And to think just a few days ago we got that photo from the Moon, putting in perspective just how tiny the Earth is in the grand scheme of things. We need more “for all of humanity” mindset instead of this “barbaric tribes beat each other over the head for sticky oil”
Quick reminder, the only humans to ever make it to the moon did it due to “barbaric tribes showing who’s better”.
It wasn’t bankrolled with billions for the good of society.
Being naive is fun, but being realistic about the species we are is better. And it seems we can leverage that to land on the moon. So it’s working as intended.
Roughly, trying to keep it with minimal judgement, as hard as it is:
- since 79 Iran is marking the US and Israel as enemy countries. (The US due to the 50s revolution, Israel because of the Palestinian problem?)
- Iran has been developing nuclear weapons, and using dangerous rhetoric threatening those counties, form Iran perspective this is a defensive measure.
- after recent happenings in the Middle East Iran directly attacked Israel (non direct attacks have been commonplace for a while now) making Israel stand to w 12 day war.
- the conclusion of this war put both sides in an arms race.
- finally, the Iranian protests ending in supposedly 30k dead citizens within about a week changed the perspective of western intelligence about the risk of Iran. A regime willing to kill so many of its citizens and building nuclear weapons is a problem hard to ignore.
Negotiations were clearly
Stuck between the sides, forcing the obvious next stage.
This is simplified. But I think touches the core events.
This is what happens when you allow money to influence power without check.
What can be done to curtail it? Ban corporate donations to political parties and PACs. Limit personal contributions. Implement campaign spending limits so parties can't spend hundreds of millions on an election if they somehow manage to get that much money.
Other nations (e.g. Canada) do this. It's not perfect. Money is always looking for a way, and politicians are always looking for the kind of power that money buys. It's an eternal game of whack-a-mole, but it's a game worth playing.
American politicians aren't going to propose this. Americans need to demand it.
But it almost doesn't matter anymore - the bribing is being done so much in plain sight anymore, that these mechanisms are hardly needed anyway. It is a cultural rot that won't be fixed by "just make some rule," the people making the rules are the ones benefiting the most from the corruption.
If every employee at a corporation has the right to free speech and to make political donations, why should the corporation itself have need of such rights? Just because big money won in 2010 doesn't mean the ruling should go unchallenged for all time.
People, not capital, should have rights, because rights are there to protect people from power.
I'm not being supportive of it, I'm explaining how unlikely it is that this ruling will be overturned. It tends to be very rare, especially a scope of 1st amendment ruling. that's just how that court works, and if it does happen, is on decades time scales, not a matter of a year or two, which is sort of what is needed right now. I would say in this case it's essentially impossible, given that this same SC also ruled that it's acceptable for they themselves to get "gifts" from politically motivated persons, as long as the gift is received after the act done, and no explicit quid pro quo conversation happened. In other words, they literally legalized bribery. There is no universe this court or any future court overturns this, the levers of power have been seized, no one is coming to save anyone, "vote harder" isn't going to work. If that sounds fatalistic or hard to read, sorry, but people have been predicting this outcome for 20+ years and nothing has come close to being done about it, much the opposite.
This is what I don't understand as a non-American. Why is this creeping corruption not opposed? What happened to, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"?
A CBC political commentator recently said, "America is not this way because Trump is president. Trump is president because America is this way." Things aren't going to magically improve if the Democrats win the mid-terms or the next election. America is this way and will likely get worse. Her former friends and allies need to take steps to protect themselves.
> "America is not this way because Trump is president. Trump is president because America is this way."
Trivially true, of course.
> Things aren't going to magically improve if the Democrats win the mid-terms or the next election.
Also true but far from trivial for the vast majority of the US population. The medias of all sorts fervently maintain the illusion that electing the other party is going to fix the damage done by the current one, ad infinitum.
Anyone who dares to challenge the above orthodoxy is quickly canceled/shouted-down/name-called/downvoted/etc into oblivion by bot farms with the latest AI at their disposal.
> Her former friends and allies need to take steps to protect themselves.
I don't see a big difference in the situation of former friends and allies. More likely than not they'd be sold a veiled version of the same, in other words, they'd follow - under the usual vague slogans which mean different things for their authors and audience. To be precise, if there is a way out of this mess, America and her former friends will have to find it, and walk on it, together.
> America is this way and will likely get worse.
Only if we keep wasting time in fatalistic contemplation and fruitless hopes of finding hiding places individually.
> This is what I don't understand as a non-American. Why is this creeping corruption not opposed? What happened to, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"?
