It just occurred to me that SEAMAP will be* gone, and I didn't notice because the people looking ahead at these sorts of things while I kept my head down and worked were all fired. I will need a new job.
* I say will be, because it was already cut down to size last spring.
Luckily, there's more in the world than NOAA. If you just search 'global warming accelerating' on Google, there are plenty of sources. I can't seem to find the 'more in the next 10 than the previous 40' stat and 'dramatically' is obviously subjective, but it doesn't look great.
If you look at some predictions from people specializing in permafrost methane ejections, it looks pretty bad even.
We're talking about recorded data, not predictions. If you think NOAA's data is wrong then it seems like a good reason to support taking down those climate reports?
I liked the idea behind the movie, but the movie itself wasn't very good. It was a bit like the movie Mickey 17, it didn't quite know what it wanted to be and tried to be a lot of things, but none of it really stuck and it ended up being a bit incoherent. The ending I thought was powerful though.
> Being preached at about science by a population of people who probably mostly failed high school science is not a good time.
I agree with the part about preaching, but fair is fair: they were preaching scientific consensus. They preach what is said by the overwhelming majority of active scientific researchers in this field.
You didn’t say they were wrong I agree, but still .. they were (/ are) right. And why should they be perfect, anyway? They are who they are, flawed and all, but they are right about this and they were right to make that movie and they were right about people being selfish.
Ironically you could say that we are now basically reenacting the movie, proving its point. There’s an asteroid heading for us and here we are, judging the high school grades of the people telling us about its trajectory.
I thought it was very depressing and surprisingly self reflective and poignant in that sense.
> about science by a population of people who probably mostly failed high school science
Your assumption that actors (and writers, those where the ones “preaching” more than the people on screen) have failed highschool at a higher rate than the general population is, I think, rather flawed¹. There are some very bright people in the entertainment industries for one reason or another (doing what they enjoy, and presumably are good at, instead of something else they are good at, being a common situation, there being more money in stardom being another).
Hence a number successful stand-ups who have degrees (in the sciences, not necessarily “media studies” before someone pipe up with that), PhDs, law certifications, and such.
Hedy Lamarr is the best known poster child for this, but too many think she is a singleton exception rather than an indicator that we shouldn't make too many assumptions about what acting talent might imply about other mental abilities.
----
[1] And, in fact, more snobby than the film you are critiquing as being snobby!
Why would you assume people that went on to have successful film careers failed high school science? Just because someone doesn't pursue science as a career doesn't mean they received bad grades in it, especially at a high school level.
Without regard to the broader point* in the particular case of Leo, I’d be surprised if he had great k-12 science education. He was a child star already at that point, right? Only so many hours in the day.
Of course, it isn’t a universal rule, see Dolph Lundgren, etc etc.
* I don’t care if the actor delivering an environmentalist message in a movie is actually good at science for the same reason I don’t care if Keanu Reaves knows king fu.
I’m not assuming anything - this is why I used words like “probably” and “mostly” - but let’s just say that I’ve known my share of actors, and I’m willing to take the odds.
It's so funny to me you'd whine about "preaching" and then take such a needlessly judgemental and demonstrably false stance, and then double down and lie when it's pointed out. Truly, a person of science.
C'mon bud, you've got a PhD. You don't really need some uneducated filth to point out how you were disengenous.
But just in case: you made a prejudiced assumption and then boldly claimed you didn't. And you didn't state an opinion, you presented it as (probable) fact. You can couch it with all the adverbs you want, your own snobby disdain shines right through.
I said a movie was bad because I don’t enjoy being lectured about science by actors, many (if not most) of whom have only the most tenuous grasp of science. I wasn’t being “disingenuous”. I meant every word. It’s fine if you think I’m a snob, but I’m not “lying”.
Y’all seem to have a hard time accepting that some people might not like propaganda, even if it is propaganda for things you support.
Your still lying. Saying you didn't say something which you very much did, and then claiming you said something completely different are forms of lying.
It's not the opposition to propaganda folks bristle with, it's the self-important passive aggressive elitism.
> I said a movie was bad because I don’t enjoy being lectured about science by actors, many (if not most) of whom have only the most tenuous grasp of science. I wasn’t being “disingenuous”. I meant every word.
I not only said it, I repeated it, and then re-confirmed that I meant what I originally said.
I loved the concept for that movie. I found the execution rather lacking, though. In the end, I wouldn't recommend watching it. Just watch the trailer instead, yo'll get the point without needing to finish the entire thing.
The section of the population that needs to think about the Inconvenient Truth didn’t watch the movie, because they don’t watch documentaries unless it’s about a Poop Cruise, or a celebrity.
I think we rely too much on government mandated websites than we do practical common sense that could save lives.
For instance, over 175,000 people die from heat exposure each year across the WHO European Region. Compare that to 1-2k in the US.
In this case, the Don't Look Up scenario is that people don't want to get A/C and governments sometimes make it very hard for them, killing hundreds of thousands because... I don't know why. But at least EU has nice proclamations and accords on the risk of climate change.
The first number is based on statistical observation of mortality rate the second is based on classification by doctor at death. It's not comparable at all. For example, if there is an increase in heart related death when it's hot it's not accounted in second stats.
WHO European region also covered Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and other countries from central Asia so I don't see how you can conclude anything about EU with this piece of statistic. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WHO_regions)
> Several EU countries have mandatory temperature limits for air conditioning in public buildings. Spain, Italy, and Greece have all announced that A/C in public buildings cannot be set lower than 27C (80F) in summer
How does that make it "hard" to get A/C in private homes? And are there a lot of heat-related deaths at 27C?
> The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioning
You should maybe look into why those exist. Air conditioning refrigerants are themselves major greenhouse gases and many deplete the ozone layer. Try also comparing those regulations to American ones. They're likely not very different.
> 90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it
The US is richer and hotter. There's nothing like Florida or south Texas or Las Vegas or Phoenix in Europe.
> There's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations
Do tell...
> some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK...
Did you write this with an LLM or something? The third link you provided says nothing of the sort. It's about tint regulations on automobile windows FFS.
Not the GP, but there are some regulations about windows, not sure if local or EU-wide. Windows at floor level above ground level must not be fully openable or must have an outside barrier. But thats a pretty sane restriction, given those windows are basically just glass doors to nowhere.
I would be amazed if much of the US didn't have a similar building code that there must be a railing if there's a possibility of easily falling out the window/door.
What does this have to do with government mandated websites? Seems that the US had a government website about climate and few heat deaths. If the number of heat deaths goes up this year without the websites would you think that is because the website went away (obviously not).
Seems like a website with information about climate change without a mandate about max AC is a pretty conservative strategy all things considered.
i think what contributes the most to my sense of dread is the feeling that if you were to tell these decision makers in govt right now "but this'll kill people!" they'd respond "good"
They don't care about people. Senator Joni Ernst when told that people would die due from the spending bill responded with, "Well, we are all going to die."
They’re not stupid. These voters see government as a means to enact cruelty on outgroups they don’t like. That’s why they vote for cruel people who don’t care about hurting others. They are not stupid. They know exactly what they are voting for and are overwhelmingly supportive if it.
We shouldn’t excuse these voters as merely stupid, like they’re just innocently ignorant or uninformed. They are deliberately malevolent, and vote specifically for cruel, terrible politicians because they, themselves are cruel and terrible people and desire such representation.
And they are not just supporting cruelty. They are cheering and screaming for it. They want more.
I feel like my understanding of politics dramatically improved once I considered that some voters are malevolent. Some voters consciously support inhumane policies, but due to social pressure, they feel that they can't be truthful about it.
So they will claim to be in favor of more socially acceptable policies, but vote against those policies giving some nonsensical reason, and it gives the appearance of stupidity.
I've spent some time reading r/leopardsatemyface, and there's just an unending stream of people who say something like "I didn't vote for this. I voted to inflict this cruelty upon other people, but now that it's coming for me I'm upset. Please redirect this toward people who deserve it. That being said I still support Trump."
This quote from 2019 really sums it up:
“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this... I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” [1]
The "good thing" he needs to do to according to this voter is "hurt people who deserve it".
I've honestly tried to avoid this conclusion for years, thinking there has to be more to it, but at long last it seems there's not. People want to hurt other people, and they see Trump as their vehicle to do so, because that's what he promises; "I am your justice...I am your retribution" was his literal campaign pitch. [2]
"Wizard's First Rule: people are stupid." Richard and Kahlan frowned even more. "People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."
I think many are single issue voters. I read a Reuters piece following 20 Trump voters and many voted because they thought he would make the economy better. Misinformation is strong.
> How are these people our elected officials? It’s unbelievable.
Because they know that the vast majority of people advocating for climate change to be a high priority issue is because they want to use that to slow down capitalism - the system that made the US the country they love.
I never hear growth-minded solutions for climate change: Let's get rich enough so everyone (even European hotels) can afford AC? Drug companies make enough money so even poor Africans can afford medicines and theraputics? Deregulate the solar industry? Reduce regulatory barriers for autonomous vehicles? Fast track nuclear power? Stop the fight against ride-sharing?
If the problem was climate change & it was a severe existential issue, I'd assume you'd support all of the above?
> Because they know that the vast majority of people advocating for climate change to be a high priority issue is because they want to use that to slow down capitalism
Is this really what you think? That the people concerned about climate change are really just interested in changing economic policy? The real motives of environmentalists is to erode capitalism? Respectfully: that's nuts.
> Let's get rich enough so everyone (even European hotels) can afford AC
This "proposal" does nothing, and in fact makes things worse, if that AC is not clean energy! Your "growth-minded" solution is not only not a solution, it's a problem exacerbator. But yes, many of us do in fact advocate for deregulation of the solar industry (I have canvassed on this very issue), and support fast tracking nuclear power. And is there even a fight against ride-sharing to stop?
I just feel like your comment is coming from a different world than my own.
> The real motives of environmentalists is to erode capitalism? Respectfully: that's nuts.
Is that really controversial? Reducing consumption and crippling new economic developments like mining/pipelines/logging/large construction projects etc has always been a huge part of environmentalist movement.
Even here in Canada whose economy depends heavily on oil, lumber, and mines...One of the biggest responses to US aggression is to try to reverse that as opposed to years our of GDP growth declining in favour of climate activism and interference by native groups stopping any new projects.
You can't even build a road in BC without activists stopping it.
idk about the US but it's hard to find any industry not impacted by it here.
Is it really controversial to say that most environmentalists want to protect ecosystems, not destroy capitalism? No, it's not controversial, it's just wrong. Must protecting ecosystems mean a hatred for capitalism? No.
You’re taking effects (slower pipelines, fewer logging permits) and making those effects the activists’ "true" goal. In reality, many of the people campaigning for stronger environmental safeguards are business-friendly too, such as 1000s of economists (and many Nobel laureates) have backed a carbon tax because it uses market forces to cut emissions.
Calling for long-term accounting of environmental costs isn’t anti-capitalist.
That's not a motive, it's a consequence. There's a difference.
Is environmental destruction a motive of capitalism? Of course not, and it would be crazy to say that. So why say the opposite about environmentalists?
Worse, AC in cities is counterproductive because it noticeably raises the surrounding temperature.
(And then it's the poorest people, those that cannot afford AC, and there will always be some (starting with the homeless), that suffer because of it.)
This is an irritating strawman. I never claimed that no environmentalists have socialist views, or that the movements don’t sometimes overlap in policy preferences even when their motivations for such policies are wholly different.
My point is simply that the vast majority of climate advocates are arguing for policies that conserve and preserve what we have into the future, and that demand the long-term costs of many of our current policies and practices are actually accounted for vs. kicking that externality to the future public. There is no hidden agenda to upend society.
Many of the desires practices are growth-friendly fixes: carbon pricing, deregulating solar, advanced nuclear[1], electrifying transport, ceasing public subsidies for coal and oil. They aren’t campaigning to upend capitalism itself, but to adapt our economy so we can continue to thrive without cooking the planet, destroying ecosystems, and damaging long-term health of the natural world we rely on for life, not just recreation.
Pointing to a handful of degrowth manifestos or niche graduate programs doesn’t prove that mainstream environmentalism is really a Trojan horse for anti-capitalism. If you’re looking to debate climate policy, let’s stick to the proposals most people are actually pushing—and whether they’ll work—not whether some fringe authors happen to share an ideology.
[1] Not all environmentalists support this, I'll grant, but I don't know any who don't personally
> the vast majority of people advocating for climate change to be a high priority issue is because they want to use that to slow down capitalism
I feel like that's something you want to believe so that you can dismiss legitimate concerns about environmental destruction.
Because that's like saying capitalists want to grow the economy faster to destroy the environment. Which is obviously crazy and untrue.
I love capitalism. I'm also deeply concerned the way it's run currently will destroy the world my children will inherit. These aren't contradictory ideas. Why can't we capitalism better?
There is no other, better, more humane form of capitalism. Capitalism's only concern is the generation and control of capital by the capitalist class. It isn't that capitalists want to destroy the environment, it's that they don't care about the environment beyond it being a resource to be exploited and consumed. "Better capitalism" just means doing more of that exploitation faster and more efficiently.
I don't know what you love and call capitalism but I suspect you've been convinced that as a system it has some inherently moral dimension. It does not, and cannot. It's a paperclip maximizer, that's all.
Private property and competitive free markets. I just don't like where they end up. I think they need a firm hand to keep from turning into a paperclip maximizer. Maybe that's impossible, but we can't know until we really try.
Socialism is the firm hand keeping capitalism at bay. Environmental laws, labor laws and the abolition of child labor, the 8 hour workday, weekends, minimum wage and overtime, disability rights and social welfare (such as it exists in the US) are all due to socialist activism in spite of the free market. The Black Panthers are the reason American schools have free lunches.
While it is a view that seems to piss off most, I am becoming convinced capitalism and socialism are both equally doomed paths if taken to their unchecked extremes.
An endless game of tug-of-war between the two is the best we can do, and right now it is pulled way way too far in the capitalist direction and needs to be yanked back hard.
Right? This Cold War era mentality of "If you say anything bad about capitalism, you're a dirty commie"/"If you say anything bad about socialism, you're an imperialist pig" is fucking exhausting and pointless.
I don't give a shit whether something is capitalist or communist or socialist. I care about results: prosperity, freedom, happiness, sustainability. Do whatever makes it happen.
Exactly. To the extent that a politico-economic system is concerned with anything other than how the capitalist class can maintain control of society through control of the means of production, it is not capitalism. Of course, platonically pure capitalism is rare, and even relatively pure capitalism is mostly a thing of the past since most of the places it was present replaced it with mixed economies in the mid-20th Century, but that's not "kinder capitalism", but simply less capitalism.
> Senator Joni Ernst when told that people would die due from the spending bill responded with, "Well, we are all going to die."
reply
Well, how many times has she seen a doctor in her life so far? Of course, more than one. Then, why did she do that if she is eventually going to die one day?
I just feel extremely sad about the mass quantity of events like this happening right now because they are all aggregate to huge negative effects but the average person knows nothing of it. It feels so unfixable.
They certainly want us to feel like its unfixable, but it's not. Were govt to put the effort into the energy transition that we saw in the early days of covid we could zero our emissions, and relatively quickly. The technology is largely available, it needs to be implemented.
The ties between the fossil fuel industry and the far right are clear. Apathy, indifference, inertia, they are all products of propaganda and updated Cambridge Analytica methods.
Fossil fuel interests will stop at nothing to further their greed.
All of this is extremely easily fixable, from a technical standpoint. But, every solution would make some rich guy very slightly less rich, so its going to be an uphill battle where we have to fight for each step.
If there's some proposed legislation that would make things notably better for 50 million people, but would cost an insurance company 100 million dollars, then that insurance company can spend any amount less than 100 million fighting the bill and still come out ahead. Even 10 million can buy a lot of lobbyists, and almost guarantee torpedoing the bill.
Meanwhile the 50 million people are working 80 hours/wk across three jobs just to put food on the table, are stressed about how to pay rent, and don't have the personal cell phone number of their congressperson even if they had the time and energy to call them.
The failure for Democrats has been to convert those 80 hours/wk and poor economic conditions to support.
Trump can increase inequality and make wealthy people wealthier, but says he's doing good for poor people. If things get better, it's because of him. If things get worse, it's because of someone else.
I'm not sure "failure for Democrats" is the right way to frame it, because the system is working as intended, and the Democrats are responding to the lobbyists rather than the people, same as Republicans.
Your choices are the party of billionaires, or the party of billionaires except we don't hate gay people quite as much.
Huh, makes me wonder about claims that it’s a reaction to his daughter coming out as trans. That happened publicly in 2020, according to wikipedia, but it probably came up in private beforehand. The timing is close enough that it seems likely. It’s interesting to note since I wasn’t really familiar with the timeline of his villain arc.
I agree that it's not the usual response, but given Musk's strong promotion of natalism and the fact that he has used IVF to select XY embryos for _all_ of his offspring...
Am I misreading this it are you claiming the family of trans people becoming more transphobic when they find out not common? Because it's extremely common. There's a reason the joke exists: Don't like in-laws? Date a trans person and you won't have to worry about them!
Maybe... But to me that whole incident seems more like a symptom than a cause. IMHO (disclaimer: pure conjecture), Musk must have been "broken" prior to engaging in such behaviour.
What's not happening? I think you are confusing what "whataboutism" is? "Whatabout" the exact same fossil fuel industry OP referenced? I corrected a misconception that OP had, and I guess so do you: that the oil industry cares about political affiliation. To you this probably sounded like a support of the right, and whatabouting the left. Least effort interpretation meets trigger happiness.
The oil industry has monetary affiliations and intrinsically sees no political color or affiliation except in the interest of making that money. The other way around, the US right has a strong preference for the oil industry, while the left has less. But I was clear that I'm looking at it from the industry's perspective: the oil industry doesn't care about right or left. They will without a doubt allow any tide to lift their boat without any moral argument. This distinction is important. Plenty of places in the world where the oil industry is affiliated to the center or left.
Again, there's nothing intrinsically "right wing" about the oil industry, there something strongly "oil leaning" in the US right-wing.
An example that captures this a bit is Musk publicly supporting and having ties to the democrat administration for years when it benefited him and the EV/green agenda. He had no qualms shifting to supporting the republicans when he thought this will benefit him even more despite the right being anti-green. You can bet that he'd try to switch back if the tides turn again although this time it's hard to come back from what he did.
'whataboutism' was not correct term here just search vector for similar effect.
I would call it maybe 'relativizing'. Like making everything so relative that anything could happen in theory while taking away attention from the fact (hence similarity with whataboutism) that it just (or mostly) happens in one specific case. So Oil industry would align with 'Left' if 'Left' aligned with Oil industry, but that is not relevant take since it is not happening.
And using Musk is not example of this case because he is not part of oil industry.
That industries shift affiliation if it brings them money is not "relative", it's just something they show again and again, some more than others. I don't care about US politics right/left but as someone who worked in the oil industry I can guarantee you that the industry will shift its affiliation towards the side that makes it more money. Many industries do this, much of the left leaning tech sector collectively kissed the boot of the Trump administration, shoveled money his way, and clapped on order at his inauguration. It probably wasn't ideological but pragmatic.
> And using Musk is not example of this case because he is not part of oil industry.
And yet he is, as the perfect example of changing affiliation for money. The poster child of the traditionally left EV/green industry slinking away to the famously non-green right. How many examples do you need? Worldwide the oil industry doesn't show a particular preference to the right, it does without exception show preference to the side making them more money.
> And yet he is, as the perfect example of changing affiliation for money.
Musk has never changed affiliations.
You can look at his political contributions. Like most of the ultra-wealthy, he does donate to both political parties. But he has never donated more to the Democrats than the Republicans.
In fact, in the average year, for the last 16 years (I went back as far as I have lived in the US) he's donated, eleven times more to the Republican party.
Musk has been libertarian at best, not liberal. And even that is sketchy. It's fine for him as CEO to go on podcasts and smoke weed and have "the highest ability to process ketamine on the planet", but work for Tesla or any of his companies and you'd best piss clean, or you're out.
> I can guarantee you that the industry will shift its affiliation towards the side that makes it more money
Which in this case is just 'right-wing' side. I get that they would shift to other side if it fits but in reality there is no other.
> And yet he is, as the perfect example of changing affiliation for money.
He may be example of "of changing affiliation" for money - even if this is also arguable - but still not relevant to topic of that fossil industry goes hand in hand with right-wing agenda.
Why do you want to move attention from the relation between right-wing politics and fossil industry by creating hypothetical scenarios that are not happening and by moving the goalpost of the topic with examples that are tangential at best?
You are correct. The fossil fuel industry will fund anyone who will take their money and push their greedy agenda. The difference in the republicans are normally the only ones who will stoop that low to sell out future generations for power today. That’s why no one cares about your false equivalency.
> That’s why no one cares about your false equivalency.
It's more because people especially in the US are so partisan and self-centered right now that anything that even remotely sounds like it doesn't fully match their views leads to brain shutdown and autopilot rage mode.
That's why it takes 3 very clear explanations for you to understand but still not quite (understanding takes effort and brainpower, but anyone can mash the trigger for free). That's why you can start by saying "you are right" and end with "but nobody cares because the 'publicans/libs". And that's why things are going the way they are over there.
The big problem is people tend to look at history as a singular event, or the final consequence of a series of events.
When such events are clearly ongoing, people roll their eyes and say you're overreacting. Then when it all ends and consequences happen, people say now is the time for healing, nobody could've foreseen this, and it's too bad nothing could've been done.
It's the same as being sober and trapped in a car with a drunk driver and their drunk friends. To them, it's fine. They're comfortable with what they're doing. You're the one being annoying for complaining. But their every action is not only endangering you and themselves, but it's endangering people on the perimeters who don't even know about the crisis that's happening within that 2 ton box. Some can see the swerving from far away, but there's nothing they can do. The only hope is the passenger trying to reason with an angry drunk to pull over, but it'll never happen. They'll just get more pissed off and drive more erratically to mess with you and to get some laughs from their friends. So it's a struggle between closing your eyes and hoping it's over soon, or trying to fight back and hope you can stop them. But neither option is easy and both shift the responsibility to someone other than the ones causing the chaos.
It is fixable, but we are going to have to wait until the mid-terms to slow down the insanity, so in 3 years we can roll it back and start the cycle over again, as is tradition.
Please don't post grand pronouncements about a nation's merits or future like this. All it does is invite others to respond with opposing grand pronouncements about other countries or regions, leading to what we can see here: a huge flamewar about nations and regions.
The guidelines ask us to avoid flamebait. Please make an effort to observe all the guidelines in future.
Germany produces not much valuable SW yet their police surveillance state has no issues making use of foreign developed spyware tech (Palantir, Pegasus) against its citizens if they say the wrong things or are not part of the political establishment.
