Without linking to the posts, Rochko also mentioned that “a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer” led him to realize it was time to “step back and find a healthier relationship with the project.” It also drove the decision to restructure Mastodon.

The result is a site with relatively measured debate but also a large chunk of missing debate. All that said I don’t have some genius idea about how to do it better so my criticisms can only go so far.

In either case, the owners/operators of HN set a standard for the kind of discourse they want to encourage, and they take steps to encourage it. Nothing wrong with that. Reddit, Slashdot, 4chan, Twitter, and countless other sites exist for people with different tastes.

For submissions with lots of comments the majority of comments are all under the top comment, branching off into all kinds of places.

It only works when there is not a lot of participation, unless you count participation itself as the goal.

There is also the limit of usefulness of longer comments, a few paragraphs - not too little, but also not too much - and everything unstructured severely limits the quality of the information.

You have many layers but it is all pressed into the linear format. You usually have less than a handful of actually on topic posts that really add significantly to the OP submission, but you may also have a lot of great discussion that is adjacent. Now, it is hard to find those few great on-topic posts, and people who may have something interesting to say may not even do so when they see they are comment #200+ because they know they won't be read far down the list.

There is also no connection in time. Every single comment only gets a brief moment in space (the submission's comment space) and time (a few hours at most before nobody will ever see it again). You can't build something up over time, it's all quite superficial.

That is not HN specific, all comments sections are the same everywhere. I am disappointed by the lack of innovation in this space. It reminds me of how many everyday things are not improving, for example, bad public toilets. I see the same ones clogged again and again, and dirty and stinking. And yet, they never make any changes, and the new constructions all have the same problems. For example, why does cleaning them remain such a disgusting chore? They could just have better surfaces, a hose and a drain so that the cleaner or even a user can just use the hose to clean a stall or the entire room. I saw that in a sausage factory when I worked there while in school, hot water hoses you could use any- and everywhere, and indeed everything was very clean because everybody just used a hot water hose a lot.

I no longer believe in automatic improvements, and it has nothing to do with whatever system society uses. There is just a lot of inertia, things just continue and nobody really spends much effort to improve many easily improvable things. Part of it is not just starting something, it's also the (correct) expectation that even if you provide something better it will be shutdown, and it has nothing to do with price (cleaning and unclogging those toilets must add up over time, never mind that e.g. the big 10 theatre cinema owner should have the idea that maybe customers always having to go into stinking restrooms is bad for business long-term?).

Back to comment systems, we have TONS of comment systems, but they all do pretty much the same. I don't believe for a second that there is no other way and we have a global maximum. We have a local maximum, and we cannot seem to get out of it.

I wouldn't necessarily call it good, however. HN is absolutely teeming with bad-faith throwaway accounts, and too much faith is put in the user moderation side of things to police them. The user moderation itself is also given far too much leeway - I have lost track of the amount of bad-faith flagging and downvoting I've seen on this site, and there's quite a bit of it even in this thread.

It's nice that the worst of the bad behavior has been flagged or dead-ed. But in communities that I actually use for socializing, behaving badly would get you put on a very short leash, followed by a gentile but firm removal from the community if it persisted. Behaving badly on an alt would get your main account outright banned, and obvious alt accounts would be proactively sought out and removed - sometimes before they even said anything. And in those communities, there are generally no user moderation tools at all, aside from a "report" button, because user moderation is far too easy to gamify and abuse.

That's part of the problem. A place this large, this public, and with this little amount of trust isn't really a community. It's the comments section of a content aggregator with a few engagement hooks via voting and user moderation. You can't really "hang out" here, there's no place to actually connect with other human beings unless you go elsewhere.

These days, it seems like most "community" spaces have migrated to places like Discord, Matrix, or even VRChat - places that allow for both public spaces and private, invite-only spaces. I've also found that Tildes feels like a community, despite being shaped a lot like Reddit/HN. I suspect that's due to the community still being rather small, not having open invitations, and making nearly all forms of gamified engagement positive.

