As an American I feel like I've been going through a bit of an identity crisis from what I remember growing up.
Probably the rose tinted glasses of being a child but being from Florida I always had a sense of amazement and wonder as I heard the sonic boom of the shuttle returning to earth.
Really felt like I was coexisting in this incredible scientific powerhouse of a country full of bright and enabled peoples that knew how to prioritize curiosity and innovation.
Feeling like a bit of a "vibe" post which is everything wrong lately but I can't help but feel some satisfaction that we're still able to accomplish something like this in our space endeavors.
I think especially online there's a lot of emphasis on "everything is wrong". A mission like this is hard to ignore and highlights the bias. On the whole, despite setbacks, we continue.
If you want to dispel a bit more of the ever-pervasive online pessimism bias, read up on global rates of hunger the last time we flew to the moon (1972) vs now. The reality is, for all the problems we face today, there's no sane answer other than today to the question "when would you prefer to be born as a random person on earth"
The '70s were not hopeful. Economy was terrible, Vietnam ended but still hung over the culture, Watergate, Three Mile Island, Iranian hostage crisis, cold war threatening to turn hot at any moment, double-digit mortgage rates.... and Disco.
Definitely not the 70's. I think the most recent age that might have counted as hopeful was really between the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) through the beginning of the GWOT (9/11/2001). So basically the 90's.
The seventies were a more representative time for technological hopes, during a time when it was not yet clear which are the right technological choices. The nineties were a time of rapid technological progress, but most of it was perfectly predictable, without surprises. The only thing that was surprising during the nineties was how important the Internet became in practice, even if the evolution of its underlying technology was not surprising.
The time correctly delimited by you was the time of the greatest false political hopes, when everybody around the World believed that we got rid of the communist blood-sucking parasites and now the World would become that which had been described for decades in the propaganda of the Voice of America, where the political elites are held accountable for their actions, so if they are bad they are replaced through democratic elections, and the bad commercial companies are eliminated by competition in the free market.
Instead of this happening, already a couple of years before 9/11 a wave of destructuring many important historical companies happened, followed by a huge wave of mergers and acquisitions that has continued until today and which has eliminated competition from most markets, so that they are now dominated by quasi monopolies. Then the democratic elections have brought to power worse and worse human beings, all of whom have been much worse than some citizens that would have been randomly selected for those positions.
Nowadays, the economies of USA and of the other "Western" countries, and also their political institutions, resemble much more those of the socialist countries that they mocked during the seventies, than those of USA and W. Europe of that time.
So all the hopes of the nineties were naive and none of them was realized.
Some parts of the US economy may have been terrible (perhaps due to the increased oil price, which became closer to the true cost of oil than that of the previous cheap oil, which was so cheap because it was basically stolen by USA), but in another parts of the world the economy was great in comparison with what followed after 1980.
Moreover, even in the US, the seventies were the greatest time for the electronics and computers industries, when the greatest amount of innovations have been made.
After 1980, there have been huge advances, but all of them were completely predictable, i.e. the electronics and computing industries settled on an evolution path that was well defined for a few decades, with very few surprises.
The seventies were much wilder, when much more diverse things have been tried (and many of those have failed) and they were surely hopeful, especially in their second half.
During the seventies, there were a lot of US companies that I liked and I was convinced that if I bought something from them that was mutually beneficial, because they really tried to make products that fulfilled as well as possible the needs of their customers, while ensuring a decent and reasonable profit for the vendor.
Nowadays there exists no big company in the entire world from which I can buy a product without feeling that this is an adversarial transaction, where they try as hard as they can to fool me into paying as much as possible for something that is worth as less as possible.
A global view is probably not the right way to look at things, encouraging as it may be. Of course globally hunger rates fell and so did child mortality. If nothing else, by the inexorable progress of science and technology.
But what about comparing the same country/region? After all that's a better sense of how things are progressing locally to you, and when people are asked "are things better or worse" they probably compare the way they live with the way their parents lived.
Would you rather be born in 1980 or 2020 in China? In Poland? No question. Same question but in the USA? In the UK? The West in general? I'm really not so sure.
As an American with severe hemophilia, 2020, without a doubt.
I was born in 1978, and in the early '80s, beat approximately 50/50 odds by not getting infected with HIV from the only available treatments at the time, and as a result of this and other risks including hepatitis, treatments were only used in response to active bleeding episodes throughout my childhood, resulting in arthritis in my ankles and elbows by the time I was around 8.
And I still wound up with hepatitis C from near birth (at which point it was referred to as "non-A, non-B", as the virus would not be identified until the late '80s) until a cure was developed decades later, fortunately never symptomatic.
