It's an emotional problem. I love writing code to solve intricate problems. But knowing that a faster, and maybe better LLM solution is just a prompt away? Somehow that takes the joy out of it. Why spend hours, when you can get an equivalent result in minutes?
I will be curious to see how I feel about AdventOfCode this year...
Virtually nobody is a professional walker or firestarter, so those are different.
And to the extent they do exist (athletes and survivalists) they might agree there is no "point" except the joy they derive from doing it themselves.
The problem is that formerly there was more alignment between the joy of solving problems with a human's mind and the business need to have problems solved.
Correct. You may demand clean water from your local government, in return for taxes, but it isn't any sort of basic right. And certainly is not mentioned in the US Constitution.
Much like food or medical care: fundamental rights can never depend on the work of other people. Otherwise you can demand that work, which imposes on their rights.
Access to clean water may not be enshrined in the US constitution, but it’s not accurate to say it’s not “any sort of basic right.”
It’s enshrined explicitly as such in a variety of UN documents and EU laws and instruments.
I wish more of my fellow Americans had a better idea of what fundamental rights the US has chosen not integrate into domestic law over the past 8 or so decades.
I might be mistaken, but when an international treaty is ratified, it has the same weight as a constitutional amendment. I’m sure the US ratified something around those lines.
It is unfortunately not that straightforward in the case of the US. For example, the ICCPR was ratified by the US, but declared “not self-executing.” The ICESCR was never ratified.
Well... The US has been getting away with all sorts of shenanigans for the past century. I think it's time to grow up and behave like an adult country.
Which won't happen until it has an adult president, but that's a different story.
> fundamental rights can never depend on the work of other people
It is the government’s responsibility to ensure the people who provide those services are hired and paid. Nobody is demanding anyone to work for free or to be forced to work on something they don’t want.
At some point, we might get there and mechanisms to compel society to work enough so that society doesn’t collapse will be considered some sort of civic duty.
Something being a "right" doesn't mean it's a magical force that overrides all others. Rights are always in tension with other rights. A society deciding something is a "right" is a statement about priorities and values.
On the medical care example, most countries have something like the US's EMTALA -- not a Constitutional right but but a de facto "right to medical care" in emergency rooms and some other carve-outs.
But the fundamental right to medical care this codifies doesn't just override all other things. You'll get rightfully and legally-correctly turned away from an ER if you are extremely violent and belligerent, and cannot be reasonably stabilized enough for everyone else in the ER to be safe. If you're in a remote area and need a airlift, but the weather conditions are not reasonably safe for the only helicopter crew available -- as determined by themselves -- then they're not obligated to rescue you, either morally or legally.
Is 2nd amendment forcing anyone to make guns? Is US hiding population of enslaved workers that are forced to dig up metal, work it, make guns and sell them?
Meh. Maybe I'm a grinch, but I don't see this as easier. I have a little NUC running Ubuntu. Putting services on it is easy: PiHole, OwnCloud, Wireguard, etc.
Our situation isn't quite that extreme, but sometimes "modern" tech is just ridiculous. For home automation, every manufacturer has their own protocol. "Matter" has just confirmed what XKCD has to say: https://xkcd.com/927/
Add to that: every manufacturer wants to run their own servers and their own cloud service. I don't want my data strewn throughout the internet. For most devices, there is zero reason they couldn't work entirely within the LAN. Plus, we all know that half of those services will die in a few years, forcing us to replace perfectly good devices.
Do things the "waterfall" way and you won't need any backtracking, as every previous line will have been adjusted as you're moving forward, not backwards, to adjust the chosen words.
> Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication.
No it doesn't. If you're careful about how you speak and how you write then
it takes next to no additional effort at all. I used to do this with all of
my online responses, and it's been fun to do it again in this thread today.
Note my responses in this comment thread as a whole. Even though I have not
done this more than once or twice this century, it barely slows me down. At
a guess, maybe it adds 10% or so to the time it takes to type a comment...?
> Imagine the backtracking required...
Virtually none. For some lines I might occasionally have to go back a three
or four words, that's all. It's quite fun: some dusty rusty old bits of the
old grey matter have been woken up and exercised, and they're rather liking
being up in the sunlight again. :-)
The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.
