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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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'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.
> 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.
“ 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.
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."
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.
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...
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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”
> just how tiny the Earth is in the grand scheme of things
In the grand scheme of things: humans are doing the granding, the scheming, and the things. Earth has a tiny bit of something to do with that.
I think you'll find it's really hard to lord over a big map on a table if you don't have the Earth to put the table on.
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.
> Quick reminder, the only humans to ever make it to the moon did it due to “barbaric tribes showing who’s better”.
Weird to quote that when that's not what the GP said and appears to be a paraphrase that loses quite a bit of specificity and so misses the point:
> We need more “for all of humanity” mindset instead of this “barbaric tribes beat each other over the head for sticky oil”
Being realistic about the species is useful, but let's not be disingenuous for imaginary rhetorical points.
I slightly corrected it not to trick op. But to clarify their position was naive. Sorry about that.
It still is naive no matter the quote though.
It’s also naive to dump down the conflict to being over oil. Oil is being used as leverage. But it is not the cause of it.
What is the cause then?
Are they also changing the way America puts a new (wholly-owned) president in the white house in 2028 in order to approve these contracts?
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.
> Ban corporate donations to political parties and PACs
Doubtful - the SC determined this was a 1st amendment right for corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
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.
reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._United_States
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.
they've got one in there right now, and have a successor lined up
Peter Thiel is almost wholly responsible for JD Vance being in the White House
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans
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.
what was the unarmed woman doing at the time?
Is killing unarmed protesters okay if we don't like what they're protesting?
You can arrest someone for trespassing without shooting them.
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.
Lots of yapping, no showing. Show me the equivalents I asked for.
> Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran
Really?
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!
https://x.com/EYakoby/status/2045697406612762951
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)
You're too kind, he hallucinated harder than an LLM on that one.
> 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.
a republican mob stormed the capitol in an attempt to overthrow the election
the republicans have actually started arresting people they don't like and building camps to imprison them in via ICE
earlier they deported people, without trial, to foreign prisons to be kept indefinitely
how long are we going to hand wave this away as "both sides are extreme"? this is a little more than the typical insider cronyism isn't it?
edit: your edit is also wrong, and kind of validates that you're only seeing what you want to be seeing
Trump is in it for himself, but can be bribed.
Vance doesn't need to be bribed, he's in it for Thiel.
Palantir must be destroyed.
Why stop there?
Great results so far!
For real. Never before has so much money been made off stock market manipulation by the family of a sitting president.
It really just rhymes. Happy New guilded age America.
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.
Funny enough it stays lol
And Thiel is behind all of them.
> And Thiel is behind all of them.
In what way do you feel Thiel is "behind" SpaceX?
https://x.com/AndrewBenson/status/2000605502292832754
investment != operational our architectural influence, unlike Anduril, for example.
However you measure "operational or architectural influence" it's definitely greater than zero and much more than what you and I have.
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.
They stand with making shitloads of money off a horrible humanitarian clusterfuck that's atm rippled out into destabilizing the global economy.
Absolutely insane.
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.
Paywall so I can’t read the whole thing, but …
> 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.
“ 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.
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."
Also the war games from a quarter century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Why collectively learn a lesson, if you can get filthy rich as a bunch of individuals?
Palantir CEO is a Psychopath:
"CEO of Palantir, described people killed in the Gaza Genocide as “useful idiots”"
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1sp4rpd/ale...
"12% of corporate leaders are psychopaths. It’s time to take this problem seriously"
https://fortune.com/2021/06/06/corporate-psychopaths-busines...
And Musk well its a whole classification on its own...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-sued-by-british-dive...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/these-federal-employee...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/musk-endorses-tweet-claiming-j...
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.
As an aside, it really irks me how Tolkien's names are used in this manner.
He would be horrified. I’m a little surprised his estate hasn’t attempted to prevent it.
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!
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
I guess we can believe they are Tolkien fans, then.
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...
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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?
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I don't have a subscription to The Economist, but I was interested in the concept of these organizations as "neo-primes."
I found an article on The Cipher Brief describing them: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/defense-neoprime-innovation
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.
> Also, for all of HN's moaning, this has bipartisan support in both parties.
This misses the issue; no one is mad about improvements in process efficiency. People don’t like what the purchases will be used for.
It's DefenseTech.
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.