I wouldn't say "new". This has been a thing for decades. While the companies who are the top spenders may have changed, Silicon Valley tech as a whole has been pretty aggressively represented for some time.
My thoughts exactly. This article calls out crypto but tech lobbying has a much longer history with Amazon, Google, and Meta. I view crypto as an extension of the financial services industry at this point (look at the boards and execs of these companies; they are more finance than tech), which obviously is the king of financing campaigns.
A while ago software companies where taking every kind of abuse from the US government, coming from well represented entertainment, finance, and all kinds of other industries. This suddenly stopped when they started to lobby.
Microsoft intensified its lobbying efforts when it faced scrutiny for bundling IE with Windows. Similarly, Facebook, Google, Apple, and others have increased their lobbying over the years.
As you pointed out, this is nothing new. When companies or entire industries feel threatened, they ramp up lobbying – even Huawei hired Tony Podesta to advocate for them.
Hillary Clinton's call to repeal Section 230 for stricter social media regulation will likely prompt tech companies to boost their lobbying efforts.
Sooner or later, companies in emerging industries will start lobbying to protect their interests or advance their agendas.
Yep! For example, the EFF was notably supported by Google back when Google was taking on Microsoft, the ITIF has been active for decades, and the Obama admin was notorious for being overrepresented by Google leadership.
Ain't no point adding morality to lobbying - it's just what it is.
You get a much more usable framework if you drop the idea that there is some "pure" tech or innovation that politics are a corruption of and instead realize that technology and innovation are always political. Politics were there from the beginning, but they may have been invisible to you in a previous era.
Understanding how that could be and articulating what the politics were before is key to deciding what to do about the changes now.
I agree, so much of our tech was built out as part of the global war machine. It was easier to keep your head in the sand with "libertarian-esque" ideas (at least for me), but as those ideas came to fruition and social media exposed the thoughts of the people behind the money, the reality of the situation became easier to see.
Because their strong opinions aren't enabling technological innovations, they're enabling commercialization and regulatory capture so they can make money.
Oh my. And you think the prior attitudes were honest on their face, and not about undermining the prior incumbents so they could eat their lunch - to get the new folks here?
The prior incumbents were the way they were because they were incumbents. all incumbents end up doing these things. Because they work.
At least until someone figures out the chink in the armor, and it stops working.
I don't agree at all that Liberalism was the greatest innovation. Neo-liberalism is quite the opposite actually. VCs are part of a rigged system of global capital. They get paid to be part of that system and continue its existence. It has nothing to do with innovation other than occasional random bets that pay off.
I'm not sure why you're getting voted down. The HN guidelines clearly state downvotes are not to be used to express disagreement. Your point was politely and concisely made, and stuck to the topic.
What is supposed to happen and what actually happen are two different things. Example: Liberalism was supposed to make everyone prosperous, but it actually made everyone more prosperous according to metrics that don't matter (CPU cores per pocket) while taking away all the prosperity that does matter (stability of living space, nutritional quality of food, etc).
>Liberalism was the greatest innovation we ever came up with as a species
Pottery, agriculture, control over the electromagnetic field, basket weaving, LANGUAGE, formalized society, written language, MATH, metalworking etc
and you posit UNREGULATED MARKETS as the greatest innovation?
NONE of the above monumental achievements of humanity are even remotely related to people being able to do business with slightly less regulation and slightly fewer taxes. Nearly all human innovation has occurred when being murdered by your king for petty reasons was the norm.
Integrated circuits as a commodity mostly exists because the US air force wanted it to. None of that is about liberalism.
The Navy trained up hundreds of thousands of people essentially to the level of electrical engineers, basic information sciences, and computers and computation and electric fields for WW2, to improve radar and targeting, including building and deploying a networked computer system for automated fleet defense and intercept tasking in the fifties, and then these people are mostly just let go, to spread their paid for knowledge to anyone in the commercial space, no non-competes. Wouldn't you know it, training up a bulk of people in a brand new but important field, with minimal cost to them, and then just freely giving that away reaped insane rewards for the next 50 years!
It has everything to do with tech an innovation. Nothing shifts the balance of power in a society like technological advancement. How could you possibly think a multi trillion dollar industry could avoid politics? You can't just bury your head in the sand.
Making your people first world is extremely good at defeating "populist cultural moments" like communism, unless of course you consider may 68 in France of evidence of the contrary.
I'll even go further and claim that Occupy Wall-Street died because the US economy boomed from 2012 on (return to embarrassed millionaire)
I've seen this analysis before, but I'm really not sure what it's supposed to mean beyond "modern populist movements want changes I don't consider to be material". There's no big mystery here - Denmark successfully defused their populist movement by delivering what populists say are their biggest priorities, stricter immigration policies and an increased focus on small towns (https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/denmark-europea...).
There is no big mystery; I believe it is proposed as that because the politicians just want to act in their own self-interest or that of lobbyists and not those of their constituents.
Even bringing up immigration policies leads to vitriol online, and all I can do is think "to whose advantage is this really"..
The worst are the seed stage founders complaining about the proposed paper gains tax (while not knowing enough about it to answer if it would apply to startup equity) because they’re definitely going to have enough value for the $100MM threshold to apply to them.
When the income tax was first passed it applied to less than 1% of citizens, yet look where we are now. Just because a new law doesn’t apply to you personally doesn’t mean you can’t be concerned about the potential downstream effects.
> because they’re definitely going to have enough value for the $100MM threshold to apply to them.
Tax cutoffs have this habit of drifting downward over time (the whole, "eventually you run out of other people's money" thing). See the original revenue act of 1913 (modern US income tax). At first it was 1% starting at today's equivalent of $93K and didn't go any higher until you made the equivalent of about $500K. And today, well, it's a little different.
New taxes are always pitched this way -- "oh it'll never affect you, just those rich people, what's your problem?"
Why are you being a Democrat shill? Didn't you see that recent video of Democratic party boss Hillary Clinton saying the quiet part outloud? If the social media isn't censored, "we lose control." And by "we", she didn't mean you and me.
In May 2017, Wyden co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, Senate Bill 720, which made it a federal crime, punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment,[88] for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories if protesting actions by the Israeli government. The bill would make it legal for U.S. states to refuse to do business with contractors that engage in boycotts against Israel.[89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden#Israel
I'm someone who has read up a lot on fascism and still finds it difficult to define clearly. Can you please explain to me how this kind of bill is "literal fascism".
I don’t have an answer to this, I’m just here to say that Italian fascist economic policy was explicitly corporatist, promoting big, sector-wide industry conglomerates, criminalizing strikes etc. It's no coincidence that large business moguls (today in the form of corporations) have strong preference towards fascist leaning politics.
Making boycotting a crime seems a lot like proscribing a political view. I doubt the law has been enforced this way - or enforced at all - but if you went to the grocery store, saw a product sold by an Israeli company and decided not to buy it on account of that fact you have now committed a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
The reality is that the courts would never uphold the validity of this law, and it's not enforced because the legislators know it's BS.
