31–40 of 67 posts
The main difference I see now is the ease of copying and publication.
I like Charles Stross essays for the interesting points they bring up, but I think this one is missing something. There will continue to be enough loyal-to-country people to staff the major intelligence agencies (and their contractors) in the major Western powers as long as there is some meaningful difference in governance and individual civil liberties between the West and the regions from which the West gathers int…
I like Charles Stross essays for the interesting points they bring up, but I think this one is missing something. There will continue to be enough loyal-to-country people to staff the major intelligence agencies (and their contractors) in the major Western powers as long as there is some meaningful difference in governance and individual civil liberties between the West and the regions from which the West gathers int…
Charlie's argument is that the vast majority of people growing up today will not have sufficient loyalty to "the state" to fill the ranks of the state's spy apparatus. While I find it persuasive that people's loyalty to institutions may be in decline, that population-wide generalization is not dispositive for the hiring ability of spy agencies. You don't need an entire generation of loyalists to fill out the NSA. You…
"A" hires "A"; "B" hires "C". And Generation Z's "A" players will not work for the NSA. You don't just need loyalists. You need loyalists who are good enough to operate your systems, who are also conscience-free enough to dissociatively split what they're doing from how they do it, day to day. And you have to have 100% accuracy to avoid the next Snowden. Speaking as an engineer hiring for software, we are desperate f…
And for all the draft avoiders and dilettantes, there was no dearth of candidates for jobs in the military-industrial complex or shortage of Cold War spooks in the following decades
If you believe that A players won't work for the NSA, you'd have to wonder why so many of them sign up to work for contractors like Palantir or Lockheed Martin which are very obviously building systems to monitor or kill people.
"Dog eat dog liberalism" is something quite different to what we have nowadays. I understand liberalism as something close to a free market. Now, western countries have everything but free markets. Here in Europe, social insurance and pension plans are state controlled and therefore monopolistic. Banks all over the world have legal privileges that wouldn't exist in free markets. Central banks are "calibrating" the in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have HN whitelisted from the paywall, so if you click through from the link on this page you shouldn't see the paywall as long as you don't have any extensions that hide your referrer. If that's not the case, would you mind dropping me an email with your browser/version? tim.showers@foreignpolicy.com
My mistake, the large subscription popup that appears on page load appeared to be a paywall to me. It does allow you to exit from it, though it had me a bit confused.
Thanks for the update, HN traffic is valuable to us and often generates interesting discussion, so I want to ensure that the paywal is disabled for it =).
I like Charles Stross essays for the interesting points they bring up, but I think this one is missing something. There will continue to be enough loyal-to-country people to staff the major intelligence agencies (and their contractors) in the major Western powers as long as there is some meaningful difference in governance and individual civil liberties between the West and the regions from which the West gathers int…
I think you misunderstand the historic context of that debate. Students at Oxford in 1933 would have been born between 1912 and 1915. Around 10% of the adult male population of the UK died in war between 1914 and 1918, and another 10% were injured in battle; the casualty rate among junior officers was terrifying, higher than the average for enlisted soldiers. Because Oxford was the domain of the privileged back then, this was a generation largely consisting of war orphans or children of traumatized veterans.
Note that the students aged 18-21 in 1933 were aged 24-27 when war was subsequently declared in 1939. They weren't notably more reluctant (or eager) to fight than their fathers' generation.
There are interesting thoughts in this article but talent is something that money can buy, ask the banks.
For instance, they do not try to keep billion-dollar programs secret from the public.
"Dog eat dog liberalism" is something quite different to what we have nowadays. I understand liberalism as something close to a free market. Now, western countries have everything but free markets. Here in Europe, social insurance and pension plans are state controlled and therefore monopolistic. Banks all over the world have legal privileges that wouldn't exist in free markets. Central banks are "calibrating" the in…
He meant economically liberal, like neoliberal or even classical liberal. Laissez-faire.
"Dog eat dog liberalism" is something quite different to what we have nowadays. I understand liberalism as something close to a free market. Now, western countries have everything but free markets. Here in Europe, social insurance and pension plans are state controlled and therefore monopolistic. Banks all over the world have legal privileges that wouldn't exist in free markets. Central banks are "calibrating" the in…
He meant economically liberal, like neoliberal or even classical liberal. Laissez-faire.
My point was that we don't have "3 generations of economic liberalism" (last paragraph) nor do we have anything even remotely close, see my first comment.