If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.
If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example.
So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...
Given the almost religious attention the term limit of sitting presidents of the US has it is interesting that so very little attention is given to the fact that the EU structure has no effectual limit at all; if the current EU President were to be nominated by the European Council in a circular manner she will effectually serve for perpetuity (while the Parliament can in principle say no they are only ever given one candidate to vote for (...) and has thus far never said no to any nominee).
I don’t think the average American voter “genuinely” thinks that they’re on a Blues Brothers-style mission from god to deliver liberalism and freedom to the world. I would be surprised if that’s even a minority view among voters.
The average American voter does think the USA play a positive role for the world, while the average non-American think otherwise. In details, a 2026 study from the Pew Research Center states that:
- 57% of A. think the USA contribute to peace in the world a great or a fair amount.
A little important context for that poll: Globally, people believe the US is a greater threat to peace, stability and democracy than any other country.
And it's been that way in every poll I've seen since 2003.
As a country, we sure do think it is our mission/duty from god to "save the world from communism" (or whatever it gets called today). I think one movie that shows this is High Noon. That 70+ year old movie shows that it is "not all Americans, but always an American".
The dictators part is false, the EU is not a structure you can easily dictate. But this encryption backdoor thing is somebody's pet project and extremely alarming. The UK has a similar bend they've already put in place with IPA and TCNs. The US is way gone on decrypted stored data and metadata, but not on encryption backdoors yet, though legislators have tried.
Can you please explain to me why you think this is the case? Can parliament make law or not? Why is the commission the only body that can make law? Its staffed with people that appear to serve special interests. I saw this during the Stop Killing Games Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative. If there is no way to challenge the EU commission's practices that are not democratic, how can you consider the EU commission a body that actually works for I members?
EU is less of a dictatorship and more of a technocracy. Where they rely heavily on experts to define policy rather than a democratic system. As you said:
> Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative
The experts they choose can just be anyone with a bit of authority whom the bureaucrats can find to support what they already want to do. Plus lots of paid expert consultants to make plans after the policy is enacted who know to tell them what they want to hear.
It's similar to the US media when they bring expert talking heads on their shows (academics, ex-military, etc). They come prepackaged with views the network's want.
In practice it is. The whole idea of technocracy comes with a bunch of levers you can easily exploit with a bit of power and money (not just external corporations or donors, but internal like intelligence agencies). As long as you make an appearance of following the process of evidence being collected and experts being involved. And there is never a careful process to check if it was actually done right after the fact. Just the usual political election risk which is even more obscured by the extra layers of descion making and consultancies. It's just democracy with less public accountability. Particularly, with as I said, how it's implemented in practice (rather than technocracy on paper).
“Experts.” Sorry, but they aren’t. I know enough people advising policy, working for external agencies, staffed on projects on a “who’s available to work on this?”-basis without any relation to their expertise.
The commission is the only body able to initiate legislature, but it cannot pass this legislature without assent from the European Parliament and/or Council of the European Union.
The EU has plenty of deficiencies, but calling it a dictatorship is wildly inaccurate.
A dictatorship needs a dictator. The EU parliament is made of several bodies. There never can be a dictatorship. People who claim "dictatorship!" should learn to express themselves properly
The US has CLOUD Act, it has a backdoor in almost every data center on Earth. Because:
"The CLOUD Act allows United States authorities to request data from cloud providers and other covered service providers regardless of where the data is physically stored. The act is not limited to companies based in the United States. It applies to "all electronic communication service or remote computing service providers that operate or have a legal presence in the U.S". Courts can require parent companies to provide data held by their subsidiaries."
Unfortunately every attempt at reforming it is blocked with "but my sovereignty!" - as EC and Council of Ministers are very much controlled and steered by member nations' governments.
This is true. However there's a potential way to fix it, and it would only take one member state, no matter how small to start the landslide. And it's basically the same thing that happened to the US Senate.
The Senate, like the Council of Ministers, was intended to represent the member states. Originally, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. A few states started to have direct primaries, with the legislative appointment amounting to ratification of the popular choice. Then this was made the way for every senator by the 17th amendment. (It took until 1913!)