I don't know what a cyber-libertarian is but Bernie Sanders is completely irrelevant (literally). The 3 bills he sponsored that became law were renaming highways and post-offices. The guy is a meme at this point. Look how he rolled over for the DNC two cycles in a row.
FWIW, your post prompted me to take a bit of time to research. I found this interesting:
"According to The New York Times, "Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his ideas are usually far to the left of the majority of the Senate ... Mr. Sanders has largely found ways to press his agenda through appending small provisions to the larger bills of others."[146] During his time in the Senate, he had lower legislative effectiveness than the average senator, as measured by the number of sponsored bills that passed and successful amendments made.[147] Nevertheless, he has sponsored over 500 amendments to bills,[148] many of which became law."
Thats the conclusion I came to. It seems like he'd be more effective as a consultant/advisor or non-elected official. Taking up a valuable senate seat to make amendments seems like a waste of influence.
My take is that he's still a successful lawmaker, it's just that he is more successful implementing his agenda with amendments rather than standalone bills.
Eh, I was curious and did some more research. Look at Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Bob Casey Jr. (D-PA), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), all of whom have been serving similar amount of time - they have sponsored bills over 1k, co-sponsored ranging from 3k to 8k. Compare that to Bernie's ~ 200 co-sponsored and 3 sponsored ... I'd say thats a very weak performance compared to his peers.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style? Your account has been doing it a ton, it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I don't want to ban you because you clearly know a lot of things and have posted quite a few good things over the years. But your comments include so much name-calling, swipes, snark, and nastiness that you're not leaving much choice.
Here's one of many examples, on an unrelated topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630774. That's a great comment, ruined by name-calling and personal attack. On the subject of cartoons of all things! There's no need to treat other people this way, or use the comment section to vent bile like that.
Arguing in a snarky way using denunciatory rhetoric is part of what I mean by the flamewar style and your comments certainly do a lot of that. We can put a different label on it if you don't like "flamewar", but the point is we're trying for something else on this site.
I'm certainly not trying to shame you or anybody—I'm trying to persuade you to follow HN's rules! and obviously not succeeding, but the last thing I want is to add shame into it.
It's common for people to underestimate the nastiness in their own comments and overestimate the nastiness in other people's. Those two factors multiply into quite a perception skew. Your posts to HN seem to me to be so nasty so often that I wonder if this might be a factor here.
It's also the case that certain types of veteran internet commenter have sharpened their weapons (snark, derision, etc.) to such a degree that they don't realize their own power. Often this type of commenter is quite smart and a good writer. I wonder if this may be a factor here too.
It's in HN's interest to have smart, good writers in the threads, but only if they're willing to leave those weapons at the door. There have been other cases where people have agreed to do this and stuck to their agreement, and I wish you would agree to do that too, because we'd all be better off. I mean it when I say I don't want to ban you.
I admire those skills—it's just that HN isn't the place for them. For that sort of combat to work on the internet requires a smaller, more cohesive community. HN can't be that. What ends up happening when people post in that style is that it degrades quality drastically as others (usually less smart and not as good writers) start taking cues from those posts. In the end we'd just have scorched earth, which is not interesting.
Hillary Clinton went on TV and said we should get rid of Section 230 in order to moderate content. So is it really that surprising that SV made a right turn?
SV made the choice before (by accepting money from dictatorships for political influence via social media). Attempts at regulation were a reaction to that.
There's no way the situation can stay like that forever. There will be regulation like there's regulation of TV, radio, press, etc.
Without regulation you don't get a libertarian utopia - you just get oligarchy.
This argument doesn't hold water. Hillary Clinton is kind of irrelevant at this point. She doesn't hold any kind of elected office and remains pretty unpopular among lefties after losing in 2016. Meanwhile Trump openly tried to reduce the protections of Section 230 while he was president[1].
> Folks that think that Trump and his friends like "freedom of speech" or any of the type of techno freedoms we take for granted are in for a deeply rude awakening. The reality is that democrats are so, SO much better on most cyber issues that you're actually a deplorable if you are voting for trump.
I'm curious as to why you conclude that Democrats are better than Republicans in terms of IT liberty. Trump ended operation choke point, a program of essentially harassing banks into dropping certain customers [1]. De-banking is, in my opinion, one of the most important threats to "cyber liberties" since it's absolutely crucial for any business to survive. Individuals who are de-banked also find it incredibly difficult to survive: Plenty of services, including apartments and HOAs, do not accept non-electronic payments.
The censorship of "misinformation" (much of which later turned out to be true) also grew considerably under the 2020 administration, which did in fact reach out to social media companies to try and influence their decision making. One of the more salient examples was covered by HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365868 To be clear, I'm not concerned about private companies autonomously deciding what to host. I take issue with the government coercing companies into making moderation decisions. This has huge potential for abuse, such as forcing the takedown of politically disadvantageous material.
Both Republicans and Democrats are in favor of getting rid of Section 230, but for essentially totally different reasons: Republicans seem to want to return to the precedence set by Cubby Inc. vs. CompuServe [2]. Democrats seem to want to narrowly repeal Section 230 to empower the government to dictate the contents of social media. Both are negative in my opinion, but the patter seems more insidious and prone to long term harm.
And to be clear, these issues are far, far from enough to get me to vote for Trump. I'm interested in hearing the counter-claim, that the Democrat party is better in terms of cyber liberties.
> The right-wing turn is absolutely disgusting and should be shattered as soon as possible with prejudice.
Do you understand how you are the problem here?
Silicon Valley didn't care about politics until politicians started getting involved and attempting to impose censorship regimes, aggressive unrealized gains taxation, and killing crypto assets. Tech startups were find being ignored.
But as you illustrate, you can't ignore DC if it chooses not to ignore you. If people like you want to use the power of the state to "shatter" anyone you politically disagree with, well, of course the tech companies will hit back.
> Porter, who had initially polled well, lost decisively in the primary, coming in third, with just fifteen per cent of the vote.
She was running against Adam Schiff, who had much broader name recognition. It also didn't help that she's overweight and "Porker" became her nasty nickname.
This is a shoddy piece of reporting. Tech lobbying didn't start with Chris Lehane, Uber, Lyft, or crypto. Anytime government is capable of helping or hurting an industry, they form a lobbying group. The more money involved, the bigger the lobbying effort.
It didn't help that the Schiff campaign (backed by the CA democratic party) donated to the Garvey campaign to force her out of the primary. Seems weird to not mention this.
“But they ended up exactly the same. Helping the worst regimes, all-in in military complex, taking advantage of screen addiction and teen insecurities.”
This implies all. I then said I don’t doubt their impact.
You are right; there are still many good people and companies in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately the Philip Morrises of Silicon Valley have outsized influence since they control major social media platforms, Web infrastructure and standards, advertising networks, cloud computing platforms, and other essential tech infrastructure. Locally, they are also large employers in the Bay Area, and due to the housing crunch it is very difficult for non-“Philip Morris” workers, even in tech, to compete for housing (not every software engineer makes $200k+ in salary and gets RSU grants), which is pushing some of them out the Valley, helping make the Valley even more of a “Philip Morris” shop.