Do you still get threatening letters with fines at home when you download a pirated movie?
I have been pirating on and off for almost 25 years. This wasn't a problem in my early years so I learned and know all the sides of it. I would have definitely got those in my early days. But the whole thing started way later and they should still be around.
> #1 among high income countries in Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, drug overdose deaths, Deaths from violence and accidents, Infant mortality, Obesity-related mortality.
...and also #1 in healthcare costs, which just adds an expensive insult to multiple injuries.
So the U.S is number one in several largely irrelevant and in any case partly ambiguous rankings of X and Y, and this is your counterpoint to the very hard facts of it still being the world's richest, largest, most dominant economic and political power, and continuing to stay that way for the foreseeable future due to how hard it is for any other major country to just magically supplant such positions?
The quality of reasoned political and economic debate on this site, so full of self-congratulatingly intelligent people, continues to be generally absurd, deplorable and full of cliched foolishness passing for opinion.
> #1 among high income countries in Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, drug overdose deaths, Deaths from violence and accidents, Infant mortality, Obesity-related mortality.
It's all originates from each person's decisions. If a person wants to pay attention to their lifestyle and health, then in the US he will get one of the best results in the parameters you listed. That is just a fact.
And if we want to maximize these parameters among everyone, we need a ultratotalitarian government that will put all the people into concentration camps where they will work under threat of execution in the open air and eat a specially designed low-calorie diet.
> It also has its lowest-ever World Happiness Rankings.
Yeas, and North Korea has the highest.
> The U.S. is currently leading in global declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence.
And that's good thing. For decades US has been doing atrocities all over the world, to the approving cries of other Western countries. So the only problem with US declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence I see is that this should have happened decades earlier
> If a person wants to pay attention to their lifestyle and health, then in the US he will get one of the best results in the parameters you listed. That is just a fact.
Is it? What are some obstacles to a similarly committed person attaining health/lifestyle benefits in other developed countries? What are the factors uniquely provided by the US that make this “fact” true? Are there factors in the US working against good outcomes for committed people?
> > #1 among high income countries in Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, drug overdose deaths, Deaths from violence and accidents, Infant mortality, Obesity-related mortality.
>
> It's all originates from each person's decisions. If a person wants to pay attention to their lifestyle and health, then in the US he will get one of the best results in the parameters you listed. That is just a fact.
If it is a fact, you should be able to back it up.
> And if we want to maximize these parameters among everyone, we need a ultratotalitarian government that will put all the people into concentration camps where they will work under threat of execution in the open air and eat a specially designed low-calorie diet.
Or the government could actually regulate things like food additives instead of just going with whatever industry lobbyists are saying. Sure, lobbying is of course a thing here as well, but clearly there are still differences there.
Hell, things like infrastructure funding could be used to encourage things like walkability which also helps with the health and quality of life of the population, but alas.
> > It also has its lowest-ever World Happiness Rankings.
>
> Yeas, and North Korea has the highest.
No, Finland has the highest. North Korea is not even ranked in the World Happiness Report.
> > The U.S. is currently leading in global declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence.
>
> And that's good thing. For decades US has been doing atrocities all over the world, to the approving cries of other Western countries. So the only problem with US declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence I see is that this should have happened decades earlier
While I am sympathetic to this line of thinking as a European myself, the current way this is going on over in the US just looks a bit silly. Basically just going out of its way to shed any remaining goodwill and soft power because... what, exactly?
Record numbers of US citizens seeking to relocate to Canada & the UK. In the last couple months I remember seeing several news stories variously about Doctors, Professors and students applying and/or relocating.
Layoffs in the tech sector haven't slowed at all, and couple that with the DOGE Govt layoffs and the recent jobs numbers stories.
I feel quite certain that if the U.S. is actually measured "at #1" for anything good, it won't retain it much longer.
Bias Disclaimer: I'm a former software engineer working an hourly labor job.
Pulling back on federally-funded research grants for the sciences does not address how the economy, hard power, and culture of the States will completely fall off the map leaving an "irrelevant nation" though.
The US has no real exports. All of its economic might was because it has its top tier market, and all that wealth is essentially from its soft power and position. The more you peel off that soft power, the weaker that position especially as wealthy and educated people leave.
I don't agree that the US won't be relevant, it's more like the US will resemble the position of Russia in the next decade than the position it is in right now.
The US exports aircraft, vehicles, and medicine, and the rest of the exports are just raw stuffs, like oil or corn. How's Boeing looking these days? Is the US auto industry where exciting new technologies are coming from? Unless the US is going to be great because we export more coal, then I too expect some decline.
The last big round of global innovation was internet services, of which I'm pretty sure (not having looked it up) that US exports represent the majority of world exports.
Apple keeps half the sales price of every iPhone whereas the last I saw Foxconn gets only a few dollars per phone for the final assembly. It used to be that most of the expensive components (display, memory) in the iPhone were supplied by Japan, S Korea and Taiwan, but I admit that that might have changed over the years.
It looks like cell phone exports are about 30 billion dollars, which is 1% of the 3 trillion dollars mentioned earlier. I'm surprised it's so low. (I'm open to corrections on these numbers.)
Here's my estimate, taken mostly from figures from Apple's 2024 annual report (as reported by Gemini Flash).
Apple's total worldwide revenue for fiscal year 2024 was $391.035 billion. The Americas Segment (which includes the US) represented $167.05 billion of that, leaving $224 billion for the rest of the world.
Apple reports that their cost of goods sold was $210.352 billion, leaving 180.68 billion as so-called "gross profit". The majority of this gross profit will be used to pay salaries and other expenses (e.g., office space) of having employees, most of which goes to Americans. (Most of the rest will be "retained earnings", which means it either goes back to investors or is used to try to generate new streams of revenue.)
But only some of that gross profit will come from exports. Let's assume that exports are as profitable (per unit of revenue) as US sales are, which seems reasonable to me because competition (mostly from Android) would be the main thing keeping gross profit low, and Android is a major competitive force in the US market, so estimated gross profit derived from sales to the rest of the world would be 180.68 * (224 / 391.035) == $103.5 billion. That is revenue from all products and services, and Apple reports that revenue from the iPhone is 0.5145 of all revenue (worldwide) or about $53 billion per year flowing from the rest of the world to Apple (and to governments in the US in the form of taxes).
To be clear, that's assuming that zero of the hardware (more precisely, zero of what accountants call the "variable cost") that goes into an iPhone is bought from US suppliers (which seems a reasonable assumption to me).
"Exports" is hiding a lot of complexity here. Some export statistics might add the entire price of an iPhone to the export figure for China because that is where the final assembly is done even though (like my previous comment shows) about half of the money from that sale ends up in the hands of Apple's investors, US-based employees of Apple and such US-based suppliers as the companies that built Apple's headquarters and the companies that supply Apple's offices and data centers with electricity.
If we go away back the argument was that the US has no real exports. You've been arguing that phones are an export, but you admit those are built by other countries. It seems fair that the country that makes a phone and then exports it would be given credit for that in the statistics.
I'm not sure what the point of this thread is anymore, so I'll stop here.
Sure, but how are you and I supposed to know which country will win the export market for the next big thing?
We could guess, but there's been a lot of guesses (confidently made out to be facts and inevitabilities) made in this thread so far. I'm trying to ground the discussion in actual facts.
Currently, but even then by nominal GDP not PPP (China's way ahead of the USA already by PPP). Nominal being different from PPP is not just about cost of living though: the US dollar is artificially high by about 10% due to being a dominant reserve currency, and China has a policy of keeping their currency weak. Flip both of those and China would be about equal nominal GDP as the USA.
Also consider that the comment you're responding to said "next few decades", and consider that China's GDP grew at four times the rate of the USA economy in the two decades between 2003 and 2023: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Nominal+GDP+China+2023+...
But the real critical thing, is that economies can fall very fast when an a poor leader is empowered. Trump is purging anyone who says "no", which is already a dangerous place even if he was competent, rather than someone who tells such obvious lies on multiple health reports (recently his height(!), previously saying an exam had "only positive results" without knowing what positive means in a medical context), or facing a court case because he misrepresented the size of his penthouse apartment.
You remember right at the start of his term, there were fires in LA? And he ordered dams in NoCal opened? That aren't hydrologically connected to LA? When that kind of decision is criticised, it gets stopped. When people around are afraid to say "no", it doesn't stop, and the dams empty. In this case, it would have led to Californian agriculture approximately ending for several years due to the drought, and consequently to food shortages.
Same deal with the currently in progress attempt to deporting all the (Biden's team's estimate) 10-11 million undocumented migrant workers, many of whom are in low-paid agricultural roles, so kicking them out directly leads to less food and higher prices.
Worse than that. Consider that he got RFK Jr as the health secretary: by itself this is likely to have a measurable negative impact on US life expectancy.
Or the trillion dollar healthcare cuts (have they fully passed into law yet? Reporting from abroad is unclear how your system works): also likely to have a measurable negative impact on US life expectancy.
Then there's the incompetent attempt at tariffs, not just Penguin Island, but also that they were without any commensurate attempt to support local industry.
Or choosing a (defence) team so lax that they accidentally invited a journalist to a Signal discussion about active military engagement.
Or consider the reports that Iran's nuclear project wasn't as utterly destroyed as he likes to publicly claim: what happens if Iran does rebuild it all over the next few months, as others say? Does his ego prevent him from responding, letting them get their nuke?
And of all this, only two examples ("positive results" and penthouse size) are more than 6 months old. When does congress get a chance to change, with the possibility of him being impeached (for a third time)?
I don't entirely agree with all of your points, but at least here, an example of someone commenting with something well-argued, instead of the ridiculous vomit of cliches and emotional outrage that so many comments here put forth on any political/economic debate about the United States.
Please don't respond to grand pronouncements about a nation or continent with one of your own. This just perpetuates the kind of flamewar we're trying to avoid here, and thus counts as flamebait, which is explicitly against the guidelines:
You being down-voted is more testament to the orientation of thinking clouding judgment here in HN. Ukraine losing the war will be a massive blow for Europe. Sibling commentator mentioned doubling of the military budget but this disregard readiness of engagement and unity[1]. Nato was the creation of the US and the US pulling out requires, probably, another entity with committed members.
>Ukraine losing the war will be a massive blow for Europe
There is no such thing. Even if Ukraine cannot recapture all of the lost territory, it's Russia who has already lost. That a country four times the population, ten times as rich has incurred a million casualties, switched to a war economy, has to throw tens of thousand of North Koreans into a war in Europe, merely to creep forward by a few meters has to be the largest humiliation to an alleged "great power" in a century.
All of this while Europe has not even remilitarized, with Ukraine becoming a major producer of military technology in its own right, the country is now largely self sufficient in terms of its drone output among other things, is one of the strongest signs of resilience of this continent.
How do you picture this? People in Paris disappear with a flash of light and baguettes falling on the ground? Or is ot more like the earth shakes and it all goes under the water? Or maybe something like Europeans collectively decide to do whatever Putin tells them? Or maybe suddenly adopt American and Russian way of life, like Italians burn their Fiat 500's and order Ford F-150's, throw away their wines and start brewing votka? Or maybe turn against each other and break down their functioning trade and cultural relations and just buy Russian and American stuff instead and pay with what?
BTW the blaming immigrants and tearing down the social state doesn't work for long because you have finite number of immigrants and social services. If you actually get rid of those and things don't improve people start to notice. A common strategy is to keep blaming those when not doing anything about it or even increase it but the problem with that is, people get tired and actually change you with someone who actually will do something about it and you end up doing something. This something can be to fix the issues and remove the pressure or remove the immigrants and the social sistem and you get a very strong counter action and flushes away those who did it. However way it goes it's not an end or beginning of anything as EU isn't an empire like the US, just bunch of sovereign states in coordination.
"End of Europe" as a coherent entity that's willing and able to look after its own interests. Even as Ukrainians die in the meat grinder and Germany is lauded as Ukraine's best friend in Europe, millions of dollars of dual-use technology products from Germany continue to transship into Russia via Kazakhstan. Imagine if it was 1942 and Britain was still shipping millions of dollars of weapons components into Germany via Sweden or Switzerland?
Europe is far from coherent, even if it is the most coherent that ever has been.
Meanwhile, support rate for EU and Eurozone is highest ever among EU member states and Europe as a whole. If anything, people are annoyed that EU struggles to be decisive as Europeans want more EU, not less. This new situation even paved the way for collaboration previously thought to be far fetched dream.
I don't know how all this will unfold but if tonight Europe ends as we know it, tomorrow we will have European federation and the discussions won't be about the petty local issues but thinks like EU army etc. as all Europeans are very annoyed by Russia, USA and the current state of affairs in Europe.
Check the stats, Europeans don't buy into the agenda pushed by the American libertarians. People want bigger stronger EU to take over where USA abandoned.
>"End of Europe" as a coherent entity that's willing and able to look after its own interests.
Europe doesn't have coherent interests across the board but every country acts purely in its own interest even if it's at the expense of the other member states. EU is an org that replaced the battlefield so Europeans don't have another world war with each other but instead backstab themselves tough politics in the EU parlaiment.
See the illegal immigration issue that still hasn't been solved since 2015 and instead of solving it, they just ban anti-illegal-immigration right wing candidates or parties from being allowed to take part in elections and pretend the issue went away.
>Imagine if it was 1942 and Britain was still shipping millions of dollars of weapons components into Germany via Sweden or Switzerland?
1) Britain was at war directly with Germany in 1942, but Germany is not fighting Russia, Ukraine is, as the proxy, so German corporations can afford to profit form this war as the government looks away. Big difference. There's Realpolitik and then there's idealistic fantasy.
2) Britain could afford to declare war on Germany because Germany didn't have nukes, while now Russia has nukes and Germany doesn't. Even "better", Germany made its economy dependent on Russian gas. Britain didn't have its economy dependent on resources imported from Germany. Huge differences that make such comparisons not even in the same ballpark.
That a Ukraine loss is seen as the end of a free Europe (because Russia wouldn't stop at least until at least DDR Germany borders), is why the other European nations are collectively increasing military spending.
So if (when) American support disappears, I expect Russia to continue to not go anywhere fast while wasting a lot of lives in the process. I also expect this to surprise Putin, as he thinks Russia is a Great Power and therefore can only be stalling if Ukraine is supported by another Great Power and doesn't recognise that (1) Russia isn't, and (2) the EU kinda is, sort of, when it feels like acting with unity rather than as 27 different nations.
The sole reason Germany annexed Czechoslovakia was was that there were atrocities being committed against the Sudeten[0].
He even made a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin in which he stated that the Sudetenland was "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe". So all's fine, and we don't have to worry about Germany.
One big difference, is that the opposition to nazi Germany was relatively weak before the start of WW2:
After Reginald Drax's mission to Moscow failed, the Soviet Union ended up signing its famous non-aggression pact.
Italy was allied, Spain was neutral/aligned. Turkiye was neutral.
Poland could only count on UK and France[0].
Compare to now, where the NATO military bloc is massive. No one would dare risking a military confrontation in these circumstances.
If anything, when there are any tensions between two non-NATO countries, it makes it more urgent for one to oppose the other joining NATO (attacking before they'd join NATO would stave off them joining, attacking after they'd join NATO would lead to an unwinnable fight).
The article you cite says nothing about the /alleged/ [by Hitler as a pretext for annexation] atrocities against Sudeten Germans. The expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia _after_ World War II was an ugly chapter, but really -- there were no 'atrocities' being committed against that population /before/ the war. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudeten_German_uprising
If we are to be completely rational, what made no sense was Ukraine thinking it could be a part of NATO, or independent. It is the sad reality of existing next to a superpower. You cannot be independent. It would either be heavily influenced by Russia, or the option B they chose: in rubble.
Russia stopped being a superpower with the fall of the USSR. And before anyone says so, "has a permanent seat on UN security council" doesn't count, the UK and France also have that status and even combined were no longer superpowers by the time of the Suez crisis. Likewise "has nukes" is not sufficient.
The EU is closer to being one than Russia is today, and even then the EU is only kinda a bit of one in some measures but not all.
To hazard a guess: because Google et al think you're the kind of person who clicks that kind of source.
When I search for list of superpowers, I get superheroes — obviously nobody on Marvel or DC is going to be listed as having "Russia" as their superpower, but this does illustrate what it is that search engines do these days, and it's not objective truth.
I could link to Wikipedia, which says of Russia "potential" superpower (along with the EU, China, and India), not currently an extant superpower. But that's not what I'd call "authoritative".
And this is the point where I got that link to the CIA's paranormal research. The CIA's World Factbook doesn't even describe the USA as a "superpower", at least not at the time of writing: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/united-stat...
What of those two options did Finland choose? In reality Russia shares a land border with 14 countries, 6 of which are already NATO members (of the others the second largest border is with China). And the countries they have only a maritime border with are Japan and the USA.
The sad reality is that your logic is just a twisted pretzel to support the position you wish to take which is you support Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Which US policy do you think caused Russia to invade Ukraine?
Was it the one where the USA, along with the UK and Russia, all jointly signed an agreement to respect Ukraine's (and several other post-USSR nations') independence and sovereignty in their existing borders (as of 5 December 1994), including an obligation to seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used", so that Ukraine would give up the nuclear weapons it had accidentally inherited from the USSR?
Put it another way: given your stance on the US mil-ind complex, do you think this war would stop if the USA completely vanished from the international scene?
Because the EU is right next door and also doesn't want Russia thinking it can do stuff like this.
If Russia attacked Ukraine because it considered applying for NATO membership that would be years of not decades away why did Russia not attack any other country that actually started the process of joining NATO and did actually join.
This line of reasoning is exactly why everyone bordering Russia is preparing for an invasion, and why no one deludes themselves with "Mr. Hitler will surely stop at Poland." It's not about NATO, ethnic Russians, or any other common excuse, but a fundamental collision between an imperialistic view of the world (represented by Putin's dictatorship) and a cooperative one (represented by the EU). Nations are naturally drawn to the EU, which does not force them to live under someone's boot, and Putin tries to stop that through raw violence.
> The sole reason Russia invaded Ukraine was that it was flirting too much with NATO.
Which was only a problem for Putin because Putin's world view is that Great Powers (such as Russia, in his mind) should have a sphere of influence, whereas most everyone else thinks Ukraine is a sovereign nation who has the right to decide for itself which treaties it does or doesn't belong to.
Even then, more like begging than flirting; the invasion made it much more likely. Likewise EU membership.
.. which has had the effect of forcing formerly neutral Finland, which shares a border with Russia, to join NATO.
The claim that Russia has a right to dictate the alliances of other countries simply because they border it is ludicrous and violates international law.
(Simo Häyhä had something to say about last time Russia invaded Finland)
Putin (et al.) has already proven to be stupid : the invasion of Ukraine was going quite well for him since 2014, he could have continued salami slicing it while the EU was still mostly asleep (and not willing to make a fuss as a Russian hydrocarbons importer).
But no, he went for a 'quick' victory instead, and ended up bogged in a much higher intensity war, made the Russian military a laughing stock, and kicked the EU/Nato bees nest so hard that another 2 countries immediately joined NATO.
> Europe will increasingly be ran by right-wing autocrats shredding the social state and blaming immigrants.
This does not:
> Ukraine losing the war will be the end of Europe
Both the question of losing (the war is somewhat stalemated, and Europe itself is rearming .. although still not breaking dependency on Russian gas!) and the idea that this will somehow "end Europe". If anything, Brexit pretty much demolished similar movements across the EU. The EU's squishyness is mistaken for weakness by too many people who are fans of "muscular" rhetoric.
> Pendulum has swung too far to the left, while the best long term place is as usually somewhere in the middle (which would still be extreme left by US standards but who cares about that)."
Is there an EU state government where a left-wing party has the majority? I can't think of one, certainly not one of the bigger countries in EU like Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland...*
Ok yes, let's count Spain. But this still is a blimp compared to the whole of EU, and certainly does not warrant saying "Pendulum has swung too far to the left"
> US has trump and I see no end of US anytime soon, sure some self-harm is happening right now but thats about it, that nation is stronger than that.
That remains to be seen. Trump and his goons are breaking apart the foundations of society as we speak, not to mention the decades of Republican gerrymandering. The complete and utter loss of trust in the US on the geopolitical stage is another huge issue, it will be a long time before Europe or Southern America trust the US again - the hope that Trump would be a short-term one-off event went out the window last year.
> Compared to hard focus on socialism that was (and still is) prevalent in EU, some better balance is required in these times.
Where outside of Spain does Europe actually have socialists even as part of the government?
Most countries here are run by the far-right (e.g. Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, the Netherlands), centrists/conservatives (Germany, Poland, Croatia), Social Democrats, neoliberals (France) or coalitions of these.
> Nah I am not worried about [Russia], they are consistently unable to wage modern war to benefit of us all.
Never underestimate the willingness of Russian leaders to sacrifice their population for meat-grinder wars.
> In the meantime we arm and train ourselves, stronger Europe is always better for any future scenario, internally and externally.
Agreed, the problem is we can't be arsed to actually evolve to a truly federal society anywhere close to the US. Economically there has been a lot of integration happening, but politically... oh that's one hell of a clusterfuck.
Let's wait and see what happens over there with the upcoming elections, and VVD isn't centrist IMHO but center-right. The voters of Wilders aren't gone, there's still a sizable far-right potential that leads the other partys to follow Wilders (the same problem as in France or Italy, it doesn't work to copy the far-right, it only makes them stronger while eventually the democratic parties erode).
Ok, let's just take your facetious argument on face value.
So that's $5.80 / hr in our land that has a minimum wage of $24.95 / hr. Still, a bit over 20%, crappy for sure (if it was true).
Now, of course, most people are not on the minimum wage, and definitely not here on HN. The tax system benefits those at the low end more though, so let us look at median wages.
Median hourly wages (in main job) are $40 / hr (Source: ABS - August 2024).
Median incomes are actually a touch higher (because not just main job), at $102,742 / annum, which attracts a tax rate of 21%, before the MANY MANY middle class welfare rebates we get (Source ATO tax calculator for 2024-2025).
So, for most of us, maybe we pay approximately our Monday to the State, but that gives us free school education, one of the world's best health systems per $ value (seriously, there are studies!), not to mention a relatively well functioning society (roads, police, firefighters, etc), on top of that we get the horrendous welfare state that you are bemoaning.
That welfare state includes things like the NDIS, which is out of control and needs to find an equilibrium between all the rent-seekers, but the ambition is amazing! We SHOULD support all our disabled people to be the best they can in society! Meanwhile, even with such a fuckup, we're doing ok. Pull your head out, mate.
Do we have issues? Hell yeah. But our terrible "social security state" is not the start of them at all.
> Number of welfare recipients in Australia: about 5.4 million, or about the entire population of Melbourne.