So, while I beat the odds, my life expectancy from birth until much later would have been considerably longer had I been born in 2020, and my joints would work a lot better.
Oh, and as someone who grew up with the Shuttle and attended both Space Camp and Space Academy in Huntsville, inevitable political nonsense notwithstanding, I'm elated about the successful mission.
As for the odds, given the opportunity, I wouldn't even hesitate unless they were worse than 1 in 10.
Objectively never a better point in history, subjectively never more people miserable and misled.
Wild stuff really. There is a book about it, using an Abe Lincoln quote he said hoping that the civil war wouldn’t happen, “better angels of our nature”.
Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free.
The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Fear is a better attention grabber than the slog of compromise and mutual understanding.
Edit: Fell into the trap of commenting on politics. To an actual curiosity technical position. Has anyone seen any good content on living underground from an energy efficiency point of view?
Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world.
Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.
Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.
The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.
That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.
The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.
The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.
If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.
Given the immense capabilities of the United States government, I don't think there is going to be a war inside the US. Or at least not one that lasts any amount of time.
This isn't really a given. Historically, whenever you have a civil war the existing state's military splits down the middle, with people generally unwilling to fire on friends, family, and neighbors. Former military officers usually form the core of the rebel military, taking their training, experience, and oftentimes equipment with them to fight for the other side.
The mistake here is thinking of the U.S. government as a monolith. Ultimately it's all just people, bound together by being paid for in dollars that are either raised as taxes or borrowed as treasuries. GP's post posits a world where the dollar is worthless; what's binding them together then?
Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself).
Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
Iran itself in its current form is a continuous line of failures of CIA and MI6 that led to their revolution against highly unpopular shah that was undemocratically installed only by those powers.
Why do you think back then the us embassy situation evolved as it did. 'Embassy' my ass, full of cia folks regardless what shallow hollywood flicks try to propagate, meddling with internal affairs for profit and power of british and americans, while impoverished common locals suffered greatly.
As usual with cia it backfired tremendously, made huge mess for decades in entire region, killed gazillion of innocents but since there aint no us citizens its just some annoying background noise of some brown 'people', right.
Anybody with above-maga intelligence can piece together those few wikipedia articles, but egos got hurt so its highly emotional topic for americans. If at least you guys learned from your collosal mistakes...
> but egos got hurt so its highly emotional topic for americans.
We've simply had decades of propaganda teaching us that the US is the most moral nation that has only fought moral wars for moral reasons.
A lot of the history books are about American exceptionalism and triumph. Even when they cover topics like slavery and civil rights, they paint it as being temporary embarrassments that we got over and now everything is OK.
MAGA is just a bunch of people who swallowed that propaganda whole and never questioned it in the slightest. We can see that in the fact that they get really upset about history lessons that are even slightly critical or analytical of America's past.
I keep seeing comments that refer to Iranians as "brown people" - usually to emphasize their perceived "otherness" by the ignorant, as in this case. But Iranians aren't brown, or Arab apart from a small minority, and relatively speaking their culture isn't even that "other" - it would probably feel more familiar to the average American than some European countries even.
Do Americans really hear "Iran" and think of durka-durka from Team America?
Iranians tend to have a little more pigment in their skin and it's not a minority.
I get why you'd say this, Iranians don't have particularly dark skin and some are as white as my English/swedish ancestors.
> Do Americans really hear "Iran" and think of durka-durka from Team America?
Some do. But usually the "killing brown people" is a shorthand for the fact that US policy has mostly focused on immiserating non-western-European nations for the benefit of of the US.
It implies racism at the core of US policy because only Western European nations are considered civilized and deserving of fair international treatment.
>> the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts
How does this work exactly? It doesn't. It's a misunderstanding of public debt.
When you say stops buying US bonds, you're talking about the secondary market for US government bonds right - because in practice, contrary to the econ textbooks and common understanding, only a small number of institutions are allowed to purchase them in the primary market, not only that but these purchasers are compelled by law to continue buying them, to continue bidding for them at a fair price, and if they don't have the reserves to buy them then these purchasers will be given the reserves to continue to buy them. The entire premise of the argument falls apart as soon as you step away from the econ model and look at the legislation governing what actually happens by law.
How does the "petrodollar" exactly prop up the US dollar? The price of a barrel of oil has oscillated quite a bit in dollar terms, so it's not like there's anything like a fixed or artificially-maintained 'exchange rate' there. There's, what, a 10x swing between highest and lowest USD price of oil in the last 10 years alone? The dollar has fluctuated vs other currencies too. I've never fully followed how trading for a dollar just to sell that dollar immediately for oil would only help the USD. It all gets turned into oil quickly, so wouldn't that mostly balance out in how demand for oil then relatively-weakens the dollar against the value of toil itself? The "medium of exchange" need has some effect, but I don't see it by itself driving "store of value." If there was a better store of value for the people selling the oil, what prevents them from swapping out those dollars essentially immediately? And then switch to taking payment in those other things as well?