For what it's worth, the largest internet community I knew of prior to the modern era of social media was Something Awful. And, frankly, it was _much_ better run than this place, or any other social media site, as it was moderated by dozens of actual humans who operated transparently - all moderator actions were publicly listed, and you could see the post and reason for the action. The site also charged $10 for access, charged you again if you got banned for breaking the rules or just not being a quality member of the community, and would actively seek out and ban anonymous alt accounts.

Eventually my blood pressure was driven too high and I fucked it off. A high percentage of people are like barely functioning apes flinging shit and I just got over it.

IME mods deserve a lot of the shit they get. It's not exactly well-functioning individuals that tend to choose such a (unpaid) position for themselves.

I'm sure there are "nice" instances out there, but I gave up after trying 2-3 and having flashbacks to regular twitter from 7-8 years ago. No thanks

That's just human culture, or more accurately, human nature. If you gather a bunch of anonymous strangers online in one place and let them run free, they'll likely make a mess of things.

Perhaps it's an unpopular opinion here, but I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.

Whereas millions of people participate in online forums every single day, and not because they're desperate, in danger of death or the like.

Why are you here there?

Seriously curious. Promise not to criticize you or even respond to what you say.

I agree with, uh, assbuttbuttass: "there are still a lot of interesting articles posted here".

As for commenting, it's just a matter of too much time on my hands, temptation, and bad habit.

> Promise not to criticize you or even respond to what you say.

You can respond, anyway. ;-)

Well, since you asked ;-)

I'd agree with you, more or less. I don't find it horrendous necessarily. But I find the focus to be far more on the articles than the conversation. Most of my comments are just me screaming into the void.

Its a different business model though, HN isn't trying to increase your session time as much as possible. I find the UI to actually discourage conversation and interaction.

The culture is fucking terrible

Feels very much like a "you become what you hate situation," in my case, interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything -- and yet, (it's mild, no worries, but) I have been on the receiving end of the literal worst behavior I've ever experienced via strangers on social media. E.g. some mild doxxing, you aren't really Black etc.

(And for those curious/interested/familiar, yes it was "Bad Space" aligned people)

That's exactly the problem, though. Political echo chambers with no diversity of thought ultimately cultivate the expectation that everyone must agree on every topic, at all times.

As soon as you dare disagree with what the majority has decided is the "correct" opinion, you will be seen as the enemy.

And you can have whatever opinion you want, but also be prepared for me to tell you that your opinion is stupid, and when you assert that a falsehood is in fact opinion instead of a lie, I will point out that facts are not opinions and opinions are not facts.

Too many of y’all get this confused.

So we make our own choices about where we spend our time, and some of us simply disconnect.

What do you mean?

Was it well meaning? Yes. Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy? Also yes.

I find that most everyone on Mastodon focuses properly, but too much on "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because of the racism," and not "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because it's boring as hell."

Very often what any group outside the mainstream does do to address their concerns is called 'overblown', etc. by people in the mainstream. 'They make too big a deal of it', you'll hear. The 'overblown' perception is a strong signal of the problem at work (and also condescending).

It goes to what is often the heart of the cause of the problems: The mainstream doesn't experience it directly, they only see it peripherally, and they can easily ignore it, which they mostly do. Doing anything effective about the problem therefore challenges the mainstream's norms.

If you are studying Ada programming, you talk to Ada programmers, not to people who read about Ada somewhere - the latter would be absurd; what do they know? If you want to know about the experiences of Black people, conservative Christians, etc., you need to talk to those people and listen to them. It's not overblown to them.

And on one hand I understand that for very many issues, black folks get unfairly percieved as making too big of a deal of things etc.

But no, I'll stand firm here. The Bad Space people are genuinely a bunch of weirdos. So much so that I feel compelled to call them out as such because I understand that for a lot of Mastodon, they're a point of contact for "Blackness" for a lot of people who are not black. And frankly, I find them embarrassing in a way that I literally never have ANY other black folks in real life. I do not want non-black people to believe that their behavior is normal or appropriate.

As in, I never found "oh, they're just playing the race card" to EVER be valid.

Until I went to Mastodon.

And especially in practice.

