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US Intel

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Re: US Intel

#491

Post by rswail »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #419
olivierduval wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that regard, US is obviously Europe's enemy, isn't it ? ;-) :-D

Worth distinguishing between actively engaging in harmful behavior, and "failing to help". The Europeans have taken the US for granted for so long that when the US is only Ukraine's #1 donor country in absolute terms by far, their main response is to complain that even more help should be offered, and pretend the US is somehow hurting them. https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s... Keep in mind…

What's Australia doing?

Around $1.5B (AUD) so far, Bushmasters, 50 M1A1s, M113s, training, etc.

We didn't sign the Budapest Memorandum, neither are we part of NATO, but we do our part, as we did in Afghanistan, Iraq (after the lies about WMD), in the Red Sea and other international events.

Oh and on the articles you quoted, some of the biggest fines were from the UK, which is not part of the EU.

As for tariffs, the US upended 80 years of work on international trade, with Trump applying tariffs without any underlying criteria except his complete misunderstanding of the difference between a trade deficit and bad trade.

The US has maintained its currency's dominance for all of the post WW2 era, which has allowed you to borrow and spend in a currency that everyone else has to support to be able to buy things like oil.

As an American, you should realize that in the last 6 months, the US has decided to abdicate its leadership, and as oil becomes less important to world trade, the USD will start to lose its dominance over trade, which means that your debts will have to be paid back in other currencies while the tariffs do nothing but damage the US consumers and economy in general.

Very dumb on your part.

Re: US Intel

#492

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

sofixa wrote: post #487
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Orban says nothing about Europe. Hungary is literally in Europe. If Orban says nothing about Europe, then nothing can ever say anything about Europe. Your country is choosing to stay in a union with Orban's. If EU membership is meaningless, as you imply, it should be easy for your country to quit in order to make a point about Hungary.

> Hungary is literally in Europe. If Orban says nothing about Europe, then nothing can ever say anything about Europe. so are the Vatican and Andorra and Belarus, so all of Europe is theocratic and/or a kleptocracy? > Your country is choosing to stay in a union with Orban's Because the benefits far outweigh the association with that pigshit, who will also die some day. Also, the EU can and does exert influence over c…

>so are the Vatican and Andorra and Belarus, so all of Europe is theocratic and/or a kleptocracy?

All of the places we're discussing are part of Europe, so insofar as any place can be said to "say something about" Europe, each says something about it.

>Because the benefits far outweigh the association with that pigshit, who will also die some day. Also, the EU can and does exert influence over countries, so some of Orban's excesses can be curbed.

One could make similar arguments for staying in the US. Trump is 79; Orban is 62.

Re: US Intel

#493

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

rswail wrote: post #491
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth distinguishing between actively engaging in harmful behavior, and "failing to help". The Europeans have taken the US for granted for so long that when the US is only Ukraine's #1 donor country in absolute terms by far, their main response is to complain that even more help should be offered, and pretend the US is somehow hurting them. https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s... Keep in mind…

What's Australia doing? Around $1.5B (AUD) so far, Bushmasters, 50 M1A1s, M113s, training, etc. We didn't sign the Budapest Memorandum, neither are we part of NATO, but we do our part, as we did in Afghanistan, Iraq (after the lies about WMD), in the Red Sea and other international events. Oh and on the articles you quoted, some of the biggest fines were from the UK, which is not part of the EU. As for tariffs, the U…

>Around $1.5B (AUD) so far, Bushmasters, 50 M1A1s, M113s, training, etc.

As a fraction of GDP, Australia is an order of magnitude below the US. See map at the top here: https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...

We literally gave almost 10x as much as you on a per-GDP basis, yet we're still the bad guy. This is why I'm an isolationist.

Did you know that "Kevin", a common name in the US, is one of Europe's favorite insults?

>We didn't sign the Budapest Memorandum

The Budapest Memorandum is frequently misrepresented online. There's no promise to defend Ukraine in the text. Read it here: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...

All the US promised in the Memorandum was to seek UN Security Council assistance if Ukraine was victimized. We went far beyond that.

Think about it: why would Ukraine be so desperate for NATO membership, if the "defense promise" in the Memorandum was already broken? Because there was no meaningful defense promise in the Memorandum! That is simply a malicious lie about the US that's very widespread online. Again, this is why I'm an isolationist. I give up. Our "allies" will hate us no matter what we do. I've figured it out. I want to be Switzerland. We'll worry about our continent, and you worry about yours.

