being taught how to fight American soldiers on the streets.
If you want an example of massive and pointless civilian casualties caused by Allies in WWII, take the Dresden bombing instead.
I totally understand the strategy and absolutely don't rule out the fact that it may have saved more life than it brutally took. But it doesn't change the fact that one nation can make the decision to murder thousand of civilians in hope that it'll save (allies mostly) lives.
Of course, no nation other than the US ever makes this terribly fraught decision. The Axis, for example, always erred on the side of not hurting any civilians. And no nation other than the US today would do something that could even inadvertently hurt civilians.
At the start of WWII the idea of civilian death was abhorrent and not something that military leaders would tolerate.
It took considerable effort to change opinions to allow deliberate targeting of civilian populations.
To go from not killing civilians, to bombing cities, to the awful fire-bombing of Dresden and the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima shows just how brutal we became during the war.
I'm not sure why you mention the Axis powers. "The Nazis did it too" is not something I want to use to justify my behaviour. We know the Axis powers were fucking evil. I hope we hold ourselves to higher standards that the people carrying out the Holocaust or Unit 731.
> And no nation other than the US today would do something that could even inadvertently hurt civilians
The US deliberately targets civilians. Very many civilian deaths are caused and these are not inadvertent or accidental.
Over 500 cruise missiles and over 1,500 air sorties, causing over 6,000 civilian deaths (Shock and Awe, beginning of Iraq war)is not some incidental death count.
You have misrepresented what I said to a really breathtaking extent. I never said "the Nazis did it too," my concern was never to justify anyone's behavior.
I am addressing a distortion of history. If you don't recognize that fraught decisions and, yes, the unintentional AND intentional deaths of civilians (and rape, and torture) are an ancient part of war - NOT just by the US or the Allies or even the parties to WWII - then I am sorry to say that something is very wrong with your understanding of war and history. Specifically, it is a very selective understanding; a very conveniently selective understanding, aimed only at imparting a sense that the US is worse than everything else in history.
It isn't helpful to propagate this misunderstanding, by selectively citing ONLY cases where the US has killed civilians (but nobody else, and always out of context). It isn't helpful to equivocate casually between civilian deaths in war, and intentionally killing civilians, as if they were exactly the same thing.
There are important and meaningful changes in how civilians have been affected by war over time. But you are just blowing these away entirely in favor of a simplistic cartoon.
I'm not sure why you would hold me to account for defending the Iraq war, which I have never done, or attribute to me the bizarrely specific claim that 6,000 deaths is "incidental". Perhaps you should address this to someone who supported that war.
It's understandable why DanBC was confused. You wrote:
The Axis, for example, always erred on the side of not hurting any civilians.
I have no idea where you got that idea. Hitler used collective punishment against civilian populations to deter resistance. Stuff like 'for every German soldier that dies, we kill 100 civilians'. The German's also bombed civilian centers like London and Belgrade.
If you are supposed to have special consideration for human life, it's strange that you don't focus on much more lethal campaigns of firebombing, or ground campaigns.
What I don't understand is why the OP is even trying to teach stuff in which his sister is obviously not interested. He is seeking a solution to the wrong problem. "How do you get someone interested in math so he can develop the will to learn it ?" is the problem he should solve before trying to teach her anything. If he fails getting her attention on mathematics, then he's lost the game and she'll have to wait until she gets interested, or just do something else (which is fine, by the way).
What I think is most depressing on another note, is that even though she clearly isn't learning maths, she'll probably stay in the average of her class, and with this attitude eventually even get a university degree in domains where comprehension of maths is the cornerstone.
I'm a software engineering student at what you'd call a "valued" university. It is unarguably essential to understand basic university maths, and yet so many of my friends would just give their faith into "applying formulas" with little to no idea on what's going on in fairly easy topics like introductory linear algebra, and they'll even sometime get As because the teacher gave up when he asked for a little reasoning on the midterm (failing half the class) and gives a silly final.
I think the issue is more that we force people into doing what they don't want to do.
Her sister doesn't have to understand maths at her age, she can wait until she feels the need to (and she will for these simple maths problems, but later).
Because this is an agency that has blown up civilian vessels engaged in peaceful protests against their State. They've established a pretty bad track record in this area; as a result, I'd be a lot less ready to attribute charitable motives to their latest behaviour.
It's my personal belief that humans need to sleep as long as their body wants too. I'm the "No alarm clock" type of guy, and when I'm very tired from a long week of short sleeps and exhaustive work, I sleep a lot more the first night of the Weekend, and the day after compensate and sleep less, with no planning whatsoever of my sleeping time.
So I usually sleep 8 hours before waking up, and I feel great, I don't know why.
What I do know, is that if I set up an alarm to wake me up before that time, say 90 minutes earlier, I would feel bad for a good part of the morning.
I'm quite sure a lot of people (the average people) are experiencing the same natural time span of sleep. Hence the "myth" that 8 hours are good for you.
On a side note, my father sleeps a lot less than I do, and most people do, and I can honestly say that he's more tired than the average person in his surroundings. Now that might be linked to stress, but I'm quite convinced that a lack of sleep induces stress, so...
