I find it weird that you single out Bush. After 9/11, a military conflict was pretty much politically inevitable. The decision to expand to Iraq was stupid, but did it really shake up the post-1991 neoliberal consensus? Or was it just its final flex - "with this one trick, we can finally fix the Middle East"?
I think Russia deserves a lot of credit. It started long before Crimea. They had a military incursion into Georgia, secured a pro-Kremlin dictator in Belarus, nearly got away with the same in Ukraine and some other neighboring republics - all while buttering up the EU with energy deals. I think the European and American (non-)response to that was the death knell of that "rules-based" worldview.
While Russia acted belligerently, China played the long game to cement its geopolitical influence and make itself "too big to fail".
If there was a domestic inflection point in the US and in the EU, I think that was actually the housing crisis / the sovereign debt crisis around 2007-2009. That really undermined the optimism about supranational institutions.
Putin has repeatedly used the Iraq War as a justification for his actions. As a formal excuse ("a major power is allowed to invade other countries according to its own judgment") and likely also as a personal belief. The NATO intervention in the Kosovo War probably had a bigger impact on Putin on a personal level, but it was less useful as an excuse for starting wars.
As for Belarus, the country only had free and fair elections once: in 1994, when Lukashenko became the president. Lukashenko was already a dictator when Putin was still a civil servant in Saint Petersburg.
> decision to expand to Iraq was stupid, but did it really shake up the post-1991 neoliberal consensus?
Afghanistan was endorsed by the UN Security Council [1]. Iraq was not [2]. That set a loud precedent that wars of conquest were back on the table. (To be clear, they were never really off. China invaded and annexed Tibet without much of a fuss during the Cold War.)
> China played the long game to cement its geopolitical influence and make itself "too big to fail"
Nobody was ever bailing out China if it fails. It’s unclear it would be bailed out today. Too big to fail doesn’t apply.
What China has done is become too big to ignore. (Though Xi, being a dictator, seems unable to not squander goodwill every time China earns it. First with the Wolf Warrior nonsense. Now with these rare earth export restrictions on everyone.)
I agree completely about Iraq. The Bush II administration sought to undermine the rules-based international order, particularly its leading authority the UN Security Council. That dovetailed with their desire to invade Iraq.
The blow was significant - the US fabricated and misinterpreted evidence to justify the invasion, not only conducting an effectively illegal international war and violating that most fundamental of international laws, but also undermining the integrity of the international order's leader, the US itself. The rest of the West was so happy when Obama took over, he got the Nobel Peace Prize before he did anything - I think just for supporting the liberal order.
But like all recent Democratic leaders, he didn't fight much for it or for its values. Then Biden particularly was egregious, abandoning the cause of freedom (in Afghanistan, west Africa, India, China, etc.). His support for Ukraine and Taiwan appeared, to me, strictly geopolitical. In fact, I remember hearing that US officials had a policy to argue not for Ukraine's freedom and democracy, but for its sovereignty - and they seemed to observe that policy.
Without values, you have no direction, no force, no way to lead or organize. Biden's enemies have clear values - nationalism, ethnic nationalism, power (as value in itself). What were Biden's? What are the Democrats'? They've shut down the government over no value, only healthcare funding.
Incidentally, with respect to the lies used to start America's war with Iraq:
> On 12 September 2002, Netanyahu lobbied for the invasion of Iraq, testifying under oath as a private citizen before the U.S. House of Representatives Government Reform Committee regarding the alleged nuclear threat posed by the Iraqi régime: "There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons…"[74][75] He also testified, "If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region."[75]
It's a bad relationship for America. If we take the term "MAGA" at face value, we should be cutting Israel lose, not continuing to do their dirty work (e.g. shielding their politicians from legal responsibility for their war crimes.)
Oh come on. Quanta Magazine basically writes for HN. They have very little online footprint elsewhere, but they feature here multiple times a week and I'm sure they know it. The titles are almost always in this mold, implying some profound yet vague discovery. Some real, recent examples:
- "Researchers Discover the Optimal Way to Optimize"
- "Origami Patterns Solve a Major Physics Riddle"
- "A simple way to measure knots has come unraveled"
- "The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves Crashes Into View"
I don't necessarily mind it, even if I don't find the articles very informative. But it's certainly fair game to nitpick this borderline-clickbait style.
> It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe
They also had an extensive industrial espionage program. In particular, most of the integrated circuits made in the Soviet Union were not original designs. They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs. They had pin- and instruction-compatible knock-offs of 8086, Z80, etc. Rest assured, that wasn't because they loved the instruction set and recreated it from scratch.
Soviet scientists were on the forefront of certain disciplines, but tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.
Seems analogous to Apple and Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. Though I'm not sure which country Xerox would be. Maybe Germany in terms of the technology lifted by the later powers, but it seems a like a bit of a rude comparison!
> tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.
This is a biased take. One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.
And while there were many low quality knockoff electronics, pre-collapse USSR achieved remarkable feats in many different disciplines the US was falling behind at.
> One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.
I don't know if you deliberately skipped the 90% of other inventions that had nothing to do with -mind you- defense from American imperialism or you're being dense on purpose. Probably both?
Anyway just glancing the respective page for US "innovations" one can easily tell which country had the most obsessive offensive war industry.
There was a Star Talk recently where they talked about how when they divided up the German aerospace scientists after WWII, Russia ended up with majority KISS scientists and we got the perfectionist, superior engineering ones. I always figured that was just a US vs Russia ethos difference. And maybe that’s why they picked who they did but maybe I have it backward.
That seems completely unbelievable to me, of the thousands (tens of thousands?) of scientists captured and recruited by the allies they just happened to split along philosophical lines? And then they had some huge cultural impact? As opposed to just being Shanghai'd by whatever nation got to them first then absorbed into the greater social and economic fabric of that nation.