And "just printing dollars" has well-documented inflationary effects inside the US too.
Not an economist but the petrodollar concept helps the dollar because everybody that needs oil needs to buy dollars. You see it as small thing but it is fundamental thing because oil is used in so many places that as we have seen a disruption of 20% of it would start causing real problems on almost the entire world.
QED: oil powerful, only dollar buy oil, dollar stronger.
The use of dollars to purchase any commodity is a negligible fraction of demand for dollars.
What you should be looking at is investment demand for dollars, that is, in which currency does the seller store their surplus.
Think about it:
I need to buy a barrel of oil, but I am in Argentina. So I sell my pesos for dollars, I buy the oil with the dollar. The seller now has dollars, and sells the dollars for Swiss Francs and invests the money in swiss bonds.
Now, what happened? The global demand for dollars by the buyer was exactly offset by the seller. It is the seller that decides, by choosing where to store his surplus, of what currency is boosted by oil. And it is not the currency that oil is sold for, it is the currency that the proceeds are invested in.
So oil is completely irrelevant for the value of the dollar, what is relevant is that investors want to store their funds in the US capital markets. That's what matters, and it is investor preference to store their earnings in capital markets that determines why they want to denominate oil in dollars. It just saves on an extra transaction.
But focusing on the transactions misses the picture of the dollar's strength, because denominating oil in dollars is merely a consequence of the desirability of US capital markets as a destination for foreign capital. And that desirability drives everything else. It's not oil, it's deep, liquid capital markets with established foreign investor rights. That trumps everything else.
Think about it -- would you keep your earnings in a country with weak foreign investor rights or lack of financial transparency or illiquid markets where you couldn't easily pull your money out when you wanted to? That is much more important to the seller of the oil than anything else. It will drive what oil is priced in. And it will drive the demand for dollars.
Certainly correct, but I think you’re underselling the historical exchange part of this. Dollars being everywhere causes the financial infrastructure to be built out in dollar terms.
Part of what enabled that huge capital flow you’re talking about is that it was the Americans who came in and gave [country’s] banks a counterparty to exchange dollars for oil.
A lot of that soft power is not just the ability of America to print dollars, but also the ability of America to control the financial infrastructure. To surveil, KYC, sanction, etc. that is a huge part of it.
The petrodollar is less mechanically important today but back in the day it was huge to have “everyone who needs oil” be the counterparty to a currency exchange. It is what injected all that liquidity, which set the whole thing off.
I think what people are realizing and considering now is with the computerization of everything, capital can flow more freely. That is what is dangerous (for the US) about today’s moment; our political leaders are taking it all for granted.
I do think history is also important, but again it boils down "where is a safe place to store my money?". That really controls everything else.
Now, in the past we had a gold standard, so you could literally move your money from one country to another. Now during both WW1 and especially the runup to WW2, the wealthy moved much of their money to the United States as a safe harbor, since we were the only advanced economy with deep liquid bond markets, rule of law, and foreign investment rights (sorry, Canada, but it's true).
This was the greatest wealth transfer in history. By 1940, the US held 80% of the world's global gold reserves. 80%! And this was in the era when international trade was settled in gold.
So it all happened in single decade between 1930 and 1940, and the US instantly became the world's global reserve leader, an extremely dominant position, merely because people were afraid of war and wanted a safe place to park their money.
After the devastation after WW2, the flood of European money into the US continued and more than offset the Marshall plan.
So already at the end of WW2, the majority of the world's liquid savings was tucked away in America.
Now, people like to tell stories of American soldiers spending dollars somehow making the dollar a reserve currency, and those are the types of things that seem plausible to people who don't monitor global capital flows, but that's honestly a ridiculous story. That was chump change.
Bottom line, there are no special technical reasons beyond "I want a safe place to store my money". That controls everything else.
There is an adage in the world of money markets: "It does not matter what currency you trade in, what matters is what currency you store the proceeds in".
And the moment that some other nation opens its doors to foreign capital inflow, establishes rule of law (which takes decades to develop a reputation for stability and not confiscating assets), is safe, stable, and secure, establishes financial transparency, and has deep, liquid capital markets -- then the world's wealthy will flood that nation with money also. But unlike declaring that "I will sell my oil for euros", doing the above takes decades of building trust and reputation. Gimmicks aren't going to do it when you are looking for a safe place to store your money.
I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from the comment. How can you read that comment and not conclude that this is the way of thinking from before "Pax Americana"? They are talking about "wealth extraction" ... in other words, free labor (not money), without paying. In other words, slavery.