The ones that do are so huge that the number of companies doesn't matter. Facebook market cap is 1.5 Trillion and has $150bn of revenue every year. That's more than many countries around the world. (and I am comparing revenues to GDP).
I don’t think it’s misleading. SV isn’t the sum of Meta, YouTube, and TikTok (which isn’t even SV despite some roles here) - even if those companies impacts are outsized. The article explicits calls out things like AI; Anthropic and OpenAI are nowhere near like those others. And that’s just one category.
I would hope a YCombinator news site of all places would see that.
Also a collective mindset - if most people one knows are doing exactly the same, morality lines tend to conveniently blur, it requires very strong personality to keep the inner compass untainted for decades.
And its a grey business so to say, you can see various justifications for it also here since many folks here work for them, its not some Zyklon-B factory. At the end, everybody under certain circumstances has a price, and kids tend to blur this even more for many.
What really gets me, is very young software engineers (not managers or marketers), that emulate the values and behaviors of tech bro billionaires.
It’s not surprising, but it is kind of disappointing.
When
I was young, I was convinced that all the bad in the world, was the fault of evil, greedy old men. If young folks ran things, we’d be empathetic, kind, ethical, and positive.
As SV is basically completely run by young folks, of various races, genders, and backgrounds , I have to admit that it is actually worse, than the evil old men.
There is only one reason that tech hires young and that's the growth rate in the number of software engineers. The profession looks young simple because there are probably 10x as many now as there were 30 years ago, so naturally there will be a whole lot less 50 year olds than 20 year olds.
This is not new: read articles of transcripts of speeches from 10+ years ago by Thiel or pg that lionize young, inexperienced founders and the benefits of working at startups pitched to the youth.
I think OP meant the opposite -- that when people have children in the Bay Area and want to support them, they'll make moral compromises to do so, given the cost.
The very young may not grasp what they are doing, and they may be easily "boiled as frogs", but I think they are more likely to believe that they are not making moral compromises.
> I like how they started with different values compared to the old American companies (oil, cigarettes, defense).
They started with the same values: make as much money as possible, even if it destroys the world. Any entreaties to the contrary were a smokescreen to deflect criticism until they could shore up their position. This is the natural end-state of incentivizing profit maximization.
No, power makes bad. Money drives bad because it makes power, but getting rid of money will not solve any problems, and historically it’s made them worse.
The thing about Pax Americana is that the brain trust behind sustaining it decides which regimes are good and which are evil based on their utility to the United States. This is classic empire building, and it's an effective strategy, but the moralizing about it is exhausting and hollow. Nobody with three brain cells thinks that one petrostate is more moral than another because it's backed by the US. I'm glad to live in the USA and benefit immensely from living at the heart of the modern Mongol or Ottoman Empire, but I have few illusions about the cost.
They aren't saying SV is firing the missiles. Rather, the suggestion is SV is helping those that do.
So when you say
> I don't see Silicon Valley firing missiles in the Red Sea
You aren't countering the original claim. Instead, you'd have to argue that you don't see SV helping those firing missiles in the Red Sea. And, in that regard, I'm not so sure of that. Just look at crypto as a clear example of helping those regimes actually doing the firing.
Exactly. Silicon Valley used to be countercultural, an alternative to Corporate America. Yes, there was always a money-making emphasis, and there’s a long history of less-than-ethical practices, but this was countered by many positive aspects of the Valley, such as the paying-it-forward ethos and the feeling that technology matters. There’s a reason Xerox PARC was placed in Palo Alto and not in New England. There’s a reason why many of personal computing’s pioneers had a countercultural vibe.
Today Silicon Valley is the establishment. It seems less like the nerd mecca it used to be (remember Weird Stuff?) and is now a place that is much more obsessed with money. When a basic 1960s suburban tract house within a reasonable commute from work costs more than $2 million, it’s hard not to be obsessed with money. There are still good people and awesome technologies in Silicon Valley, which is one of the main reasons I’ve decided to stay in the Bay Area, but it seems like some companies in Silicon Valley have gone absolutely mercenary, and they have eroded the goodwill the area had as recently as a decade ago.
But I think this is part of the natural evolution of industry. The same could be said about the history of the railroad and car industries in America. Think of how essential telecommunications and electricity are to modern society, yet I’ve yet to meet a person who loves Comcast and PG&E.
I used to think this was the case as well, even though I suffered through the reality: computing was always a rich person's game. Even more so in the early days. Even a C64 was an upper middle class toy. Cosplaying counter cultural (really well) doesn't change the fact that if you cold afford to build the foundation of the computer industry, you were at least very aligned with capital. Now that alignment has been exposed, highlighted and scaled to global proportions.
My eyes were opened when I started realizing the Wikipedia pages of luminaries in the software field had blue links to their famous parents and those parents also had blue links to _their_ famous parents
Hell I’m guilty of some myself. I was surprised early in my career when I found out that most of my peers did not have a computer and internet access as children in the early 90s
Linus Torvalds? Maybe I’m the wrong age but that was one of the bigger names when I was starting my tech career
Edit: you’ve got luminaries like Stallman too, who didn’t have the rich family but did get the university they worked at to cover their living expenses. An uncomfortable amount of leaders in the Free Software and Open Source communities openly advocate for people to give away their time and effort for free, while living on the largesse of others
This is some low level criticism. Just because some one has successful parents it takes anything away from their accomplishments? I mean, it's always nice to root for the underdogs, I do too, but this Zeitgeist has just become childish.
I wasn’t diminishing or taking away their accomplishment's, their background doesn’t change what they did or made.
What I was critiquing was the fact that a seemingly inordinate number of people who advocate that your work in software should be free for anyone else to take without payment, also happen to not ever need to consider how they put food on the table due to wealth they inherited or were given due to their celebrity status
You need to watch "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace" by Adam Curtis which outlines Silicon Valley's long Libertarian roots. Making money and greed has been deeply embedded from the start.
Absolutely love Adam Curtis. I was first exposed to AWOBMOLG in the basement of the Palais de Tokyo as an idealistic undergrad, and bristled at his claims. Since then it has become one of my favorite pieces of filmmaking. Great soundtrack too.
This reminds me of the tycoon's thunderously semi-religious speech from The Network [0], which has aged pretty well for a movie 50 years old.
> The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
> Silicon Valley used to be countercultural, an alternative to Corporate America.
Turns out this is bullshit.
It's fine I bought into it too. But it's a pretty unbroken path from today back through the history of business in Silicon Valley. It's always been a smokescreen.
It has nearly nothing to do with the tech industry or counterculture and everything to do with being shit at urban planning and selling land to speculators on the cheap, so you end up with nowhere for the sprawl to go, and the land owner voting block that sabotages any attempt at building high density settlements.
> different values compared to the old American companies (oil, cigarettes, defense).
To play devil's advocate a bit, I think those old industries started out just as idealistic as the tech sector. The oil companies pursued amazing feats of science and engineering to power the new industrial economy. The defense companies made remarkable technological advances to help deter Soviet aggression and win the space race. And before the link to lung cancer was discovered, tobacco was like coffee: it gave people a nice cognitive boost, as well as possibly helping them stay thin.
