I’d have picked the Manhattan Project, ARPANET/Wikipedia, and aerospace development in the wake of the Wright brothers.
Many of the ones you’ve listed would likely have happened whether or not the USA-qua-USA existed. The Manhattan project and the current internet and the rush to build airplanes (first as weapons of war, of course) would probably not have happened the way they did without the USA.
You think the death toll of the US government is below 500,000? I have some most unfortunate news for you...
The US government killed over 250,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and remains the only government to ever deploy atomic weapons in combat, to say nothing of knowingly and intentionally deploying it against civilians.
The US is responsible for a substantial portion, though not outright majority, of the >1.5 million civilian deaths on the Northern side during the Korean War.
The US government killed over 180,000 civilians in Vietnam - miraculously few considering they dropped over 7 million tons (14 BILLION lbs) of ordnance on a force of only 860,000 troops occupying less than 110,000 km². For reference, that's about 63.5 tons / 127,000 lbs of high explosives per square kilometer of the entirety of Northern Vietnam. That's also over 8 tons / 16,000 pounds of high explosive per combatant.
These represent just the civilian deaths of just 3 of the 123 military conflicts that resulted in at least 1 civilian fatality (5 ongoing) that the US has been involved in - a microcosm of the all deaths that have ever been inflicted by the US government.
Remember, not all military combatants voluntarity chose to fight. Think about how many Russian and Ukranian men have been conscripted against their will (at gunpoint), never killed another person, and were killed in a war they didn't even want to be fighting, left with no alternative choice. Are those men's deaths morally justified simply because they were in uniform, or is it possible many of those, too, were innocent, good people forced to participate in an ugly tradition?
If you add even 10% of combat fatalities inflicted by the US government, that figure exceeds the combined total of all documented drug overdose deaths in American history, though it's worth noting that records on that don't go back very far, as the war on drugs that has destroyed millions of lives is a very, very recent thing in American history - it started less than 60 years ago as a plan to weaponize government against political opponents (anti-war activists who care more about preserving human life than about enforcing American political will around the globe).
Read a history book or two, you might learn something that your government-funded schools conveniently skipped over.
You really scooted away from the fact that yes, since drug overdose deaths have been tracked, more people have been killed by drug overdoses than by the US government in combat. You brought in a bunch of irrelevant data to hide the fact that you are lying out of your ass.
Your assertion is factually untrue, unless you include deaths from comorbidities arising from the use of government-approved carcinogens like alcohol and tobacco.
Remember, the war on drugs isn't about protecting you from harmful substances. POSIWID. The purpose of the war on drugs was to silence and oppress Nixon's political enemy, the anti-war movement.
You cite no data, just unsubstantiated ad-hominem attacks against my character. This makes you appear to be engaging in bad faith.
I hope you're at least being paid well for advancing the interests of the US federal government against the interests of innocent people. Regardless of your intentions, that's the effective result of your words.
No, your assertion is factually untrue. You have to reach back to a point where no one living today was in any position to make any kind of policy, and still you bring in a bunch of irrelevant material instead of anything resembling statistics. (Seriously? Hiroshima and Korea? Why not go back to slavery?)
And overdose deaths today have fuckall to do with Korea and fuckall to do with the war on drugs, and barely anything to do with crypto or the post. And yet you put your criminal apologia on this thread, a tangent on a tangent.
Criminal apologia? What criminals am I defending? No victim = no crime. An individual choosing to ingest questionable substances of questionable origin, by their own free choice, only has consequences, not victims.
> It's the language with the highest ratio of (useful work / LOC), so it's the least verbose language.
That's not even close to true. Even setting aside APL and its descendants, even setting aside Perl, any of the functional programming languages like Haskell and Scala are less verbose.
(The relative lack of success of those languages should indicate why minimizing verbosity is a poor aim to target.)
Don't just focus on the language syntax, the high ratio of useful work to verbosity is in large part owing to the excellent design of the standard library, which is available without including any headers or downloading third party libraries. This is where it handily beats out any of the alternatives you mention.
You've cherry-picked a few bogeymen.
What about Norman Borlaug, Bell Laboratories, the Gates Foundation, Margaret Sanger and the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology?
reply