That's the number of unique Australians who get any form of income support at least once in a full reporting year, and there are a number of one off and short term payment types.
It includes many people who are working, a number on pensions, likely children (I haven't dug deep, etc), students, and others.
It's not the case that there are 5 million dole bludgers spending the year on the piss at the TAB, pulling bongs on the couch, etc.
>Democracy can last only up to that point the majority realise they can vote themselves largess from the public purse.
You wish people would go back to forming loving families, but you believe people will naturally leave others to die in poverty and sickness once their eyes open.
I have co-worker like this, he had minimal insurance, until he crashed his car and lost like 15k, doesn't need insurance for his cat until 2k vet bill, doesn't need doctors, until he gets sick..
You didn’t really answer GP’s point, though. What if a big, strong family is struck by disaster (multiple earners lose jobs or die, or one member develops, say, an illness or huge debt which consumes the entire family’s resources)?
Those kind of scenarios aren’t that rare even in places with very family-first social safety nets (which, incidentally, are often places with high poverty and low standard of living).
The big welfare state was born in the post-war boom, a period of big, strong families that believed in the future.
The dismantling of the Family and of the Welfare State, and of Unions, and of any kind of support and collaboration between salaried people go hand-in-hand. Late stage capitalism needs to extract everything from everyone, without opposition. Having people desperate for a job at any cost because they don't a a support network is the ideal state for our managers and bosses.
> The number of elderly Australians who live alone with no family, or no family nearby, is truely disappointing.
That's a thing across all Western societies, and we got unchecked rabid capitalism and a complete lack of industry structural politics to thank for that one. Young people not living in an urban area have little choice but to leave there to find employment and higher level education.
If this administration doesn't want to do anything to solve climate change, that's their choice. It's a terrible choice, but it's in their power to do so.
However, there's a huge difference between dismissing the severity of the evidence vs. going out of your way to hide evidence. The first is born of arrogance. The later is naked cowardice - they know exactly how wrong they are. If they wanted to project strength, they could simply leave the reports up and say "we don't care". Instead they scurry around behind the curtains trying to cover their tracks. Fucking pathetic.
I'm not sure that's a fair argument. When social media takes down what it perceives as misinformation, the right uses the sunshine argument. "Leave it up and let the best argument win."
In any event, just because you don't like the conclusion doesn't mean it is biased.
I was just pointing out the incorrect logic of the comment:
If you believe they’re biased, removing them is removing false legitimacy from biased content — something the government has an interest in. And no different than a journal retracting a flawed paper.
And since you want to discuss “fair argument”: there’s an obvious difference between allowing discourse on a public forum and publishing as an institution.
Journals remove papers that break rules, e.g. fabricating data or boning your postdocs. You seem to be waving at all of climate science and saying they all fail the same scrutiny. And you use the vaguest possible accusation: "they have bias", something that could be said or every scientific paper.
I’m not making any claim, but it’s clear the people accused of removing them feel the bias delegitimizes the results — so the OP’s logic is incorrect. As I originally said.
Also, factually, they’re merely transferring the website to a different department, so this whole argument is moot.
I hope it's true that the hosting duties are simply passed to NASA. Surely you've seen enough in the past six months to not assume the stated plan is their actual intention.
From the article: “ The White House, which was responsible for the assessments, said the information will be housed within NASA to comply with the law, but gave no further details.”
It doesn’t seem like the admin believes the reports are biased and need to be removed. Cool conspiracy though.
For those who prefer their news without pop-overs galore, autoplaying unrelated animation/video, requests to enable notifications with only yes/later options, claims to care about your privacy despite wanting to share your details with hundreds of other companies, etc.: https://archive.is/Tu51y
As a non-American, the most painful thing about all of this is seeing how much the world has relied on America's charity for so long.
Had other supposed economic powerhouses invested in their geographic and atmospheric science the same way the USA has, this would've been a rather annoying blip on the radar. We'd need to quickly get our backups out of storage and host them elsewhere, and go without American data points for a couple of years, but most things would be fine.
Instead, it's now becoming clear how much just about any country but China, Russia, and Iran has relied on American scientific investments, and even those seem to freely incorporate American data when it's provided for free.
I have no doubt that all of the atmospheric, oceanographic, and environmental science the American government has all been for strategic purposes, either directly providing information useful for the military of providing a believable excuse to install sensors all around the globe, some of which have been "enhanced". Still, as long as your country is friendly to the American regime, you were getting huge amounts of useful scientific data out of that deal, enough not to set up local alternatives.
Here in the EU, scientists have been scrambling to safeguard data like this since the day of Trump's reelection, but it seems like governments here don't seem to be all that interested in funding any of the work the Americans have been doing.
Still way too much capital in the US for now. If every US citizen with a post graduate qualification emigrated most of them aren't going to find better jobs. Better lives maybe. It is frustrating to see so much money from around the world invested in the US when it could be invested at home. Hopefully the current trends will change that.
Right, nice savings and opportunities for fossil energy industry. Good job.
So what is the plan for handling the US nuclear warhead stockpile as the empire crumbles? I'm worried about billionaires with nukes. Maybe not the person directly but people behind all that envision super wealthy city-states and I totally expect those to have nukes.
The nuclear codes won't stop anyone with time and engineers. These are intended for physically arming the strong link in the warhead that is supposed to send the signal to the exclusion zone but someone with unrestricted access should be able to override it and send the signal directly. Although over the years the mechanical systems were replaced with electronics that eventually become encrypted microelectronics, IIUC the actual device that does the kaboom remained with its original design and applying voltage will be able to trigger it. Safe against rough handlers(i.e. crazy solders) but won't stop people with unrestricted access.
> IIUC the actual device that does the kaboom remained with its original design and applying voltage will be able to trigger it
That is not my understanding. My understanding is that the proper implosion requires very precise timing of signals for each shaped charge element otherwise the implosion ends up being lopsided and the nuke fizzles instead of exploding. These timings depend not just on the shape of the charges, but also on the relative wire lengths from the detonator to the explosives. (In theory these wire lengths can be unique for each warhead, thus making the timings for each warhead unique). The detonation circuit is not just comparing the code with an expected one, but using it to create the right signal timings. In other words the right code plus the information in the electronics together gives the timings for the signals with which they propagate through the different length of wires such that they form the right implosion.
To reverse engineer this you need to figure out when each explosive element needs to be triggered to form the explosion. Then you need to figure out when the signals need to leave the electronics such that it travels through the wiring looms just right to create the desired explosive pattern. And then you need to figure out what code you need to supply the electronics so it produces this desired electronic timing to achieve the above.
That is three wickedly hard challenge. And you will only know if your people pulled each of them off corectly, when you try to detonate the warhead.
> won't stop people with unrestricted access
That is true. But it is not like all they would need to do is to apply voltage on a single line, like some crazy hot-wiring car tief. Their best and easiest bet is to dissasemble the warhead and use the fissile material from it inside of an implosion device of their own design.
You may be right, the reason I assumed that the controller that controls the detonation itself was contained in the exclusion zone since earlier safety mechanisms were mechanical. So if they modernized the safety mechanism maybe they didn’t change the exploding part and all they need is power to prepare the device and then a simple signal to trigger it ?
I think there must be a plan after the USSR collapse. Somehow they did not let rough agents obtaining the warheads but there were enough rumors, literature and media around it to prompt a consideration IMHO.
By the time you could act it's too late, if you don't want to dismantle the nukes independently. It's a consequence of the existence.
Just imagine Biden having commanded to trigger a process which destroys the nuclear material (by triggering some degeneratio process or something) would that have been accepted or would everybody have said that limits U.S.'s strategic options permantly in too high degree?
tl;dr: the Soviet state didn't collapse in the manner of a zombie apocalypse or environmental catastrophe, it collapsed politically; there was continuity in command / control until the weapons were all moved back physically into Russia.
It's a real shame but at least there other nations still doing this work like China and various Euro countries. Sad to see the USA transition to a banana republic. This belief that MAGA party has that the US can't do big things any longer and only corporations and broligarchs know how to lead us forward is just sad.
> This belief that MAGA party has that the US can't do big things any longer and only corporations and broligarchs know how to lead us forward is just sad.
Especially given the Musk/DOGE recent experience.
Musk takes over Twitter, fires 40% of the workforce, and nothing much happens.
Musk takes over the US Govt, fires <10% of the workforce, and things stop working.
From this we should conclude, obviously, that the government is run much, much more efficiently and with less slack than any of the Big Tech organisations (who are also all busy laying off 10s of % of their workforces, apparently with no ill effect).
An insistence - in spite of the reality - that you're a democracy seems likely prophetic.
Right now though I think you can say the US is just back-sliding. Trump threatened to arrest Mamdani for I guess being very popular or something but he doesn't seem to have even attempted to actually do that. Once it's actually gone, Mamdani just gets imprisoned or executed so that Trump's preferred candidate "wins" regardless. The technology of democracy is still there, but the actual principles it supports are gone.
> An insistence - in spite of the reality - that you're a democracy seems likely prophetic.
Lord of War:
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
How in the world did Juche become our national philosophy? I'm not sure, but I think about it all the time now.
I'm on HN, so I tend to want to blame the ad industry. It's pretty nebulous to think that "made in America" directly snowballed into this; so many things did. The freakier nativism in advertising really could use a break right about now though.
I do think USA-flavored Juche does some explanatory power for the group as a whole, even if the individuals lack any specific philosophy beyond hill climbing.
Likewise, “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer describes some of the political processes that got us here. That along with “The Family” by Jeff Sharlet to provide a little color to the religious side.
One of the underlying contradictory elements in the national philosophy of America since its founding has been white supremacy. Yes, that conflicts with "believe all men are created equal". No, this hasn't been properly resolved despite periods of extreme violence. I believe it's the anniversary of Gettysburg about now?
Hence the $45bn for putting people in camps. It's right there in the budget. Of course, that drip-fed in bipartisan fashion: there have been (smaller!) internments of immigrants for a long time.
I think the "advertising" was the billions spent on what were effectively anti-brown ads to help sell the Iraq/Afghan wars. Meanwhile in the 2000s the GSEs did not disclose their financials bc if they had perhaps the people would have felt the wars had a cost.
Since then it's been gradual attacks on press freedom (WL exposed fraud/propaganda in the Iraq/Afghan wars) and massive profits by the defense industry, resulting in dramatically more lobbying money. Not to mention the US automotive industry and major banks getting bailed out and preventing many small economic corrections that should have occurred.
Then 20 years after 9/11 when the US has spent 10s of TRILLIONS on wars and virtually nothing on infrastructure, industrial policy, etc., everyone wonders why China appears to be close to leapfrogging. The anti-brown propaganda and "USA USA" jingoism back in the early 2000s is still fresh, benefitting candidates with xenophobic and jingoistic messages. Many feel real economic pain but don't understand that you don't spend $20T without consequences -- plus scapegoating the weakest members of society is apparently more emotionally satisfying.
By the time we got the pandemic both parties realized that they had more to gain from fiscal irresponsibility, and the tribalism of the government's anti-brown propaganda combined with the "multicultural solidarity" focus over class warfare by Dems, led to increasing tribalism and tribe-focused media. Now a large percentage of the population lives in a complete information bubble and is close to worshiping its political favorites as though they are religious icons.
Thus now regardless of which party is in power, there will be a shift to censor and suppress information that is viewed as harmful to society. I honestly blame both parties for their share of this, but the ultimate culprit is feed algorithms that are optimized for emotionally potent content that creates engagement (and ad dollars) and nothing more.
What is actually fascinating about the orignal TikTok is that the algorithm was so much more useful at showing interesting/appealing content that it pretty much overtook Insta, YouTube, and Netflix and required government intervention to stop its growth. This shows us clearly how the major social media platforms were not just wrong about how to maximize profits but wrong on how to entertain and engage people, mistakes that are only possible when there is really not much competition, which is how we now do capitalism in the US -- and by the way if you win you get nationalized.
It's actually where the Heritage Foundation has been trying things out before using in America. The connection between Heritage, Orban, and Trump's circle is concerning. At this point, Trump is more their useful idiot who can be the populous frontman. He's a symptom of the larger frustration with govt and growth in inequality
There are so many red flags with this administration that I lost count. Policing speech, suppressing information, cutting research funding, cutting social programs, increasing spending and intensity for deportations, deporting people for political affiliation, an unnecessarily disruptive economic policy and many reports of general incompetence, lying and corruption.
The new tax bill, which benefits asset owners (wealthy), older people, and the beneficiaries of the wealthy.
When you have a population age histogram that is flattening and eventually an upside down triangle, you need some way of extracting labor from the young and giving it to the old (the chosen ones who can afford it) to maintain the socioeconomic hierarchy.
The young without inheritances won’t ever have it as good, so you’ll need to distract them and otherwise fool them into believing it is their duty to transfer their earned income via earned income taxes to the elderly.
I don't think it really has a whole lot to do with socioeconomic hierarchy; I think that's just a happy accident.
Old people vote. Old people vote in midterms and odd timed elections. Therefore, old people decide the candidates. Any politician would be smart to court them as a voting bloc.
As for the benefits for the wealthy; that's just the same old bullshit in a new protectionist wrapper. Get my friends and family as much benefit as I can while I have the ability sort of thing.
Old people voting in their own interests at the expense of young people is them trying to maintain their higher position in the socioeconomic hierarchy. There is a secondary component related to skin tone and ancestry as well.
Nice theory, however you’re believing people vote for their best interests, and the above comment believes they’re deluded by misinformation.
I think both are occurring. Young white men went GOP, why is that? Anti vaxx leftists went with Kennedy, why is that? Why do anti-immigration and pro-economics claim the top two republican policy slots, when they’re firmly opposed in their effects on the economy? This is the contradictory trend of delusion and cult of personality.
If the BBB just passed is an indication, I think overall we are more on the deluded side, most of these deluded non-rich white folks are more anti-immigrant than pro-economics.
Of course I do not believe GOP economic policies are better than the alternative, I’m not the one who voted for that policy regime however!
Hold on -- the regime recently welcomed refugees from Africa! If only we could understand why that group, versus the ones they're actively deporting. If only there was some pattern, a clue or hint as to what matters to them...
Because Biden was much better at doing than talking about what was done, and in an absence of words any words dominate.
The Democratic party needs to stop looking at election results as mistakes by underinformed voters, and start looking at them as feedback on engagement.
Why do we need to "tackle" the demographic collapse? The CEO of Ford just said he expects 50% of white-collar jobs to be eliminated soon. Tax the AI and you'll have plenty of money for retirees. There's nothing wrong with naturally, and gradually, going back to the population levels of 1980 or whatever.
I don’t see a way to avoid population decline, assuming women have freedom and access to 100% effective birth control.
The whole process of pregnancy/birth//breastfeeding/infant rearing sucks, so that most women will opt for 1 or 2, max.
Then you have to account for all the men and women who opt to stay single (or queer or whatever). The number of women that need to have more than 2 kids to offset those with 0 and 1 will never happen.
The only possible mechanism to align incentives is to remove all old age benefits and wealth transfers, so that one likely has to depend on their children. But even then, I doubt it would work.
What do you mean? I see no success so far across the world, and simply paying people to have kids is the wrong incentive (since badly raised children are worse than no children).
> paying people to have kids is the wrong incentive
I absolutely agree. Childcare is horribly expensive and just easing the burden of that would make parenting far more palatable to those who would otherwise be good parents.
>The payoff is very obviously genocide and the reestablishment of chattel slavery
The Trump administration is deplorable, corrupt, grotesque and ridiculous in so many ways, not to mention dangerous, but seriously, get off it with these kinds of declarations. Such hyperbolic nonsense just shuts down genuine possible inroads into protesting against this government's uglier things and paints those who oppose it as hysterical lunatics.
Genocide has a real definition, and so too does chattel slavery. They're literal, specifically barbaric things whose definition only gets watered down by every random idiotic accusation of either happening because someone can't get a grip on their emotional outrages.
I see zero sign of Trump's government committing or even planning for genocide at the present time, and likewise for chattel slavery.
The deportations to third-party country are deportations, not mass slave sales.
the genocide no, but the chattel slavery is a clear and obvious goal.
or rather, its pretty well already here? thats the US government choosing to not raid farms if the farm owner will be the owner of the immigrants they hire.
the shipping people off to be tortured in south america might not be a sale of the person, but its awfully close, and i think youre overly focusing on the experience of the slave driver and not the enslaved person
I think downvoting comments like the parent exacerbate political polarization. Definitions of words such as "genocide" and "slavery" indeed is problematic and arguing like the parent doesn't imply being a Trump apologist.
Remember when Biden called the war in Ukraine a genocide? Didn't you think it watered down the word? If that's a genocide, does it mean we need a new word for holocaust-style genocides? Do we need to start saying things like "oh, yeah, this is a genocide alright, but not quite as much as the real ones in Rwanda and Germany". Is this really what we want to end up having to say?
That being said, prison labor combined with strong ethnic bias in the police force is very, very close to genuine slavery. What was this gross thing with the corrupt judge again. Kids For Cash? or something like this? Slavery.
It's worth noting that their policies with regard to global health initiatives are currently killing 88-people every hour, on average. Mostly children.
Wow, talk about a completely loaded and dishonest definition of cause and effect. I personally think that the U.S should fund these programs for health overseas, but saying that it no longer funding some of them is killing 88 people per hour is completely off base. The diseases these programs addressed are what kills 88 people per hour, not some U.S policy. Since the U.S doesn't have a legal obligation to fund such programs, you claiming them as responsible is like saying that because you don't donate X money per month to some anti-malaria charity (for example), you're killing some group of children that would have had their malaria treated in those months by your specific donation.
Remember when Biden called the war in Ukraine a genocide? Didn't you think it watered down the word?
No, it did not "water down the word." It is the stated position of Vladimir Putin that the Ukrainian people are indistinguishable from Russians, with no identity of their own. To that end, his forces have been kidnapping Ukrainian children and "repatriating" them to Russia since the invasion began.
Feel free to point me to a single instance of Trump administration genocide and i'll happily reconsider my thoughts. I'm no fan of this government, but hyperbole does nobody any good.
I agree that "genocide" might be a bit hyperbolic, but I think it's important to note that pretty much all genocides historically were done covertly, and under the guise of legitimate policy. If there were a genocide going on right now, it's entirely possible most people would not know and it could even be hidden in plain sight.
The progressively worsening attacks on the ability of trans people to exist in daily life.
Depending on how you define the Ten Stages of Genocide, we for sure have crossed the 3rd stage of genocide with all the state level anti trans bills and Trumps executive orders, and they’ve also engaged in stages 4 and 6. They’re not pressing on the brake, there’s a lead block on the gas pedal and they have repeatedly professed to wanting to erase us from public life. Trump released a campaign video about it in Feb/March of 2023.
>The progressively worsening attacks on the ability of trans people to exist in daily life.
Really? Care to name an example of their being persecuted legally by the administration in the way you claim? For example, there were multiple huge gay pride parades in the U.S just recently, which are visibly and vocally attended by trans people too, and I didn't see federal agents or police of any kind going at them at any point.
That executive order is for the benefit of female athletes who have been disadvantaged and adversely affected by male-inclusion policy. The order is not "anti-trans". Its purpose is to restore fairness and improve safety in women's sports.
This is just one clear-cut example of the administration prosecuting genocide. There are others, there's plenty of boogeymen.
Assuming you disagree that this is proof of genocide-in-progress, please explain to me how an official policy of ethnic cleansing is not prosecuting genocide. It will be illustrative.
In parting, a digestif, courtesy of the prominent far-right ideologue who's made public claims of a lurid sexual relationship with Trump:
Ethnic cleansing: "with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group"
"Mass killings" is a big detail which is hard to overlook. If we can't agree where ethnic cleansing includes mass killing it's hard too agree if ethnic cleansing is taking place.
Personally, ethnic cleansing to me sounds like Rwanda or Yugoslavia, which is not happening in the US yet.
It's a wikipedia definition, and should be weighted as such. There exists a continuous spectrum of arguments about the definition of genocide, with Holocaust-denial existing at one extreme and a hard line against things like forced displacement, systemic/legal erasure, or forced deprivation of a population, i.e. systematic actions that materially contribute to the elimination of a group, at the other. Somewhere in between the two are all the arguments in support of mass atrocities throughout history.
I'm comfortable once we can agree that it's merely a question of degree and that we're indeed very solidly on the genocide spectrum.
I would like to believe Americans are capable of identifying genocide before we've gone full-Rwanda. I would like to hold my fellow Americans in higher esteem than that. I would like a pony.
> Currently, the Trump admin is actually deporting fewer illegal immigrants per month from the U.S than either the Biden or Obama admins did previously.
Interesting, got any source for this claim ?
Whether current claims are overblown or not, I assume that it's what Trump 2 might do next that is a cause of concern for a lot of people. Between his mercurial behaviour, disregard for the rule of law, and some of the previously stated goals...
The situation is quite different of course, but one of the planned first "Jewish Solutions" by the Nazi regime was instead deporting them to... Madagascar.
(A really weird alternative to consider to the current Israelo-Palestinian conflict, huh. Someone should perhaps write an alternative Man in a High Castle story about this...)
Things can turn very bad quite quickly when previous norms of behaviour go out of the window...
I guess they see themselves as high officers in those states. I fail to understand how someone could read about living in a dictatorship and go "yeah, I would like to live like that"
Evidence suggests ~30% of people are content to be worse off in order to inflict a larger loss upon others. This paper makes for rather grim reading but imho provides a very useful heuristic for understanding the political enfironment in an era of mass communication.
Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games
> Evidence suggests ~30% of people are content to be worse off in order to inflict a larger loss upon others. This paper makes for rather grim reading but imho provides a very useful heuristic for understanding the political enfironment in an era of mass communication.
Pinning this on human psychology is ignoring how the game is set up. If you structure something in such a way that the person who gets the most points wins and gets a prize, a move that causes you to lose one point but causes your only opponent to lose two points will put you ahead. That's arithmetic, not psychology.
The issue, then, is when we allow things to be structured that way -- as zero sum games. Instead what we should be doing is stamping out anything that fosters artificial scarcity.
Moreover, as the paper points out, that's what happens in dyadic systems. Which is to say, two party systems. If you have the option to cost yourself a point but cost one of your opponents two points, that's an advantageous move in a two-party system, but not in a five-party system even with a zero-sum game, because then you've cost yourself a point against three of the four other parties. So if you want to get rid of that, have your state adopt score voting (specifically score voting, not IRV or any of that mess) instead of the existing voting system which mathematically constrains us to a two-party system.
You don't have to see yourself as a high officer. You just have to imagine that you will be restored to your deserved state. In that state you are slightly better than average, and only those who are morally defective suffer. (Those are the ones who are now unjustly keeping you from succeeding on your merits.)