Re: US Intel

#494

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

sofixa wrote: post #458
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Americans may be proud of that, but that’s pure bullying. It's slightly weird to me how foreigners seem to look on the Trump era as personifying the US to a greater degree than e.g. the Biden or Obama eras. Trump is not especially popular right now: https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker

> It's slightly weird to me how foreigners seem to look on the Trump era as personifying the US to a greater degree than e.g. the Biden or Obama eras. That's easy to explain. Trump is so much out there in being aggressively obnoxious, criminal, racist and senile. His platform was a list of nonsense combined blatant diminishing of rights and social progress. The fact that a majority of voting Americans chose him is ir…

>extremely narrowly self-centred

It's normal for countries to prioritize their own self-interest. The unusual thing is the degree to which the US attempted to take responsibility for world affairs for as long as it did, to the point where other countries took the US for granted. Now other countries interpret America's failure to take responsibility for their problems as aggression. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45035076

Re: US Intel

#495

Post by ragazzina »

keepamovin wrote: post #24

Standard Silicon is a nice name. Maybe they should use it. Other possibilities: - Standard Circuit - Standard Semiconductor - Standard Microchip

Standard Silicon sounds really great, would be shortened to SS or StaSi..

Re: US Intel

#496

Post by keepamovin »

ragazzina wrote: post #495
keepamovin wrote: post #24

Standard Silicon is a nice name. Maybe they should use it. Other possibilities: - Standard Circuit - Standard Semiconductor - Standard Microchip

Standard Silicon sounds really great, would be shortened to SS or StaSi..

I hereby appoint you National Secretary of Child Naming

Re: US Intel

#497

Post by baq »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #413
hattmall wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily the real limiter, right now, is finding a combination useful and profitable application. Simply charging money for generalized AI access is never going to be the ideal profit center.

>Simply charging money for generalized AI access is never going to be the ideal profit center. Exactly. Margins are dropping rapidly: https://ethanding.substack.com/p/openai-burns-the-boats

...and to quote a classic, "your margin is my opportunity".

Re: US Intel

#498

Post by jajko »

epolanski wrote: post #317
rich_sasha wrote: post #46

I am torn on this. On the one hand, I strongly agree with this article. This kind of state ownership never brings anyhing good. I don't see how this is different. On the other, it is hard to deny how impressive the new wave of Chinese manufacturing is. No longer are they just making knock offs of Western products with stolen IP. BYD for example seems genuinely innovative, a top product. There are many other examples.…

People who think that china makes crap products has probably never been in china in the last 5+ years and their knowledge about their products end up with Shein or Temu crap.

Yeah folks judge Chinese output by 1$ usb cables, ignoring how ie DJI came to the market and ate everybody's lunch including US companies like gopro who basically had to cancel whole drone product pipeline overnight, thats how badly behind they were.

When I picked up my DJI drone many years ago the amount of polish was top notch - hardware worked flawlessly, software was fast and without any glitch. I was looking for any signs like 'designed in Germany' or similar but nope, all Chinese.

People think about 3rd world countries and somehow end up thinking about the very definition of permanent incompetence - russia and its satellites. Like they still put chips from stolen wash machines into their ballistic missiles. When China is in comparison more like a humiliated, smart, deeply focused, hard working, ignoring some pesky human rights group of people who grokked well they don't need to bow to any foreign powers anymore if they focus and work hard on specific goals.

Re: US Intel

#499

Post by petralithic »

roenxi wrote: post #485
fxtentacle wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's almost as if prioritizing returns on investment over EVERYTHING!!! else has bad side-effects for the economy as a whole.

What country are you thinking when you say that? It doesn't sound like the US. Through the zero-interest rate era they've been absurdly tolerant of companies offering no- to little- returns on investment. They've basically been operating investor-led charities. It is still unsettling seeing Uber turning a profit, but even with that they're not turning a net profit over the lifetime of the company yet and won't be for…

Their sentiment and their phrasing ("it's almost as if... ") is a Reddit-level meme I see all the time on that site that's then blindly upvoted, so I don't think they're thinking of any country besides the US in particular when they say that.

Re: US Intel

#500

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #451
troad wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for some reason Europe is always excused from that standard, despite Orban, Fico, Meloni, Wilders, Nawrocki, Erdogan, etc etc. We're meant to believe that the 49%-to-48% election of Trump is some deep window into the eternal American psyche, but Orban's fifteen-year drive into corrupt, racist autocracy, endorsed by the voters at every turn, is just some sort of very temporary oopsie that says nothing at all about…

Don't forget France. The far-right party is most popular by far: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/france/ The majority of second-round polling has the far right winning the next presidency in France, potentially even by a landslide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2027_F... For that reason, it's rather ironic to me when I see Europeans rally around Macron. France is poised to rug-pul…

It is easy to be in opposition and complain about everything. The contrarian parties tend to get very popular in the years between election cycles as the governing party can't deliver on everything and has to compromise.

Because you do know that Labour in the UK won a landslide victory a year ago and the last date for holding a new general election is in 2029.

The Scandinavian experience is that these parties crash as soon as they get to real power and have to compromise. Suddenly they had to be responsible.

If we do see these Trumpian parties win the majority in these elections in more rather than one-offs then we have a problem. But you're just fearmongering because you can't accept how completely wacko Trump is and need to blame it on "everyone does it!!!".

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