This is just one person's POV that I would say is more informed than the average american, by no means an expert -
I would say to answer your question very simply - most Americans, if you asked, would have no idea about the Supreme Court in general, let alone the nuances of those rulings I have linked up thread, let alone the implications of them. Americans are raised from a very early age, in school and reinforced by culture, that their institutions and rights are unflappable and almost even incapable of error or harm - while simultaneously teaching historical lessons that blatantly show this isn't true, like chattel slavery, women's sufferage, civil war, etc. This creates a sort of cognitive dissonance that I can't really explain but seems to make people incapable of seeing any harm done by their own systems.
That's one area. The other area is, in the current environment, major news sources are mostly coming from social media these days, that is gamed to hell, and the news sources themselves are bought and paid for by people with corrupt interests. So even getting a fair view of what's actually happening requires work, and a lot of critical thought because there's so much bs out there, that most people just won't bother.
The other thing is that if anyone does push the line a bit and tries to challenge things, if it becomes threatening to the mainstream narrative or people in power, gets squelched, sometimes brutally, by these same systems. A really good example of this is the widespread censorship (explicit censorship, and things like shadow bans/watch lists inducing fear to make people self censor) of the Gaza "conflict" - and this started in the Biden admin, it wasn't really one particular party at all. You can see the same silencing effect happen when any progressive upstart begins threatening the establishment party, they just get outspent. There was one incident in a California senator race, due to it's "top 2" system, where a democrat actually spent money on his likely republican opponent's campaign to push out the progressive, because he felt he would be easier to beat than his progressive challenger.
A system like that cannot possibly function fairly or in the interest of its own people. I do not see how the union is preserved, this is too unstable. I do not want to live through it.
People underestimate how radical JD Vance is. He wrote an endorsement for the skull book, and not a "my buddy wrote a book that I totally read and you should too" endorsement, but one that restated the core argument: Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you and we should invoke the Iron Law of Reciprocity to preemptively ... them.
During the election I thought this was mostly rhetoric, but now that the administration has turned ICE fully paramilitary and tried to get its base excited about murdering their political opposition, I'm not so sure.
> Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you
Isn't this just how politics looks now? The Republicans say that, the Democrats say the Republicans are secretly nazis who want to nazi genocide you, both parties contain millions of people so both can point to some extremists on the other side saying something shocking and then they both go back to trying to get 51% of the votes so they can be the ones picking your pocket this year.
edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".
When things are this lopsided, both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one.
Want to prove me wrong? Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric (which is the left-coded equivalent). Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are. Show me dead protestors and stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable. Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.
> both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one.
That implies there is a good one. The lesser of two evils is still evil, and even how to measure lesser is extremely subjective.
> Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric
Harris campaigned on saying as little as possible. Several Democrats have called for Trump's assassination. Some (like Stacey Plaskett) quite directly, others (including Harris) have implied or joked about it. Someone worked the nutters into a sufficient frenzy to attempt it with Trump and to murder Charlie Kirk.
> Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are.
Around 3 million people die in the US per year, on the order of 6000 of those are in prisons, ICE was on the order of 30.
The media focuses on that because Trump campaigns on immigration, not because it's a significant proportion of the people the government kills. Significantly more people die when Democrats get paid off by the AMA to limit the number of medical residency slots, or impede housing construction even in states their party fully controls resulting in homelessness and poverty-inducing high rents.
> Show me dead protestors
Are you referring to the unarmed woman killed by the capitol police in 2021?
> stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable
Biden pardoned a lot of people in his own party.
The government failing to hold itself accountable is the default. Most of the time they don't even initiate proceedings against themselves when they're committing a crime, and hide behind qualified immunity etc. if someone wants to sue them.
> Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.
The Inflation Reduction Act was a trillion dollars. The federal budget is multiple trillions every year and a double digit percentage of it is corruption every year, regardless of which party is in office.
In general it seems like you want to point to specific things that represent a fractional percentage of the overall problem and ignore the systemic bipartisan corruption and government unaccountability that has been the status quo for generations.
Oh, so you can't find equivalents from Harris and Walz! That's what I thought. You aren't an enlightened centrist, you're a partisan hack posing as one.
> residency slots, NIMBY
Who put forward the last bill addressing the residency slot issue? Which party has the bigger YIMBY faction?
> Ashli Babbitt
She was storming the capitol! The officer who shot her was investigated and cleared because the courts agree: cops are allowed to shoot if you are trying to breach the inner defensive perimeter of the US capitol. Where are the investigations for Rene Good and Alex Pretti?