> I am black as well

I don't know that it gives too much legitimacy to the argument. There are ~~ 40 million black people in the US; lots of different ideas and perspectives. If I went by all the black people who try to shock me by saying they like Trump, he would have gotten 70% of the black vote. Frankly, lots of people online claim to be black after they say something critical - and especially something racist (you didn't say anything racist, afaik) - as if that somehow justifies it. It's a well-worn troll tactic to turn the tables on racism, etc.

> And frankly, I find them embarrassing in a way that I literally never have ANY other black folks in real life. I do not want non-black people to believe that their behavior is normal or appropriate.

Doesn't that take on the too common perspective toward black people (and lots of other groups), that each black person is like a spokesperson of a universal Black Persons Association and speaks for / represents every other black person?

Freedom is the freedom to be outrageous, wrong, disagreeable, etc. (Not that disagreeing with you or me is 'wrong'.) Look at what white people do.

And yes, I can say that, because white people aren’t impacted in a significant, systematic way by my statement about white people as a whole being used to shape policy and practice across Western society. And no, the very brief moment in which white men had to think twice before saying racist things doesn’t count, nor does affirmative action, of which white women were the primary benefactors.

And I don’t worry how non-Black people perceive those annoying and exhausting Black people, because if I can treat white folks individually after the shit I’ve been through, white folks can learn how to treat Black folks like individuals, and if they can’t they weren’t my kind of people anyway.

Would not tolerate otherwise.

Which is to say, to some extent, innocently, people on all sides often DO have in their heads some-kind-of uBPA, and I just wanted to make sure that people knew that in the pure opinion (again, opinion) jrm4 very much thinks the Bad Space is very far from any putative uBPA.

I worry that HN is too much an echo chamber itself: People criticizing perspectives like Bad Space supporters are commonplace here; the Bad Space people might never have space to make a serious argument.

In my experience? YES YES YES YES YES.

And hey, in my experience, if you want that perspective, head on over to Mastodon; it's ALL there.

edit: ha, I'm being uncharitable. I think it is naive to not understand that there is some sliver of "truthful experience" for most people to the uBPA, regardless of who you are.

>I find that most everyone on Mastodon focuses properly, but too much on "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because of the racism," and not "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because it's boring as hell."

It's sad to say but I think black people aren't big in the tech space or similar spaces in general and not just in the US. Fosdem is one of the most pasty conventions out there in a rather international city.

As an outsider looking in I think just like with the lack of women in tech it's not primarily a barrier problem. And this is a different subject but I in factthink some of the weird campaigning towards women to join has had the opposite effect (Think 'barbie and her pink laptop entering the male dominated field' type stuff just reinforcing pointlessly gendered preconceptions.)

like, the 4chan tech board is a great source of information and also a disgusting cesspool of casual racism. C'est la vie.

I think in the US there is 'black culture' and having a black skin, and I understand your point that skin color should not be assumed to be related to a view. But I don't think that's implied here.

that's WHY I said "with whom I shared views" and not BLACK PEOPLE GENERALLY.

so many feelings people get into.

There are Black people on Mastodon, myself included. In my interactions with them, to me, it appears as of the (very tiny) subset of Black folks who are also on Mastodon, I have observed and interacted with them on views and issues about the world.

Presuming, for example, they vote - we would vote similarly. We would support the same causes, we would likely react similarly to things in real life -- and yet...etc see above.

Point being, it's not like I was in with like Black MAGA or some other group who I'd be unlikely to associate.

I though they were applying an overly-restrictive definition of “agree with 97%,” and was trying to point out that what you actually wrote “97% similar,” left plenty of room for reasonable interpretations (like the one you posted).

I'm not trying to be mean when I say this: don't kid yourself into thinking you're in a club with the cream of the crop, anywhere - you're just setting yourself up for disappointment in the best case and horror in the worst case.

Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.

Not "even" intellectuals. Eugenics and racial superiority were progressive intellectual concepts less than 100 years ago, with people writing self-important letters to each other about it.

Mastodon reminds me a lot more of those old-school internet hangout spaces, like IRC channels and web forums, than it does Twitter, despite wearing its artifice.