The high officials are the truly great ones who have restored the natural order. You don't need that. You just require being recognized as somewhat better than most.
You reminded me of the Lyndon B Johnson quote which seems more relevant that ever. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
The trouble with this quote is that it's too easy to misinterpret it exactly in favor of the people it's criticizing.
Racism is a system for pitting poor white people and poor black people against each other. But the perpetrators are not the people in the other tribe, they're the people telling you that there should be separate tribes.
Bacon's Rebellion [1] in colonial Virginia, 1676-7, was a a multi-race and cross-class uprising against the colonial government and the aritocratic planter class. The rebellion's failure was followed by measures that served to alienate the poor white population from the enslaved black population.
> I fail to understand how someone could read about living in a dictatorship and go "yeah, I would like to live like that"
fwiw there are religious people who read about the great kings in the bible and wish they had one of those today, and they vote (not endorsing, just sharing my experience)
More importantly, US oligarchs are religious. Mostly evangelical, mormon or some postmodern derivative, like Thiel, Yarvin, Musk and their ilk.
In the US, even people who aren't very religious in practice still harbour religious beliefs like the state of Israel being a divine entity. I.e. like Ted Cruz, who knows some english biblical phrases but isn't religious enough to stop himself from playing golf with the pharaoh, and yet strongly holds on to the antisemitic zionist belief that jews must move to the state of Israel and eradicate their neighbours.
I think Cruz is likely a lot more religious than he puts out only because his brand of religion is, or at least was, too extreme for a lot of people. His father is a fundamentalist leader a la Handmaid’s Tale, which should have been a lot more worrying a lot sooner for a lot more people.
Democracy is complicated. The world is complex, but you get only a limited set of choices (in some implementation a few more, in others a few less) which means the burden in the end is on you. Now you take the wannabe dictator, which takes that all of you "I'm like your dad and will care about all those problems, so you only have to care about your direct environment, doing your job, taking care of your family, all else will be handled"
Wow, that's possibly the bleakest set of opinions I've ever seen detailed.
I can't help but think that this is typical self-loathing and ensuing self-destruction turned towards society itself. I need to read his actual writing, though. I'm sure there's also some element of actively pandering towards people in power desperate to justify their hold through some ideology.
Although it seems more robust in the long term*, anti-intellectualism probably has a cliff of adaptivity, just like academia, ideology, or indeed any collection of values
*The foundations of China's rise can ultimately be traced to the cultural revolution? Now we wait.
Of course I know Thiel is probably one of the most evil people alive. But I suspect he's a lot more evil than he's let us know. But this guy seems to have built his career off of actively propagating resentment and hate. If you read about Thiel's upbringing it's entirely unsurprising the two get along so well.
> Swakomund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism after World War II, including the celebration of Hitler's birthday and "Heil Hitler" Nazi salutes given by residents. In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany". As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.
Just read his Gray Mirror posts or watch a podcast with him. If you really want to get the full experience you need to go back to his unqualified reservations stuff but it can be VERY tedious.
He is simply not that smart nor that interesting. Just a mega cringe-lord loser who got the ear of other cringe-lord losers who happen to be unfathomably wealthy.
Yeah, it's amazing to me that any of these clowns consider themselves intelligent when they end up holding philosophical and political beliefs that the average high-schooler could tell you are completely wack.
The natural consequence of the worship of financial success, strong isolationist tendencies, and social atomization. When you "don't rely on anyone else" and managed to make billions with your "own wits" anything you think must be genius or at least correct, right? It's insane how our current socioeconomic structure has effectively let men with the social maturity of twelve year olds gain absurd amounts of influence and power.
Also not much of a coincidence that Yarvin is an out and out white nationalist, though he denies it, or at least the name: "I am not a white nationalist, though I am not exactly allergic to the stuff" - whatever the hell that mealy mouth answer is meant to mean.
He even wrote a bloviating article to further clarify that he is not a white nationalist. You'd be forgiven though, if you didn't read the title. It spends most of the article sympathizing with, understanding, agreeing with and talking of how white nationalism "resonates" with him. But don't worry, he swears he's not one at the end!
The administration is so devoid of any value it staggers the mind. The only thing that I can agree with is that our dependence on China is not a good thing (Oh yes, and minimizing governmental fraud and waste) -- the concepts, not any of the actions done to address these concerns.
What makes this mess even more disheartening is that about of third of the population loves it.
Let me fill you in on a secret: one of the reasons behind US’s dominance is that even though “there are other countries” that could do the hard science, the US is one of the only ones that did. Now the US is at risk of becoming just another one of those “other countries“.
>NOAA was caught using data from weather stations with faulty equipment and positioned next to new heat sources and only moved to correct the issue when confronted so I'd say this is entirely justified. The first step in any scientific process is clean data.
Assuming this uncited assertion is true, why would it be "entirely justified" to simply remove it without any particular reason as to why, nor discussion around the concern over data accuracy? Seems to me that the scientific community would be better served with an open dialogue rather than mute removal.
Yes, normally in a case where data were later shown to have been taken incorrectly, you would remove just the incorrect data but leave an unmodified copy of the old data available somewhere. Or, just leave a very prominent note about the change with a detailed explanation somewhere else. You would not take down everything because 1. That would deprive taxpayers of the correct data they had already paid for, and 2. That would mess up the data ingestion pipelines of the researchers who depended on the data.
Yeah we should definitely make policy based on claims from 15 year old Fox News articles, which are famous for their even-handedness and lack of editorial bias.
"If you use only the sites that currently have good siting versus those that have not-so-good siting, when you look at the adjusted data basically you get the same trend," said Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch at NCDC.
Lawrimore admitted that Watts' volunteers had discovered real problems with sensor siting, but he said that even when those sites' heat readings were adjusted down, they still showed a steady overall rise in temperatures.
"The ultimate conclusion, the bottom line is that there really isn't evidence that the trends have a bias based on the current siting," he said.
And surface station data is only a small subset of information confirming the warming of the climate, Lawrimore said.
> Wrecked rain gauges. Whistleblowers. Million-dollar payouts and manhunts. Then a Colorado crop fraud got really crazy.
> The sordid story of two ranchers who conspired to falsify drought numbers by tampering with rain gauges on the plains of Colorado and Kansas, resulting in millions in false insurance claims
They never do. I always look up users like this after the fact and it’s always clear to me they got lost in sauce online, ended up on HN, and think they can just get away being edgy in a room full of professional nerd snipers.
“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which coordinated the information in the assessments, did not respond to repeated inquiries”
Nobody is jumping to conclusions, lots of climate related information is being scrubbed. This website has been down for at least 12 hours. The fact that the domain is still registered proves precisely nothing.
Could it be a misconfiguration? Sure, but available evidence points to an ongoing attempt to erase everything related to climate change.
> “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which coordinated the information in the assessments, did not respond to repeated inquiries”
Except they did, as I found an NPR article with official comment, and there's a link downthread to this much better article about the same thing, again with authoritative reply:
No you said it’s probably a dns configuration, posted some pointless name server addresses and implied government sysadmins are incompetent.
What actually happened is exactly what this article said and I wouldn’t be surprised if they get no response from NOAA because of the administration’s well documented feud with the AP.
And if you believe NASA will publish anything beyond the most perfunctory version of this report under this administration I have a bridge to sell you.
I said that barring better information, you can't rule it out. Still true.
> posted some pointless name server addresses
They're government servers, is the point. And don't you find it a little bit curious that someone bothered to change the NS records? It's not the usual way that a website goes down. In fact, it's the sort of thing that happens when you're in the process of (potentially incompetently) moving a domain from one server to another.
> What actually happened is exactly what this article said and I wouldn’t be surprised if they get no response from NOAA
Yet other reporters, from multiple different left-leaning news outlets, managed to get these elusive comments from super hard-to-reach people like...the White House press secretary for science policy. It's almost like there was a press conference or something.
Sometimes you actually have to do work to be a reporter, and when you skip that part and jump directly to conspiracy, it's not defensible. It's just trash journalism.
> NASA will now take over, Victoria LaCivita, communications director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told ABC News. "All preexisting reports will be hosted on the NASA website, ensuring compliance with statutorily required reporting," LaCivita said, referring ABC News to NASA for more information.
So, they're explicitly answering the second half of that question. Again, not suggesting the fact pattern is good, just that this article is terrible. I assume the AP could have also managed to get the same quote before running to press with speculation?
> It's from your source. It's the very last sentence in the article as of right now.
Sorry, what? I don't have any affiliation with ABC. Someone else posted the link.
NPR has the same basic comments [2]:
> All five editions of the National Climate Assessment that have been published over the years will also be available on NASA's website, according to NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens. NASA doesn't yet know when that website will be available to the public.
How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
I didn't say that. You've been posting it everywhere and called it a "better source" that we should all read. Calling it "your source" is a reasonable shorthand.
> How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
I didn't say that either. I only pasted a direct quote from an article you urged everyone to read. How you get from that to what you're saying is beyond me.
> I only pasted a direct quote from an article you urged everyone to read.
Mea culpa, I missed the line because it was at stranded at the bottom of a bunch of blocked ads. About the only thing I can say is that "NASA" and "any details" is doing all of the heavy lifting in that sentence.
The reporter just quoted someone from the administration saying that they'll follow the law. So the reporter runs over to NASA, doesn't get an immediate or exact answer, and says "OK, I'll just make it sound like maybe they're being dodgy about following the law, then."
Its a fairly standard reporter trick, but it's sleazy nonetheless: "At press time, we've received no answer from the man about when he stopped beating his wife."
> > How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
> I didn't say that either.
I now realize that this language could be misconstrued. I wasn't literally talking about "you". I meant it as "how one gets from that statement to..", and I was talking about the reporters.
>How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
In case you've missed it, the current administration lies constantly and loves suppressing views it doesn't like. Hosting a document is not rocket science. There is zero reason to take something down before having the new host up and running. That this has been done anyway suggests malign intent. And the current administration is long past getting the benefit of the doubt.
Is it really that unreasonable to believe that a government run by people who’ve regularly called climate change a hoax and has a history of pulling previously public data is pulling the public data about climate change? I don’t disagree that jumping to conclusions is bad but intentionally discounting prior behavior seems just as reckless to me.
i’ve noticed a large uptick over the past couple years of some people insisting it’s unreasonable to consider context and known past behaviors when we try to discuss things.
again, no, it’s not unreasonable. actually it would be incredibly silly, more unreasonable to ignore their past behaviors when discussing this.
I’m not “discounting prior behavior”, I’m just not getting exorcised over shutdown of a website, particularly when the explanation is likely to be incompetence.
Be real: do you honestly believe that this website was influencing any marginal opinions? I don’t. Most of the people here who are so outraged likely had no idea that this website existed before today.
This is a case where a website is a political flag, and one side is upset that the other side took down their flag. It’s all just tedious and dumb, has only tangential relationship to science, and makes exactly no difference to the world.
Yeah. The copium and ignorance described as "reason" is strong.
This administration really shows you that there are several people out there that are so dense and naive that they'd want to give their oppressors a "fair shake" and "look at the facts" (issued from the oppressors) before daring to question the justice of their own persecution.
Some Americans and Europeans have apparently had things so cushy they can no longer discern when their systems and institutions are actively being destroyed. The very idea of systematic and active oppression is so foreign to them that their "reason" becomes unreasonable. The democratic establishment in the US is a blatant example of this. Let's allow the neofascists to do whatever they want on the ground of remaining "civil".
That's a better article than the link, since they actually bothered to get answers to the question from definitive sources. NPR also linked directly to the NOAA copy of the report, lending credence to the "sloppy relocation" theory of the case:
If they already fired the staff of the agency, it's actually pretty believable that the dedicated website would get shut down. Talk about burying the lede.
That's hopelessly naive. A "misconfiguration" is the excuse they use after the fact when there's enough outrage that they have to put things back the way they were.
I'm not being hopelessly naive. It's certainly possible that they took it down with the explicit intention of hiding information on the internet, but that would also be pretty stupid, since various articles have found the reports on other government servers. So I assume incompetence before malice.
What's already known is that they fired the staff who prepared the report, and are presumably shutting down the agency. Is it really surprising that someone might have turned off the webserver before transferring the domain?
You are being repeatedly pummeled in the face by a gang of bullies and responding by pondering whether or not they may be continually assaulting you out of some kind of misunderstanding. lol
Yes you are. If you’re arguing in good faith then you should try to answer this question:
How far does it have to go before you assume malice? Do they have to tell you “I am malicious”? And if someone malicious is using the “dont admit it” strategy are you fucked?
Sure, it is always DNS. But are other sites on that DNS also down? How long has this site been down? Has anyone acknowledged this outage?
If the DNS is up and the domain is registered it starts to look like a takedown instead of a mistake.
I do know that the EPA took down their EJScreen [1] dataset so it’s not like politically motivated takedowns are unprecedented under the current regime.
There is a very large amount of redundency in enviromental data gathering and reporting, plus given.the most basic facts that it is impossible to close source the information source, and that there are now countless sensors on.earth and in orbit that can be re calibrated to provide conitiniousl'y consistent new data to older ongoing studies, there is essentialy nothing that can be effected by a political directive to actualy stop reporting, short of martial law, and then people would start printing pamphlets with potatoes and coffee dregs
NOAA released their budget estimate for FY 2026. Someone in our org ran it by copilot to summarize the impacts:
* NOAA eliminates most climate, weather, and ocean labs and grants, causing major layoffs and loss of research capacity.
* National climate research infrastructure is lost, with staff reductions.
* Regional climate services, adaptation, and heat health programs end.
* All climate research grants are cut.
* Foundational ocean observation and Great Lakes research are terminated.
* Sea Grant support for coastal resilience and aquaculture ends.
* Aquaculture research and ocean science partnerships are stopped.
* Funding for uncrewed systems R&D is eliminated.
* Research computing for climate/ocean modeling is reduced or lost.
* Many programs shift to operational focus (NOS/NWS), with layoffs in OAR.
* Regional ocean observing systems and applied coastal research are ended, with grant losses and layoffs.
* State coastal management, resilience, and estuarine reserve grants are terminated.
* Support for coral reef grants and marine sanctuaries is reduced; no new sanctuaries.
* Species/habitat research, salmon recovery, and habitat restoration programs are cut, with major layoffs.
* Satellite/data services are reduced, with staff cuts.
* NOAA Office of Education is closed; mission support staff reduced.
* Overall, there is a major workforce reduction and elimination of many programs.
But look on the bright side: a relative handful of ultra-wealthy will pay slightly less in taxes. That’s got to count as positive news for them!
It just occurred to me that SEAMAP will be* gone, and I didn't notice because the people looking ahead at these sorts of things while I kept my head down and worked were all fired. I will need a new job.
* I say will be, because it was already cut down to size last spring.
Speed-running global warming with our eyes closed. Fun.
Right when warming has accelerated dramatically, too, such that we will see more warming in the next 10 years than we have in the last 40.
Those cuts couldn’t have come at a better time. /s
Where do you see that warming has accelerated dramatically? NOAAs graphs don't show that.
> NOAAs graphs don't show that
Good one...
Luckily, there's more in the world than NOAA. If you just search 'global warming accelerating' on Google, there are plenty of sources. I can't seem to find the 'more in the next 10 than the previous 40' stat and 'dramatically' is obviously subjective, but it doesn't look great.
If you look at some predictions from people specializing in permafrost methane ejections, it looks pretty bad even.
We're talking about recorded data, not predictions. If you think NOAA's data is wrong then it seems like a good reason to support taking down those climate reports?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up
I liked the idea behind the movie, but the movie itself wasn't very good. It was a bit like the movie Mickey 17, it didn't quite know what it wanted to be and tried to be a lot of things, but none of it really stuck and it ended up being a bit incoherent. The ending I thought was powerful though.
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> Being preached at about science by a population of people who probably mostly failed high school science is not a good time.
I agree with the part about preaching, but fair is fair: they were preaching scientific consensus. They preach what is said by the overwhelming majority of active scientific researchers in this field.
You didn’t say they were wrong I agree, but still .. they were (/ are) right. And why should they be perfect, anyway? They are who they are, flawed and all, but they are right about this and they were right to make that movie and they were right about people being selfish.
Ironically you could say that we are now basically reenacting the movie, proving its point. There’s an asteroid heading for us and here we are, judging the high school grades of the people telling us about its trajectory.
I thought it was very depressing and surprisingly self reflective and poignant in that sense.
So? There’s more to a movie than being right.
It wasn’t a documentary, and even if it were a documentary, a dreadful, preachy, insipid movie that is technically right is still bad.
(I say “technically right”, because let’s not forget that this film was supposed to be a satire.)
I don't think the movie was snobby: it was full of over-the-top gags, and it was clear to me that the movie was never taking itself too seriously.
The main character (played by DiCaprio) is also depicted as a quite flawed and vain human being as well.
Also honestly, who doesn't feel frustration at the whole real-world situation the movie is actually about?
People who complain about being "preached" at while the world burns behind them are exactly the kind of people the movie is poking fun at
Precisely. But just as scientific literacy, media literacy always was, and still is, a huge problem.
> about science by a population of people who probably mostly failed high school science
Your assumption that actors (and writers, those where the ones “preaching” more than the people on screen) have failed highschool at a higher rate than the general population is, I think, rather flawed¹. There are some very bright people in the entertainment industries for one reason or another (doing what they enjoy, and presumably are good at, instead of something else they are good at, being a common situation, there being more money in stardom being another).
Hence a number successful stand-ups who have degrees (in the sciences, not necessarily “media studies” before someone pipe up with that), PhDs, law certifications, and such.
Hedy Lamarr is the best known poster child for this, but too many think she is a singleton exception rather than an indicator that we shouldn't make too many assumptions about what acting talent might imply about other mental abilities.
----
[1] And, in fact, more snobby than the film you are critiquing as being snobby!
Actors act, writers write. You seem to be confused about who was "preaching".
I've confirmed that both writers of the movie graduated high school, and one of them even graduated college.
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Why would you assume people that went on to have successful film careers failed high school science? Just because someone doesn't pursue science as a career doesn't mean they received bad grades in it, especially at a high school level.
Without regard to the broader point* in the particular case of Leo, I’d be surprised if he had great k-12 science education. He was a child star already at that point, right? Only so many hours in the day.
Of course, it isn’t a universal rule, see Dolph Lundgren, etc etc.
* I don’t care if the actor delivering an environmentalist message in a movie is actually good at science for the same reason I don’t care if Keanu Reaves knows king fu.
I’m not assuming anything - this is why I used words like “probably” and “mostly” - but let’s just say that I’ve known my share of actors, and I’m willing to take the odds.
It's so funny to me you'd whine about "preaching" and then take such a needlessly judgemental and demonstrably false stance, and then double down and lie when it's pointed out. Truly, a person of science.
Where did I "lie"?
I expressed an opinion.
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C'mon bud, you've got a PhD. You don't really need some uneducated filth to point out how you were disengenous.
But just in case: you made a prejudiced assumption and then boldly claimed you didn't. And you didn't state an opinion, you presented it as (probable) fact. You can couch it with all the adverbs you want, your own snobby disdain shines right through.
I said a movie was bad because I don’t enjoy being lectured about science by actors, many (if not most) of whom have only the most tenuous grasp of science. I wasn’t being “disingenuous”. I meant every word. It’s fine if you think I’m a snob, but I’m not “lying”.
Y’all seem to have a hard time accepting that some people might not like propaganda, even if it is propaganda for things you support.
Your still lying. Saying you didn't say something which you very much did, and then claiming you said something completely different are forms of lying.
It's not the opposition to propaganda folks bristle with, it's the self-important passive aggressive elitism.
> I said a movie was bad because I don’t enjoy being lectured about science by actors, many (if not most) of whom have only the most tenuous grasp of science. I wasn’t being “disingenuous”. I meant every word.
I not only said it, I repeated it, and then re-confirmed that I meant what I originally said.
Agree, great idea, strong ending, kinda saggy middle.
I loved the concept for that movie. I found the execution rather lacking, though. In the end, I wouldn't recommend watching it. Just watch the trailer instead, yo'll get the point without needing to finish the entire thing.
And two decades before that, Inconvenient Truth.
And way before that, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here
The section of the population that needs to think about the Inconvenient Truth didn’t watch the movie, because they don’t watch documentaries unless it’s about a Poop Cruise, or a celebrity.
Too many high price celebrities. I’m sure they’re all great people, but I was more focused on them than the actual movies message which is an issue.
I think we rely too much on government mandated websites than we do practical common sense that could save lives.
For instance, over 175,000 people die from heat exposure each year across the WHO European Region. Compare that to 1-2k in the US.
In this case, the Don't Look Up scenario is that people don't want to get A/C and governments sometimes make it very hard for them, killing hundreds of thousands because... I don't know why. But at least EU has nice proclamations and accords on the risk of climate change.
https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/01-08-2024-statement--h...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2822854
The first number is based on statistical observation of mortality rate the second is based on classification by doctor at death. It's not comparable at all. For example, if there is an increase in heart related death when it's hot it's not accounted in second stats.
WHO European region also covered Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and other countries from central Asia so I don't see how you can conclude anything about EU with this piece of statistic. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WHO_regions)
Cold still kills at least 2x the number of people in the same region. 363,800 deaths are attributed to cold exposure.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/21/heat...
Couldn't they push heat pump units that cool and heat (with a bonus of not being reliant on wood or natural gas)?
Or do the regions that matter the most get too cold for heat pumps?
How do governments make it "very hard" to get A/C?
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> Several EU countries have mandatory temperature limits for air conditioning in public buildings. Spain, Italy, and Greece have all announced that A/C in public buildings cannot be set lower than 27C (80F) in summer
How does that make it "hard" to get A/C in private homes? And are there a lot of heat-related deaths at 27C?
> The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioning
You should maybe look into why those exist. Air conditioning refrigerants are themselves major greenhouse gases and many deplete the ozone layer. Try also comparing those regulations to American ones. They're likely not very different.
> 90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it
The US is richer and hotter. There's nothing like Florida or south Texas or Las Vegas or Phoenix in Europe.
> There's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations
Do tell...
> some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK...
Did you write this with an LLM or something? The third link you provided says nothing of the sort. It's about tint regulations on automobile windows FFS.
Not the GP, but there are some regulations about windows, not sure if local or EU-wide. Windows at floor level above ground level must not be fully openable or must have an outside barrier. But thats a pretty sane restriction, given those windows are basically just glass doors to nowhere.
I would be amazed if much of the US didn't have a similar building code that there must be a railing if there's a possibility of easily falling out the window/door.
That 27C limit seems to have been due to the energy crisis in 2022 and restrictions were lifted in 2023.
The last source you cited is AI slop and is not even related to your message.