Personally I would argue that the addiction simply shifted for most Americans. It was cigarettes, now it is food, particularly ultra-processed food.
There's a large subset of people, the majority in my opinion, who are somewhat prone to addiction. Most are just a wee bit prone. They certainly won't peruse the streets for drugs. But, if something is readily available and socially accepted, they'll do it.
Before this was smoking, now its ultra-processed foods. Fast food, junk food, sweets type stuff.
It's probably still a boon, I'd say. I mean, I think being obese is probably healthier than smoking. But we didn't really "solve" anything, we just moved the problem.
Not very surprising, considering it’s the same companies using the same playbook. I’m not so sure that being obese is healthier than smoking, being obese might not give you cancer but it will certainly mess with your heart, and I would not be surprised if someone who smoked for the same amount of time someone else was obese ends up having a better prognosis after quitting.
The connection is even closer. Tobacco company extensively invested in the highly processed food industry and brought their advertisement experts in. The obesity crisis (and addiction to sugary and fatty processed foods) is not an accident, it's the result of a sophisticated advertisement campaign directed by the brains behind tobacco and alcohol campaigns.
I mean, of course I have no evidence because nobody is really looking into it. In my opinion, despite the fact we have many tens if not hundreds of millions of people eating themselves to death, we (socially) are incredibly hesitant to consider overconsumption an addiction.
But when people are dying slowly, and painfully, by their own hand and they can't stop, I personally consider that an addiction. In addition, we know ultra-processed foods are designed to invoke as much pleasure in the user as possible. In many ways, they suffer the same hyper-optimization that modern cigarettes do.
There's also some* evidence that part of the Tobacco industry shifted to food as Tobacco in the US died off. This is more circumstantial evidence. I think the "hard" evidence is that everyone smoked and was thin, now nobody smokes, and everyone is obese.
Regardless, I think we need harder and more proven solutions to the obesity epidemic. I think "willpower!" isn't working out for us, on a large scale. I'm rooting for Ozempic. And, fun fact, Ozempic also curbs nicotine and alcohol addiction.
They aren't defending smoking. They're referring to the industry and its ethos when it originally grew. While smoking was established as being bad for health in the mid-20th century, this wasn't as clear in the late 19th and early 20th, when the tobacco industry boomed and brought many jobs to the southern US economy.
No, that was honestly how I interpreted your comment. That may have been the wrong interpretation, but your two word reply didn't leave me with much. I possibly misinterpreted your first comment also, but I wasn't really sure how you were leaning there, whether it be just an absurdity or a question honestly pondered.
> And before the link to lung cancer was discovered, tobacco was like coffee: it gave people a nice cognitive boost
Now you can just buy nicotine products for that boost with a substantially reduced risk profile (it's not a carcinogen). Some writeup on it: https://gwern.net/nicotine
Same question applies perfectly to caffeine. I might just be justifying my addiction, but it’s possible this is still worthwhile as it allows one to manually select when they want to expend their mental energy, overriding the normally semirandom fluctuations brought on by exhaustion, mood, etc.
A big difference is that caffeine isn't addictive. It may seem like it, and you do get a few headaches when you quit cold turkey, but you just don't get the intense graving you get with addictions.
> A big difference is that caffeine isn't addictive. It may seem like it, and you do get a few headaches when you quit cold turkey, but you just don't get the intense graving you get with addictions.
I'm curious what definition of "addiction" you're using to arrive at the conclusion that caffeine isn't addictive.
> Isn’t the standard definition that you continue to use the drug despite it causing serious negative problems in your life?
There's no one standard definition of "addiction", and most concise definitions (one or two lines) are extremely fragile and break down when you try to apply them in any meaningful context.
By this definition you're putting forth, caffeine certainly could be addictive, as could any substance - and in fact, nearly any behavior, which is why professionals generally frown upon using this measure definitionally, because it leads to pseudoscientific terms like "X addiction", for absurd values of X.
> Numerous controlled laboratory investigations reviewed in this article show that caffeine produces behavioral and physiological effects similar to other drugs of dependence. Moreover, several recent clinical studies indicate that caffeine dependence is a clinically meaningful disorder that affects a nontrivial proportion of caffeine users.
I think you’d be surprised. When i quit coffee cold turkey, I was basically out of commission for a week. Mentally I felt and functioned as though I was running a heavy fever, I could never feel full, and I felt exhausted and ready to sleep the moment I woke up. The headaches were constant and agonizing for about a whole week, easily worse than a migraine, and I had weird mood swings where I’d suddenly feel very anxious or sad out of nowhere. The difference is I was probably drinking 300mg a day or so.
There is fairly good evidence that nicotine causes some mild cognitive benefits beyond the baseline. Of course there are also downsides even separate from the effects of smoking.
I think nicotine is one of the very few components that can enhance some brain functions very slightly. It does however have far more negative side effects as its role in nature would suggest it would have.
This is an exception and other common drugs like caffeine that do not have any positive effects at all. Or any other drug for that matter.
Anyone care to suggest what money "wants" or where it wants to go?
I know it's a flawed question, because money is in many ways inert, but we have similar caveats around genes and evolution. Non-sentient things can still create persistent structures that we can label with our human values. Or something :)
Money wants to go to where more money is, and accumulate in great pools that can pull in more and more money. Money seeks to erode barriers that would prevent this, so that the money pool can accumulate faster and faster. This force can overcome morals that are barriers to the process of money accumulation.
Its ancestors wanted to feed the Roman army, and to ensure that the recently conquered stayed conquered next year. I don't think it's much different today: provide legitimacy to cases where those with power want to coerce those without.
The modern wrinkle is that our effects on the world are more significant. This design has side effects (re: the climate, to name just one). These are side effects which we may not be able to tolerate forever. I think that money, being a status-quo preserver, "wants" us to ignore them for as long as possible, but since they're cumulative, that's going to be tougher sell as time goes on.
Also, It's an information technology. As the makers of such things I think it's up to us to figure out what the next version should look like.
I think money is simply like mass: it has some kind of gravitational force, so people are drawn to it (the more money the stronger the pull), and it attracts itself (money tends to accumulate like a black hole), if left unchecked.
The only way to interfere with it is by using other unrelated forces, like kindness, just like we can move masses around with electromagnetism.
I don't think the 'they' you refer to exist anymore. It isn't that tech workers got corrupted by power. There was a brief (20 year?) period where workers had more leverage than owners. Asset owners were forced to bend to workers, pay huge salaries and beg to invest in companies they didn't understand.
Now asset owners have the whole thing comfortably under their thumb, every large tech co has MBAs throughout and schools have been pumping out engineers for 20 years so workers have no leverage. It has become the same as every other large industry.
The Andreessen and Horowitz quotes in this are particularly hilarious and pathetic. The desperate attempts at linking their greed to the fate of the country itself is so nakedly self-serving (as are many of the quotes from these lobbyists and other VCs) that they should make them a laughing stock.
The Citizens United decision will be a cancer in American politics and a boon for the ultra-wealthy for generations.
For one thing, it equates money with speech, which destabilizes our democracy by giving more power to those who have money. Obviously, money does that in many ways outside of the electoral process, but one would imagine that any serious democracy would want to keep its democratic processes maximally equitable.