If preferring community spaces to habit-forming social media firehoses is somehow cast as "not being able to handle social media," then...guilty as charged, I guess, though it continues to escape me why anybody would consider that a bad thing.

I don't see people who are addicted to social media but starving for real social connections as some other side of a debate. I see them as victims of an insidious social experiment created by some of the most anti-social and immoral people on the planet.

Social Media is corrosive to society by design, and I think that we will look back on the era of cramming everybody into one of a few shared social spaces that all go out of their way to anger you people monetary gain as an enormous mistake. But I don't blame the social media users themselves for falling into the trap.

I have a FB account since, what, 16 years or so. It has helped me to connect with people, it helped me to partially break out of my (disability-inflicted) social isolation. Heck, it even brought me and my partner of 14 years together. Yes, it also tiggered some rage at some times, but that does normal social interaction as well. People are people, and some people are plain assholes. I dont need facebook to be triggered by people.

Not everyone who drinks alcohol is an alcoholic. Not everyone who gambles is a gambling addict.

> Yes, it also tiggered some rage at some times, but that does normal social interaction as well.

Anywhere can be toxic. The difference is that social media is incentivized to drive engagement, and the way most social media is set up leads to the kinds of anti-social behavior that is rampant on most social media sites these days.

Not all of them. Discord has quietly become the 10,000 gorilla of functioning communities due to the fact that servers are invite-only and moderated by humans, without any populism-driven moderation. Most of the folks I know from the oldschool forum and IRC era ended up there, and I've met loads of new people simply through connections and friends of friends.

I suppose I hope that future generations will consider social media in its current form to be a vice in the same way that alcohol or gambling are, but I don't claim to know what an actual society-wide solution would look like.

All I can do in the here and now is point out how fake social media is, try and articulate why, and gently guide people who might want off the ride towards spaces where they can connect with actual human beings.

In a way, I feel sorry for terminally online social media addicts. I never understood the appeal of sites like Tumblr, Twitter, or Instagram in the first place. Facebook seemed neat until the artifice of real people + real names + real pictures turned out to be smoke, then I stopped bothering with it. Reddit was probably the closest to being appealing that social media ever got, but it had some serious systemic issues with community-building that only got worse as moderators went from community curators to doing janitorial work for a large company >for free.

I don't think acting indignant rather than trying to reach understanding is in good faith. If we want to raise the level of conversation, we should listen to each other.

> I don't see people who are addicted to social media but starving for real social connections as some other side of a debate. I see them as victims of an insidious social experiment created by some of the most anti-social and immoral people on the planet.

This really condescending. They are addicts and victims. You are not.

> Social Media is corrosive to society by design, and I think that we will look back on the era of cramming everybody into one of a few shared social spaces that all go out of their way to anger you people monetary gain as an enormous mistake. But I don't blame the social media users themselves for falling into the trap.

My point was: I don't think making money from engagement means much, though maybe it exacerbates the existing tendencies of socializing online. Mastodon makes no money but it's often even more toxic than the more widespread networks. I don't think size is the predictor. Lobsters and Bluesky are smaller than HN and Twitter but they both have plenty of toxicity.

I think the point is that once you combine the property of creating an online space disconnected from real life signals and give people a way to stay constantly connected to it (smartphone, always on internet), then reality for these folks erode. I think engagement algorithms can change the incentives on these networks but even a purely chronological forum has the same issues. The reason forums of old were less toxic (and they often were just as toxic, I remember many old flamewars) was just that the participants had to turn off the internet and go outside and interact with the offline world. They could only separate for so long.

Not everybody who drinks is an alcoholic. Not everybody who gambles is a gambling addict. I was quite specific about who I was talking about.

> The reason forums of old were less toxic (and they often were just as toxic, I remember many old flamewars) was just that the participants had to turn off the internet and go outside.

In my experience, the toxic conversations stopped because a moderator stepped in and gave them a time out, forcing them to touch grass.

And that's ultimately the problem. All spaces can be toxic. Social media sees toxicity and thinks to themselves, "This is drawing eyeballs and engagement. Let's double triple and quadruple down on it.". The incentives of social media are totally maladjusted for creating good social spaces on a fundamental level. Not every old-school social space was run well, but at least the possibility was there and not being actively subverted.