What does this have to do with government mandated websites? Seems that the US had a government website about climate and few heat deaths. If the number of heat deaths goes up this year without the websites would you think that is because the website went away (obviously not).
Seems like a website with information about climate change without a mandate about max AC is a pretty conservative strategy all things considered.
Awful misinformation.
The WHO European Region includes Central Asia and Russia, massive populations that aren't in the EU.
You cant draw ANY conclusions about the EU from this data.
i think what contributes the most to my sense of dread is the feeling that if you were to tell these decision makers in govt right now "but this'll kill people!" they'd respond "good"
They don't care about people. Senator Joni Ernst when told that people would die due from the spending bill responded with, "Well, we are all going to die."
And then doubled down with a later Instagram post making fun of everyone. How are these people our elected officials? It’s unbelievable.
>How are these people our elected officials? It’s unbelievable.
Voters are stupid?
They’re not stupid. These voters see government as a means to enact cruelty on outgroups they don’t like. That’s why they vote for cruel people who don’t care about hurting others. They are not stupid. They know exactly what they are voting for and are overwhelmingly supportive if it.
That sounds so incredibly short sighted I think it could still be reasonably described as stupid.
We shouldn’t excuse these voters as merely stupid, like they’re just innocently ignorant or uninformed. They are deliberately malevolent, and vote specifically for cruel, terrible politicians because they, themselves are cruel and terrible people and desire such representation.
And they are not just supporting cruelty. They are cheering and screaming for it. They want more.
It's no excuse at all, just pointing out that the malevolent/stupid dichotomy is a false one.
I feel like my understanding of politics dramatically improved once I considered that some voters are malevolent. Some voters consciously support inhumane policies, but due to social pressure, they feel that they can't be truthful about it.
So they will claim to be in favor of more socially acceptable policies, but vote against those policies giving some nonsensical reason, and it gives the appearance of stupidity.
I've spent some time reading r/leopardsatemyface, and there's just an unending stream of people who say something like "I didn't vote for this. I voted to inflict this cruelty upon other people, but now that it's coming for me I'm upset. Please redirect this toward people who deserve it. That being said I still support Trump."
This quote from 2019 really sums it up:
The "good thing" he needs to do to according to this voter is "hurt people who deserve it".I've honestly tried to avoid this conclusion for years, thinking there has to be more to it, but at long last it seems there's not. People want to hurt other people, and they see Trump as their vehicle to do so, because that's what he promises; "I am your justice...I am your retribution" was his literal campaign pitch. [2]
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
[2] https://www.c-span.org/clip/campaign-2024/former-pres-trump-...
What's the quote? "A Republican would happily eat dog shit if he thought a Democrat would have to smell his breath".
That is the Wizard's First Rule for a reason.
"Wizard's First Rule: people are stupid." Richard and Kahlan frowned even more. "People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."
I think many are single issue voters. I read a Reuters piece following 20 Trump voters and many voted because they thought he would make the economy better. Misinformation is strong.
> How are these people our elected officials? It’s unbelievable.
Because they know that the vast majority of people advocating for climate change to be a high priority issue is because they want to use that to slow down capitalism - the system that made the US the country they love.
I never hear growth-minded solutions for climate change: Let's get rich enough so everyone (even European hotels) can afford AC? Drug companies make enough money so even poor Africans can afford medicines and theraputics? Deregulate the solar industry? Reduce regulatory barriers for autonomous vehicles? Fast track nuclear power? Stop the fight against ride-sharing?
If the problem was climate change & it was a severe existential issue, I'd assume you'd support all of the above?
> Because they know that the vast majority of people advocating for climate change to be a high priority issue is because they want to use that to slow down capitalism
Is this really what you think? That the people concerned about climate change are really just interested in changing economic policy? The real motives of environmentalists is to erode capitalism? Respectfully: that's nuts.
> Let's get rich enough so everyone (even European hotels) can afford AC
This "proposal" does nothing, and in fact makes things worse, if that AC is not clean energy! Your "growth-minded" solution is not only not a solution, it's a problem exacerbator. But yes, many of us do in fact advocate for deregulation of the solar industry (I have canvassed on this very issue), and support fast tracking nuclear power. And is there even a fight against ride-sharing to stop?
I just feel like your comment is coming from a different world than my own.
> The real motives of environmentalists is to erode capitalism? Respectfully: that's nuts.
Is that really controversial? Reducing consumption and crippling new economic developments like mining/pipelines/logging/large construction projects etc has always been a huge part of environmentalist movement.
Even here in Canada whose economy depends heavily on oil, lumber, and mines...One of the biggest responses to US aggression is to try to reverse that as opposed to years our of GDP growth declining in favour of climate activism and interference by native groups stopping any new projects.
You can't even build a road in BC without activists stopping it.
idk about the US but it's hard to find any industry not impacted by it here.
Is it really controversial to say that most environmentalists want to protect ecosystems, not destroy capitalism? No, it's not controversial, it's just wrong. Must protecting ecosystems mean a hatred for capitalism? No.
You’re taking effects (slower pipelines, fewer logging permits) and making those effects the activists’ "true" goal. In reality, many of the people campaigning for stronger environmental safeguards are business-friendly too, such as 1000s of economists (and many Nobel laureates) have backed a carbon tax because it uses market forces to cut emissions.
Calling for long-term accounting of environmental costs isn’t anti-capitalist.
That's not a motive, it's a consequence. There's a difference.
Is environmental destruction a motive of capitalism? Of course not, and it would be crazy to say that. So why say the opposite about environmentalists?
Worse, AC in cities is counterproductive because it noticeably raises the surrounding temperature.
(And then it's the poorest people, those that cannot afford AC, and there will always be some (starting with the homeless), that suffer because of it.)
> Is this really what you think? That the people concerned about climate change > are really just interested in changing economic policy?
Yes, Here's some examples:
Environmental Justice and Economic Degrowth: An Alliance between Two Movements
https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2011.648839
You can read this wonderful socialist article
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/04/01/marxian-ecology-dialect...
Or from "International socialism"
https://isj.org.uk/degrowth-and-marxism/
Or you can get a degree!
Master's Degree in Political Ecology Degrowth and Environmental Justice
https://www.uab.cat/web/postgraduate/master-in-political-eco...
This is an irritating strawman. I never claimed that no environmentalists have socialist views, or that the movements don’t sometimes overlap in policy preferences even when their motivations for such policies are wholly different.
My point is simply that the vast majority of climate advocates are arguing for policies that conserve and preserve what we have into the future, and that demand the long-term costs of many of our current policies and practices are actually accounted for vs. kicking that externality to the future public. There is no hidden agenda to upend society.
Many of the desires practices are growth-friendly fixes: carbon pricing, deregulating solar, advanced nuclear[1], electrifying transport, ceasing public subsidies for coal and oil. They aren’t campaigning to upend capitalism itself, but to adapt our economy so we can continue to thrive without cooking the planet, destroying ecosystems, and damaging long-term health of the natural world we rely on for life, not just recreation.
Pointing to a handful of degrowth manifestos or niche graduate programs doesn’t prove that mainstream environmentalism is really a Trojan horse for anti-capitalism. If you’re looking to debate climate policy, let’s stick to the proposals most people are actually pushing—and whether they’ll work—not whether some fringe authors happen to share an ideology.
[1] Not all environmentalists support this, I'll grant, but I don't know any who don't personally
> the vast majority of people advocating for climate change to be a high priority issue is because they want to use that to slow down capitalism
I feel like that's something you want to believe so that you can dismiss legitimate concerns about environmental destruction.
Because that's like saying capitalists want to grow the economy faster to destroy the environment. Which is obviously crazy and untrue.
I love capitalism. I'm also deeply concerned the way it's run currently will destroy the world my children will inherit. These aren't contradictory ideas. Why can't we capitalism better?
There is no other, better, more humane form of capitalism. Capitalism's only concern is the generation and control of capital by the capitalist class. It isn't that capitalists want to destroy the environment, it's that they don't care about the environment beyond it being a resource to be exploited and consumed. "Better capitalism" just means doing more of that exploitation faster and more efficiently.
I don't know what you love and call capitalism but I suspect you've been convinced that as a system it has some inherently moral dimension. It does not, and cannot. It's a paperclip maximizer, that's all.
> I don't know what you love and call capitalism
Private property and competitive free markets. I just don't like where they end up. I think they need a firm hand to keep from turning into a paperclip maximizer. Maybe that's impossible, but we can't know until we really try.
It's not like other systems have a better track record on environmental protection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
>It's not like other systems have a better track record on environmental protection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
Socialism is the firm hand keeping capitalism at bay. Environmental laws, labor laws and the abolition of child labor, the 8 hour workday, weekends, minimum wage and overtime, disability rights and social welfare (such as it exists in the US) are all due to socialist activism in spite of the free market. The Black Panthers are the reason American schools have free lunches.
Well great let's have more of that without losing private property or instituting central planning.
While it is a view that seems to piss off most, I am becoming convinced capitalism and socialism are both equally doomed paths if taken to their unchecked extremes.
An endless game of tug-of-war between the two is the best we can do, and right now it is pulled way way too far in the capitalist direction and needs to be yanked back hard.
Right? This Cold War era mentality of "If you say anything bad about capitalism, you're a dirty commie"/"If you say anything bad about socialism, you're an imperialist pig" is fucking exhausting and pointless.
I don't give a shit whether something is capitalist or communist or socialist. I care about results: prosperity, freedom, happiness, sustainability. Do whatever makes it happen.
Exactly. To the extent that a politico-economic system is concerned with anything other than how the capitalist class can maintain control of society through control of the means of production, it is not capitalism. Of course, platonically pure capitalism is rare, and even relatively pure capitalism is mostly a thing of the past since most of the places it was present replaced it with mixed economies in the mid-20th Century, but that's not "kinder capitalism", but simply less capitalism.
> Senator Joni Ernst when told that people would die due from the spending bill responded with, "Well, we are all going to die." reply
Well, how many times has she seen a doctor in her life so far? Of course, more than one. Then, why did she do that if she is eventually going to die one day?
Because she doesn’t see herself as “one of them”.
She is the living embodiment of the Lord Farquaad meme: “Some of you are going to die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take”
It's not even hypothetical:
https://www.latintimes.com/trump-ally-slammed-saying-alligat...
At least we know what to do with the guy when he finally gets convicted.
>I really don't care, do you?
I just feel extremely sad about the mass quantity of events like this happening right now because they are all aggregate to huge negative effects but the average person knows nothing of it. It feels so unfixable.
They certainly want us to feel like its unfixable, but it's not. Were govt to put the effort into the energy transition that we saw in the early days of covid we could zero our emissions, and relatively quickly. The technology is largely available, it needs to be implemented.
The ties between the fossil fuel industry and the far right are clear. Apathy, indifference, inertia, they are all products of propaganda and updated Cambridge Analytica methods.
Fossil fuel interests will stop at nothing to further their greed.
All of this is extremely easily fixable, from a technical standpoint. But, every solution would make some rich guy very slightly less rich, so its going to be an uphill battle where we have to fight for each step.
If there's some proposed legislation that would make things notably better for 50 million people, but would cost an insurance company 100 million dollars, then that insurance company can spend any amount less than 100 million fighting the bill and still come out ahead. Even 10 million can buy a lot of lobbyists, and almost guarantee torpedoing the bill.
Meanwhile the 50 million people are working 80 hours/wk across three jobs just to put food on the table, are stressed about how to pay rent, and don't have the personal cell phone number of their congressperson even if they had the time and energy to call them.
The failure for Democrats has been to convert those 80 hours/wk and poor economic conditions to support.
Trump can increase inequality and make wealthy people wealthier, but says he's doing good for poor people. If things get better, it's because of him. If things get worse, it's because of someone else.
Ergo, poor people support him.
I'm not sure "failure for Democrats" is the right way to frame it, because the system is working as intended, and the Democrats are responding to the lobbyists rather than the people, same as Republicans.
Your choices are the party of billionaires, or the party of billionaires except we don't hate gay people quite as much.
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You weren't paying attention to his Twitter, then. The far right turn was extremely obvious.
You can pinpoint, fairly easily, the year Elon turned from eccentric to insane to sometime in 2019 just by looking at his wiki page. It’s so weird.
Huh, makes me wonder about claims that it’s a reaction to his daughter coming out as trans. That happened publicly in 2020, according to wikipedia, but it probably came up in private beforehand. The timing is close enough that it seems likely. It’s interesting to note since I wasn’t really familiar with the timeline of his villain arc.
No one becomes transphobic when a family member comes out as trans, it's usually the opposite
I agree that it's not the usual response, but given Musk's strong promotion of natalism and the fact that he has used IVF to select XY embryos for _all_ of his offspring...
? It's uncommon for trans people to still be on good terms with their family. Coming out often gets terrible reactions.
Am I misreading this it are you claiming the family of trans people becoming more transphobic when they find out not common? Because it's extremely common. There's a reason the joke exists: Don't like in-laws? Date a trans person and you won't have to worry about them!
I think it was "pedo guy" which broke something in him.
Maybe... But to me that whole incident seems more like a symptom than a cause. IMHO (disclaimer: pure conjecture), Musk must have been "broken" prior to engaging in such behaviour.
> The ties between the fossil fuel industry and the far right are clear.
The fossil fuel industry has ties to anyone who will promote their business.
> Fossil fuel interests will stop at nothing to further their greed.
Exactly. Nothing. If tomorrow the left advances their interest be sure that the fossil fuel industry will just as quickly attach to them.
Is there a term to describe "whataboutism but it's not even happening"?
I believe the term is "dishonesty".
> "whataboutism but it's not even happening"?
What's not happening? I think you are confusing what "whataboutism" is? "Whatabout" the exact same fossil fuel industry OP referenced? I corrected a misconception that OP had, and I guess so do you: that the oil industry cares about political affiliation. To you this probably sounded like a support of the right, and whatabouting the left. Least effort interpretation meets trigger happiness.
The oil industry has monetary affiliations and intrinsically sees no political color or affiliation except in the interest of making that money. The other way around, the US right has a strong preference for the oil industry, while the left has less. But I was clear that I'm looking at it from the industry's perspective: the oil industry doesn't care about right or left. They will without a doubt allow any tide to lift their boat without any moral argument. This distinction is important. Plenty of places in the world where the oil industry is affiliated to the center or left.
Again, there's nothing intrinsically "right wing" about the oil industry, there something strongly "oil leaning" in the US right-wing.
An example that captures this a bit is Musk publicly supporting and having ties to the democrat administration for years when it benefited him and the EV/green agenda. He had no qualms shifting to supporting the republicans when he thought this will benefit him even more despite the right being anti-green. You can bet that he'd try to switch back if the tides turn again although this time it's hard to come back from what he did.
Source: worked in the oil industry for years.
'whataboutism' was not correct term here just search vector for similar effect.
I would call it maybe 'relativizing'. Like making everything so relative that anything could happen in theory while taking away attention from the fact (hence similarity with whataboutism) that it just (or mostly) happens in one specific case. So Oil industry would align with 'Left' if 'Left' aligned with Oil industry, but that is not relevant take since it is not happening.
And using Musk is not example of this case because he is not part of oil industry.
> Like making everything so relative
That industries shift affiliation if it brings them money is not "relative", it's just something they show again and again, some more than others. I don't care about US politics right/left but as someone who worked in the oil industry I can guarantee you that the industry will shift its affiliation towards the side that makes it more money. Many industries do this, much of the left leaning tech sector collectively kissed the boot of the Trump administration, shoveled money his way, and clapped on order at his inauguration. It probably wasn't ideological but pragmatic.
> And using Musk is not example of this case because he is not part of oil industry.
And yet he is, as the perfect example of changing affiliation for money. The poster child of the traditionally left EV/green industry slinking away to the famously non-green right. How many examples do you need? Worldwide the oil industry doesn't show a particular preference to the right, it does without exception show preference to the side making them more money.
> And yet he is, as the perfect example of changing affiliation for money.
Musk has never changed affiliations.
You can look at his political contributions. Like most of the ultra-wealthy, he does donate to both political parties. But he has never donated more to the Democrats than the Republicans.
In fact, in the average year, for the last 16 years (I went back as far as I have lived in the US) he's donated, eleven times more to the Republican party.
Musk has been libertarian at best, not liberal. And even that is sketchy. It's fine for him as CEO to go on podcasts and smoke weed and have "the highest ability to process ketamine on the planet", but work for Tesla or any of his companies and you'd best piss clean, or you're out.
> I can guarantee you that the industry will shift its affiliation towards the side that makes it more money
Which in this case is just 'right-wing' side. I get that they would shift to other side if it fits but in reality there is no other.
> And yet he is, as the perfect example of changing affiliation for money.
He may be example of "of changing affiliation" for money - even if this is also arguable - but still not relevant to topic of that fossil industry goes hand in hand with right-wing agenda.
Why do you want to move attention from the relation between right-wing politics and fossil industry by creating hypothetical scenarios that are not happening and by moving the goalpost of the topic with examples that are tangential at best?
You are correct. The fossil fuel industry will fund anyone who will take their money and push their greedy agenda. The difference in the republicans are normally the only ones who will stoop that low to sell out future generations for power today. That’s why no one cares about your false equivalency.
> That’s why no one cares about your false equivalency.
It's more because people especially in the US are so partisan and self-centered right now that anything that even remotely sounds like it doesn't fully match their views leads to brain shutdown and autopilot rage mode.
That's why it takes 3 very clear explanations for you to understand but still not quite (understanding takes effort and brainpower, but anyone can mash the trigger for free). That's why you can start by saying "you are right" and end with "but nobody cares because the 'publicans/libs". And that's why things are going the way they are over there.
The big problem is people tend to look at history as a singular event, or the final consequence of a series of events.
When such events are clearly ongoing, people roll their eyes and say you're overreacting. Then when it all ends and consequences happen, people say now is the time for healing, nobody could've foreseen this, and it's too bad nothing could've been done.
It's the same as being sober and trapped in a car with a drunk driver and their drunk friends. To them, it's fine. They're comfortable with what they're doing. You're the one being annoying for complaining. But their every action is not only endangering you and themselves, but it's endangering people on the perimeters who don't even know about the crisis that's happening within that 2 ton box. Some can see the swerving from far away, but there's nothing they can do. The only hope is the passenger trying to reason with an angry drunk to pull over, but it'll never happen. They'll just get more pissed off and drive more erratically to mess with you and to get some laughs from their friends. So it's a struggle between closing your eyes and hoping it's over soon, or trying to fight back and hope you can stop them. But neither option is easy and both shift the responsibility to someone other than the ones causing the chaos.
It is fixable, but we are going to have to wait until the mid-terms to slow down the insanity, so in 3 years we can roll it back and start the cycle over again, as is tradition.
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Please don't post grand pronouncements about a nation's merits or future like this. All it does is invite others to respond with opposing grand pronouncements about other countries or regions, leading to what we can see here: a huge flamewar about nations and regions.
The guidelines ask us to avoid flamebait. Please make an effort to observe all the guidelines in future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Doubt with the whole tech stack. Germany is using a lot more Palantir in the police. I'd love to see change.
Germany produces not much valuable SW yet their police surveillance state has no issues making use of foreign developed spyware tech (Palantir, Pegasus) against its citizens if they say the wrong things or are not part of the political establishment.
Do you still get threatening letters with fines at home when you download a pirated movie?
I have been pirating on and off for almost 25 years. This wasn't a problem in my early years so I learned and know all the sides of it. I would have definitely got those in my early days. But the whole thing started way later and they should still be around.
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Please don't perpetuate or escalate nationalistic flamewar here. It's against several guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> #1 among high income countries in Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, drug overdose deaths, Deaths from violence and accidents, Infant mortality, Obesity-related mortality.
...and also #1 in healthcare costs, which just adds an expensive insult to multiple injuries.
Is that per capita or total?
In the early nineties Andrew L. Shapiro wrote an entire book on this theme:
https://www.amazon.com/Were-Number-One-Stands-Falls/dp/06797...
So the U.S is number one in several largely irrelevant and in any case partly ambiguous rankings of X and Y, and this is your counterpoint to the very hard facts of it still being the world's richest, largest, most dominant economic and political power, and continuing to stay that way for the foreseeable future due to how hard it is for any other major country to just magically supplant such positions?
The quality of reasoned political and economic debate on this site, so full of self-congratulatingly intelligent people, continues to be generally absurd, deplorable and full of cliched foolishness passing for opinion.
> #1 among high income countries in Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, drug overdose deaths, Deaths from violence and accidents, Infant mortality, Obesity-related mortality.
It's all originates from each person's decisions. If a person wants to pay attention to their lifestyle and health, then in the US he will get one of the best results in the parameters you listed. That is just a fact.
And if we want to maximize these parameters among everyone, we need a ultratotalitarian government that will put all the people into concentration camps where they will work under threat of execution in the open air and eat a specially designed low-calorie diet.
> It also has its lowest-ever World Happiness Rankings.
Yeas, and North Korea has the highest.
> The U.S. is currently leading in global declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence.
And that's good thing. For decades US has been doing atrocities all over the world, to the approving cries of other Western countries. So the only problem with US declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence I see is that this should have happened decades earlier
> If a person wants to pay attention to their lifestyle and health, then in the US he will get one of the best results in the parameters you listed. That is just a fact.
Is it? What are some obstacles to a similarly committed person attaining health/lifestyle benefits in other developed countries? What are the factors uniquely provided by the US that make this “fact” true? Are there factors in the US working against good outcomes for committed people?
> What are some obstacles to a similarly committed person attaining health/lifestyle benefits in other developed countries?
Poverty, underdeveloped medicine, less variety of relevant goods and services
> > #1 among high income countries in Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, drug overdose deaths, Deaths from violence and accidents, Infant mortality, Obesity-related mortality. > > It's all originates from each person's decisions. If a person wants to pay attention to their lifestyle and health, then in the US he will get one of the best results in the parameters you listed. That is just a fact.
If it is a fact, you should be able to back it up.
> And if we want to maximize these parameters among everyone, we need a ultratotalitarian government that will put all the people into concentration camps where they will work under threat of execution in the open air and eat a specially designed low-calorie diet.
Or the government could actually regulate things like food additives instead of just going with whatever industry lobbyists are saying. Sure, lobbying is of course a thing here as well, but clearly there are still differences there.
Hell, things like infrastructure funding could be used to encourage things like walkability which also helps with the health and quality of life of the population, but alas.
> > It also has its lowest-ever World Happiness Rankings. > > Yeas, and North Korea has the highest.
No, Finland has the highest. North Korea is not even ranked in the World Happiness Report.
> > The U.S. is currently leading in global declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence. > > And that's good thing. For decades US has been doing atrocities all over the world, to the approving cries of other Western countries. So the only problem with US declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence I see is that this should have happened decades earlier
While I am sympathetic to this line of thinking as a European myself, the current way this is going on over in the US just looks a bit silly. Basically just going out of its way to shed any remaining goodwill and soft power because... what, exactly?