I hear you , but that doesn't seem to pass the smell test.
The vast majority (97% ?) of voters are low-information voters. 1 such vote is equal to 1 high information vote (3% ?), those who research, read bills, etc.
So the process is already not maximally equitable - in fact, the system severely punishes high information voters via opportunity cost.
At that point dollars positively affect your outcome because with paid mediums , low information voters can now get more information, despite being unwilling to inform themselves via hard work. So that's a benefit.
That information flow is subject to competition, so the best ideas (and information) will win out. That's another plus. Money competes for eyeballs, and your dollars are just as good as mine. If you have more $$, i can pool my friends and beat you. There's nothing more equitable than that we have discovered so far.
Now, enter someone with a ton of money, Musk. You could argue that he would tilt the game. But we then observe the opposite: Billionaires are also subject to the law of diminishing returns. 'Donations' will only buy so much favor, and then they become a losing proposition. So, do you want a billionaire burning his cash in the political process? The answer is absolutely: it signals a level of credibility and conviction, when business opportunity is already a loser.
So in short, you want people to risk all their chips in something they believe, instead of limiting their bets and just get rich off the house, playing the long game .
Perhaps we start from the other side of the table. Maybe money is not the problem. Perhaps it is the power concentrated in too few individuals ?
How about cutting off power from those that are selling favors to the highest bidders ?
The massive influx of money has empirically had a tendency to turn a substantial portion of your "high information votes" into "high _dis_information votes"
American democracy does not give special preference to information content of a voter, nor should it. Did you skip the entire Jim Crow era of history where the racially-presumed information content of a particular voter was used to disenfranchise those voters, even spuriously?
Our constitution does not begin, "We, the highly-informed people..."
Anything else, and you are no longer talking democracy.
Yawn-inducing attempt at sleight of hand. Despite being a republic, we nevertheless select our representatives democratically. I vote directly on state-level constitutional amendments.
> At that point dollars positively affect your outcome because with paid mediums , low information voters can now get more information, despite being unwilling to inform themselves via hard work. So that's a benefit. That information flow is subject to competition, so the best ideas (and information) will win out.
I don't believe in this rosy view of the "marketplace of ideas", fear wins out, populism wins out, not the best ideas. The best ideas have nuance, they demand to be understood in context, they aren't catchphrases nor explore scapegoats for societal problems. All of that demands a high-information voter to parse through and judge what's the "best idea" within their context, environment, community, etc.
No, I do not believe that allowing ideas to fight it out inevitably leads to the best ideas raising to the top, people don't vote intellectually, they vote emotionally and the person who tries to fight strong emotions (such as fear) with ideas will lose out.
Is a voter more like a VC: invest in the person not the idea (aka policy). Although the policies and how they are communicated are of course part of how you judge. I think everyone knows election promises are just promises.
Yes, well we are discussing elections which very definitely have time frames. We can't wait for Edward Gibbons to come along 2 millennia later and tell us that some bullshit idea's poisoning of this particular election is going to wreck democracy.
Add to that the fact that bullshit is cheaper to produce than truth.
Sprinkle in the notion also that bullshit is likely more profitable too.
Consider what might happen if the bullshitters control orders of magnitude more money in the first place, and then filter through Brandolini's Law:
To even get power you now need to nod to crypto, nod to a certain middle eastern country and so on. Eventually politicians will be entirely impotent suits. Look at the current "choice" the electorate has.
Citizens United was the correct decision. The alternative is our government deciding who gets to engage in politics. Without Citizens United politics would be even more restricted to a much smaller set of even wealthier people and established politicians who have access to the governemnt approved outlets of political speech.
Oh no! Established politicians! They know how the government works, and could possibly be effective. We can't let them get reelected!
I joke, but the current system is so much more vastly corrupt than this imagined scenario where small potatoes money gets handed out equally to all candidates in a race, that I just can't really imagine what your actual nightmare scenario might be.
The nightmare scenario is that the money is not handed out equally to all candidates.
If corrupt incumbent politicians have complete control of the finances of an election, how could they be held accountable? Anyone wanting to run against them on this issue would simply be denied the money to do so.
But what you are proposing is a different government, one in which leaders could operate without the primary accountability that they face now: that anyone can organize a campaign against them.
The barriers you cite already exist. There are plenty of rules ablout what must do to get on the ballot, yet somehow new politicians still get into politics.
Assuming that what you say is the outcome of a proposal like mine (which, btw, it isn't): I would rather have the government (which is beholden to the constitution) than the wealthy (who aren't beholden to the constitution) be the gatekeeper.
In fact, this money would be available to anyone who met whatever threshold was legally enshrined, a far better alternative than having to kiss the ring of an oligarch, as you propose.
Many modern, developed democracies do exactly that, and are quite more democratic than 2 parties running the state. As well as not making elections a show might help democracy instead of the best showman.
I will be waiting for the American exceptionalism arguments on why a thing that well functioning democracies/countries do wouldn't work in the USA.
The government should set sensible limits on campaign contributions that avoid a system of legalised bribery, aka. SuperPACs, such that actual people get to choose their representatives, not a handful of ultra-rich with the means to steer politics.
The only candidate in American politics that lives up to your idealised, independent politician of the people, is Bernie Sanders. And guess what? He strongly opposes billionaires buying themselves a government.
Works in Europe and established politicians get voted out regularly.
You can also establish campaign spending limits without it being funded by taxes. In other words anyone can raise money for their campaign but only up to X amount (and no PACs).
Donations to political campaigns are still limited. Even after Citizens United.
What's not limited is independent expenditures. You can, for example, organize rallies or put up billboards advocating more serious efforts to combat climate change without limit.
> Without Citizens United politics would be even more restricted to a much smaller set of even wealthier people
Really? Because there are many countries with far stricter regulations on campaign financing than the US had pre-Citizens United, that also have much more working class representation in their politics than the US.[0]
False dichotomy. Prior to CU, individuals could contribute to any candidate of their choosing (up to an annual contribution limit). Companies are compased of individuals. CU was twisted logic to reach a preconceived, corrupt outcome.
You are misunderstanding what the Citizens United vs. FEC determined. Candidate contributions are still limited, even after CU. What's not limited is independent expenditures.
I can understand how the "up to an annual contribution limit" part of my comment could be confusing. I added that in an attempt to not be misleading / to circumvent spurious disagreement. I've moved it inside of parenthesis to de-emphasise it.
If you read my comment as a response to the parent, I believe it will make more sense.
---
CU opened the floodgates of anonymous, unlimited political contributions to "independent", but not really independent, organizations which can campaign on behalf of candidates.
The goal was/is to replace our democratic republic with an oligarchy. And we're now in the end game.
Wrong, if the candidates are directing or otherwise leading ostensibly-independent donations this is illegal. Independent donations are exactly that: independent of a candidate's campaign. If they're carried out on behalf of a candidate, they're not independent donations.
You can put up billboards saying, "X candidate's record is the best on climate change, tax policy, etc.". Your spending in this manner is not subject to limits. If the candidate calls you up and says "It'd be really good if you put up billboards saying X, Y, and Z" then that's breaking election laws.