The idea of having user-run social spaces without populism-driven moderation is thankfully an idea that is coming back. Discord has quietly become a 10,000 pound gorilla based on that exact model. I have also found that VRChat is also quietly amassing a following of VR enthusiasts, as it turns out that there is value in maintaining long-distance relationships with a sense of presence you don't get out of group chats and video meetings.

On the other hand, I don't really get the point of BlueSky. It suffers from the same underlying incentives as Twitter, and we all know how that story ended.

Heard some pundits on the radio talking about the elimination of the penny and one of them who worked at the Secret Service as an analyst talked about why the US paper money only goes to $100 bills. He said it was to reduce criminals and illicit activity and criminals having to store it.

He related the story of Pablo Escobar's brother or cousin who was the accountant for the cartel. He said they were losing billions of dollars every year because of various kinds of attrition like rats chewing up the money, it getting too wet and disintegrating. They were losing so much because they had to store it and that wasn't always the best because they had so much of it on hand which seemed to lend credence to his story.

So if you were to get rid of the $100 bills that would further erode the ability of criminals to store so much of it.

Now, "illicit activity" more broadly speaking checks out to me. The EU stopped printing the 500 euro note because it was primarily used for illegal transactions and money laundering.

With bitcoin, it's moot.

A $100 is basically a tank of gas and a sandwich in CA.

I was just lamenting with my wife the other day about how "$100 is the new 20 bucks"

When I was a kid, mowing someone's yard for $20 was a really good payout. Kids my neighborhood last year were doing it for $70 lol.

I wouldn't pay more than $5 for someone to mow my lawn, but then again, it's tiny at like 20x15 feet. I spend more time getting the mower out and putting it back away than actually mowing. Probably gonna replace it with just a bunch of wildflowers next spring.

On one hand, the difference between 2¢ and 8¢ looks completely inconsequential now. OTOH it's a four-fold difference.

Profit for the US government. Fixed by plastic bills.

Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant profit (assuming other costs are low like printing).

Especially yummy when countries just want to hoard the currency - same as selling stamps that are never used:

  estimate the stock of U.S. currency circulating in Argentina ... U.S. currency inflows during 1988-1992 totaled $20.8 billion

Redeemed? Redeemed for what? Its not like they're still trading dollars for gold at any kind of fixed rate.

Since the government can just print money, it can spend whatever it wants, but doing so creates inflation because of the higher money supply.

Dollars that disappear (ie, they get eaten by rats) push that inflation back down by removing money from the supply.

Every time someone brings up a date picker I just wanna pull the pin on my parachute and jump out the window. 100% agree, its one of the hardest components to get right for so many different reasons. Like you mentioned in cross border booking, just in Canada they have three or four different ways to write a date. I worked for a healthcare company and just getting a consensus on that alone was a 8 month process of back and forth.

I feel your pain man, I really do.

The world is a very confusing place these days.

I pay lots of taxes, probably in top 0.1% of the world on a % basis. I don’t have to, I’m not a US or French citizen so I could easily just choose to relocate a couple of minutes away and pay essentially no taxes.

If I did choose to stop paying taxes, I’d do so in order to donate a similar amount of my income to some charity. I’m just not sold on that being so much more efficient to be worth the hassle. OTOH, it’d definitely greatly improve my philanthropy credentials which would very much be worth it to some for purely selfish personal reasons.

I believe the Palm T2 and T3 had bluetooth so would be interesting if you could connect the two to keep contacts and appointments off your smartphone. I'm seeing Handspring Treo 650's for under $100 as well.

One of the first startups I worked at in the early aughts, I started as a front-end dev. Indian dude a few cubes over. I'm not kidding, he had a "Learn .Net Nuke" Wrox book he was constantly pouring over.

He was gone on my second day. Apparently the company had hired an outside recruiter who interviewed someone and when they got the job, this dude showed up. Apparently this was a really common scam back then.

I see not much has changed.