The same thing could happen to the EU council of ministers. It's a little more obfuscated because the representative to the council of ministers is formally a delegate of the government of the EU member state. But, since the process is under the control of the member state, there's nothing stopping them being directly elected by the public of that EU country. They can simply decide that that's who they want to send. Unlike any other democratic reform of the EU, this doesn't require consensus among all member states (which in practice, means the political elites).
There would have to be some kind of groundswell of support for it in several nations, as otherwise the government of bigger nations would do everything to make an individual small nation regret it; unless they would pay some political cost. But if there is a movement to democratise the EU, this is the one move that doesn't need the permission of the incumbents.
There is a dilemma, but I don't think it's loss of legitimacy so much as authority. They are quite similar but not the same; an institution that loses authority but is still legitimate, and there is potential for it to regain authority (like the strategic concept of a "fleet in being").
But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.
>But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.
The UK was one of the largest members of the EU, and as such had a substantial say over it's direction and policies; and as the EU is a major economic power, consequently that is power in the world as well.
That is, it's government had this, as an "inside the room" participant. Power is often exercised by that means; in fact one definition of power is your having the means to sway others. For example, in the 90s the EU was debating whether to "deepen or widen", i e. to become more like a single state, or to admit more members. Germany and France led the faction that wanted to deepen, the UK, along with smaller allies, preferred to widen and admit more members from Eastern Europe. The UK's preference prevailed.
Because this mostly happened in diplomatic negotiations, it's not so well known, the press thought that EU bureurocracy was a better story.
Member states will veto it because it will shift power from national governments directly into a separately voted parliament, changing the current approach of "EP is where we can drop someone if they lose national election as a reward for being good little soldier or to make them pay half the money to party coffers"
I have many concerns about the rise of populism in Europe but the (few/very few) good things that might come out of this is that there will finally be (enough?) pressure on the EU to reform.
Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter.
It’s more likely that the rise of the populist right (or left, like Melenchon) will lead to the destruction of the EU. They do not want reform, they want to go back to the fifties.
This is a real risk but from the embers of the (current) systems a better one could still rise.
Despite all the big talk from the likes of Wilders and Meloni, the moment that they're in government they do seem to be very willing to cooperate with their European peers.
EU and EC have been made as a resistant to populism by design, the end result is that we citizens can't change anything, and decisions are arbitrarily made behind closed doors.
The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues.
I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens.
Not that they don't disregard some of my opinions too, but I am quite worried about the opinions of some of the other citizens.
The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy.
Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.
Or maybe it's impossible to satisfy desires of such culturally diverse populace as EU citizens.
Which makes current model, and federated model impossible and/or prone to crumbling.
Problems of Germany are different than one Spain faces, and France, and Poland etc.
Which why originally much more was decided by consensus and if there is no consensus then simply every country can do their own way. I feel like a lot of things actually reached a local optimum in the 90s in our approach to improve things, we left that.
The last concrete attempt was blocked at Dutch and French referenda, not the lobbyists.
That was in 2004. Since then, basically any referendum about anything related to the EU anywhere returns a negative result, with a couple of small exceptions like a Danish defense opt-out.
So the money doesn't really go to the lobbying, more to the population-wide propaganda.
And the money is available, as it's in the interest of both the major state actors as the major corporations for the EU to weaken and dissolve.
> So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...
So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content?
Until they come up with a procedure to workaround the fact that there is no majority in the EU parliament and push it through anyway (like they did a couple of weeks ago with ChatControl 1.0).
That would be more like there being no setting to tell Meta to stop sending you cakes, but them continuing to send cakes. Except they take something from you, instead of giving.
There was opposition in parliament, though. It was only passed because they snuck it in while MPs had left for summer vacation, and the parliamentary rules are absolutely pants-on-head idiotic and default to passing proposed legislation if a majority of all MPs do not vote it down (rather than merely the ones present). In other words, they passed it by default without achieving any kind of majority, because there weren't enough people physically present to vote it down.
The EU never delegitimised itself more than it did with that act. Actively undermining parliament to knowingly impose legislation the population absolutely does not want validated every concern anti-EU advocates ever had.
That's a bit of a touchy subject that exposes the fact that the EU has repurposed a system for designing industry standards (not laws) and has a shaky legal foundation.