> state investigators were denied access to the shooting scene by the federal government
Oh. This isn't even "we've investigated ourselves," it's just "we kill you, you die." That's new in US politics.
> IRA was a trillion dollars
Spending that you do not like is not fraud. That's not what the word means. I'd love to call the trillions spent on Iraq and Afghanistan and (soon) Iran fraud, but I can't, because that's not what the word means.
> you want to point to specific things that represent a fractional percentage
The reason why you can't come up with equivalents for the Trump fraud is because they don't exist, so you have to pretend that congressional appropriations that you don't like are somehow equivalent. But they aren't. They made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm, but Trump can just pocket billions and Republicans say "both sides." No, it's not both sides, it's not normal outside of shithole countries, and despite Trump's best efforts to turn the US into a shithole country we can still decide to enforce our laws and turn back the clock on that.
I can't help but feel you're leaving out some key details here...
was she perhaps trespassing after walking through broken barriers, past security guards that told people to leave, and through broken windows? was she also warned to stop multiple times while climbing through a broken window to circumvent a barricaded door at the time of being shot?
If those things happened to be true, it would seem that you're attempting to deceive us as readers to make a point in poor faith. Probably no need to do that, right?
The Democrats have a very similar platform to the Republicans (especially around ICE and Israel, both of which Harris vowed to continue supporting). Trump is uniquely incompetent though, which if you believe in accelerationism may or may not be a good thing. For instance Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran, now Trump did it, but he did it in such an incompetent and rushed manner that it's led to US bases throughout the Middle East being destroyed and abandoned. That's a good thing that came out of a bad situation.
I'm not trying to be combative, just honest. Here is Harris saying Iran is our greatest adversary (sorry for the Zionist source). Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton have also been very vocal about wanting to attack Iran. Clinton actually recently praised Trump!
Oh, Harris called Iran an adversary! Wow! I'm glad we didn't elect her or the party that negotiated the last deal with Iran! The party that tore up the Iran deal and kept joking about bombing them into the stone age and started 2 out of 2 of the last middle eastern forever wars is the much better bet.
What? They bombed Iran and started forever war 3 of 3? Who could have seen this coming?!
No, Harris failing to push back hard enough on Gaza is not in the same galaxy of culpability or catastrophe as Trump starting a war with Iran on Israel's behalf. And endorsing their actions in Gaza, lest we forget.
And let's not forget who is actually in office and started the war, and how it's currently going. We can wring our hands about what democrats might have done but we have active proof of what republicans are currently doing and it isn't pretty. There's a vast gulf between "hawkish" and "actively bombing." I'd be willing to give pretty much anyone else a shot at it right now.
I simply do not vote for Zionists of either party. They can keep swapping seats and lose every time. If you support Israel, you cannot have my vote. I'll just sit out the election if I have to (and did last time).
Oh, that's why you can't acknowledge the simple fact that Kamala was better on Gaza, because if you do you acknowledge your own culpability in making the genocide worse.
More people in Gaza were murdered under Biden/Harris than Trump. I’ll never understand neo-liberal extreme parasocial behavior. These people are not your friends, they are the scum of the earth. Treat them as such.
What Biden did in Gaza (and Trump continued) is way worse than what has happened in Iran. It's a vile crime against humanity to attack Iran and kill civilians but Gaza is a straight up US fueled genocide.
All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.
Exactly: the tear-down-the-system left barely exists outside twitch and college campuses, while the far right has the presidency and majority control of the Republican party. These are not the same.
> edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".
I don't think we should pat ourselves on the back too hard for milquetoast takes devoid of any specifics.
(also I think you misread the responses to your post)
> All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.
"There are five actual Marxist-Leninists you need to be paying attention to in the US but we can't even name one relevant actual fascist, so the symmetry isn't there."
That was my initial reading, and it's because I've encountered numerous people who sincerely believe that. Using sarcasm in posts subject to Poe's Law is a good way to be ambiguous.
Lets start: you. Followed by Stephen Miller. Trump, per the assessment of his own former chief of staff. Josh Hawley. Leonard Leo. All the "Dark Enlightenment." Your initial reading is tendentious and of little value. Are you seriously going to challenge the notion that American politics has a spectrum from center right to fascists-would-blush ideological crackpots like the dark enlightenment?
Yeah JD Vance is a questionable politician who has not won that many election and those he did win he had massive sport behind him that was ideological.