Started doing automation about 6 years ago. We had several offshore teams. The one caveat was that the company was vying for several government contracts. One of the requirements was the ability to pass a low level security clearance and on yeah, you cannot, under any circumstances off shore any of the work.

Therefore, they needed an onshore team to handle the government work.

Well, when things got slow, our team was essentially the clean up team. We had several hockey players on our team so we nicknamed our team "Zamboni". A large chunk of what we were doing was fixing the off shore teams coding and things would break so regularly two of devs became full-time off shore support.

The company was literally paying our off-shore team to build an automation. Then when it constantly break, they would pull us in to fix it.

Absolutely maddening they couldn't understand they were paying triple or quadruple for work we could do once properly instead of two or three times before we got it.

Same thing happened to me. My name in outlook was the right under a high up VP. Outlook auto correct would bring my name up at the top of the list so people would just hit enter and write their email.

Same thing, I was getting some emails I clearly should not have been viewing, with budgetary spreadsheets and names of people who were being considered for layoffs.

One of them I sent back to the VP and diplomatically explained the mixup. I didn't get any emails for a few months and wondered how they fixed the situation. I guess they gave the VP and underscore in his name instead of the normal [email protected] so now when I typed in my name, his came up first.

Proof would be if rather than blowing up the boats, they, say, intercepted them, searched them, and actually found drugs.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/18/politics/caribbean-boat-strik...

There is a very long tradition of treating pirates as outside of all laws because pirates would murder and pillage in one jurisdiction or on the high seas and then sail away to another jurisdiction. So all nations had a duty to confront pirates. That is not to say that summary execution was considered normal - it happened, but typically pirates were captured and afforded some due process.

In the modern era this logic has been extended to terrorism and certain crimes against humanity like torture.

It has NOT been extended to encompass drug trafficking. If you're smuggling drugs from Venezuela to Trinidad, you really don't want to be detected, so you're not going to stop any random ship that you see and murder the crew and steal the cargo. The whole concept of the pirate as someone who is waging war on humanity with extreme violence and can't be effectively dealt with by the nation that is effected doesn't really apply neatly to this situation.

You could make the argument that because drugs are dangerous, and drugs can be transported anywhere, that drug traffickers are effectively enemies of humanity who are doing extreme violence in the same vein as terrorists and pirates. But that would be a novel argument, not, in any way, "normal".

What? The whole point of the "enemy combatant" designation is to say that they're not criminals and not PoWs either. I don't like it but it was the standard position under Bush, Obama, and Biden, there's nothing new here.

“No US troops directly in danger means anything goes” is really the most cynical way to do FP, and all this tech has enabled it

as a general best practice, id expect them to send a patrol boat to go board and confiscate the drugs, then show off said drugs.

its not hard to collect the evidence of drugs, since the drugs will be on the boat/sub, and with the size of the deployment, there's more than enough capacity to just sail over to it, rather than destroying it with missiles.

But that’s hard, unglamorous work, out of the limelight with people that are sick, addicted, grimy. No spectacular fireworks.

(Sorry for the rant)

Not sure what you would expect, but on a state level. My state has hundreds of millions in funding for free clinics, free treatment centers, free methadone clinics, free housing, and free welfare. If people really want to get clean, they can.

This isn't a problem of funding either on the state or federal level, its a bunch of NGO's getting rich making sure the situation continues by handing out free tents, clean needles, narcan and "safe zones" where people can do their drugs without interference.

When you make it easier to stay addicted and homeless? Those who are in that situation will continue to take the easy route. Its not easy getting clean and this is 100% on the individual to make the choice to get clean. When you encourage addiction and make it socially acceptable, is it any wonder this issue isn't getting any better and in fact, is well past a crisis point now.

There will also be those who try to take advantage of government funding. But the gross handouts to the Pentagon, we can and do audit NGOs. I doubt fraud is the biggest issue here, but if you have studies, please share them.

> Those who are in that situation will continue to take the easy route

Are you saying it's a personal choice and not a mental health problem?

> When you encourage addiction and make it socially acceptable

I don't understand how spending money on housing and addiction treatment is doing that. If you want to encourage addiction and make it socially acceptable, you just don't spend money on housing or treatment.