To some extent countries are bound by EU law, but what this means depends on the institutions and legal structure within that country. Although the EU tends to claim they have final say, but how can someone interpreting national law agree with that if the EU goes against the law they are interpreting? Even if the EU is right they can only ask members to acoid contradiction, they lack the force to demand it.
Ohh. But doesnt it push and control legislation? If it was just a standards body, couldn't countries governments just approve or deny recommendations at will?
It seems like its operating as a government too me, but maybe I am not seeing the whole picture.
Governments also codify into law that everything X standardizes is automatically a regulation for other standard bodies. Road and building standards work that way: they are just standards issued by a random association and the government has stated, that all developments in their jurisdiction need to follow this associations standards.
The government could also do this for the EU, it's called leaving the EU.
Some of its standards supersede national law (I think it was the regulations that did so, amd standards needed to be built into national law, could be the other way around).
And this makes a lot of sense with rules about food safety, product standards etc. It almost makes sense for privacy protections. It makes very little sense for surveillance laws.
I‘m not being ironic. With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person. Bureaucracies are the opposite: they’re intentionally setup to diffuse responsibility as much as possible and hold no one accountable. Instead of a single guy, you now have to fight something resembling a fungus. This is much harder: instead of a decapitation strike, you face an enemy that is more resilient and resistant to change, and near impossible to kill.
Are you saying that historically very bureaucratic countries have been worse to live in than dictatorships? Not sure I follow actually. It sounds very strange to me. Isn’t also the first move of all dictators to take over all institutions with their own people?
They are saying that in bureaucratic countries there is not a single entity that can be held accountable, which means that "bad" decisions, are not easily undone.
Likewise it means that "good" decisions are hard to change.
It is a statement about the momentum of change, not about it's worth or intention.
There is no further comparison made between these governmental forms and how they affect their subjects.
Red herring how exactly? The conversation is literally:
”> In reality, they want to be dictators.
Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.”
Edit: to expand on what I mean. I read so much negativity and hyperboles here on the EU. It is full of problems absolutely but ”With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person” is simply not true. Dictorships are master minds of shifting blame. EU has problems but what large organization works better? US? India? China? Brazil? I’m obviously biased as a European but I’d pick the eu any day.
A red herring is a bait planted specifically to derail a conversation.
I will make an example to demonstrate this in a setting which is less loaded.
Beware that all analogies are flawed in essence, so a direct transfer to our conversation will be difficult, especially since I am trying to be blatant. But since I want to answer your question of where the red herring lies I feel like that is the easiest way:
A (raising an issue): This hole in the wall sucks, I can't stand it. At least if we were in a tent we could sew it shut.
B (planter of herrings): So you'd rather live in a tent than in a house? Don't you know that tents are generally worse than houses?
C (the innocent bystander lead astray): I also much prefer houses. You hear so many bad things about them, but in the end nothing is better. No caves, no huts, and certainly no tents. I'd pick a house any day of the week.
Did you notice that we are no longer talking about the hole in the wall?
The hole could be required for mold-prevention, it could just be an oversight that is actually fixable, it might be a trade-off. But since we are no longer talking about the hole we will never know.
> ... but ”With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person” is simply not true. Dictorships are master minds of shifting blame.
This is you talking about the hole in the wall. I am also not convinced by the original argument, but I do believe that there is some substance to be explored.
> ... I’m obviously biased as a European but I’d pick the eu any day.
This is you falling for the red herring. We don't know if the original poster lives in the EU. We don't know if they prefer it to a dictatorship, but it also does not matter.
The original qualms are that there is seemingly no single point you can go to to stop the endeavor once and for all, which in this context is encryption backdoors within the EU.
We could be talking about how the same mechanics that make this so frustrating are useful elsewhere; find out or explain why the things are the way they are. We could be uncovering a valid flaw in the system just waiting to be fixed; conclude that things don't have to be this way.
Instead, we ask ourselves if we like living in the EU better than in other places.
We've lost the plot, so to speak: There is no more insight to be had.
This is what makes a red herring so obnoxious to deal with.
It is an easy trap to lay if you don't want to think about something or hinder someone, but takes so much effort to recover from.