Did this article travel forward in time from the year 1999?
In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a good number of techies who were in control of the infrastructure and believed that as long as you don't mess with other people's toys, you should be allowed to roam freely online. But even then, this wasn't the universal consensus. You would still get shown the door for certain behaviors on the Usenet or on web forums. And many ISPs would still drop you for hard porn, gore, or piracy.
But today, the consensus is that tech companies are the guardians of morality. You can get deplatformed quite easily from all the major platforms just for saying things that others disagree with. Your private files in the cloud (and sometimes on the device) get scanned for contraband. Search engines and LLMs are carefully engineered to never say or encourage the wrong things, and to flag certain things for human review. You'd be hard-pressed to find an online platform or a Western ISP that doesn't bow to social pressures.
The honest answer that applies to almost everyone here is that as a kid, they liked playing computer games and heard that the job pays well.
It's interesting, because to become a plumber, you pretty much need a plumber parent or a friend to get you interested in the trade show you the ropes. Meanwhile, software engineering is closer to the universal childhood dream of "I want to become an astronaut" or "I want to be a pop star", except more attainable. It's very commoditized by now, so if you're looking for that old-school hacker ethos, you're gonna be disappointed.
I think you're grossly underestimating the number of people here who fell into software development because it's one of the best outlets for "the knack" in existence. Sure, this site is split between the "tech-bro entrepreneur"-types and developers, and there are plenty of developers who got into this for the cash, but in my experience about a quarter of developers (so maybe 10-15% of users on this site) got into this profession due to getting into programming because it fed an innate need to tinker, and then after they spent a ton of time on it discovered that it was the best way to pay the bills available to them.
I got stupidly lucky that one of my hobbies as an avid indoorsman was not only valued by the private sector but also happened to pay well. This career was literally the only thing that saved me from a life of poverty.
The regulatory landscape here is pretty funny. In all likelihood, the worst RFI offenders in your home are LED lights, followed by major appliances. Both of these are regulated less than something like a computer mouse. For lightbulbs, I think the manufacturers just self-certify.
I guess there are two ways to look at it. Either the regulation was wildly successful, so the problems persist only in the less-regulated spaces. Or we spend a lot of effort chasing the wrong problem.
If I turn my kettle or microwave on in my kitchen it will kill any bleutooth or wifi signal. My microwave is getting on for 15 years old, maybe newer ones are better, but the kettle was bought last year.
If you cannot change the microwave, consider trying a different wifi channel. I once had a 2012 Panasonic microwave that killed 802.11g channels 7 and 14 but not channel 0.
I am not too bothered about it. I only use it every other day for about 3 minutes to heat up some porridge. I keep on meaning to buy a new Microwave, I bought it in ASDA 15 years ago for £30 and it just keeps on working.
> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.
First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism.
In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.
Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.
Especially the actor one, understanding why someone would take the trouble to check that is almost as hard as understanding why someone would take the trouble to lie about it. Should we expect it of media? Probably.
The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract.
But looking into it, that company seems very odd. Can you really get a billion pound valuation and investments from tons of powerful people from placing school leavers into apprenticeships?
Sometimes I wonder if PR companies spread false stories about companies to pre-emptively discredit the true stories that have yet to be told.
> The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract.
Which is a rather strange approach to writing the article, because I had to do quite a bit of clicking around to have any understanding of what he was talking about.
I get your joke, but the thesis here isn't that Neanderthals were exposed to more lead. Instead, the claim is that we might have evolved a mutation that protects our brain against lead to some extent.
HN as an aggregator of geek news is exceptional. It's not the first of its kind - Slashdot was quite similar - but perhaps because it's associated with the SF Bay Area, it managed to stay relevant while Slashdot withered away.
HN as a commenting community is markedly more hit-and-miss. We often comment without reading the articles, we are sometimes gratuitously negative for the sake of negativity, and there isn't any other place where I've seen so many people being confidently wrong about my areas of expertise. I think we'd be better off if we were more willing to say "this is okay and I don't need to have a strong opinion about it" or "I'm probably not an expert on X, even though I happen to be good with programming".
People say that, but the sales didn't really change anything. The site still looks pretty much the way it did back in the day.
I think the main thing is just that Slashdot "belonged" to the BOFH / sysadmin subculture that's largely gone. In my younger years, that was the tech career to aspire to. Nowadays, kids want to work at OpenAI / Google / a billion-dollar future unicorn, so the SF Bay Area ethos is dominant.
You hit the nail on the head. There is no place on the internet more broadly susceptible to the same kinds of "founder brain" malaise that has afflicted so many in Silicon Valley--i.e. "I am good at software development so therefore I am confident I have a good understanding of (and opinion on) all sorts of intellectual topics".
The snark isn’t lost on me but scarce resources and lack of access to capital is why we have an army of people building ad tech and not things that improve society.
“I think your idea is wrong and your lack of financial means to do it is proof that you’re full of shit” is just a pretty bullshit perspective my dude.
I am a professional data scientist of over 10 years. I have a degree in the field. I’d rather build nothing than build shit for a fuck boy like Altman.
I think Russia deserves a lot of credit. It started long before Crimea. They had a military incursion into Georgia, secured a pro-Kremlin dictator in Belarus, nearly got away with the same in Ukraine and some other neighboring republics - all while buttering up the EU with energy deals. I think the European and American (non-)response to that was the death knell of that "rules-based" worldview.
While Russia acted belligerently, China played the long game to cement its geopolitical influence and make itself "too big to fail".
If there was a domestic inflection point in the US and in the EU, I think that was actually the housing crisis / the sovereign debt crisis around 2007-2009. That really undermined the optimism about supranational institutions.