Citizens United is not even remotely close to replacing our republic with an oligarchy. You can't buy elections, no matter how much people try to say so. Clintion received about twice as many donations as Trump in 2016, but still lost the election.
It all assumes the candidate is the queen bee. They are now the worker bee. The superpac sets the rules, the candidate follow to get elected. That is the example in thw article, well actually more meta: it was a flex by crypto to show them they are a new mafia. They get many for the price of one.
Indeed. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, which in clear language protects free speech for corporations. That includes the right to engage in political advocacy, which is what Citizens United v. FEC was about.
A lot of people have a, let's say filtered understanding of the decision, which has become a sort of shibboleth rather than a direct reference to the Supreme Court's ruling.
That might have been the “hopeful” argument for Citizens United but the the reality has been the opposite. There is so much more money going into politics by large companies and the wealthy than ever before. It’s a poison on democracy and one of the absolute worst SC decisions ever.
Makes sense. Lobbyists for legacy competitors tried to screw them so they picked up the game. In Canada and Australia they tried to screw them on the news / search linking debacle. The problem is that when you come at the king, you best not miss.
An unprecedented peek-behind-the-covers at the inside of mainstream media brain.
Man with wide eyes and stock photos and nordvpn sponsorship on set with full makeup and steampunk costume rambles through various headlines, not forgetting to show you how to (mis)interpret facts, and how to manifest life as a rabid political fanatic, ready to ruin any dialog you come across with barking and screeching and red eyes.
There is nothing in that video that even resembles thought or rationality, it is just classic mainstream media non-sequitur that adorns the regalia of knowledge and batters the viewer with meaningless "facts" and "figures" until they are in a state of ready-to-be-filled aporia.
It's not about "intelligence" or about any particular factual misinterpretation, I'm sure there's some "source" that more-or-less backs each individual claim made in the video, the problem is, in broad strokes, the standard of evidence for each individual "fact", and the narrative that guides the viewer through the set of curated and disconnected facts to an implied conclusion, which is less like a conclusion and more like a sentiment: "The crypto industry is a bunch of rich scammers like FTX and Sam Bankman Fried that are trying to grease the wheels of power with all of their ill-gotten wealth to protect themselves and continue to rob dopes that are buying into this trash." It's easy to imagine a conjugate set of disconnected and non-sequitur facts that with the right presentation lead to precisely the opposite conclusion.
But, neither of those is thinking. I mean that, the problem is not that the ambiguity of the situation provides for two or more interpretations, which it seems to me that it does, but that this mode of investigation, which outwardly accounts for itself like "Each side go to your corner and gather as many facts as you can, then we'll gather in the middle and compare, whoever has the more and heavier facts shall be found truthful!", but is really more like, "Let's all divide ourselves in two, randomly, and amass as many facts as we can that back up our point-of-view, while dismissing any that support the other, and just for fun let's add in hating the other corner too, because it makes all of this more exciting."
If you hang your thinking on the results of some surveys, and one account of what happened in some particular historical event, plus some truistic phrase like "All's well that end's well" and a couple of well-timed stock photo gags to pull it all together, you will find yourself 1. impermeable to any ideas that don't fit in the point-of-view or framing of the question you already have and 2. completely and willfully uncurious about the world and questions you aren't already asking about the things you don't already have preconceived notions of.
Regular subscribers to Patrick Boyle know that his channel is not really about finance - and certainly not about crypto. Most of the time, the channel is meant to be a place to talk about rap music. It's very subtle.
Dismantle what SV has evolved into under venture capital.
When tech was scrappy and didnt have billions at stake, its products seemed to benefit humanity. Now it is (the most powerful?) part of the oppresive regime.
It seems like a bad move though, I mean these are nerdy investor guys, right? They do well in this meritocratic system. If I was a tech billionaire I’d be very worried that a guy who’s only skills were catering and gangster stuff would have had a lot more time to study the latter, than me.
These tech moguls assume they will be in charge in the event of any sort of revolution or apocalypse. Look at some of what the Reddit founders have said for an example
I don’t have a subscription, but does their plan involve preposterously loyal soldiers who have no motivation to follow their instructions for any reason other than suddenly valueless money?
It’s not unique to the wealthy in tech, most nouveau riche seem to forget at some point that the only reason most people attend to their needs or are in their orbit is to get money and if that becomes useless or turns off they will be dropped like a bad habit
According to what? I've never heard him say anything positive about Putin. He also reportedly tipped off the FBI when the Kremlin invited him to meet with Putin.
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Both quotes by Peter Thiel in a Cato Unbound[1] blog post, 2009. The second quote is - let's call it "interesting" - considering Thiel is the patron of a VP candidate who may be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
You're likely reading the quote wrong, since it reads completely differently out of context. He was referring specifically to how beneficiaries of the government are incentivized to vote for policies which provide government benefits to themselves, thereby continually maintaining or increasing the size of the government. His implication is that as the government grows bigger, as it does with continually increasing beneficiaries, who vote in order to increase their benefit as the system allows, the freedom of those who are not advantaged by a growing and naturally increasingly regulatory government will decrease, due to a higher tax and regulatory burden.
> He was referring specifically to how beneficiaries of the government are incentivized to vote for policies which provide government benefits to themselves
I can believe that, but one has to be willfully ignorant to believe that such voter self-interest started in 1920, and that previous cohorts voted in an objective manner, always devoid of self-interest and for everyone's benefit.
The underlying question is "Whose interests does (or should) the government concern itself with"
A government beneficiary doesn't typically refer to anyone who is advantaged by a governments laws, but essentially a person or entity who receives a monetary benefit from the government, which is likely what is being referred to. This is what did not exist in the US till the early 20th century.
The line referencing the franchise is a separate quote and I'm not even going to pretend to understand sdwhat he was thinking when he wrote that. I assume that he regrets that quote, since he hasn't said anything similar since.
> but essentially a person or entity who receives a monetary benefit from the government, which is likely what is being referred to. This is what did not exist in the US till the early 20th century
Are you seriously suggesting the voter pool received no monetary benefits from the government before 1920? President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862 - does getting 160 acres from uncle Sam for a token fee count as "monetary benefit" in your books? The act grant was for "heads of households" 21 years and older. I bet there were similar land grants in the original colonies predate the declaration of independence.
No, of course I wouldn't argue that, and I not only did not, but it also has nothing to do with what I mentioned Thiel was referring to. I think you also know that your example is tangential and hardly comparable. The Homestead Act, and all other related land grant acts, have no relation to the modern beneficiary system that only came into existence in the US in the early 20th century. The modern beneficiary system is what is being referred to by Thiel.
> I think you also know that your example is tangential and hardly comparable. The Homestead Act, and all other related land grant acts, have no relation to the modern beneficiary system that only came into existence in the US in the early 20th century
I posit that the distinction is arbitrary. There is no qualitative difference between civil war pensions of 1862 vs the G.I. bill of 1944. If there was a change in government doctrine, I'd love to see concrete contrasts rather than hand-waving. Or perhaps Thiel's gripe is quantitative rather than qualitative?