Its not even remotely clear at all that JD Vance has anywhere near the 'skill' of Trump on unifying so many wildly different groups. And JD Vance is a bottom feeder who attached himself to Trump in the right moment and was put as Vice president because some of the Hardcore Trump people didn't want a non-100% Trump Vice President. He didn't win an election to be Vice president.
Thiel and friends can dream up anything, just like they dreamed of Orban winning in Hungary. But just because they were lucky in the last couple years, with a bunch of things, doesn't mean all their plans will work.
Vance's political instincts are highly questionable.
It appears he's reached the first seat in the line of succession without demonstrating any particular skills at all, so I take little comfort in the idea that this is maybe the end of his puppeted rise to power. With an 80 year old in office with nearly 3 years left of presidency, he may very well find himself in the highest office without the need of unifying anyone.
I've been wondering for a while now what sort of air defense if any the US military has around SpaceX launch sites.
After watching videos of Russian and now gulf state oil & gas infrastructure being blown up by small drones for the past while I've come to realize the obvious reality that a SpaceX rocket -- particularly Starship is an extremely vulnerable and expensive target.
It seems totally feasible for a nation state or even an individual to short SpaceX stock after it goes public and then blow up a rocket or two on the launch pad.
Palantir just ran a full page add in the NYT saying that they "stand with Israel", they also just released a techno-fascist manifesto. We've already seen people shooting at Sam Altman's house, I feel like Palantir is openly inviting citizens to practice self-defense against their executives.
I know it's not a good look to be the grammar Nazi, but an actual guilded age in the form of collective bargaining for labor might be preferable to this new gilded age.
In principle not relaying on the same old contractors is not a bad thing. SpaceX has genuine capability that literally nobody else in the world has. Same might be true for the others but that's hard to tell.
And its not like the old primes are 'good' guys either. So the fact that Anduril makes its money from government isn't really special or surprising. If anything is surprising its how much money SpaceX makes out of government.
And embracing some of these capabilities is what a smart government would do. What a smart government wouldn't do is to have a literal clown 'run' the show talking about 'mass-killing' and 'DoW' and all the other Buzzword nonsense that is mostly about signaling to Trump himself.
Not getting locked into one system is good, but not using advanced capabilities because there is only one supplier is bad. Its not SpaceX fault that Vulcan has been a shitshow for example.
But while on the merits many of these things can be defended, the way and process its arrived at is almost everything you don't want to have happen.
> THE IRAN war may end up teaching America many lessons. One that it has learned the hard way is the woeful economics of using traditional weaponry against cheap Iranian drones. “The dynamics of the world have changed,” says Emil Michael, a former Silicon Valley executive who is now a senior official in the Pentagon. “You don’t want to spend a $1m missile to take out a $50,000 drone.”
This would have been obvious to anyone following the war in Ukraine. The implication that we learned this from our attacks on Iran are absurd.
This would have been obvious to anyone following the war in Vietnam, even.
The Iranians have explicitly tweeted:
"For years, we've been awaiting the Americans' entry into the designated points, and for over two decades, we've been training with the asymmetric warfare strategy for this very moment. Now, we have just one message for the American soldiers: Come closer."
“ You don’t want to spend a $1m missile to take out a $50,000 drone”
I think the defense contractors disagree with this. I often wondered how these shiny super high tech, crazy expensive US weapons would do in an all out war. They are good at bullying countries with not limited military capacity (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya come to mind) but probably won’t do well against an enemy that can build huge numbers of drones.
Careful, three months ago the claim that the US doesn't have a plan for what to do if Iran attacked shipping in the strait of Hormuz would be considered absurd.
Also, there's nothing unusual about the big guy thinking they don't have to learn lessons from others and so ignore their experience.
One would think, but some folks seem to struggle to learn from others' experiences, and need to experience things for themselves first.
For example, the UK defense review that was published during the Ukraine War (in which the UK is closely supporting Ukraine) focused on traditional defense approaches (tanks, big boats, that sort of thing) and mostly ignored the need to upskill quickly in building, iterating, and deploying disposable cheap drones.
Or, more generally, there are people who voted for the current US administration who are upset that the things that were promised in Project 2025 have actually been implemented and have now affected them personally and negatively.
Without being drawn too much into politics I can't imagine anything more unamerican than universal civil service. Of course a dweeb like Karp would push this bullshit. I dare anyone to explain to me how, exactly, it's any different from communism.
I have a lot of deep ambivalence here. On one hand, I would rather Americans be safe. I don't want anyone in harm's way; if I absolutely had to choose, I'd rather we have superiority.
