I was bored so I did the math and you are not correct. Even if you don't care about the people themselves, a normal citizen in an industrialized society like Israel has about 40 years of working life. Let's assume for simplicity that some rockets would hit children but others would hit retired people, on average hitting people when they're halfway through their career and would have 20 years of productive work left.
According to Wikipedia [1], Israel has an average GDP per capita of about 60 USD per hour worked, which at 40 hours per week, 50 weeks worked per year over 20 years comes to about 40000 hours of work and ~2.4 million USD of GDP generated. At an income tax of about 30% [2], that means an income for the state of about 800k USD equivalent. If the person dies due to rocket attack, the state would miss out on that. Iron dome interceptors are quite cheap compared to that and the laser intercepts should be an order of magnitude cheaper still.
This doesn't even take into account the sunk costs that industrialized nations incur by every citizen having to attend school for about the first two decades of their lives, mostly funded by the state. That represents a tremendous investment into human capital that would be lost if you let your citizens get shot up in preventable rocket attacks.
So no, human lives are not actually cheap when viewed through the lens of a country, even when completely excluding morals and only looking at it financially. They are in fact quite valuable.
One life can cost as much as you calculated. However, if the attack will kill an unproductive (elderly, disabled or other) person then it could be a net gain instead of loss for the economy.
Perhaps but you while you can maybe predict where the rocket will fall, you cannot reliably predict who it might kill if it hits. People move around and even if you can see it will hit a house for the elderly, you cannot see how many (grand)children are currently visiting. Also the opposite is true: a rocket hitting a child care facility would cause double the economic damage. That is why I used an average in my previous post.
In any case, elderly and disabled are not as useless to the economy as you might suppose. There are many disabled who are economically productive. One of the most capable colleagues I've ever had was a blind programmer. Grandparents often provide things like babysitter services that don't show up in formal GDP measurements but are very valuable nonetheless. Don't count out the contribution of people to society just because they don't have a normal job.
Both sides are right. Life is cheap in many developing nations. My hope is that this tech could help governments in those regions to protect their citizens even when their GDP returns are significantly lower.
I wouldn’t call golf low impact. If you walk 18 it’s 5 or 6 miles with 25lbs on your back. Many pros tend to blow up their back and require surgery in their early 30s. Even amateurs can suffer from back or hand issues. It may not be intense cardio like rowing but the body is certainly being used towards its limits along some vectors and being put at risk for injury. Swinging a weighted metal rod at 100+ mph sometimes with all that force going right back from the ground you chunked into your wrists and spine.
It’s lower impact than most other sports (excluding sports like darts or bowls, of course).
There’s a reason that (i) professional golfers have a longer career than most other professional sports and (ii) many sports people transition to golf later in their career and (iii) there is a high preponderance of older players in golf.
You can get in the weeds with complex decision making even when you suck. Say you hit your 3 wood 200 yards and you are 200 yards away from the hole. Course management would tell you that you hit your 9 iron well x% more often than three wood so maybe try and hit it twice laying up instead of the hero shot. Then there is the true reality unbound by theory like course management is, where if you thin the hell out of that 3 wood it is still going to skip forward at least 130 yards making it a safer shot than the 9 iron with a risk free attempt at the green coupled in.
Taking a moment to consider the green before you chip on is also a simple concept that would benefit golfers of all handicaps. Setting yourself up for easier putts or the chance to roll the ball in off the chip just takes awareness rather than skill and repetition.
Golf is one of the more interesting sport just from a standpoint of how many considerations you are making and how lies aside from the teeshot are often so unique.
>Then there is the true reality unbound by theory like course management is, where if you thin the hell out of that 3 wood it is still going to skip forward at least 130 yards making it a safer shot than the 9 iron with a risk free attempt at the green coupled in.
Yes, I improved when I accepted that the objectively correct decision based on a perfect shot execution was not necessarily the right decision for me. Subtle but crucial distinction I didn't have at the beginning and had to develop with experience.
If you go to a golf coach to "learn golf", they will teach you how to hit the ball. A crucial step, no doubt, but that's well short of "playing golf".
Golf is first understanding what to do, then executing it. It's a risk/reward balance. Yes, execution will fail sometimes (ok, often), but at least trying the right thing is better than successfully expecting the wrong thing.
In so many ways, it's just like software development.
If academia was solely about job training it would take at most like 6 weeks. It is about getting a rounded education. It is why engineers need to take liberal arts classes.