In the tent-example it is easy to see that we completely derailed and stopped talking about what matters. Unfortunately, reality is much more subtle and not everyone has the same goals in mind. At least on HN I'd like to try and keep discovery in focus and once we reach the stage where it's only about opinions there is nothing more to discover.
It's unfortunate that some of us have been warning and shouting this for years, before it got to this place, and before they amassed all this power, and now that it's almost too late people are catching on.
I'm a little hazy on how this gets enforced. I thought the EU made rules, but then those rules had to be ratified and implemented by the national governments of the member nations (and historically, some of them have been very lax about implementing and enforcing those rules).
Will we end up with a hodgepodge of national rules from each EU country that is effectively unenforceable? Or is there a different mechanism that allows the EU to enforce a blanket rule over all the EU nations?
> The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.
As much as I hate the political leaning of the Commission, this is complete bullshit.
The commission is named by the member states' head, with the head of the commission and the individual commissioners' nomination being validated by the European parliament.
Yes they aren't elected, but that's no different from a minister in most country, nobody elected the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, the Secretary of Defense in the US or the Ministre de l'Intérieur in France. But we don't call them wannabe dictators because that would be silly.
That's equally silly when talking about the European commission.
The EU has never been a democratic entity, As a French, I still remember the so-called "2005 French European Constitution referendum (Do you approve the bill authorising the ratification of the treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe?)
55% of voters voted no despite the constant propaganda on TV nudging people to vote yes.
In 2007, the new French president was elected, he was very pro EU (like the vast majority of French politicians), after several meeting behind closed doors, it was decided to bypass the will of the people though the ratification of a treaty without a referendum. The Lisbon Treaty, was voted by the Parliament.
We can argue that this was decided by the French politicians and not EU politicians but we are now two decades into it and the same playbook have been used over and over.
The EU constantly dilute responsibilities. Our local politicians will claim they can't do much, this is now decided in the EU and the EU politicians will claim that the national governments decided to adopt this on their own terms.
We are now completely deprived of any freedom and I personally made the choice to leave the EU because it gives a bad taste to live in a place where everything is decided behind closed door without any possibility to vote on anything.
I understand this setup was likely necessary to get countries to join initially, but it no longer makes sense & should be abolished, with all power of the commission given to the parliament.
I don't think it is too much power or even the wish for more. It is IMHO more the disconnect of EU beaurocrats and the Brussels bubble. We need more direct legitimation given the amount of power they have (actually down to the DGs).
This its more like an oligarch edict with democratic dressing. Its set up so the European elite can force political chance without having to deal with annoying things like democracy other than in name
Ursula is 100% a dictator and the EU as well. All in the pockets of Bibi. Every time I hear it's a democracy I want to gag. We have a huge issue with fascists again and it won't solve itself.
Or democraticallly rejects them, but trough unbelievable trickery they still become law. See Chat Control, which never had majority support in parliament.
There are two main problems with the EU, both political.
First, the EU Commission has way too much power, and honestly wants to play dictator. Look at ChatControl: Voted down more than once, but the Commission just repackages and resubmits, with some dirty backdoor tricks, until they get it through. Parliament is not allowed to propose legislation, only the Commission.
Second, regulatory hell. The continual avalanche of regulations out of Brussels cannot be overstated. People make fun of the bottle caps, but those are absolutely illustrative of how literally everything is over-regulated. This is one of the main reasons that European industry is struggling.
The EU commission is just a way for national governments to launder their authoritarian desires through the EU. The commissioner for each country is choser by national governments. It's them pushing that shit.
The main problem with it, is that when you vote on national elections, typically you are concerned with local issues. Housing, healthcare, transportation, employment, immigration, etc.
Nobody is really thinking "who will this party behave on the EU level?" Then they do shit like this and hide behind "we have to comply with the EU".
> The EU commission is just a way for national governments to launder their authoritarian desires through the EU. The commissioner for each country is choser by national governments. It's them pushing that shit.
You're both right. The problem is it's the commission that sets the agenda for the parliament.
If you inverted it and had the elected parliament set the agenda for the national government appointed commission it would be far more likely to reflect the will of the people, which is precisely why it is the way it is.
Europe still hasn't learned the lessons of the French revolution, and is destined to keep repeating it.