On the other hand, the "the ends justifies the means" justification of the near constant erosion of civil liberties and due process is really, really concerning. And I do not trust, at all, the Rand-lite tech bro sociopaths or anyone in the Trump administration to do the right thing.
Our country is less safe because the people behind these technology companies have brought us to a place where NATO allies do not trust us, and we are implicated in war crimes facilitated by these technology companies.
Interesting claims in this article that direcly conflict with Palantir publicly calling for universal conscription. If AI and robotics are going to keep people off the front lines, why would we need the draft?
> On one hand, I would rather Americans be safe. I don't want anyone in harm's way; if I absolutely had to choose, I'd rather we have superiority.
To what extent does waging war contribute to increasing the safety of Americans? Every war the United States has started since WWII against another country has not been a defensive war, but an invasion by the U.S. itself. The United States has enjoyed global military dominance for decades. It has also become clear that even the world’s best military is no match for a large-scale psychological operation.
Be careful with dreams of superiority, those tend to make the other guy convinced you'll attack as soon as the gap gets wide enough and make them spend even more to "catch up".
A few rounds of this and eventually both sides have worked themselves into a frenzy to motivate buying excessive amounts of weapons, and then finally something trivial makes someone important "that's it, that was the thing we got the guns for" and a few billion dollars in weapons go up in smoke along with some hundreds of human lives (if everything goes well).
The question on is whether what’s happening right now is actually keeping Americans safe. I feel we are moving more and more towards accepting normalizing using military power by powerful nations. I am sure China is watching closely what’s going on and may feel encouraged to move on Taiwan. Once that happens, things will get really interesting.
At my new startup, Ungoliant, we intend use AI-powered space-based mirrors to at long last achieve humanity's dream of plunging Arda into endless night. We're excited to have you join us in this exciting venture!
This is honestly a meaningless cliche. There is a bottled water company called Liquid Death, is that a reason to expect their product to be more hazardous than competitors? A lot of free software has traditionally used self-deprecating names, should we expect them to be bad as a result? How about when something is called Truth Social?
My rule is, "if you have to say, it isn't". If the tofu were really yummy and tasty, you wouldn't need to say so on the package. (Some years ago, when Americans' idea of uses for tofu was mostly as a salad topping, Texas had a tofu brand that said "yummy and tasty!" on the package.)
"Truth Social"? Probably a cesspool of lies. "Liquid Death"? Well, I would have expected it to be full of alcohol, capacsin, and/or cinnamon, not bottled water...
Specifically, the idea here is that companies like Anduril, Palantir, and SpaceX are rapidly delivering cutting-edge technology (including software) as opposed to the traditional defense contractor process of long, drawn out, super expensive projects mostly focused on hardware (such as building a new type of jet).
It makes sense: this is basically what happened in civilian tech, too. Delivering high-tech solutions quickly -- dare I say with agility -- is usually the superior approach.
Basically it's a return to the pre-1990s model of defense iteration - dual use components constantly iterated on by newer challengers in direct competition or partnership with larger players.
This is a model most countries are working on now - from China to France to Russia to Ukraine to India to South Korea to ...
Also, for all of HN's moaning, this has bipartisan support in both parties. Based on my network, NatSec and Defense Policy roles haven't seen significant turnover irrespective of admin and those of us in the space are aligned with America irrespective of who's in the White House.
It's the same way how at SF Climate Week right now where plenty of founders in the space are taking conversations with VCs irrespective of political opinions. Climate and GreenTech is dual use, and even a couple European trade commissions have been working on introducing their startups here and helping them expand IP and R&D headcount IN the US. Clearly the overlap between pissy HNer and people doing s#it doesn't overlap as much anymore.
It's used to threaten opponents that we can efficiently kill them while minizming our casualties. That's the point. And has always been the primary driver for most tech development.
You may hate it but you don't matter. We all do it no matter what.
A large portion of the commenters here only heard of Thiel because of Trump, and think the industry begins and ends with him. It does not.
> You may hate it but you don't matter. We all do it no matter what.
I've seen you say "you don't matter" in many of your comments. Why do you think like this? Sure, we don't matter much most of the time, but this kind of elitist thinking and decision-making is clearly leading to growing discontent, which can then be used against "people who matter". Perhaps the tools for controlling the masses are now powerful enough to make what you say true, but there's a chance your "let them eat cake" attitude will lead to the downfall of the people who currently matter.
If you check their profile you will see they are a VC. I’m sure they believe they are one of the masters of the universe, and by “you don’t matter” they mean other people, not themselves. They have money and power, so they get to matter.
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