To piggyback on what PaulDavisThe1st said.
Record numbers of US citizens seeking to relocate to Canada & the UK. In the last couple months I remember seeing several news stories variously about Doctors, Professors and students applying and/or relocating.
Layoffs in the tech sector haven't slowed at all, and couple that with the DOGE Govt layoffs and the recent jobs numbers stories.
I feel quite certain that if the U.S. is actually measured "at #1" for anything good, it won't retain it much longer.
Bias Disclaimer: I'm a former software engineer working an hourly labor job.
US citizens relocating to Canada and the UK seems misguided at best.
At least the US has at least a handful of themes to choose from among its many states.
UK has a lot of themes, they're just all moist.
https://fosstodon.org/@georgetakei@universeodon.com/11478482...
(proposed/desired reductions in federally funded (NSF) science positions for FY 2026. 250,000 (75%) reduction in numbers)
EDIT: see also: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/american-science-bra...
Pulling back on federally-funded research grants for the sciences does not address how the economy, hard power, and culture of the States will completely fall off the map leaving an "irrelevant nation" though.
The US has no real exports. All of its economic might was because it has its top tier market, and all that wealth is essentially from its soft power and position. The more you peel off that soft power, the weaker that position especially as wealthy and educated people leave.
I don't agree that the US won't be relevant, it's more like the US will resemble the position of Russia in the next decade than the position it is in right now.
The US is exporting over $3 trillion worth of stuff per year:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports
China exports more, but China also must import more, including more of the things needed for the survival of its people, like food, fertilizer, fuel.
The US exports aircraft, vehicles, and medicine, and the rest of the exports are just raw stuffs, like oil or corn. How's Boeing looking these days? Is the US auto industry where exciting new technologies are coming from? Unless the US is going to be great because we export more coal, then I too expect some decline.
US exports: https://www.ondeck.com/resources/every-states-top-import-exp...
The last big round of global innovation was internet services, of which I'm pretty sure (not having looked it up) that US exports represent the majority of world exports.
Apple keeps half the sales price of every iPhone whereas the last I saw Foxconn gets only a few dollars per phone for the final assembly. It used to be that most of the expensive components (display, memory) in the iPhone were supplied by Japan, S Korea and Taiwan, but I admit that that might have changed over the years.
It looks like cell phone exports are about 30 billion dollars, which is 1% of the 3 trillion dollars mentioned earlier. I'm surprised it's so low. (I'm open to corrections on these numbers.)
Here's my estimate, taken mostly from figures from Apple's 2024 annual report (as reported by Gemini Flash).
Apple's total worldwide revenue for fiscal year 2024 was $391.035 billion. The Americas Segment (which includes the US) represented $167.05 billion of that, leaving $224 billion for the rest of the world.
Apple reports that their cost of goods sold was $210.352 billion, leaving 180.68 billion as so-called "gross profit". The majority of this gross profit will be used to pay salaries and other expenses (e.g., office space) of having employees, most of which goes to Americans. (Most of the rest will be "retained earnings", which means it either goes back to investors or is used to try to generate new streams of revenue.)
But only some of that gross profit will come from exports. Let's assume that exports are as profitable (per unit of revenue) as US sales are, which seems reasonable to me because competition (mostly from Android) would be the main thing keeping gross profit low, and Android is a major competitive force in the US market, so estimated gross profit derived from sales to the rest of the world would be 180.68 * (224 / 391.035) == $103.5 billion. That is revenue from all products and services, and Apple reports that revenue from the iPhone is 0.5145 of all revenue (worldwide) or about $53 billion per year flowing from the rest of the world to Apple (and to governments in the US in the form of taxes).
To be clear, that's assuming that zero of the hardware (more precisely, zero of what accountants call the "variable cost") that goes into an iPhone is bought from US suppliers (which seems a reasonable assumption to me).
Your argument is that Apple exports are 3% of exports then? Did I understand correctly?
"Exports" is hiding a lot of complexity here. Some export statistics might add the entire price of an iPhone to the export figure for China because that is where the final assembly is done even though (like my previous comment shows) about half of the money from that sale ends up in the hands of Apple's investors, US-based employees of Apple and such US-based suppliers as the companies that built Apple's headquarters and the companies that supply Apple's offices and data centers with electricity.
If we go away back the argument was that the US has no real exports. You've been arguing that phones are an export, but you admit those are built by other countries. It seems fair that the country that makes a phone and then exports it would be given credit for that in the statistics.
I'm not sure what the point of this thread is anymore, so I'll stop here.
So it is immaterial to you that Foxconn gets about $5 per iPhone sold and Apple get about $500?
It's about the "next big thing" not what happened 20 years ago.
Sure, but how are you and I supposed to know which country will win the export market for the next big thing?
We could guess, but there's been a lot of guesses (confidently made out to be facts and inevitabilities) made in this thread so far. I'm trying to ground the discussion in actual facts.
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Please don't do this here.
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A, yes. Freedom, and freedom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjMqda19wk
The US is number #1 on income and tech (IT/Software in particular). It lags in many other areas.
> Remember, the U.S. is currently still #1.
Currently, but even then by nominal GDP not PPP (China's way ahead of the USA already by PPP). Nominal being different from PPP is not just about cost of living though: the US dollar is artificially high by about 10% due to being a dominant reserve currency, and China has a policy of keeping their currency weak. Flip both of those and China would be about equal nominal GDP as the USA.
Also consider that the comment you're responding to said "next few decades", and consider that China's GDP grew at four times the rate of the USA economy in the two decades between 2003 and 2023: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Nominal+GDP+China+2023+...
And that by GDP/capita, China has room to do the same again before reaching the top of the charts for existing countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
--
But the real critical thing, is that economies can fall very fast when an a poor leader is empowered. Trump is purging anyone who says "no", which is already a dangerous place even if he was competent, rather than someone who tells such obvious lies on multiple health reports (recently his height(!), previously saying an exam had "only positive results" without knowing what positive means in a medical context), or facing a court case because he misrepresented the size of his penthouse apartment.
You remember right at the start of his term, there were fires in LA? And he ordered dams in NoCal opened? That aren't hydrologically connected to LA? When that kind of decision is criticised, it gets stopped. When people around are afraid to say "no", it doesn't stop, and the dams empty. In this case, it would have led to Californian agriculture approximately ending for several years due to the drought, and consequently to food shortages.
Same deal with the currently in progress attempt to deporting all the (Biden's team's estimate) 10-11 million undocumented migrant workers, many of whom are in low-paid agricultural roles, so kicking them out directly leads to less food and higher prices.
Worse than that. Consider that he got RFK Jr as the health secretary: by itself this is likely to have a measurable negative impact on US life expectancy.
Or the trillion dollar healthcare cuts (have they fully passed into law yet? Reporting from abroad is unclear how your system works): also likely to have a measurable negative impact on US life expectancy.
Then there's the incompetent attempt at tariffs, not just Penguin Island, but also that they were without any commensurate attempt to support local industry.
Or choosing a (defence) team so lax that they accidentally invited a journalist to a Signal discussion about active military engagement.
Or that he's banned trans people from serving in the US armed forces despite the US armed forces having recruiting difficulties: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/01/the-u-s-militarys-recrui...
Or consider the reports that Iran's nuclear project wasn't as utterly destroyed as he likes to publicly claim: what happens if Iran does rebuild it all over the next few months, as others say? Does his ego prevent him from responding, letting them get their nuke?
And of all this, only two examples ("positive results" and penthouse size) are more than 6 months old. When does congress get a chance to change, with the possibility of him being impeached (for a third time)?
I don't entirely agree with all of your points, but at least here, an example of someone commenting with something well-argued, instead of the ridiculous vomit of cliches and emotional outrage that so many comments here put forth on any political/economic debate about the United States.
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Please don't respond to grand pronouncements about a nation or continent with one of your own. This just perpetuates the kind of flamewar we're trying to avoid here, and thus counts as flamebait, which is explicitly against the guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You being down-voted is more testament to the orientation of thinking clouding judgment here in HN. Ukraine losing the war will be a massive blow for Europe. Sibling commentator mentioned doubling of the military budget but this disregard readiness of engagement and unity[1]. Nato was the creation of the US and the US pulling out requires, probably, another entity with committed members.
1: https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-grand-plan-meet-nato-t...
>Ukraine losing the war will be a massive blow for Europe
There is no such thing. Even if Ukraine cannot recapture all of the lost territory, it's Russia who has already lost. That a country four times the population, ten times as rich has incurred a million casualties, switched to a war economy, has to throw tens of thousand of North Koreans into a war in Europe, merely to creep forward by a few meters has to be the largest humiliation to an alleged "great power" in a century.
All of this while Europe has not even remilitarized, with Ukraine becoming a major producer of military technology in its own right, the country is now largely self sufficient in terms of its drone output among other things, is one of the strongest signs of resilience of this continent.
>end of Europe
How do you picture this? People in Paris disappear with a flash of light and baguettes falling on the ground? Or is ot more like the earth shakes and it all goes under the water? Or maybe something like Europeans collectively decide to do whatever Putin tells them? Or maybe suddenly adopt American and Russian way of life, like Italians burn their Fiat 500's and order Ford F-150's, throw away their wines and start brewing votka? Or maybe turn against each other and break down their functioning trade and cultural relations and just buy Russian and American stuff instead and pay with what?
BTW the blaming immigrants and tearing down the social state doesn't work for long because you have finite number of immigrants and social services. If you actually get rid of those and things don't improve people start to notice. A common strategy is to keep blaming those when not doing anything about it or even increase it but the problem with that is, people get tired and actually change you with someone who actually will do something about it and you end up doing something. This something can be to fix the issues and remove the pressure or remove the immigrants and the social sistem and you get a very strong counter action and flushes away those who did it. However way it goes it's not an end or beginning of anything as EU isn't an empire like the US, just bunch of sovereign states in coordination.
"End of Europe" as a coherent entity that's willing and able to look after its own interests. Even as Ukrainians die in the meat grinder and Germany is lauded as Ukraine's best friend in Europe, millions of dollars of dual-use technology products from Germany continue to transship into Russia via Kazakhstan. Imagine if it was 1942 and Britain was still shipping millions of dollars of weapons components into Germany via Sweden or Switzerland?
Europe is far from coherent, even if it is the most coherent that ever has been.
Meanwhile, support rate for EU and Eurozone is highest ever among EU member states and Europe as a whole. If anything, people are annoyed that EU struggles to be decisive as Europeans want more EU, not less. This new situation even paved the way for collaboration previously thought to be far fetched dream.
I don't know how all this will unfold but if tonight Europe ends as we know it, tomorrow we will have European federation and the discussions won't be about the petty local issues but thinks like EU army etc. as all Europeans are very annoyed by Russia, USA and the current state of affairs in Europe.
Check the stats, Europeans don't buy into the agenda pushed by the American libertarians. People want bigger stronger EU to take over where USA abandoned.
>"End of Europe" as a coherent entity that's willing and able to look after its own interests.
Europe doesn't have coherent interests across the board but every country acts purely in its own interest even if it's at the expense of the other member states. EU is an org that replaced the battlefield so Europeans don't have another world war with each other but instead backstab themselves tough politics in the EU parlaiment.
See the illegal immigration issue that still hasn't been solved since 2015 and instead of solving it, they just ban anti-illegal-immigration right wing candidates or parties from being allowed to take part in elections and pretend the issue went away.
>Imagine if it was 1942 and Britain was still shipping millions of dollars of weapons components into Germany via Sweden or Switzerland?
1) Britain was at war directly with Germany in 1942, but Germany is not fighting Russia, Ukraine is, as the proxy, so German corporations can afford to profit form this war as the government looks away. Big difference. There's Realpolitik and then there's idealistic fantasy.
2) Britain could afford to declare war on Germany because Germany didn't have nukes, while now Russia has nukes and Germany doesn't. Even "better", Germany made its economy dependent on Russian gas. Britain didn't have its economy dependent on resources imported from Germany. Huge differences that make such comparisons not even in the same ballpark.
That a Ukraine loss is seen as the end of a free Europe (because Russia wouldn't stop at least until at least DDR Germany borders), is why the other European nations are collectively increasing military spending.
For a sense of scale (only scale, money is definitely not the most important criteria), the EU currently spends twice as much on their military as Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...
So if (when) American support disappears, I expect Russia to continue to not go anywhere fast while wasting a lot of lives in the process. I also expect this to surprise Putin, as he thinks Russia is a Great Power and therefore can only be stalling if Ukraine is supported by another Great Power and doesn't recognise that (1) Russia isn't, and (2) the EU kinda is, sort of, when it feels like acting with unity rather than as 27 different nations.
It makes no sense whatsoever for Russia to attack more states than Ukraine.
The sole reason Russia invaded Ukraine was that it was flirting too much with NATO.
Putin might be a lunatic, but he is not stupid.
The sole reason Germany annexed Czechoslovakia was was that there were atrocities being committed against the Sudeten[0].
He even made a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin in which he stated that the Sudetenland was "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe". So all's fine, and we don't have to worry about Germany.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesson_of_Munich
One big difference, is that the opposition to nazi Germany was relatively weak before the start of WW2:
After Reginald Drax's mission to Moscow failed, the Soviet Union ended up signing its famous non-aggression pact.
Italy was allied, Spain was neutral/aligned. Turkiye was neutral.
Poland could only count on UK and France[0].
Compare to now, where the NATO military bloc is massive. No one would dare risking a military confrontation in these circumstances.
If anything, when there are any tensions between two non-NATO countries, it makes it more urgent for one to oppose the other joining NATO (attacking before they'd join NATO would stave off them joining, attacking after they'd join NATO would lead to an unwinnable fight).
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Polish_military_alliance
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The article you cite says nothing about the /alleged/ [by Hitler as a pretext for annexation] atrocities against Sudeten Germans. The expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia _after_ World War II was an ugly chapter, but really -- there were no 'atrocities' being committed against that population /before/ the war. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudeten_German_uprising
It also made "no sense" for Russia to attack Ukraine. This is not about rational thinking.
If we are to be completely rational, what made no sense was Ukraine thinking it could be a part of NATO, or independent. It is the sad reality of existing next to a superpower. You cannot be independent. It would either be heavily influenced by Russia, or the option B they chose: in rubble.
Russia stopped being a superpower with the fall of the USSR. And before anyone says so, "has a permanent seat on UN security council" doesn't count, the UK and France also have that status and even combined were no longer superpowers by the time of the Suez crisis. Likewise "has nukes" is not sufficient.
The EU is closer to being one than Russia is today, and even then the EU is only kinda a bit of one in some measures but not all.
Why does every source I can find list Russia as a superpower?
To hazard a guess: because Google et al think you're the kind of person who clicks that kind of source.
When I search for list of superpowers, I get superheroes — obviously nobody on Marvel or DC is going to be listed as having "Russia" as their superpower, but this does illustrate what it is that search engines do these days, and it's not objective truth.
When you search for a list of superpowers? I mean did you not simply include the word countries?
Do you have a good authoritative source that lists the superpower countries that does not include Russia?
> When you search for a list of superpowers? I mean did you not simply include the word countries?
Sure, but also in writing this reply, "cia superpower list" to see if they had anything "authoritative" got me CIA's paranormal research: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000...
> Do you have a good authoritative source that lists the superpower countries that does not include Russia?
In most cases, the statement I see is that the USA is "the", singular, superpower. So none of my sources are lists.
What counts as a "good authoritative source", for you? And when?
Samuel P. Huntington was highly rated in his day, but "The Lonely Superpower" was 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20060427150630/http://www-stage....
RAND I think still are, and this was 2019, "Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue": https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE310.html
Is nationalinterest.org "authoritative"? "What Happens When America Is No Longer the Undisputed Super Power?", 2020: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-happens-when-ameri...
I could link to Wikipedia, which says of Russia "potential" superpower (along with the EU, China, and India), not currently an extant superpower. But that's not what I'd call "authoritative".
And this is the point where I got that link to the CIA's paranormal research. The CIA's World Factbook doesn't even describe the USA as a "superpower", at least not at the time of writing: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/united-stat...
You are proving my point…
If you can’t find an authoritative source of who is a superpower then how can you confidently claim who isn’t?
What of those two options did Finland choose? In reality Russia shares a land border with 14 countries, 6 of which are already NATO members (of the others the second largest border is with China). And the countries they have only a maritime border with are Japan and the USA.
Latvia and Estonia are members.
Finland is a member.
Lithuania is a member.
The sad reality is that your logic is just a twisted pretzel to support the position you wish to take which is you support Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Finland? Didn't Finland apply to join NATO in 2022, after the start of the war?
Yes, and Russia did not invade them. Weird.
I do not support any invasion. This is why I do not support the US policy that caused this invasion. And countless others.
The US military industrial complex is a huge beast that needs an enemy to exist. There is so much money in the game.
Which US policy do you think caused Russia to invade Ukraine?
Was it the one where the USA, along with the UK and Russia, all jointly signed an agreement to respect Ukraine's (and several other post-USSR nations') independence and sovereignty in their existing borders (as of 5 December 1994), including an obligation to seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used", so that Ukraine would give up the nuclear weapons it had accidentally inherited from the USSR?
Put it another way: given your stance on the US mil-ind complex, do you think this war would stop if the USA completely vanished from the international scene?
Because the EU is right next door and also doesn't want Russia thinking it can do stuff like this.
If Russia attacked Ukraine because it considered applying for NATO membership that would be years of not decades away why did Russia not attack any other country that actually started the process of joining NATO and did actually join.
The USA did not make Russia attack Ukraine.
This line of reasoning is exactly why everyone bordering Russia is preparing for an invasion, and why no one deludes themselves with "Mr. Hitler will surely stop at Poland." It's not about NATO, ethnic Russians, or any other common excuse, but a fundamental collision between an imperialistic view of the world (represented by Putin's dictatorship) and a cooperative one (represented by the EU). Nations are naturally drawn to the EU, which does not force them to live under someone's boot, and Putin tries to stop that through raw violence.
> The sole reason Russia invaded Ukraine was that it was flirting too much with NATO.
I don't understand, are you trying to make Russia sound like an incel? It's not a flattering look.
In addition to the other responses:
> The sole reason Russia invaded Ukraine was that it was flirting too much with NATO.
Which was only a problem for Putin because Putin's world view is that Great Powers (such as Russia, in his mind) should have a sphere of influence, whereas most everyone else thinks Ukraine is a sovereign nation who has the right to decide for itself which treaties it does or doesn't belong to.
Even then, more like begging than flirting; the invasion made it much more likely. Likewise EU membership.
.. which has had the effect of forcing formerly neutral Finland, which shares a border with Russia, to join NATO.
The claim that Russia has a right to dictate the alliances of other countries simply because they border it is ludicrous and violates international law.
(Simo Häyhä had something to say about last time Russia invaded Finland)
The same way the US has left all the countries around it alone ? Are you joking ?
The list of US backed military coups in the Americas does not fit on an A4 page with a font size small enough to be unreadable.
Easy response: those were also wrong. As was the invasion of Iraq, which arguably ended up being used as a justification in the opposite direction.
Another easy response to go with pjc50's: why do you think Cuba was so eager to get some Soviet nuclear missiles?
Putin (et al.) has already proven to be stupid : the invasion of Ukraine was going quite well for him since 2014, he could have continued salami slicing it while the EU was still mostly asleep (and not willing to make a fuss as a Russian hydrocarbons importer).
But no, he went for a 'quick' victory instead, and ended up bogged in a much higher intensity war, made the Russian military a laughing stock, and kicked the EU/Nato bees nest so hard that another 2 countries immediately joined NATO.
This looks plausible:
> Europe will increasingly be ran by right-wing autocrats shredding the social state and blaming immigrants.
This does not:
> Ukraine losing the war will be the end of Europe
Both the question of losing (the war is somewhat stalemated, and Europe itself is rearming .. although still not breaking dependency on Russian gas!) and the idea that this will somehow "end Europe". If anything, Brexit pretty much demolished similar movements across the EU. The EU's squishyness is mistaken for weakness by too many people who are fans of "muscular" rhetoric.
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> Pendulum has swung too far to the left, while the best long term place is as usually somewhere in the middle (which would still be extreme left by US standards but who cares about that)."
Is there an EU state government where a left-wing party has the majority? I can't think of one, certainly not one of the bigger countries in EU like Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland...*
So PSOE, the ones with a rose in their logo aren't left enough for you? They have a coalition with some parties that are quite a bit further left too.
Ok yes, let's count Spain. But this still is a blimp compared to the whole of EU, and certainly does not warrant saying "Pendulum has swung too far to the left"
>Is there an EU state government where a left-wing party has the majority? I can't think of one,
A single party? No. But a coalition to form a leftist majority, yes.
can you please talk more about the socialism that is prevalent in the EU? what do you exactly mean by "hard focus on socialism"?
In Europe, "hard focus on socialism" would mean something akin to the USSR.
I am not aware of any party that could hope to win elections in their county pushing for anything close to this ?
> US has trump and I see no end of US anytime soon, sure some self-harm is happening right now but thats about it, that nation is stronger than that.
That remains to be seen. Trump and his goons are breaking apart the foundations of society as we speak, not to mention the decades of Republican gerrymandering. The complete and utter loss of trust in the US on the geopolitical stage is another huge issue, it will be a long time before Europe or Southern America trust the US again - the hope that Trump would be a short-term one-off event went out the window last year.
> Compared to hard focus on socialism that was (and still is) prevalent in EU, some better balance is required in these times.
Where outside of Spain does Europe actually have socialists even as part of the government?
Most countries here are run by the far-right (e.g. Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, the Netherlands), centrists/conservatives (Germany, Poland, Croatia), Social Democrats, neoliberals (France) or coalitions of these.
> Nah I am not worried about [Russia], they are consistently unable to wage modern war to benefit of us all.
Never underestimate the willingness of Russian leaders to sacrifice their population for meat-grinder wars.
> In the meantime we arm and train ourselves, stronger Europe is always better for any future scenario, internally and externally.
Agreed, the problem is we can't be arsed to actually evolve to a truly federal society anywhere close to the US. Economically there has been a lot of integration happening, but politically... oh that's one hell of a clusterfuck.
> run by the far-right (e.g. Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, the Netherlands),
Since the far right PVV stepped out of the Dutch governing coalition, they should now be placed with the centrists/conservatives.
Let's wait and see what happens over there with the upcoming elections, and VVD isn't centrist IMHO but center-right. The voters of Wilders aren't gone, there's still a sizable far-right potential that leads the other partys to follow Wilders (the same problem as in France or Italy, it doesn't work to copy the far-right, it only makes them stronger while eventually the democratic parties erode).
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Ok, let's just take your facetious argument on face value.