I am as pro-EU as it gets, and I really would prefer if it worked as a true parliament. Instead of commissioners chosen by national governments and a head commissioner, a premier minister chosen by the parliament, and a commission that would only have the power to approve of veto laws that come from the parliament. Hell, the parliament should even have the power to override vetoes.
The way the EU is composed right now, it is designed to be kneecapped by the national governments every time.
This is the way. If the US imposes tariffs, impose tariffs on US goods.
The US administration twists facts to suit their agenda. For example, they often complain about the trade deficit the US has with other countries. However, that deficit often (depends on the country) only exists if you exclude digital goods (Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.).
If the rest of the world were to restrict the import of those digital goods, in the interest of fairness, the tech lobbyists would swarm D.C. in panic.
Europe/Canada should ban chatgpt/anthropic and say "ok we will use chinese models for our vibe coding I guess" and watch the stock market implode overnight. Remenber when they tried to ban non-US citizens from using Fable? best to remove that sword of damocles now regardless
I'm not a country, but on Monday I'll be enabling Kimi models for my company's GitHub Enterprise account, and encouraging our teams to use those for their coding tasks.
They would have to make a free chat interface that uses Chinese models. It isn't about the technical implementation, it's about the interface and the ease of use.
That might have been the case two years ago, but there is no shortage of decent open source solutions that meet or exceed most business use cases. I am sure some enterprising consulting firm will come along and offer integration of those + Canada located inference infra + OSS models (Chinese, or otherwise). I know that there is at least one Canadian inference provider, Augure, but I haven't tried them yet, as well as a few actual model developers in Canada.
> If Europeans don’t care about democracy in Taiwan maybe we shouldn’t either.
The USA has a long history of organizing coup d'états on democratic governments to prop up their own dictators. Let's be honest here, you guys don't care about Taiwanese democracy, only about keeping TSMC running.
the advantage US labs have is that we use them. If chinese labs got 1 years worth of usage from everyone else as their daily driver, they would catchup if not overtake the US based firms - assuming you even think that they're truly behind anyway.
Ok. Don’t use them and then we’ll just leverage China’s models too. What’s the problem? Why does the US need to lead in AI if Europe (and everyone else) prefers to partner with China? We can just partner with them too. They can have Taiwan. We can pull out of NATO and bring our troops home from overseas bases around the world. It’ll save us a lot of military spend and then we don’t have to play these games anymore.
Besides we can just distill Chinese modules and release open weights like they do now.
I mean this would be great haha, America voluntarily ceding its position as the supreme global power without bloodshed. Its the best we could hope for. Now watch the US show that this is the one course they will never take.
Russia dominates "Europe"; what, that Russia who can't even beat Ukraine? That can't even make ball bearings anymore? That has to pull North Korean troops in? We're fucking terrified man.
I think Poland alone could defeat Russia, if it even still exists in the current form in a few years -- add the finances of France and Germany and it's even more one sided.
That doesn’t make any sense. The US has access (and is the source) of global capital because of our markets, laws, and strength of our economy. China won’t supplant the US because it’s a communist dictatorship that disappears people which means folks including the Chinese don’t want to keep their capital in China.
Second the OP said “no longer #1” which can take many forms including still being the dominant reserve currency. Also UK isn’t doing too bad see: UK not doing too bad.
Im anti MAGA because it was obvious from the beginning it was a pack of lies. He ran on "no news wars" and then started one. Ad nauseum. There no point debating policy with the Mafia who are taking over your block. If it were about policy, yes I do think Im actually pretty aligned with what average Anerican voters want.
The important thing when dealing with Americans is to pay no attention to what they say as that is all "PR", you only need to observe what they do. Most Americans dont know this even about themselves, which is why they end up with a guy like Donald Trump
8note since I cant reply to you directly as the thread is too long - ok, maybe I should have used "release the Epstein files" or "bring down the national debt"
I think there's a notion that the imposition of tarifs will ultimately affect the amount the country imports. However that stick only kinda-sorta works.
As a reference - in the country I live in, exports to the US rose in the year after "liberation day". Because of 2 things; Americans like to buy stuff and tarifs imposed on everyone doesn't cause importers to source elsewhere - it's just business as usual.