Nations used to fight for extracting tax, and with it free labor, from each other, and that situation was pervasive, and the cause of many wars, before WW2. In fact WW2 is the last such war.
Before WW2, France and England extracted (a LOT of) tax, without doing anything, from Germany. That's how the wealthy in France and England got richer, you know, without producing anything.
Before WW1, the Ottoman empire (the "islamic world" as people like to refer it now) extracted wealth, by capturing slaves and forcing them, at gunpoint (well "at knifepoint", and by simply letting them starve chained up in ditches until they worked), from essentially all of Africa. By the end of the slave trade, Europe participated. Again, let's not pretend that either the caliphs or sultans or royal houses used what was effectively unlimited free labor to end poverty. In fact they made it a lot worse, everywhere, from England to "the islamic world" to India.
You can go back thousands and thousands of years and compare the many situations (e.g. people would not tax foreign nations directly but tax things they needed, sometimes as dramatically as water, but lots of things, including access to international trade), but it goes back very, very, very far. The story of the Minotaur (slaves, militarily extracted from foreign nations would be thrown to a beast if they didn't work). The Exodus story. The Vedas. Right up to the story of Epic of Gilgamesj.
The comment you're replying to is a scream that this situation must be restarted. The US does wealth extraction, and, read the comment, their point is not that they want wealth extraction to stop. No. They want to ... uh ... participate in it.
>The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
The fallacy in the line of thinking that "why don't we all just shake hands, say something nice, and get along with each other" comes from the erroneous belief that everyone in the world just wants peace and material prosperity for themselves and their people. This isn't the case, for countless reasons.
Peace is what you and I want, because we're living in highly privileged lives where maintaining the peaceful status quo (one in which we're on top) for as long as we live is the best outcome for us, and because we have a fairly rational view of life and the world (e.g. we are not convinced that killing a certain people is the only key to an eternity in "heaven", or have bought into some myth of ethnoracial/cultural exceptionalism that needs to be defended by any means). We also aren't emburdened by some great injustice for which we have a burning itch for vengeance (e.g. no one has bombed your whole family).
This just isn't the case for everyone in the world.
Of all things there's a relevant Tumblr post from nearly a decade ago that I often think everyone should consider (in agreement BTW):
"If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."
That's a reflection/continuation of a very old meme (from before we called them memes). "Why your idea won't work" checklists were passed around USENET and other forums, and one of the checklist items was almost always something like "your idea requires immediate total cooperation from everyone at once".
This is formally known as a "collective action problem", and CAPs always make achieving a solution damn-near impossible.
I know a number of people who grew up in extreme poverty who are extremely well reasoned here and others who are extremely spoiled and fortunate who would gladly enter into a holy war.
I don't think you can quite generalize that much.
Additionally cooperation is an evolutionary advantage and world war is a species level threat now that we have nuclear weapons.
I don't believe that everyone wants peace. I believe the people who have the ability to shape policy and invest capital would want peace.
Which I think is also complicated. Kind of harkens back to the cliche that WW1 was caused by old people romanticizing war. Most letters between the heads of states confirmed they were anticipating industrial destruction and death but they felt the pressure to initiate war anyway.
I think it's a bit more complex than that, because sometimes even the people outside that bubble still don't want to rock the boat because they're comfortable enough, or worry that things could get even worse.
Still, your point is well taken. People's tendency to wish for calm and an unrocked boat when they think things are okay is something I've started calling "jasmine in Damascus" thinking, which is a phrase I came across in this article ( https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-03-14/syrian... ) with perspectives from Syrians on Assad and the Syrian civil war, in particular this bit:
> I hate when Syrians reminisce about the smell of jasmine in Damascus, or the cheap cost of living before the war as some sort of excuse for a regime like Assad to remain without anyone saying no, without anyone in history objecting at the very least…. I don’t think that life was worth it.
Globalization offered the model for this. When the economy is globally linked there is more pressure for stability than conflict. I think that theory still holds. The fallout of the last 10 years is that the distribution of the wealth created in that system has not been even at all, and we are seeing huge wealth gaps. Jobs were redistributed to poorer nations and lost in a lot of wealthier markets.
If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.
I'll add to this by saying that globalization works as well as it does because the average person would suffer dramatically from a major war and the resulting breakdown of global supply chains. People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.
As a corollary: people who, because of geography, are unlikely to suffer any traditional or novel military consequences of a war in country <X> (e.g. Americans w.r.t a war in the middle east) are only going to have moral reasons for avoiding such a war, other than the risk to members of their family and friends. This makes the risks from such countries significantly worse than those who are militarily at risk should they choose to attack another.