I'm dying to know how I'm incorrectly reading the part where he calls giving women the right to vote has rendered "capitalist democracy" an oxymoron. He seems pretty clear on it to me.
Prigozhin had never own an army. He was just high-ranking Putin's clerk. He "owned" a 60k army in a meaning, in which any general owns an army.
>Russian style oligarchical hellscape
Russia has nothing to do with oligarchs. There's none left. Because oligarchy is about political power via the money, political will of capitals. And capitals have about zero political power in Russia.
>he is rich and powerful either way.
In Russia it works the other way around: you are powerful - and because of that you have money, and Zuck is NOT powerful. Literally one government decree - and he owns nothing and decides nothing, and considers himself lucky enough if after that decree he is allowed to get tenth of the marketprice for meta, or maintain his position as formal owner of de facto government controlled meta
I suppose it's called in english "chain of command" - it is not about loyalty, it is about execution of orders. Literally any army in the world are built on this principle. More then this, that "mutiny" was not about overthrowing of the government. It was сonflict between different branches of the army, and Prigozhin tried to put pressure on Putin to resolve it.
The closest thing to a private army that you can find in Russia - is Kadyrov's ~2k core forces. Everything else - is de facto government forces.
Do you think the Russian soldiers who shot down their own government's helicopters + command center did so on their own initiative -- or were they following Prigozhin's "chain of command"?
They were following the orders of their immediate commanders, just like any soldiers are supposed to do. Prigozhin's "chain of command" at that moment was part of the government's chain of command
Meaning they were answerable to Prigozhin, not Putin during the revolt. But even more fundamentally (apart from what happened during "revolt time"): as an organization and in terms of the laws that applied to it, it was entirely separate from the regular Russian army (and supposedly didn't technically exist on paper at all). That's why it's official name was PMC Wagner, where PMC stands for, drum roll... Private Military Company.
I'm really not sure what you're trying to get at with this "not a private army" angle, when it by all indications it was exactly that, or with the idea that Prigozhin was just like any other commander in a regular army, when of course he wasn't.
But that's okay, you can model and label this information however you want.
>why it's official name was PMC Wagner, where PMC stands for, drum roll... Private Military Company.
Yes, and North Korea is a Democratic Republic.
>by all indications it was exactly that
There is no such indications, only name. Other than name - PMC Wagner had nothing to do with a private army. It was a government-organized, government-funded, government-chai-of-command-integrated experimental military force
>idea that Prigozhin was just like any other commander
Rather something like government-appointed director of the special service
It was a government-organized, government-funded, government-chai-of-command-integrated experimental military force
Whose members shoot down government helicopters and an airborne command center when its government-appointed director orders them to. Following the government-chain-of-command, we imagine.
I don't believe this, as there are way too many glaring contraindications: his quick cooperation with the FBI, the fact that Palantir does significant business with Ukraine, lack of any statements in favor of Putin (or in support of his narratives), etc. Remember also he's gay, and so fundamentally at loggerheads with Putin on the whole "traditional values" issue.
A better reading would be: since he's cast his lot squarely with Trump, ipso facto he'd be fine (enough) with whatever dirty deals Trump might wish to make with Putin (as Trump has essentially promised he would try to make). That doesn't mean he has to love these deals; but if it's the cost of maintaining his access with the Trump-Vance administration, then fine.
Civil rights of the LGBT community in Russia, and civil/property/existence rights of Ukrainians be damned.
> Most likely Crypto influencers are Putin-proxies, as usual.
What proof do you have for this assertion? I find cryptocurrency influencers to be incredibly distasteful and lame, but I am unaware of any evidence that supports this theory.
So far, there was a trend, if you dig and look where far right money was coming from (Truth Social, Brexit, etc) it was invariably coming from proxies of Putin or useful idiots.
If you notice, Trump had started collecting large amounts of money from Crypto. At approximately the same time when normal channels to transfer money from Putin’s proxies dried up. This channel, on the other hand, is still wide open. A known vulnerability, easy to exploit.
At least the media and public are aware.
The oil industry: not so much: they are destroying the whole planet, and their lobbying is so much more secret and politically motivated
One has to wonder if we are truly aware. How much is AI ruining the environment via its constant demands for electricity and water? I'd expect more harms will come to light way down the line, as was true with big oil, tobacco, etc.
I question the very framework of judging harms at the tool instead of at the user in the first place. Under that twisted logic of attributing the morality of all users to the creator so much as sharpening an axe is a moral wrong.
If VCs disappear overnight most tech would not change ideologically. It hasn't changed too much ideologically for the past few decades.
Most were libertarian and continue to be libertarian.
The minor shift is from being left libertarian to more right libertarian, though that's mostly due to the political landscape where there isn't much room for contrarian leftists.
> If VCs disappear overnight most tech would not change ideologically. It hasn't changed too much ideologically for the past few decades.
What has changed is that the proportion of people who wind up in tech primarily due to passion has drastically dropped as it became more prestigious. I'll paraphrase something I read elsewhere that rang true to me. In the 80s and 90s, amoral,greed-is-good, get-rich-by-any-means people got into banking and finance because it paid well. Now they go into tech.
That still wouldn't change the political leanings much, which is my main point.
However the kind of moralization, where the industry has suddenly become amoral greedy monsters is imo wrong.
Tech has alway been ruthless. It's always been a cutthroat business. We even valorize that kind of character as the founder. That hasn't changed.
What has changed is the political opportunity. SV can now influence and leverage real political power. That political opportunity is why so many are switching away from being Left leaning Libertarians (with even re-distributive ideas like UBI), to more Right leaning libertarians.
And this is all because the incumbents on the Left aren't willing to make room for the new players in Tech. So path of least resistance is to move Right.
This realignment has happening for a decade plus now.
Semi on-topic: Why should the federal government even entertain a "strongly" pro-cryptocurrency agenda, when the real goal of cryptocurrencies is to displace/reduce the power of the U.S. dollar, from which the federal government (and the American people) derive many, many benefits?
It started off that way—remember people buying pizzas and domain names with bitcoin? That is the sort of thing that people do with dollars.
But it became quickly apparent that cryptocurrencies suck as currency because they are so strongly deflationary. However, that makes them work great as commodity financial instruments.
So viewing crypto as a financial market (not a currency), it benefits the U.S. to have as much of the market transacting within the jurisdiction as possible. Then you get the tax benefits, and ancillary benefits (e.g. rich crypto owners buying things).
Because blockchains can be a great weapon against dictatorships who cannot allow free expression.
US has enough cultural and institutional flexibility to accommodate dissent. First amendment protects almost any speech against the government, including insulting the president.
Compare that against China, who simply cannot tolerate citizens having any freedom of expression beyond what the party allows. See "tanks of tiananmen" smart contract[1] or "winnie the pooh" NFTs [2] - the only thing CCP can do at that point is to ban the entire blockchain ecosystem. But if blockchains are a big success in the rest of the world, CCP also has to cater to it just to keep pace with the West's tech progress.
Because you need to be/stay elected in order to enforce policy.