Take for example something as mundane as coffee. Do tarifs mean Americans drink less? (perhaps not). Do they grow more locally (well, no, not least because of ramp-up time to new production.) Tarifs are just a local tax on consumerism.
So take your example above. 25% of the Canadian GDP goes to the US. The question then becomes how much of that is going to be sourced elsewhere instead? And can Canada find an alternative market to make up the difference?
About 30% (of that 25% above) is oil & gas etc. That's easilly sellable on the global market. Not that they'll need to, the US customer will simply pay more. The next 21% is car parts, machinery etc. US Auto makers are already dependent on external parts - maybe they can get them from somewhere else? Somewhere without already higher tarifs?
Other big chuncks are Consumer, Forestry and Industrial goos (15%), Metas (12%) and agriculture (10%). None of these are easily sourced (cheaper) elsewhere.
In other words, tarifs make for good headlines. And there will inevitably be some winners and losers. But the effect on Canada's GDP will be minor.
I'm not even sure that Canada needs to reciprocate - Canadian consumers are very good at simply not buying American products. No govt can force the Canadian people to buy Budwizer....
>> If both countries decide to start ramping up tariffs, one of them is going to collapse and one won't even notice a difference.
I agree, but probably not the same way you think. It's US suppliers who depend on exports that very much will notice. American products are very expensive, and Canada is one of the few markets where they are viable. That's why DJT is so upset with alcohol bans in Canada. There are lots of markets for Canadian goods. And ultimately this whole process is encouraging Canadian producers to explore some of those markets, which in the long run is good for Canada.
> About 30% (of that 25% above) is oil & gas etc. That's easilly sellable on the global market.
No, it's not. The bulk of Canada's oil sells at a discount (the WCS price), because most of it can only be bought by the US.
In order to change this, Canada would need to dramatically ramp up pipeline capacity to its coasts, and Canadian domestic politics stand in the way of that more than anything else.
( note: thanks to a savage sinus blockage my energy terminal capacity-fu is sketchy ATM, feel free to correct and rank global LNG and contrast against oil
I think your handwaving away the impact isn't all that convincing and some don't make all that much sense.
> American products are very expensive, and Canada is one of the few markets where they are viable. That's why DJT is so upset with alcohol bans in Canada.
American alcohol is "very expensive" and Canada is the only viable market? That makes no sense. It's not like Canada is a bastion of cheap labor.
DJT is bringing up the alcohol sales most likely because business leaders are bringing it up. The overall impact to US GDP is miniscule.
> There are lots of markets for Canadian goods. And ultimately this whole process is encouraging Canadian producers to explore some of those markets, which in the long run is good for Canada.
If there are lots of markets for Canadian goods then why aren't they selling into them now? And the US is the biggest consumer market in the world (2x bigger than the EU which is the next biggest). Losing the biggest market in the world can't be argued to be "minor".
I don't think Canada loses the US market. The implication is that if the product gets more expensive then the US simply stops using it, or sources elsewhere.
Take hockey sticks. Does this mean Minnesota stops playing hockey? Or they play without sticks? Or maybe they'll buy their sticks from...?
Where I live there was much doom and gloom. Then our exports went up....
Of course small exporters are predicting calamity. It's a good sound bite, and it's definitely the obvious prediction. I'm just not convinced it'll have that effect.
You completely missed the point - these retaliatory tariffs are being rolled out strategically to protect vulnerable industries from one way tariffs not with the primary goal of hurting the us. You notice one is defensive and one is aggressive - different goals.
Why is this ironic? I see this point a lot but don’t understand the underlying reasoning for why it is a meaningful rebuttal?
It’s insane that the US administration (said as an American) doesn’t continue to treasure a values-aligned, peaceful, stable, independent neighbor along a massive unprotected border.
But I don’t understand this energy carve-out argument.
Expectation is that Canada should have a balanced trade with the USA. The reality is that Canada will always have a trade deficit because of oil exports to the USA, especially now when the USA needs it the most.
There’s not a lot of irony in trade politics, but more ignorance. It’s perfectly fine to have a trade deficit with individual countries. The layman’s example is that most of us have a trade surplus with our employers, and deficits with retail outlets. It all balances out.