Of course, none of that stops terroristic responses to war, but those by themselves affect relatively small numbers of people (or have done so far; obviously terroristic use of nuclear weapons would change that).
We can see all of this in the voices of the segment of the American population that is "all in" for the war in Iran, safe in their belief that they will suffer no militaristic consequences from it.
> People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.
Eh, if you’re a billionaire factory owner and landlord, the kind of war that would send you to a military grade bunker in New Zealand will be bad for your factories, properties, workers and tenants.
Also, a man can only go to the opera if the singers and orchestra aren’t busy scavenging for food or fighting mutant wolves. And the same is true of most other entertainment, fine dining, fashion and suchlike.
Sane wealthy people gain nothing from a world scale war, and in fact would face a big loss in quality of life.
As I understand it, the idea was that there would be winners and losers from globalization but overall the benefit would be more global and outweigh localized drawbacks. This means that you can tax the global benefit and compensate the losers while still having everyone come out ahead! Sounds fantastic right, but in reality there were winners and losers and no one gave a shit about the losers. Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.
>Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.
For people who give such lip service to sustainability you'd think their political policy would have taken longer to run such a course.
One of the reasons for this is that the financial system - which is supposed to serve as a mechanism for representing value in a fungible way - does not assign value to many forms of structured, engineered creation. For instance, a high-performing team within an organization has value, held in the agreements and trusts between the people; organizations will destroy this in a second if it suits them because there is no quantitative record of the value of that group. Similarly, at scale, there is intense value in having all of the necessary tooling in one city to manufacture something as complicated as a car, to use your Detroit example. We can see the shadow of the qualitative value by looking at the losses incurred by all the ancillary industries affected when a major company like GM moves manufacturing out of town and everything downstream of that shuts down; and we can see the long tail of the loss in terms of the socioeconomic outcomes of the average working class person living there.
In a sense, these corporate (and on the next scale up, governmental) decisions have a large scale social cost that is externalized when it should probably have to be borne by the company. A generation of men that should have grown up to take their father's place building cars instead are relegated to either leaving their city or accepting one of the lesser jobs that they're forced to fight for; meanwhile the shareholders of the company profit from lower labour cost somewhere else.
Capitalism offers no means of dealing with this problem; creating this problem is incentivized. Many of the problems capitalism does solve, it does so through quantization of value; perhaps we need to find a better way to map social value as a second or third order system out beyond raw currency so that we don't destroy it.
Capitalism offers a means of dealing with the problem. Workers are free to start their own companies. People can just do things and don't need permission. Henry Ford himself started from nothing.
Your "just" there is doing a lot of work. Don't trivialize the difficulty of starting a company. Most people who start companies and are successful either have some financial backing or reserves already, or they have very little in the way of other responsibilities (like a spouse, children, or elderly family members) to cause them to think twice about living on ramen for years.
Yes, there are exceptions, as with everything, but this isn't a path to be taken lightly. Your average worker who lost their job due to globalization ends up scrambling to find a job, any job, immediately, or else risk their family living on the street.
Relatively speaking, it would seem Ford was well enough off.
Born in 1863, given a pocket watch at 12 (1875), starting a company at age 40 after some years pottering about as an apprentice machinist before working on steam engines and other "advanced machines".
This is well above "having nothing" for those times - some decades earlier a pocket watch was an extremely high end highly valued prestige item - not so much so when Ford was given one at 12, but absolutely a signifier of "better than nothing"
Working on machines at that time was also a fairly prestige career path, well paid, in demand, not at all like being "just an auto mechanic" might be seen in the 1950s.
“Wilt thou call again thy peoples, wilt thou craze anew thy Kings?
“Lo! my lightnings pass before thee, and their whistling servant brings,
“Ere the drowsy street hath stirred—
“Every masked and midnight word,
“And the nations break their fast upon these things.
“So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space.
“The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place,
“Where the anxious traders know
“Each is surety for his foe,
“And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.
“Now this is all my subtlety and this is all my wit,
“God give thee good enlightenment, My Master in the Pit.
“But behold all Earth is laid
“In the Peace which I have made,
“And behold I wait on thee to trouble it!”
This is ignoring the concept of "cultures" entirely. Other cultures are not the same as mine. They do not hold the same values, morals, beliefs or language. These are all important for societies to function.
Societies that are split along these lines are doomed to fail. Take a simple example of a new neighbor moving next door to you. If they don't speak the same language, do you think you'll form much of a relationship? Possible, yes, but more likely no. Now add religion, tradition, etc into the mix.
The problem in my view is, once dirt poor countries that work for nothing in horrible sweatshops to make cheap trinkets skill finally up and entire region moves from horribly poor to just poorish, the not en-vogue parts of the rich world will suffer some decline if they dont adapt and refocus on whats needed now and in near future.