Its also not hard to see the video of a fast boat with two to four huge 250HP outboard motors and the entire hull filled with huge light colored bales of something and conclude this is not a fishing boat and these are not fishermen who are transporting their catch for the day back to the port.

Also, IIRC the first strike killed 11 people. Why would you need, or want, 11 people to crew a fast boat that's supposed to be clandestine. Is it possible that they were smuggling people instead of or in addition to drugs? In which case, maybe we just killed some migrants who wanted to get out of Venezuela.

Is this what's happening?

Know what Venezuela has a shit-ton of though? Oil. Guess who loves the oil, gas, and coal industries? If your answer involves someone orange you'd be right. Guess who got kicked out of Venezuela when Chavaz took over? If you said large multinational oil corporations you'd be correct.

On top of that donnie gets to look tough against a country that largely has no serious regional allies in fact I believe a lot of them are pissed, China has ties but they aren't going to ratchet up the trade fiasco over Maduro, russia is a bit busy punching itself in the balls and last I check Venezuelans aren't big fans of Maduro so donnie is basically riskless save domestically.

Also given the size of those boats I'd wager a solid amount on the total lost amount would be equivalent to taking out 8 McDonald's store shipments and claiming you've dealt a serious blow to McDonald's bottom line.

Venezuela’s oil production is a single digit percentage of US oil production and the quality of their crude is famously poor. The US neither needs it nor wants it except to the extent they pay the US to refine it for them because they don’t have that ability.

Pinning this action on a desire for oil is a lazy argument far past its expiration date.

There's also speculation that it may have lithium deposits because of it's location.

The US has always had significant control over Venezuelan oil production because the US runs some of the only refineries that can process that type of low-quality crude. If the US banned Chevron from refining Venezuelan oil in the US, Venezuela has few other options. The US already captures much of the value of Venezuelan oil production because of the refinery monopsony. There is little margin in the rest of it. They’ve been profit-maxxing Venezuelan crude for decades.

Your argument could have been reasonable a few decades ago in a “big picture” geopolitical sense but we don’t live a few decades ago. OPEC no longer controls oil prices and the US is the uncontested oil producing superpower. No one saw that coming. Pretending all of this history never happened isn’t going to lead to rational conclusions.

The US used to expend a lot of power ensuring its oil supply. It hasn’t needed to do that for a while. Now it expends power to control oil supplies to other countries. None of this applies to Venezuela though because Venezuelan oil has a dependency on US refineries that other oil producing countries don’t have.

Your argument, then, is the GP has a more recent and up to date grasp of geoplotics than the current POTUS?

The same POTUS with a 1930s grasp of tariffs?

What reason exists for the US to "bail out" Argentina? Was that as simple as extending time for those who contributed to the Presidential library fund to claw back their money from Argentina?

Modern geopolitics is all very well and good, but it falls well short of explaining some of blatently century old banana republic stuff going on in the current US administration.

The same military used a 6 figure missile to shoot down a children's balloon https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1158048921/pico-balloon-k9yo

I think they murdered an innocent man, Alejandro Carranza, a Colombian fisherman. The President of Colombia himself personally advocated on his behalf; it's been all over international news. Does this stuff not diffuse into your echo chamber?

https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-10-22/colombia...

> "On the same Saturday, Petro declared that U.S. officials “committed murder and violated sovereignty in territorial waters,” stating that the fisherman identified by RTVC as Alejandro Carranza had no connection to drug trafficking. In subsequent posts, the Colombian president has repeatedly emphasized that Carranza was a “humble fisherman.”"

I would expect them to provide the proof that served as justification for the strike and an explatation as to why a strike rather than interdiction was lawful and justifiable.

Eg an intelligence source suggested this very boat was being being used by Bob the blow on such and such a date Bob was responsible for ordering the murder of 4 FBI agents and due to assets available it would have been a huge risk to our people and it might be difficult or impossible to local bob any time in the near future.

If need be this justification may be given secretly to a bipartisan group of lawmakers who assert vague but important findings like we believe that the strikes are justified and didn't kill innocent people.

Sucks for the 60 odd random peoples’ families that died though.