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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • BachenBenno@feddit.detoMemes@lemmy.mlMeet the #1 serial killer
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    1 month ago

    Stalin’s 20 million and Mao’s 70 million both come from a book called ‘The Black Book of Communism’ where th authors tried to inflate all the numbers as much as possible to arrive at 100 million deaths under communism in the end. The really high numbers come from taking the difference between the population decades later and what the population would have been if the borth rate hadn’t dropped (even though lower birth rates are an indication of better living standards).

    Also, if you leave out the USSR’s purges (Soviet archives revealed around 800k), almost all of the deaths come from ‘man made famines’. Completely disregarding that in both China and Russia there have been famines all the time before their revolutions. Both countries were among the poorest and most backward in the world. No government on earth could have prevented all famines immediately. After some years after Mao’s and Stalin’s reorganizations of agriculture, famines were eliminated (except for during WW2). Life expectancy doubled within 30 years under communist China. Very quickly in the Soviet Union as well.

    Of course you can argue about the governments having been able to do it better in hindsight, but even then the deaths certainly weren’t cold blooded murder.

    Considering this, you certainly won’t arrive at the tens of millions of people killed just by the US military. Many, many more if you factor in indirect deaths (by embargoes, sanctions, refusing to allow other countries to produce their vaccines, etc.).













  • No, funnily there is no limit. It is just a standard normal distribution with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15. You can read more on wikipedia’s ‘intelligence quotient’ under the section ‘current tests’ where you could click on the links to learn more about the mathematics. Setting the mean to 100 rather than zero was probably so people wouldn’t get offended as easily 😂


  • This is actually possible. Not yet though. IQ only measures how smart you are compared to other people. If everyone took the same IQ test and there would be around 13 billion people then there would be like one or two people with negative IQ. The bell curve onto which you are sorted is never zero, so you just need so many people n that the integral from negative infinity to 0 is at least 1/n.