Sounds like it matches those 2 regions although I am not that familiar with Toledo story. Also, from poor countries perspective it certainly looks like first world 'problems' they wish they had.
If we lift whole world from poverty then our western wages wont buy us much. You can see this in more egalitarian societies like nordics or Switzerland, there are no dirt poor, big middle class but you pay a lot for stuff and services and dont hoard tons of wealth. State picks up the tab for healthcare and whole education though. Thats the price for well functioning modern society (nothing to do with socialism), it has benefits but this is the cost and it cant be avoided.
I personally like living and raising kids in such system a lot, way more than US one for example.
I agree with your comment regarding fairer distribution, but I think when we look at globalisation's impact on war, I'm not sure this is really playing out.
Iran has not benefitted hugely from globalisation (unless I'm missing something), however because of globalisation and their ability to impact the global economy, they have an outsized hand to play relative to their GDP.
>Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Because nature is filled with examples.
Look at the plants around you. They are nice and peaceful, right? No wars with other plants, no battles for life and death and resources... Well if you don't know anything about plants that's exactly what you'd think.
And I'm not really talking about animals and insects that are trying to consume them, plants themselves, rooted into the ground are in a constant war. Some breed very quickly to compete, making millions of seeds or growing at insane speeds. Some plants poison the soil around them with horrifically toxic substances so only they can grow. Some plants grow broad leaves flat against the ground strangling anything that tries to grow. Other plants make vast canopies creating a world of darkness below them to snuff competitors. Some plants have symbiotic relationships with bacteria to fix nitrogen so they grow faster than other plants. Some plants have relationships with ants and the ants keep competition away.
War and peace are simply game theories in real life. Take your statement
>Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Anything that doesn't involve you smashing someone's head in and instead doing anything that is even slightly cooperative is a peaceful scenario. Pretty much everything you do every day is just that.
Furthermore you need to dream up every possible conflict idea that you possibly can if you want to defend against it. The difficult part there is not using it against others. This is why you see people worry about things like advance AI. Because while it could come up with all kinds of peaceful ideas, even just a few good conflict ideas could make mankind go extinct.
Human cooperation is another survival strategy, and a very effective one when achievable. Peace in no way disagrees with what you said, anymore than plant cooperation with bacteria is a counterexample.
I think you're thinking of it the wrong way. Cooperation is effective if the party you're cooperating with has something to give in return that's within a couple of orders of magnitude of value. Just as much as war has a cost, peace/cooperation has a cost.
I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible.
Unless we've managed to find ourselves alive at the point in all of history where humanity forever abandoned war all together, there will be another war at some point.
That doesn't mean it needs to happen today or that fighting to sustain peace isn't an admirable, and necessary, action to take. It does mean one still needs to consider the next war though, in case its forces upon us despite wanting peace.
I've had the same challenge when an argument is raised that nukes haven't been used since 1945 so they may never be used. It is quite a feat for sure, but in my opinion the only way a nuke is never again used in conflict is if we invent an even worse weapon and someone eventually uses that instead.
>I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible.
There is no post-WWII goal of permanent peace. It’s a side effect of the invention of nuclear weapons, which made wars amongst powerful countries a lose-lose scenario for everyone.
Why do we insist on building cars to be safe in a collision when it would be so much nicer to not have accidents? Why do we build cancer treatment when not getting cancer is a much better option?
I do not think mural understanding works. It just allows you to merely accept someone, but it doesn’t mean that you want to work with them.
What America pushed after the WW2 was the “American world order” which was primarily “if we can trade, let’s forget about war and make money.” America would sit in the middle, protect shipping routes, provide a stable currency to ease trade, and encourage trade pacts.
Surprisingly, unlike beliefs, religion, language, or almost anything else, wanting to make money is… somewhat universal. It breaks down barriers. Countries wanted to work together and make money from trade. It exploited human materialistic tendencies.
you don't have to be ideological. You can be perfectly rational and continue a seemingly useless pointless war, when the alternative is "armed men return home and start to question your power". Your goal is to stay in power and every move which helps you with it is rational
> Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Sadly, war is often a driver of economic growth. WWII pulled the US economy out the Great Depression and transformed it into one of the most prosperous in human history. I'd argue that the proxy wars the US has been waging largely exist to satiate a military industrial complex that is focused on growth. Hard to grow when your business is war if there are no wars to fight.
And I'll wade into political waters. The US government has no problem waging war because it's not unpopular enough of an issue to threaten an administration. We're spending $1B a day now to fight Iran but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
That's a property shared by any large scale government spending.
The difference between pouring 80B into a war and pouring the same into infrastructure is that one gives you a more developed MIC and a lot of munitions and a lot of explosions (exported), and the other gives you... infrastructure, and construction industry.