You trust the green dot with your heart simply because they wired it in series with the camera. Can’t be bypassed unless you opened the device and bypassed the green light. This is why people with webcam covers on macbooks are fools: they fear and yet they do not care to understand what it is they fear to see if it is actually worth fearing.
The problem is that apparently, often enough that is just not the case.
On laptops, the LED is not powered with the camera, but controlled by it. And on smartphones, if it's a green dot on the display it can obviously be bypassed in different ways given the right vulnerabilities.
Also, aside from that, your condescending attitude is frustrating.
I thought the story was the CIA and other intelligence said there are not wmds, but the bush whitehouse said there were anyhow and invaded all the same.
I think CIA analysts said no WMDs, but the CIA head personally told the President that the case for WMDs was a "slam dunk" - maybe just a kiss-ass moment, but something to learn from: those moments have consequences.
But generally not getting the answers they wanted, VP Cheney and/or SecDef Rumsfeld setup their own mini-intelligence agency in the Department of Defense which produced their desired results, including WMD and also Iraq somehow being involved in 9/11. They relied heavily on an informant that they code-named "Curveball". Seriously.
A Google search using the terms "did the CIA claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003?" yields the following information:
The CIA and the Bush administration claimed Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in 2003, building the case for invasion on assertions that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs and failed to comply with UN resolutions, though these claims proved to be incorrect after the invasion found no stockpiles, leading to later acknowledgments of intelligence failures...
CIA's Role: The CIA provided assessments, including classified estimates, stating high confidence in Iraq's possession of biological and chemical weapons, which formed the basis for public statements by officials...
Intelligence Failures: Investigations later confirmed that the intelligence community was "simply wrong" in its assessments, highlighting failures in analysis and sourcing, despite intelligence professionals believing their information at the time...
In summary, the CIA and U.S. government did assert the presence of WMDs, but these claims were later disproven, revealing significant flaws in the intelligence used to justify the war.
Recommend "The Mission" by Tim Weiner for this one. Not as simple as this.
Often the intel community is dead right, but get thrown under the bus by the admin. The intel community can't really come out and say "actually what our pres is saying is false, we told him this would happen".
The issue with remote viewing as the CIA understood it was not that it didn’t work. By all means there are documents that indicated it did work. The difficulty however was that the training program was unreliable and insufficient to establish a reliable pipeline to competency like other military skills.
The "difficulty" with remote viewing is nonsense pseudoscience and crackpottery.
It absolutely does not work. Not "unreliably", but not work at all.
This reminds me of that one time on HN when someone tried to convince me that ritual witchcraft (I think they called it blood magic) on servers was a real thing, necessary to make them work, and my dismissal was typical of narrow minded people.
Dude claims “there are documents that indicated it did work”. You didn’t enquire about them, just completely dismissed it. That is indeed typical of narrow minded people.
Dudes claim all kinds of crap online. He already posted a PDF that indicated nothing of the sort.
If you will believe anything that seems true to you, because someone online said so, without any weight of evidence, and which is widely considered pseudoscience (go check)... I have a bridge to sell you.
What's with the wave of anti-intellectualism on HN of all places? Are we really trying to debate whether debunked crap like witchcraft and ESP is real? What's next, that Nigerian prince truly wants to gift you his money if only you can help him with a few dollars?
You're one of the dudes online - never forget that.
Examining something != believing it, it's step 2 in the scientific method, with which I advise you get familiar with before invoking it as much as you have in this thread.
If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?
> You're one of the dudes online - never forget that.
I never made any outlandish claims and therefore the onus isn't on me to prove anything.
> Examining something != believing it
But parapschyology has been examined and tested by scientists, and none of it has been verified in independent and controlled conditions. Unlike what the other commenter claimed, there are zero documents indicating RV works. Many of its practitioners have been shown to be frauds, pranksters or cranks (Puthoff thought Uri Geller was a psychic and was fooled by sleight of hand). What new evidence is there? RV isn't a new claim; it's an old debunked claim. Have they won the Amazing Randi prize yet? They could have, if RV was real!
> If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?
I'm reminding participants about how the scientific method works, which is important when discussing outlandish claims.
I remember when gta5 was getting hacked left and right when it was released. People would just hand you millions in in game currency and you’d get to unlock all the hypercars and military vehicles. Really made the game fun removing the grind and pay to win and allowing everyone to do anything. And it gave people a chance if someone was dominating a lobby with something broken or overpowered to actually fight back fire with fire.
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