So that's $5.80 / hr in our land that has a minimum wage of $24.95 / hr. Still, a bit over 20%, crappy for sure (if it was true).
Now, of course, most people are not on the minimum wage, and definitely not here on HN. The tax system benefits those at the low end more though, so let us look at median wages.
Median hourly wages (in main job) are $40 / hr (Source: ABS - August 2024).
Median incomes are actually a touch higher (because not just main job), at $102,742 / annum, which attracts a tax rate of 21%, before the MANY MANY middle class welfare rebates we get (Source ATO tax calculator for 2024-2025).
So, for most of us, maybe we pay approximately our Monday to the State, but that gives us free school education, one of the world's best health systems per $ value (seriously, there are studies!), not to mention a relatively well functioning society (roads, police, firefighters, etc), on top of that we get the horrendous welfare state that you are bemoaning.
That welfare state includes things like the NDIS, which is out of control and needs to find an equilibrium between all the rent-seekers, but the ambition is amazing! We SHOULD support all our disabled people to be the best they can in society! Meanwhile, even with such a fuckup, we're doing ok. Pull your head out, mate.
Do we have issues? Hell yeah. But our terrible "social security state" is not the start of them at all.
These are the facts:
Australian social security budget: about $120 billion
Australian NDIS budget: about $52 billion
Number of working Australians: 14.6 million
Number of welfare recipients in Australia: about 5.4 million, or about the entire population of Melbourne.
Number of NDIS recipients in Australia: about 661,000
That’s about $78,500 per NDIS recipient.
Democracy can last only up to that point the majority realise they can vote themselves largess from the public purse.
G'day again :-)
Just to clarify to all.
> Number of welfare recipients in Australia: about 5.4 million, or about the entire population of Melbourne.
That's the number of unique Australians who get any form of income support at least once in a full reporting year, and there are a number of one off and short term payment types.
It includes many people who are working, a number on pensions, likely children (I haven't dug deep, etc), students, and others.
It's not the case that there are 5 million dole bludgers spending the year on the piss at the TAB, pulling bongs on the couch, etc.
There's quite the list of support types here: https://www.dss.gov.au/income-support-payments
It includes assistance for real Job seekers and helps keep them from being a greater problem, assistence with starting small businesses, etc.
>Democracy can last only up to that point the majority realise they can vote themselves largess from the public purse.
You wish people would go back to forming loving families, but you believe people will naturally leave others to die in poverty and sickness once their eyes open.
Which one is it, nandomrumber?
Where did I say that?
That's until you get disabled in an accident - or your son or daughter is.
Then you'll suddenly convert to how benefits are essential.
(In before: "I don't need a car insurance, I'll never get into any accident, I am too good a driver for that")
I have co-worker like this, he had minimal insurance, until he crashed his car and lost like 15k, doesn't need insurance for his cat until 2k vet bill, doesn't need doctors, until he gets sick..
You think he would learn at some point, but no.
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You didn’t really answer GP’s point, though. What if a big, strong family is struck by disaster (multiple earners lose jobs or die, or one member develops, say, an illness or huge debt which consumes the entire family’s resources)?
Those kind of scenarios aren’t that rare even in places with very family-first social safety nets (which, incidentally, are often places with high poverty and low standard of living).
Who is "we"?
The big welfare state was born in the post-war boom, a period of big, strong families that believed in the future.
The dismantling of the Family and of the Welfare State, and of Unions, and of any kind of support and collaboration between salaried people go hand-in-hand. Late stage capitalism needs to extract everything from everyone, without opposition. Having people desperate for a job at any cost because they don't a a support network is the ideal state for our managers and bosses.
Welcome to the anti-neoliberalism camp :)
> The number of elderly Australians who live alone with no family, or no family nearby, is truely disappointing.
That's a thing across all Western societies, and we got unchecked rabid capitalism and a complete lack of industry structural politics to thank for that one. Young people not living in an urban area have little choice but to leave there to find employment and higher level education.
In other words, every year each Australian pays 12K to other Australians?
I guess that is what tax is for
Promise?
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If this administration doesn't want to do anything to solve climate change, that's their choice. It's a terrible choice, but it's in their power to do so.
However, there's a huge difference between dismissing the severity of the evidence vs. going out of your way to hide evidence. The first is born of arrogance. The later is naked cowardice - they know exactly how wrong they are. If they wanted to project strength, they could simply leave the reports up and say "we don't care". Instead they scurry around behind the curtains trying to cover their tracks. Fucking pathetic.
They're still angry at Fauci for not going along with the world's dumbest coverup attempt in Feb 2020.
All (most?) bullies are cowards.
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The non-cowardly thing to do would be to engage scientifically rather than memory hole the consensus.
Or create the impossible requirement that a study have no bias.
I'm not sure that's a fair argument. When social media takes down what it perceives as misinformation, the right uses the sunshine argument. "Leave it up and let the best argument win."
In any event, just because you don't like the conclusion doesn't mean it is biased.
I was just pointing out the incorrect logic of the comment:
If you believe they’re biased, removing them is removing false legitimacy from biased content — something the government has an interest in. And no different than a journal retracting a flawed paper.
And since you want to discuss “fair argument”: there’s an obvious difference between allowing discourse on a public forum and publishing as an institution.
Journals remove papers that break rules, e.g. fabricating data or boning your postdocs. You seem to be waving at all of climate science and saying they all fail the same scrutiny. And you use the vaguest possible accusation: "they have bias", something that could be said or every scientific paper.
I’m not making any claim, but it’s clear the people accused of removing them feel the bias delegitimizes the results — so the OP’s logic is incorrect. As I originally said.
Also, factually, they’re merely transferring the website to a different department, so this whole argument is moot.
I hope it's true that the hosting duties are simply passed to NASA. Surely you've seen enough in the past six months to not assume the stated plan is their actual intention.
From the article: “ The White House, which was responsible for the assessments, said the information will be housed within NASA to comply with the law, but gave no further details.”
It doesn’t seem like the admin believes the reports are biased and need to be removed. Cool conspiracy though.
You don't need to "believe" that there's bias, you look at the data and you can tell whether they're biased or not.
For those who prefer their news without pop-overs galore, autoplaying unrelated animation/video, requests to enable notifications with only yes/later options, claims to care about your privacy despite wanting to share your details with hundreds of other companies, etc.: https://archive.is/Tu51y
As a non-American, the most painful thing about all of this is seeing how much the world has relied on America's charity for so long.
Had other supposed economic powerhouses invested in their geographic and atmospheric science the same way the USA has, this would've been a rather annoying blip on the radar. We'd need to quickly get our backups out of storage and host them elsewhere, and go without American data points for a couple of years, but most things would be fine.
Instead, it's now becoming clear how much just about any country but China, Russia, and Iran has relied on American scientific investments, and even those seem to freely incorporate American data when it's provided for free.
I have no doubt that all of the atmospheric, oceanographic, and environmental science the American government has all been for strategic purposes, either directly providing information useful for the military of providing a believable excuse to install sensors all around the globe, some of which have been "enhanced". Still, as long as your country is friendly to the American regime, you were getting huge amounts of useful scientific data out of that deal, enough not to set up local alternatives.
Here in the EU, scientists have been scrambling to safeguard data like this since the day of Trump's reelection, but it seems like governments here don't seem to be all that interested in funding any of the work the Americans have been doing.
Still way too much capital in the US for now. If every US citizen with a post graduate qualification emigrated most of them aren't going to find better jobs. Better lives maybe. It is frustrating to see so much money from around the world invested in the US when it could be invested at home. Hopefully the current trends will change that.
Gotta provide a smokescreen for “Drill baby drill”
It wasn't supposed to be literal :(
Don't look up!
Right, nice savings and opportunities for fossil energy industry. Good job.
So what is the plan for handling the US nuclear warhead stockpile as the empire crumbles? I'm worried about billionaires with nukes. Maybe not the person directly but people behind all that envision super wealthy city-states and I totally expect those to have nukes.
The nuclear codes won't stop anyone with time and engineers. These are intended for physically arming the strong link in the warhead that is supposed to send the signal to the exclusion zone but someone with unrestricted access should be able to override it and send the signal directly. Although over the years the mechanical systems were replaced with electronics that eventually become encrypted microelectronics, IIUC the actual device that does the kaboom remained with its original design and applying voltage will be able to trigger it. Safe against rough handlers(i.e. crazy solders) but won't stop people with unrestricted access.
> IIUC the actual device that does the kaboom remained with its original design and applying voltage will be able to trigger it
That is not my understanding. My understanding is that the proper implosion requires very precise timing of signals for each shaped charge element otherwise the implosion ends up being lopsided and the nuke fizzles instead of exploding. These timings depend not just on the shape of the charges, but also on the relative wire lengths from the detonator to the explosives. (In theory these wire lengths can be unique for each warhead, thus making the timings for each warhead unique). The detonation circuit is not just comparing the code with an expected one, but using it to create the right signal timings. In other words the right code plus the information in the electronics together gives the timings for the signals with which they propagate through the different length of wires such that they form the right implosion.
To reverse engineer this you need to figure out when each explosive element needs to be triggered to form the explosion. Then you need to figure out when the signals need to leave the electronics such that it travels through the wiring looms just right to create the desired explosive pattern. And then you need to figure out what code you need to supply the electronics so it produces this desired electronic timing to achieve the above.
That is three wickedly hard challenge. And you will only know if your people pulled each of them off corectly, when you try to detonate the warhead.
> won't stop people with unrestricted access
That is true. But it is not like all they would need to do is to apply voltage on a single line, like some crazy hot-wiring car tief. Their best and easiest bet is to dissasemble the warhead and use the fissile material from it inside of an implosion device of their own design.
You may be right, the reason I assumed that the controller that controls the detonation itself was contained in the exclusion zone since earlier safety mechanisms were mechanical. So if they modernized the safety mechanism maybe they didn’t change the exploding part and all they need is power to prepare the device and then a simple signal to trigger it ?
There is no plan, and I am not sure why you’d think otherwise?
I think there must be a plan after the USSR collapse. Somehow they did not let rough agents obtaining the warheads but there were enough rumors, literature and media around it to prompt a consideration IMHO.
By the time you could act it's too late, if you don't want to dismantle the nukes independently. It's a consequence of the existence.
Just imagine Biden having commanded to trigger a process which destroys the nuclear material (by triggering some degeneratio process or something) would that have been accepted or would everybody have said that limits U.S.'s strategic options permantly in too high degree?
tl;dr: the Soviet state didn't collapse in the manner of a zombie apocalypse or environmental catastrophe, it collapsed politically; there was continuity in command / control until the weapons were all moved back physically into Russia.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16mab9x/when...
China and India both know how to handle nuclear weapons and would be interested in ensuring safe handling.
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It's a real shame but at least there other nations still doing this work like China and various Euro countries. Sad to see the USA transition to a banana republic. This belief that MAGA party has that the US can't do big things any longer and only corporations and broligarchs know how to lead us forward is just sad.
> This belief that MAGA party has that the US can't do big things any longer and only corporations and broligarchs know how to lead us forward is just sad.
Especially given the Musk/DOGE recent experience.
Musk takes over Twitter, fires 40% of the workforce, and nothing much happens.
Musk takes over the US Govt, fires <10% of the workforce, and things stop working.
From this we should conclude, obviously, that the government is run much, much more efficiently and with less slack than any of the Big Tech organisations (who are also all busy laying off 10s of % of their workforces, apparently with no ill effect).
> Sad to see the USA transition to a banana republic.
I'm not sure banana republic is the best description of what is happening, the definition of the term only cover part of where things are heading.
A comparison with NK seems more complete, especially given the current twits at the top, so I've taken to referring to the US as DPR-US.
An insistence - in spite of the reality - that you're a democracy seems likely prophetic.
Right now though I think you can say the US is just back-sliding. Trump threatened to arrest Mamdani for I guess being very popular or something but he doesn't seem to have even attempted to actually do that. Once it's actually gone, Mamdani just gets imprisoned or executed so that Trump's preferred candidate "wins" regardless. The technology of democracy is still there, but the actual principles it supports are gone.
> An insistence - in spite of the reality - that you're a democracy seems likely prophetic.
Lord of War:
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
As the US slowly becomes N. Korea...
How in the world did Juche become our national philosophy? I'm not sure, but I think about it all the time now.
I'm on HN, so I tend to want to blame the ad industry. It's pretty nebulous to think that "made in America" directly snowballed into this; so many things did. The freakier nativism in advertising really could use a break right about now though.
There's no national philosophy. That's giving these people way too much credit.
"Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman is 100% predictive and descriptive of how we got where we are.
I do think USA-flavored Juche does some explanatory power for the group as a whole, even if the individuals lack any specific philosophy beyond hill climbing.
I do also need to read Postman, though.
Likewise, “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer describes some of the political processes that got us here. That along with “The Family” by Jeff Sharlet to provide a little color to the religious side.
Sibling comment has it about right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44450898
One of the underlying contradictory elements in the national philosophy of America since its founding has been white supremacy. Yes, that conflicts with "believe all men are created equal". No, this hasn't been properly resolved despite periods of extreme violence. I believe it's the anniversary of Gettysburg about now?
Hence the $45bn for putting people in camps. It's right there in the budget. Of course, that drip-fed in bipartisan fashion: there have been (smaller!) internments of immigrants for a long time.
I think the "advertising" was the billions spent on what were effectively anti-brown ads to help sell the Iraq/Afghan wars. Meanwhile in the 2000s the GSEs did not disclose their financials bc if they had perhaps the people would have felt the wars had a cost.
Since then it's been gradual attacks on press freedom (WL exposed fraud/propaganda in the Iraq/Afghan wars) and massive profits by the defense industry, resulting in dramatically more lobbying money. Not to mention the US automotive industry and major banks getting bailed out and preventing many small economic corrections that should have occurred.
Then 20 years after 9/11 when the US has spent 10s of TRILLIONS on wars and virtually nothing on infrastructure, industrial policy, etc., everyone wonders why China appears to be close to leapfrogging. The anti-brown propaganda and "USA USA" jingoism back in the early 2000s is still fresh, benefitting candidates with xenophobic and jingoistic messages. Many feel real economic pain but don't understand that you don't spend $20T without consequences -- plus scapegoating the weakest members of society is apparently more emotionally satisfying.
By the time we got the pandemic both parties realized that they had more to gain from fiscal irresponsibility, and the tribalism of the government's anti-brown propaganda combined with the "multicultural solidarity" focus over class warfare by Dems, led to increasing tribalism and tribe-focused media. Now a large percentage of the population lives in a complete information bubble and is close to worshiping its political favorites as though they are religious icons.
Thus now regardless of which party is in power, there will be a shift to censor and suppress information that is viewed as harmful to society. I honestly blame both parties for their share of this, but the ultimate culprit is feed algorithms that are optimized for emotionally potent content that creates engagement (and ad dollars) and nothing more.
What is actually fascinating about the orignal TikTok is that the algorithm was so much more useful at showing interesting/appealing content that it pretty much overtook Insta, YouTube, and Netflix and required government intervention to stop its growth. This shows us clearly how the major social media platforms were not just wrong about how to maximize profits but wrong on how to entertain and engage people, mistakes that are only possible when there is really not much competition, which is how we now do capitalism in the US -- and by the way if you win you get nationalized.
US spent just under $2T in Iraq and just over $2T in Afghanistan, for a total of just over $4T.
If you consider indirect costs I believe it ends up at $18T or more.
Hungary is a more accurate analogy.
It's actually where the Heritage Foundation has been trying things out before using in America. The connection between Heritage, Orban, and Trump's circle is concerning. At this point, Trump is more their useful idiot who can be the populous frontman. He's a symptom of the larger frustration with govt and growth in inequality
when politics ban science you know things are messed up big time
It´s not so severe, it was just that those servers and the people maintaining them, melt in the latest heatwave. Nothing to worry about.
Also a methane sensing satellite just went awol. Probably coincidence though
There are so many red flags with this administration that I lost count. Policing speech, suppressing information, cutting research funding, cutting social programs, increasing spending and intensity for deportations, deporting people for political affiliation, an unnecessarily disruptive economic policy and many reports of general incompetence, lying and corruption.
It's all so bleak. Where is the payoff?
The new tax bill, which benefits asset owners (wealthy), older people, and the beneficiaries of the wealthy.
When you have a population age histogram that is flattening and eventually an upside down triangle, you need some way of extracting labor from the young and giving it to the old (the chosen ones who can afford it) to maintain the socioeconomic hierarchy.
The young without inheritances won’t ever have it as good, so you’ll need to distract them and otherwise fool them into believing it is their duty to transfer their earned income via earned income taxes to the elderly.
I don't think it really has a whole lot to do with socioeconomic hierarchy; I think that's just a happy accident.
Old people vote. Old people vote in midterms and odd timed elections. Therefore, old people decide the candidates. Any politician would be smart to court them as a voting bloc.
As for the benefits for the wealthy; that's just the same old bullshit in a new protectionist wrapper. Get my friends and family as much benefit as I can while I have the ability sort of thing.
Old people voting in their own interests at the expense of young people is them trying to maintain their higher position in the socioeconomic hierarchy. There is a secondary component related to skin tone and ancestry as well.
Nice theory, however you’re believing people vote for their best interests, and the above comment believes they’re deluded by misinformation.
I think both are occurring. Young white men went GOP, why is that? Anti vaxx leftists went with Kennedy, why is that? Why do anti-immigration and pro-economics claim the top two republican policy slots, when they’re firmly opposed in their effects on the economy? This is the contradictory trend of delusion and cult of personality.
If the BBB just passed is an indication, I think overall we are more on the deluded side, most of these deluded non-rich white folks are more anti-immigrant than pro-economics.
Of course I do not believe GOP economic policies are better than the alternative, I’m not the one who voted for that policy regime however!
> Why do anti-immigration and pro-economics claim the top two republican policy slots
Pro-economics? This admin can’t tell supply from demand. Anti-immigration, definitely.
> Anti-immigration, definitely.
Hold on -- the regime recently welcomed refugees from Africa! If only we could understand why that group, versus the ones they're actively deporting. If only there was some pattern, a clue or hint as to what matters to them...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/12/trump-administratio...
>> Why
Because Biden was much better at doing than talking about what was done, and in an absence of words any words dominate.
The Democratic party needs to stop looking at election results as mistakes by underinformed voters, and start looking at them as feedback on engagement.
Right, because that’s a “smart” way to tackle the demographic collapse/crisis while totally not making the problem worse.
Why do we need to "tackle" the demographic collapse? The CEO of Ford just said he expects 50% of white-collar jobs to be eliminated soon. Tax the AI and you'll have plenty of money for retirees. There's nothing wrong with naturally, and gradually, going back to the population levels of 1980 or whatever.
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I don’t see a way to avoid population decline, assuming women have freedom and access to 100% effective birth control.
The whole process of pregnancy/birth//breastfeeding/infant rearing sucks, so that most women will opt for 1 or 2, max.
Then you have to account for all the men and women who opt to stay single (or queer or whatever). The number of women that need to have more than 2 kids to offset those with 0 and 1 will never happen.
The only possible mechanism to align incentives is to remove all old age benefits and wealth transfers, so that one likely has to depend on their children. But even then, I doubt it would work.
Immigration.
Yes, that's part of it but helping to ease the economic burden of child rearing would definitely help.
The documentary Idiocracy has some interesting insights into the issue -- it's worth the watch.
Of course. My response was overly simplistic, simply because the parent comment seemed to suggest that there existed no solution.
What do you mean? I see no success so far across the world, and simply paying people to have kids is the wrong incentive (since badly raised children are worse than no children).
> paying people to have kids is the wrong incentive
I absolutely agree. Childcare is horribly expensive and just easing the burden of that would make parenting far more palatable to those who would otherwise be good parents.
Not to be a dick, but these aren't "red flags" anymore: the actual thing is here, plainly visible.
The question is "for whom is the payoff?" and they've made that very clear.
The payoff is exclusively a whiter America and women back in the kitchen. It’s not complicated and they don’t care about anything else.
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>The payoff is very obviously genocide and the reestablishment of chattel slavery
The Trump administration is deplorable, corrupt, grotesque and ridiculous in so many ways, not to mention dangerous, but seriously, get off it with these kinds of declarations. Such hyperbolic nonsense just shuts down genuine possible inroads into protesting against this government's uglier things and paints those who oppose it as hysterical lunatics.
Genocide has a real definition, and so too does chattel slavery. They're literal, specifically barbaric things whose definition only gets watered down by every random idiotic accusation of either happening because someone can't get a grip on their emotional outrages.
I see zero sign of Trump's government committing or even planning for genocide at the present time, and likewise for chattel slavery.
The deportations to third-party country are deportations, not mass slave sales.
They are "renditions" in the most charitable reading. Deportations involve due process.
the genocide no, but the chattel slavery is a clear and obvious goal.
or rather, its pretty well already here? thats the US government choosing to not raid farms if the farm owner will be the owner of the immigrants they hire.
the shipping people off to be tortured in south america might not be a sale of the person, but its awfully close, and i think youre overly focusing on the experience of the slave driver and not the enslaved person
I think downvoting comments like the parent exacerbate political polarization. Definitions of words such as "genocide" and "slavery" indeed is problematic and arguing like the parent doesn't imply being a Trump apologist.
Remember when Biden called the war in Ukraine a genocide? Didn't you think it watered down the word? If that's a genocide, does it mean we need a new word for holocaust-style genocides? Do we need to start saying things like "oh, yeah, this is a genocide alright, but not quite as much as the real ones in Rwanda and Germany". Is this really what we want to end up having to say?
That being said, prison labor combined with strong ethnic bias in the police force is very, very close to genuine slavery. What was this gross thing with the corrupt judge again. Kids For Cash? or something like this? Slavery.
It's worth noting that their policies with regard to global health initiatives are currently killing 88-people every hour, on average. Mostly children.
https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...'
Wow, talk about a completely loaded and dishonest definition of cause and effect. I personally think that the U.S should fund these programs for health overseas, but saying that it no longer funding some of them is killing 88 people per hour is completely off base. The diseases these programs addressed are what kills 88 people per hour, not some U.S policy. Since the U.S doesn't have a legal obligation to fund such programs, you claiming them as responsible is like saying that because you don't donate X money per month to some anti-malaria charity (for example), you're killing some group of children that would have had their malaria treated in those months by your specific donation.
Why not address the very valid argument instead of downvoting like some little child?
Remember when Biden called the war in Ukraine a genocide? Didn't you think it watered down the word?
No, it did not "water down the word." It is the stated position of Vladimir Putin that the Ukrainian people are indistinguishable from Russians, with no identity of their own. To that end, his forces have been kidnapping Ukrainian children and "repatriating" them to Russia since the invasion began.
Some homework for you:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/07/01/there-is-no-ukraine...