A big part of this is that apparently, any president can unilaterally decide to go to war and spend $1B per day destroying things, but building infrastructure for Americans requires the agreement of 60 US Senators.
Pre-emptive strikes are “national security”, but ensuring nutritional food for children in schools, safe bridges and potable water, and healthcare are not “national security”.
Look what Biden had to do to try and get Americans a piddling amount of paid sick leave and paid parental leave. And still 60 votes couldn’t be mustered. But if he wanted to bomb another country to the stone age, that was well within his capacity.
US states are free to build infrastructure without any federal involvement or permission. California just spent $114M to build a wildlife crossing bridge over Highway 101.
Starting with CodingJeebus' comment, the context of the discussion is what the US federal government can and cannot do, or does and does not do, at the best of a single person (the US President). They have the power to direct destruction, but not the power to direct creation.
Not only is a state government's capabilities irrelevant, it is also incomparable to the might of the US federal government, given its unique ability to sell US Treasuries and issue US currency. State governments are also in competition with each other, unlike the federal government which is in competition with other countries and has more power to restrict and negotiate trade agreements.
> but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
Sounds like you're buying into reddit propaganda. The US spends more on social programs than it does on war, so apparently we have and can definitely find the courage to improve healthcare and hunger.
In fact, hunger is mostly not an issue in the united states.
I think the reason we can imagine conflict easier than peace is pretty structural. Wars usually happen because of disequilibrium, and we're sitting right in the middle of a big one.
The world order we know was built by and for the US when it was the uncontested superpower. Thats just not the case anymore. Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either. Both sides have real competing interests, this isnt some misunderstanding that better diplomacy can fix. Its a genuine redistribution problem.
Thats why peaceful outcomes are so hard to picture. They require everyone to accept losses and nobody is lining up for that.
significant parts of the current world order evolved when the US was very much a contested superpower, c/o the USSR. While many things have changed since the dissolution of the USSR, many things have remained the same.
Further, you can guarantee that if Russia had announced in the days of war rumors re: Iran that they would militarily (not just intelligence & logistics, if stories are to be believed) support Iran, the US would likely not have attacked in anything like this way. That they did not doesn't mean that the US is "uncontested", merely that Russia wasn't interested in that sort of positioning of its own (nuclear) military threat over US action in Iran.
I don't think there are major unresolved economic tensions between US and Iran or the likes. US isn't, somehow, mad because Iran or Venezuela are suddenly very rich and prosperous and independent - that simply isn't true.
The closest to your dynamic would be that between US and China, and those two aren't at war as of yet. Iran is vaguely supported by China, but it's a low level of support, and it isn't China's proxy.
Yes that's the "it actually makes sense" the more repugnant conservative pundits have been pushing because those guest spots on the right wing networks require you not to criticize the administration in any way.
Trump may be a violent moron, but this goes back further. US sanctions and intimidation of Iran and Venezuela has been supported by both parties when in power. It's a US regime thing, not a party/administration thing (that stuff is for the mugs who believe they have a democracy).
The US relationship with China is fascinating. My entire life it has both been an economic boogeyman, the nation nipping at our heels, and yet also the manufacturing engine powering everything out companies were creating.
Ignoring the one sided benefits of that even though you shouldn't it kind of reminds me maybe of the US and Britains relations?
Not a 1:1 but the continental separation, the "greed" of external companies trying to exploit the natural resources and work force.
And yet we're allies today.
If you're interested in the topic I'd highly advise checking out Sarah Paine and her lectures. An interesting view point of Mao and the rise of China.
>But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either.
How is it that Hacker News people can be so smart on tech, yet lack Econ 101 understanding that the world is not a zero-sum place? The pie can grow for everyone.
Why do you suppose that the World Bank and the IMF make loans to developing countries? Under a zero-sum frame, wouldn't it be better to keep them underfoot by denying them credit?
Before you complain about someones economic knowledge, you must first learn that while econ 101 tells you trade creates surplus, econ 301 tells you the distribution of that surplus is a power struggle.
The World Bank/IMF were designed to integrate developing countries into a system on WESTERN TERMS as suppliers of raw materials and labour, as markets for Western goods, as borrowers denominated in dollars. The loans weren't charity but architecture. They worked great as long as the recipients stayed in their lane. The tension now is precisely that countries like China used that system to climb the ladder and are now competing for the parts of the pie that were never supposed to be on the table, semiconductor fabs, AI leadership, alternative financial infrastructure, military projection in their own regions.
>The world order we know was built by and for the US when it was the uncontested superpower.
You mean after the fall of the Soviet Union? Because Soviet Union used to contest US power.
>Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either.
So you believe relations between countries are a 0 sum game?
The soviet union did not contest that order so much as exist outside of it. When it collapsed, those institutions didn't change they just lost their counterweight.
aggregate economic growth is positive sum, but the things that actually matter in geopolitics, namely who controls chokepoints, who sets standards, whose currency denominates trade, who has military primacy in a given region are zero-sum or close to it. china getting richer grows the pie. china getting rich enough to contest US naval dominance in the South China Sea does not. both are happening simultaneously. pointing at the first doesn't make the second disappear.
If anything, the prospects for war are far higher now, because drones provide economic victory to a gigantic number of countries against a larger foes.
I would agree, except that de-escalation generally assumes there's a rational reason for conflict. That is, both sides want or need something that makes sense, and the failing to come to some sort of terms is what leads to war.
In the case of both Russia/Ukraine and US/Iran, there's nothing rational here. You can't de-escalate in these cases, because the aggressors (Putin and Trump) are making war for ideological or ego reasons. Putin wants glory and more territory for the Russian Empi-- oops, I mean Federation. Trump wants to distract from Epstein and other problems at home (which hasn't worked as well as most manufactured wars often do), and is in general just someone who likes to break things.
> Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict.
There have been wars ongoing since more than centuries. Since way before the US even existed. We could name names and point to movement that have enslaved people, conquered many countries and brought misery everywhere they went way before the european/american slave trade took place, for example. And countries in which slavery persisted long after that one slave-trade was stopped.
Even if you don't go to war, war and misery has a way to come to your country.
While in the US the current president is 2/3rd of his total terms (counting the eight years) and things may go better later on, there are beliefs and cultures in other parts of the world that make it so they are nearly always at war. And this won't stop even should the US "play nice".
The theory behind the US having a large military is that it acts as a sort of fleet in being - that the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily. In turn, having stable global relations and protected global trade provides the US with a huge economic boon to fund its large military.
That's the theory anyway - our Idiot King and his idiots have completely missed the point of the US military existing and are using it as a primary method of engagement, which is causing the economic boon used to fund the military to evaporate.
As an aside, it's not a huge issue, but China's military costs use different accounting than the US, and seem lower by comparison. Apples to apples, China probably spends about half what the US does on military.
> the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily
If the US has such a strong military why are they always begging European countries to help them with their various totally-not-a-war "actions", like most recently in Iran?
Last time the UK got into something in the Middle East with the US we lost more people to "friendly fire" than enemy action. There's no real appetite for that any more.
I mean we could just go back to talk softly and carry a big stick. There are options between pacifism and boisterous rabble rousing and picking fights that don't particularly need to be fought without good plans.
Bullshit. Those numbers are not to be trused. China simply lies about their military spending, but independent estimates put their spending alone close to the USA.
So curiously I wonder if it's not that Anthropic/Claude can do this magically. More like can individuals at IBM who are heavy hitters just leave and create their own company and effectively provide these services because AI gives them the productivity to do so?
To be fair the author shows an example of using NixOS. It's absolutely another layer of indirection (probably several) but it does make that usual Linux "fun" less problematic because of its immutable nature and API design.
https://brianjlogan.com
I haven't done much with it but my plans are to try and spend more time writing. Haven't even ported over most of my prior content.
I've been on the web since I think 2007 learning HTML as a kid uploading files via FTP.
I need to figure out a better RSS reader that I can subscribe to other blogs like Julia Evan's
This was a super interesting article for me as I'm working on a prototype software aiming to promote spaced repetition and some newer wave learning science as a common approach to "leveling up" in an age where AI is pushing the competitiveness of human labor.
I've thought about posting to HN but I'm a little apprehensive of when and how to post.
Anyone interested in this and/or have some advice for posting my prototype online for feedback?
I ran my own home router and I used Kea and Power DNS using Systemd Containers to provide service for my whole home.
I was really impressed. I think the folks who put it together did a good job of addressing the major warts of my experience with isc-dhcp-server.
I'm sure it's a tremendous challenge writing software that's supposed to live up to modern expectations while still attempting to deliver on all of the legacy dependents and their unique use cases.
Makes me think of that article on how Cloudflare wrote their own Golang DNS Server and like some 900 whopping people use LOC records but they still support it
Probably the rose tinted glasses of being a child but being from Florida I always had a sense of amazement and wonder as I heard the sonic boom of the shuttle returning to earth.
Really felt like I was coexisting in this incredible scientific powerhouse of a country full of bright and enabled peoples that knew how to prioritize curiosity and innovation.
Feeling like a bit of a "vibe" post which is everything wrong lately but I can't help but feel some satisfaction that we're still able to accomplish something like this in our space endeavors.
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