The US trade deficit is mostly balanced out by service (often not counted) and investment flows. The US could theoretically end most of its trade deficits if it balanced its budget, thus reducing demand for treasuries. However, that would come with other pitfalls. It would either entail tax increases, spending cuts, or both at the government level and it would then bleed into the standard of living of most Americans as foreign investment slowed down.
It doesn’t surprise me at all to see yields go up as foreigners invest less into the US as they get dinged sending goods here. So maybe that’s ironic…
Exactly. If I buy a new jacket from a store and it's durable, fashionable and warm, I'm not complaining - I exchangedml my money for a valuable product!
Macroeconomics are a different beast but I think it still holds (and not that Trump knows a thing about them). A country with a productive economy may buy some valuable products from other countries. It becomes a problem if it's buying everything and not selling anything.
Trade deficits are good though. They are otherwise called capital surpluses. America gets to send worthless pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, and in return we get real, physical goods with finite supply.
But now the circulation of dead president paper is all fucked up, people are mad about it and they're tackling it via this (which won't work but it looks like it does something anyway).
Agreeing with your larger point but on the other hand, Trump-voting districts with older industries probably have trade deficits, both with other American districts and especially internationally.
I agree it is the point, but it is not the end of the story. These districts will continue to vote for Trump-like candidates until their situation improves, I predict.
Yeah, I'd say "old web" is early '90s up through about mid-2000s or so. Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, lots of standalone web forums, the early blogosphere, no social media, etc.
Back in the early 2000s, we were encouraging all of our friends and family still using AOL to come over to the open web. Little did we know that they'd provide the impetus for the open web to gradually turn into a new version of AOL.
It's time for trust busters to mandate the gardens have open standards based authentication-less protocols for scraping and viewing the content behind their walls. If that bankrupts them then so what? That's what they get for being web-destroying walled gardens!
‘09-‘14 is hilariously not the “old web.” With that said, those of us who participated in what I consider the “old web” are likely “old” now, so… shrug?
Two of my favorite sites [0][1] still online—Lurkers Guide to Babylon 5 and ex-astris-scientia—were started in ‘92 and ‘98 respectively.
Yeah, I took a shortcut by just grabbing the copyright on page, but Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 has a slightly more storied history than being a www site. It started on Usenet before the pilot even aired iirc. I assume the ‘92 date encompasses the early content that evolved into the site it became.
With that said, its domain has changed a few times iirc… so maybe not the best example given the nature of the article.
I've just gotten used to this at this point. My first time on the web was somewhere around 1995 I think, although my first time on the Internet was earlier (it was a proxy through some ancient BBS and I'm pretty sure it was using gopher). Even though I was just a kid back then, clearly that makes me old now.
Ha, people who didn't live it will have a hard time believing AJAX was as strong a buzzword as AI is today. Crazy to think asynchronous requests were peak innovation at the time
I'd consider the facebook and mega era to be relatively new, the "old web" for me would be the one without centralization around a few giants, the era of random phpbb forums, private websites with "this site is under construction" banners and internet directories to find stuff.
My first grandchild was born in 2000. And the COBOL panic for Y2K is probably partly my fault because 4 characters were too computational expensive when I wrote code that probably still powers your Igloo ice containers and GEICO insurance policies. 80's tech still persists!
The advantage of "publish or perish" is that it is based on something concrete. The system is gamed, for sure, and even more so with AI, but still, a paper which is cited a lot tend to be useful and the authors get rewarded.
Remove that metric, and for the lack of a better idea, it will just turn into a game of who has the best connections or who talks the most convincingly, I mean, even more than it is now.
The point is that not everything of value can be easily measured.
Instead of wasting some resources on corruption and bad judgement, we now waste them by forcing people to chase the wrong goal. In other words: "If you rely on incentives, you undermine values." (Barry Schwartz)
So I don't disagree with you, but I think we went too far into that direction. We have allow people to use their better judgement sometimes.
That misses the fact professors have plenty of other requirements beyond publications already. Teaching requirements, service requirements, chairing committees, taking on and graduating grad students. All of these are considered when one goes up for tenure.
I will be curious to see how I feel about AdventOfCode this year...
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