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/putin-still-steali...
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Feel free to point me to a single instance of Trump administration genocide and i'll happily reconsider my thoughts. I'm no fan of this government, but hyperbole does nobody any good.
https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...
I agree that "genocide" might be a bit hyperbolic, but I think it's important to note that pretty much all genocides historically were done covertly, and under the guise of legitimate policy. If there were a genocide going on right now, it's entirely possible most people would not know and it could even be hidden in plain sight.
The progressively worsening attacks on the ability of trans people to exist in daily life.
Depending on how you define the Ten Stages of Genocide, we for sure have crossed the 3rd stage of genocide with all the state level anti trans bills and Trumps executive orders, and they’ve also engaged in stages 4 and 6. They’re not pressing on the brake, there’s a lead block on the gas pedal and they have repeatedly professed to wanting to erase us from public life. Trump released a campaign video about it in Feb/March of 2023.
https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages
>The progressively worsening attacks on the ability of trans people to exist in daily life.
Really? Care to name an example of their being persecuted legally by the administration in the way you claim? For example, there were multiple huge gay pride parades in the U.S just recently, which are visibly and vocally attended by trans people too, and I didn't see federal agents or police of any kind going at them at any point.
Regarding "persecuted legally", this administration is actively trying to dismantle the rule of law and flouts it.
I appreciate you looking for examples. This podcast episode will give you some, as well as a lens through which you may spot others.
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/common-sense-324-whats-goo...
Arbitrarily overriding trans people's declared gender on passport applications?
https://www.genderjusticeleague.org/trans-non-binary-passpor...
I literally named one: Trump's anti-trans sports executive order.
Care to read more than a sentence at a time?
That executive order is for the benefit of female athletes who have been disadvantaged and adversely affected by male-inclusion policy. The order is not "anti-trans". Its purpose is to restore fairness and improve safety in women's sports.
It is essential to understand the concepts involved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
And then you can take your pick of media outlets. The Office Of Remigration is happening, they aren't hiding it. For example:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/29/politics/rubio-lays-out-detai...
This is just one clear-cut example of the administration prosecuting genocide. There are others, there's plenty of boogeymen.
Assuming you disagree that this is proof of genocide-in-progress, please explain to me how an official policy of ethnic cleansing is not prosecuting genocide. It will be illustrative.
In parting, a digestif, courtesy of the prominent far-right ideologue who's made public claims of a lurid sexual relationship with Trump:
https://xcancel.com/LauraLoomer/status/1939831588902109629#m
On these wiki definitions:
Ethnic cleansing: "with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group"
"Mass killings" is a big detail which is hard to overlook. If we can't agree where ethnic cleansing includes mass killing it's hard too agree if ethnic cleansing is taking place.
Personally, ethnic cleansing to me sounds like Rwanda or Yugoslavia, which is not happening in the US yet.
I'm guessing that they want to keep 'genocide' for the worst cases ? While others want a more general term including it ?
I think some also tried to push for the term 'ethnocide' for when mass killings were not involved ?
It's a wikipedia definition, and should be weighted as such. There exists a continuous spectrum of arguments about the definition of genocide, with Holocaust-denial existing at one extreme and a hard line against things like forced displacement, systemic/legal erasure, or forced deprivation of a population, i.e. systematic actions that materially contribute to the elimination of a group, at the other. Somewhere in between the two are all the arguments in support of mass atrocities throughout history.
I'm comfortable once we can agree that it's merely a question of degree and that we're indeed very solidly on the genocide spectrum.
I would like to believe Americans are capable of identifying genocide before we've gone full-Rwanda. I would like to hold my fellow Americans in higher esteem than that. I would like a pony.
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> Currently, the Trump admin is actually deporting fewer illegal immigrants per month from the U.S than either the Biden or Obama admins did previously.
Interesting, got any source for this claim ?
Whether current claims are overblown or not, I assume that it's what Trump 2 might do next that is a cause of concern for a lot of people. Between his mercurial behaviour, disregard for the rule of law, and some of the previously stated goals...
The situation is quite different of course, but one of the planned first "Jewish Solutions" by the Nazi regime was instead deporting them to... Madagascar. (A really weird alternative to consider to the current Israelo-Palestinian conflict, huh. Someone should perhaps write an alternative Man in a High Castle story about this...)
Things can turn very bad quite quickly when previous norms of behaviour go out of the window...
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The current administration is not merely racists, autocratic, and hell bent on insuring all wealth is held by the oligarch class,
it is also engaged in the most venal, short-sighted, and destructive assault on the basic functions of governance and civil society I can imagine.
I don't care what one's view is on the appropriate scale and role of federal governance, some operations are best and only accomplished at that level,
and this short of bullshit is not just a disservice to, it is an attack on the citizenry.
Destroying federal governance seems on point for people who read Yarvin and want to rule feudal micro-states as techno-kings.
I guess they see themselves as high officers in those states. I fail to understand how someone could read about living in a dictatorship and go "yeah, I would like to live like that"
Evidence suggests ~30% of people are content to be worse off in order to inflict a larger loss upon others. This paper makes for rather grim reading but imho provides a very useful heuristic for understanding the political enfironment in an era of mass communication.
Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
> Evidence suggests ~30% of people are content to be worse off in order to inflict a larger loss upon others. This paper makes for rather grim reading but imho provides a very useful heuristic for understanding the political enfironment in an era of mass communication.
Pinning this on human psychology is ignoring how the game is set up. If you structure something in such a way that the person who gets the most points wins and gets a prize, a move that causes you to lose one point but causes your only opponent to lose two points will put you ahead. That's arithmetic, not psychology.
The issue, then, is when we allow things to be structured that way -- as zero sum games. Instead what we should be doing is stamping out anything that fosters artificial scarcity.
Moreover, as the paper points out, that's what happens in dyadic systems. Which is to say, two party systems. If you have the option to cost yourself a point but cost one of your opponents two points, that's an advantageous move in a two-party system, but not in a five-party system even with a zero-sum game, because then you've cost yourself a point against three of the four other parties. So if you want to get rid of that, have your state adopt score voting (specifically score voting, not IRV or any of that mess) instead of the existing voting system which mathematically constrains us to a two-party system.
Isn't 30% roughly the percent of people who voted for this situation?
This really feels like the best explanation for what's happening right now :c
You don't have to see yourself as a high officer. You just have to imagine that you will be restored to your deserved state. In that state you are slightly better than average, and only those who are morally defective suffer. (Those are the ones who are now unjustly keeping you from succeeding on your merits.)
The high officials are the truly great ones who have restored the natural order. You don't need that. You just require being recognized as somewhat better than most.
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You reminded me of the Lyndon B Johnson quote which seems more relevant that ever. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
The trouble with this quote is that it's too easy to misinterpret it exactly in favor of the people it's criticizing.
Racism is a system for pitting poor white people and poor black people against each other. But the perpetrators are not the people in the other tribe, they're the people telling you that there should be separate tribes.
Bacon's Rebellion [1] in colonial Virginia, 1676-7, was a a multi-race and cross-class uprising against the colonial government and the aritocratic planter class. The rebellion's failure was followed by measures that served to alienate the poor white population from the enslaved black population.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion
Racists were just temporarily embarrassed by the civil war.
Were they? If so, embarrassed about what? Losing it?
I think they and right wingers are only embarrassed by losing, it explain their behaviour.
There are also religious people who look forward to the coming of the “end times”. They also vote.
yep, they definitely do
More importantly, US oligarchs are religious. Mostly evangelical, mormon or some postmodern derivative, like Thiel, Yarvin, Musk and their ilk.
In the US, even people who aren't very religious in practice still harbour religious beliefs like the state of Israel being a divine entity. I.e. like Ted Cruz, who knows some english biblical phrases but isn't religious enough to stop himself from playing golf with the pharaoh, and yet strongly holds on to the antisemitic zionist belief that jews must move to the state of Israel and eradicate their neighbours.
I think Cruz is likely a lot more religious than he puts out only because his brand of religion is, or at least was, too extreme for a lot of people. His father is a fundamentalist leader a la Handmaid’s Tale, which should have been a lot more worrying a lot sooner for a lot more people.
Democracy is complicated. The world is complex, but you get only a limited set of choices (in some implementation a few more, in others a few less) which means the burden in the end is on you. Now you take the wannabe dictator, which takes that all of you "I'm like your dad and will care about all those problems, so you only have to care about your direct environment, doing your job, taking care of your family, all else will be handled"
Partly being submissive, partly betting on being among the rulers, partly distaste for most of the world, and partly just idiocy and insanity
Wow, that's possibly the bleakest set of opinions I've ever seen detailed.
I can't help but think that this is typical self-loathing and ensuing self-destruction turned towards society itself. I need to read his actual writing, though. I'm sure there's also some element of actively pandering towards people in power desperate to justify their hold through some ideology.
I can outbleak that! In 2 paragraphs!
Although it seems more robust in the long term*, anti-intellectualism probably has a cliff of adaptivity, just like academia, ideology, or indeed any collection of values
*The foundations of China's rise can ultimately be traced to the cultural revolution? Now we wait.
So you don't know that the vice-president's mentor completely agrees with him
Of course I know Thiel is probably one of the most evil people alive. But I suspect he's a lot more evil than he's let us know. But this guy seems to have built his career off of actively propagating resentment and hate. If you read about Thiel's upbringing it's entirely unsurprising the two get along so well.
CF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swakopmund#Until_Namibian_Inde...
> Swakomund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism after World War II, including the celebration of Hitler's birthday and "Heil Hitler" Nazi salutes given by residents. In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany". As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.
Yeah, I knew where he grew up
Just read his Gray Mirror posts or watch a podcast with him. If you really want to get the full experience you need to go back to his unqualified reservations stuff but it can be VERY tedious.
He is simply not that smart nor that interesting. Just a mega cringe-lord loser who got the ear of other cringe-lord losers who happen to be unfathomably wealthy.
Yeah, it's amazing to me that any of these clowns consider themselves intelligent when they end up holding philosophical and political beliefs that the average high-schooler could tell you are completely wack.
The natural consequence of the worship of financial success, strong isolationist tendencies, and social atomization. When you "don't rely on anyone else" and managed to make billions with your "own wits" anything you think must be genius or at least correct, right? It's insane how our current socioeconomic structure has effectively let men with the social maturity of twelve year olds gain absurd amounts of influence and power.
Also not much of a coincidence that Yarvin is an out and out white nationalist, though he denies it, or at least the name: "I am not a white nationalist, though I am not exactly allergic to the stuff" - whatever the hell that mealy mouth answer is meant to mean.
He even wrote a bloviating article to further clarify that he is not a white nationalist. You'd be forgiven though, if you didn't read the title. It spends most of the article sympathizing with, understanding, agreeing with and talking of how white nationalism "resonates" with him. But don't worry, he swears he's not one at the end!
The administration is so devoid of any value it staggers the mind. The only thing that I can agree with is that our dependence on China is not a good thing (Oh yes, and minimizing governmental fraud and waste) -- the concepts, not any of the actions done to address these concerns.
What makes this mess even more disheartening is that about of third of the population loves it.
If the US was a rebellious teenager then they are past their doing coke and doing corn phase and onto their face tattoo and smoking meth phase.
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Agreed.
Tell me more: At my PC, the weather URL
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=35.90615740000...
still works.
But Trump doesn't seem to have air conditioning on his golf carts yet.[1] So global warming can't be a big problem.
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
Remember folks: if it keeps happening, just dig your head further into the sand.
There are other countries.
Let me fill you in on a secret: one of the reasons behind US’s dominance is that even though “there are other countries” that could do the hard science, the US is one of the only ones that did. Now the US is at risk of becoming just another one of those “other countries“.
We’re well on our way to becoming them.
Earlier, without discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44439836
There, climate problem solved! /s
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>NOAA was caught using data from weather stations with faulty equipment and positioned next to new heat sources and only moved to correct the issue when confronted so I'd say this is entirely justified. The first step in any scientific process is clean data.
Assuming this uncited assertion is true, why would it be "entirely justified" to simply remove it without any particular reason as to why, nor discussion around the concern over data accuracy? Seems to me that the scientific community would be better served with an open dialogue rather than mute removal.
Yes, normally in a case where data were later shown to have been taken incorrectly, you would remove just the incorrect data but leave an unmodified copy of the old data available somewhere. Or, just leave a very prominent note about the change with a detailed explanation somewhere else. You would not take down everything because 1. That would deprive taxpayers of the correct data they had already paid for, and 2. That would mess up the data ingestion pipelines of the researchers who depended on the data.
Yeah we should definitely make policy based on claims from 15 year old Fox News articles, which are famous for their even-handedness and lack of editorial bias.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/u-s-climate-data-compromised...
And even in that article it states:
"If you use only the sites that currently have good siting versus those that have not-so-good siting, when you look at the adjusted data basically you get the same trend," said Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch at NCDC.
Lawrimore admitted that Watts' volunteers had discovered real problems with sensor siting, but he said that even when those sites' heat readings were adjusted down, they still showed a steady overall rise in temperatures.
"The ultimate conclusion, the bottom line is that there really isn't evidence that the trends have a bias based on the current siting," he said.
And surface station data is only a small subset of information confirming the warming of the climate, Lawrimore said.
Here’s something from 2024. It’s not heat sources, but tampering with rain gauges in this case.
https://coloradosun.com/2024/09/08/patrich-esch-ed-dean-jage... ( https://archive.is/jBh8H )
> Wrecked rain gauges. Whistleblowers. Million-dollar payouts and manhunts. Then a Colorado crop fraud got really crazy.
> The sordid story of two ranchers who conspired to falsify drought numbers by tampering with rain gauges on the plains of Colorado and Kansas, resulting in millions in false insurance claims
Got any sources for that bro?
They never do. I always look up users like this after the fact and it’s always clear to me they got lost in sauce online, ended up on HN, and think they can just get away being edgy in a room full of professional nerd snipers.
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“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which coordinated the information in the assessments, did not respond to repeated inquiries”
Nobody is jumping to conclusions, lots of climate related information is being scrubbed. This website has been down for at least 12 hours. The fact that the domain is still registered proves precisely nothing.
Could it be a misconfiguration? Sure, but available evidence points to an ongoing attempt to erase everything related to climate change.
> “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which coordinated the information in the assessments, did not respond to repeated inquiries”
Except they did, as I found an NPR article with official comment, and there's a link downthread to this much better article about the same thing, again with authoritative reply:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-shutters-majo...
And they responded to say “yes we took it down” so what’s your point again?
No, they literally said "we're moving it to NASA".
I'm not arguing that the overall fact pattern is good here. I'm saying this article is stupid and lazy.
No you said it’s probably a dns configuration, posted some pointless name server addresses and implied government sysadmins are incompetent.
What actually happened is exactly what this article said and I wouldn’t be surprised if they get no response from NOAA because of the administration’s well documented feud with the AP.
And if you believe NASA will publish anything beyond the most perfunctory version of this report under this administration I have a bridge to sell you.
> No you said it’s probably a dns configuration,
I said that barring better information, you can't rule it out. Still true.
> posted some pointless name server addresses
They're government servers, is the point. And don't you find it a little bit curious that someone bothered to change the NS records? It's not the usual way that a website goes down. In fact, it's the sort of thing that happens when you're in the process of (potentially incompetently) moving a domain from one server to another.
> What actually happened is exactly what this article said and I wouldn’t be surprised if they get no response from NOAA
Yet other reporters, from multiple different left-leaning news outlets, managed to get these elusive comments from super hard-to-reach people like...the White House press secretary for science policy. It's almost like there was a press conference or something.
Sometimes you actually have to do work to be a reporter, and when you skip that part and jump directly to conspiracy, it's not defensible. It's just trash journalism.
This administration has lost the benefit of the doubt because they lie so much and rarely follow through.
Until they actually do it, it's more likely they will not and are just saying whatever comes to mind as a way to manipulate the narrative
"As of this writing, NASA has not provided any details on when and where the reports will be available again or if the new assessment will proceed."
Yeah, try reading a better source [1]:
> NASA will now take over, Victoria LaCivita, communications director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told ABC News. "All preexisting reports will be hosted on the NASA website, ensuring compliance with statutorily required reporting," LaCivita said, referring ABC News to NASA for more information.
So, they're explicitly answering the second half of that question. Again, not suggesting the fact pattern is good, just that this article is terrible. I assume the AP could have also managed to get the same quote before running to press with speculation?
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-shutters-majo...
> Yeah, try reading a better source [1]:
It's from your source. It's the very last sentence in the article as of right now.
> It's from your source. It's the very last sentence in the article as of right now.
Sorry, what? I don't have any affiliation with ABC. Someone else posted the link.
NPR has the same basic comments [2]:
> All five editions of the National Climate Assessment that have been published over the years will also be available on NASA's website, according to NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens. NASA doesn't yet know when that website will be available to the public.
How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5453501/national-climat...
> I don't have any affiliation with ABC
I didn't say that. You've been posting it everywhere and called it a "better source" that we should all read. Calling it "your source" is a reasonable shorthand.
> How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
I didn't say that either. I only pasted a direct quote from an article you urged everyone to read. How you get from that to what you're saying is beyond me.
> I only pasted a direct quote from an article you urged everyone to read.
Mea culpa, I missed the line because it was at stranded at the bottom of a bunch of blocked ads. About the only thing I can say is that "NASA" and "any details" is doing all of the heavy lifting in that sentence.
The reporter just quoted someone from the administration saying that they'll follow the law. So the reporter runs over to NASA, doesn't get an immediate or exact answer, and says "OK, I'll just make it sound like maybe they're being dodgy about following the law, then."
Its a fairly standard reporter trick, but it's sleazy nonetheless: "At press time, we've received no answer from the man about when he stopped beating his wife."
> > How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
> I didn't say that either.
I now realize that this language could be misconstrued. I wasn't literally talking about "you". I meant it as "how one gets from that statement to..", and I was talking about the reporters.
>How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
In case you've missed it, the current administration lies constantly and loves suppressing views it doesn't like. Hosting a document is not rocket science. There is zero reason to take something down before having the new host up and running. That this has been done anyway suggests malign intent. And the current administration is long past getting the benefit of the doubt.
Is it really that unreasonable to believe that a government run by people who’ve regularly called climate change a hoax and has a history of pulling previously public data is pulling the public data about climate change? I don’t disagree that jumping to conclusions is bad but intentionally discounting prior behavior seems just as reckless to me.
no, it isn’t unreasonable at all.
i’ve noticed a large uptick over the past couple years of some people insisting it’s unreasonable to consider context and known past behaviors when we try to discuss things.
again, no, it’s not unreasonable. actually it would be incredibly silly, more unreasonable to ignore their past behaviors when discussing this.
I’m not “discounting prior behavior”, I’m just not getting exorcised over shutdown of a website, particularly when the explanation is likely to be incompetence.
Be real: do you honestly believe that this website was influencing any marginal opinions? I don’t. Most of the people here who are so outraged likely had no idea that this website existed before today.
This is a case where a website is a political flag, and one side is upset that the other side took down their flag. It’s all just tedious and dumb, has only tangential relationship to science, and makes exactly no difference to the world.
Yeah. The copium and ignorance described as "reason" is strong.
This administration really shows you that there are several people out there that are so dense and naive that they'd want to give their oppressors a "fair shake" and "look at the facts" (issued from the oppressors) before daring to question the justice of their own persecution.
Some Americans and Europeans have apparently had things so cushy they can no longer discern when their systems and institutions are actively being destroyed. The very idea of systematic and active oppression is so foreign to them that their "reason" becomes unreasonable. The democratic establishment in the US is a blatant example of this. Let's allow the neofascists to do whatever they want on the ground of remaining "civil".
According to someone from NASA, it was in fact shut down. NASA will eventually re-publish the reports.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-shutters-majo...
That's a better article than the link, since they actually bothered to get answers to the question from definitive sources. NPR also linked directly to the NOAA copy of the report, lending credence to the "sloppy relocation" theory of the case:
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/61592
Yes cancelling funding and firing all the people involved is indicative of an honest mistake when moving some stuff around.
If they already fired the staff of the agency, it's actually pretty believable that the dedicated website would get shut down. Talk about burying the lede.
"As of this writing, NASA has not provided any details on when and where the reports will be available again or if the new assessment will proceed."
That's hopelessly naive. A "misconfiguration" is the excuse they use after the fact when there's enough outrage that they have to put things back the way they were.
I'm not being hopelessly naive. It's certainly possible that they took it down with the explicit intention of hiding information on the internet, but that would also be pretty stupid, since various articles have found the reports on other government servers. So I assume incompetence before malice.
What's already known is that they fired the staff who prepared the report, and are presumably shutting down the agency. Is it really surprising that someone might have turned off the webserver before transferring the domain?
You are being repeatedly pummeled in the face by a gang of bullies and responding by pondering whether or not they may be continually assaulting you out of some kind of misunderstanding. lol
Yes you are. If you’re arguing in good faith then you should try to answer this question:
How far does it have to go before you assume malice? Do they have to tell you “I am malicious”? And if someone malicious is using the “dont admit it” strategy are you fucked?
What wild conclusions specifically are you objecting to? This seems an awful lot like burying your head in the sand.
If you see your hosts file what the DNS used to show, does the server respond?
That’s usually the real test.
I don't know, it's a good question. I don't have the IP addresses cached.
NPR notes that the report is here [1], so if someone is trying to hide it, they're not doing a particularly good job.
[1] https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/61592
https://dnshistory.org/historical-dns-records/a/globalchange...
It seems to be maybe AWS, and manual IP action doesn't get anything.
Sure, it is always DNS. But are other sites on that DNS also down? How long has this site been down? Has anyone acknowledged this outage?
If the DNS is up and the domain is registered it starts to look like a takedown instead of a mistake.
I do know that the EPA took down their EJScreen [1] dataset so it’s not like politically motivated takedowns are unprecedented under the current regime.
[1]: https://screening-tools.com/epa-ejscreen
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Like who, exactly?
How many people have died by climate paranoia versus actual climate change?
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I guess some of us would prefer not to see our progeny living the Mad Max timeline.
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Do I need to explain the word 'progeny'?
Your assumptions about my voting are as well-evidenced as your skepticism of science.
It’s possible to do both. Attitudes like yours are manufactured by the ones to blame. Don’t shoot the messengers.
That’s some 1984 shit right there yo!
Really? I was thinking 4 or 5 decades before then
There is a very large amount of redundency in enviromental data gathering and reporting, plus given.the most basic facts that it is impossible to close source the information source, and that there are now countless sensors on.earth and in orbit that can be re calibrated to provide conitiniousl'y consistent new data to older ongoing studies, there is essentialy nothing that can be effected by a political directive to actualy stop reporting, short of martial law, and then people would start printing pamphlets with potatoes and coffee dregs