721–730 of 799 posts
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Comments like this really don't belong in hacker news. They amount to blind partisanship and instigation of flame wars.
comparing Hegseth to HRC will do a whole lot more :)
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On the positive side, Trump is so unstable that he'll trash your business one day and then the next day he'll reverse course. So, "if people kiss your ass enough, they get contract" does not seem to be a long-term viable strategy. (Exhibit A: Musk.) I'm 90% sure it will lead to America's ruin, but it might not quite be the same path that led the USSR to ruin. Hey, at least it looks more entertaining! :/
> but it might not quite be the same path that led the USSR to ruin. The end of the Soviet Union as a political and geographic entity was not its ruin. What ruined it and opened the door for a strongman ruler was: a) an inexperienced President (Yeltsin) who lacked a unifying vision for the newly formed republic and wasn't respected by its business elite or by foreign leaders b) the 'free market liberalization' reform…
Speaking of civil war -and asking from abroad-, what the heck is happening in LA?
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> but it might not quite be the same path that led the USSR to ruin. The end of the Soviet Union as a political and geographic entity was not its ruin. What ruined it and opened the door for a strongman ruler was: a) an inexperienced President (Yeltsin) who lacked a unifying vision for the newly formed republic and wasn't respected by its business elite or by foreign leaders b) the 'free market liberalization' reform…
> Present circumstances in America aren't that different. All it's currently missing is a civil war to call its own, like Chechnya. Speaking of civil war -and asking from abroad-, what the heck is happening in LA?
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FPTP is what makes Reform so dangerous though. They have a real chance of having a lot of power. In a proportional representation system where parties have to share power in coalitions these extreme parties actually have to be involved in government, at which point they’re exposed as completely incompetent. See the Netherlands right now for example. I would rather have these extreme positions represented, because the…
I think FPTP ends up working out a lot different in the parliamentary context. The US only has 2 parties in Congress, despite FPTP. In terms of strength of 3rd parties, I'd say they are generally quite weak in the US system, somewhat stronger in a proportional representation parliamentary system, and potentially overpowered in a FPTP parliament like in the UK. Historically I believe the 2-party system in the US was p…
You're blaming both parties for where the US is now?
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American democracy died on the day the supreme court overturned campaign finance restrictions. Since then US politics is a mere playground for billionaires and corporations.
Nah, America was on this trajectory from watergate. The day the other party decided they wanted to give up on bipartisan efforts, and started primary-ing their own for bipartisan behavior, you took a step down this path. With the advent of Murdoch’s papers and news efforts, the infinite money and credibility glitch allowed for these specific circumstances to occur. The question is whether the information economy is d…
What do we even need to be sending people into space for? It seems like a lot of savings could be had if we just completely shut down the entire manned space program. Unless there is some direct business case for it, why do it at all? Don't tell me some vague definition of "science". This isn't some new frontier that needs exploring, its well understood at this point. There needs to be a direct benefit to the america…
But we know it's bad, and we know the fix: Just simulate gravity by spinning the spacecraft like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or in Interstellar. Easy.
There's this... thing... with NASA that you can recognise once you see it, because you will see it, over and over: Once they find something that the government is willing to fund, they will never stop researching that thing, because to "solve" the problem is to turn the funding tap off.
My favourite example of this phenomenom is water and/or life on Mars. There's been a ludicrous volume of press releases (like clockwork!) about possible life (or water) on Mars. However, notably, not a single mission to Mars has ever included any instrument that could definitively disprove that there is life or water on Mars. To do so would be an instant off-switch for billions in funding, so "oops" these instruments are always omitted.
Send a microscope! A frigging microscope! One! They're not that big or heavy!
Nope, can't do it. That would be the end, you see? Got to keep sending magnetometers, microphones, cameras, stereo cameras, all sorts of things. Just not anything that would accidentally prove that there's nothing to find.
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Are you tracking actual identity politics or the term "identity politics"? Because the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements. Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
>Are you tracking actual identity politics or the term "identity politics"? The term "identity politics" is not being tracked. Rather, terminology used by modern left-wing idpol ideology is being tracked. See here: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/new-york-times-word-usage... >the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements. I'm not sure that's true. E.g.…
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I don't really buy the education argument. How do you "educate" somebody who lived through the first Trump administration and voted for more of the same? Let's get specific: what exactly did they miss in school that would have driven them towards a different decision? At some point it's necessary to confront the uncomfortable truth: stupid people are easy for smart, ill-intentioned people to herd, which gives the lat…
>This bug in democracy was there in the beginning. But it's only now, 2500 years later, that it can be exploited effectively enough to invalidate the whole concept. Not sure where the 2500 number came from. The US is about 250 years old, and the founders were extremely wary of democracy based on its history prior to the US. The US constitution was designed to mitigate issues with democracy, e.g. that is the purpose o…
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Nah, America was on this trajectory from watergate. The day the other party decided they wanted to give up on bipartisan efforts, and started primary-ing their own for bipartisan behavior, you took a step down this path. With the advent of Murdoch’s papers and news efforts, the infinite money and credibility glitch allowed for these specific circumstances to occur. The question is whether the information economy is d…
That's a different problem. Toxic bipartisanship has been around for a long time with supporters and opponents. But a single billionaire outright buying a candidate to the point where he can claim that the president would not be in office without him is madness.
The mechanisms which were broken, that let these events come to pass - these began with the decision to end bipartisanship by republicans.
This isn’t about toxic bipartisanship, which isn’t even an issue. Unadulterated partisanship as a political strategy, is the start.
The enablement is the news ecosystem that was set up to defend these actions, and eventually launched the conversations entirely out of the gravitational well of facts and norms.