As an aside, one could easily replace 'crypto-currency' with 'fascism' in your comment to accurately describe why Republicans are following a similar tact in spite of the benefits of a democracy
Crypto people care about the price. They know it cannot be a mainstream currency because of how wasfeful, slow or insecure it is (pick 1+ depending on the coin) so really BTC/USD number goes up makes us richer is the game. Also encouraging degen gambling is the game. As is Ponzi. All of which makes insiders money.
The best coup would be Bitcoin as a gold that backs USD. This would force the price up well above a million. It might also make the world dark. $1 per kwh. $10 per kwh and so on.
Other coups would be lebanon style power interruptions while energy is diverted to mining with various subsidies.
If anyone needs to see what happen, read Marc Andreesen's cringy posts on X. The guy is a MAGA promoter and sounds more and more like an elderly "the country is going to hell in a handbasket" geriatric conservative every second.
Too many years in a bubble of undeserved wealth where people suck up to him constantly.
YC helped fund/promote Palantir, the dystopian surveillance company.
The Iraq war defense contractor boom pumped tons of money into pro-war entities and this is just the result of that capital finding its way into new ventures. Ideology comes along for the ride. It's the very definition of dystopian, government propaganda and big-lie-driven malinvesment and (in hindsight) massive financial fraud on taxpayers.
I'm personally shocked that PG touches any of this dirty money. When is enough enough?
YC gave Palantir a massive platform at startup school to present the company and vision and recruit talent. Far more than the seed investment would have been worth.
With respect to the ares industries, YC buys into the neocon view strongly enough that it wants to help create the next wave of military tech. The only reason anyone perceives these "threats" and perceives the US to be "woefully unprepared" because of the marketing budget the defense industry has after profiting handsomely from the Iraq wars, etc.
The US is not in danger and does not need new and state of the art weapons systems. We are not losing in Ukraine because we don't have adequate weapons but because we are playing a very stupid and risky strategy. See the comments of Jeffrey Sachs on all of this.
Jeffrey Sachs is unfortunately a misinformation machine. His words sound convincing but lack truth. Unrelated to Ukraine, he is also very friendly with Chinese oppression and refused to acknowledge Uyghur torture.
Try reading this letter and see if you still believe him. Note the number of signatures at the bottom.
I read the letter and it sounded like the "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive aggression. The claim is that Russia is by nature aggressive (based on a very long-term historical trend that does not include its current regime) and so aggressive action against Russia is warranted, regardless of the current government or any existing treaties.
The aggressive aspect of NATO is also minimized, which I think is naive.
I was in Ukraine in 2016 and saw the US fighter jets flying formations on Russia's doorstep. Calling that "defensive" is absurd. We now know that since the 1990s there has been a US goal to aggressively expand NATO mainly to suppress Russia.
The problem with this strategy is that it does not care at all about Ukrainian lives. As someone with family in Ukraine, I do not want my country (the US) wreaking havoc in the region. Thousands of Ukrainians are dying every single day right now, all because the US doesn't want to respect Russia's security zone. Mearshimer calls this the US nostalgia over the "uni-polar moment" when the US was briefly the only superpower.
Too much of the modern notions of American exceptionalism rely upon biases from that brief moment in history, to everyone's peril.
Unfortunately this narrative is imperceptibly different from Russian propaganda (eg, leaving out that Russia regularly buzzes American airspace in Alaska). So if you want to make this case, you’ll have to find a narrative that works for Ukrainians (who overwhelmingly support the war[1]) and the Taiwanese. Convince them that an American pullback will be fine for them, and I’ll support America pulling back.
Until then, a multi-polar world among authoritarian aristocracies is a pipe-dream. Everyone hates American hegemony until you ask them what other hegemony they would like.
So missiles we must make, and make them cheaper we can.
> It's hard not to be sympathetic to Russia's perspective that the US arming Ukraine and promoting NATO expansion violates the spirit of the Budapest memorandum and also the informal assurances that were apparently given to Russia by the US.
1. Nobody was providing military aid to Ukraine before Russia invaded, and even then it was initially of non-lethal nature.
2. NATO expansion was an initiative of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, against heavy skepticism by existing NATO members (including the US) -- and not something that the US "promoted". The initiative was in large part a reaction to the Russian war in Chechnya, and overall Russian hostility towards its European neighbors. Whatever glimmer of hope there was in early 1990s for different kind of relations, seeing Russian atrocities in Chechnya squashed them overnight.
3. If by "apparent" assurances you mean the conspiracy theory that someone promised Russians that NATO would not accept new members in Europe, then this has been refuted by USSR's top leaders - Gorbachev himself, his foreign minister, defense minister, and others. It's total nonsense.
> Of course now in 2024 Ukrainians support the war, but if one were to ask them in 1994 if they would want what they now have in 2024 or would it be OK to continue to be neutral, they would undeniably prefer neutrality and peace.
"Neutral option" is how they arrived in the present day. Ukraine was too slow to follow other CEE countries in joining EU and NATO, and wasn't covered by mutual defense guarantees by the time Russians invaded. Ukraine remaining out of strong alliances made the invasion less risky for Russians. That was a mistake. Sweden and Finland -- the last two neutral countries near Russia -- immediately learned from that mistake and joined NATO.
Chechnya was hugely important to Russia geopolitically and so it should not have been a surprise that it would not want to let Chechnya become independent.
Russia already had a mix of rivals both for political Islamist reasons and oil/gas pipeline dominance reasons. Not surprisingly, those groups/nations supported the Chechen cause as tehy stood to benefit handsomely.
As usual the US did a lot of finger shaking and humanitarian atrocity shaming.
From Russia's perspective, the Chechen wars were significant attacks on its security and economy. Zooming out, an independent Chechnya would have made post-Soviet Russia much, much weaker.
So I think it's reasonable to attribute Russia's suppression of the Chechen rebellions to be motivated by the same desire to protect its territory that has motivated its war with US-backed Ukraine.
It seems that the only way to say it's unreasonable is to claim that Putin is himself mentally unwell and motivated by mental illness (a common claim in the US, sadly) or that Russia itself does not deserve to establish its own geopolitical "red lines" for when it will act militarily to protect its interests/territory.
No, it's not about Chechen independence per se. It's about the methods Russia used there - grainy smuggled VHS tapes showing extreme savagery against civilians on a massive scale. At least fifth of the entire population went through concentration camps.
This is simply not the way a modern country treats people, even in war.
Combined with the rhetoric about Russia deserving to rule over other nations (which you too demonstrate so clearly), it doesn't take much for people in Eastern Europe to put 1+1 together and run for whatever military alliance they can find.
I completely reject the notion that Russia has some inherent right to invade European countries and kill and enslave at their will.
If Russia was worried about national security as apologists claim, it would support EU and NATO memberships for its European neighbors - instead of desperately sabotaging such aspirations like in Ukraine. These organizations have produced the most peaceful, stable, reliable and predictable neighbors.
I'm not making excuses for Russia's treatment of civilians at all. However the US killed a lot of Japanese civilians during WW2 and is considered "civilized" by some today.
I think the geopolitical view offers a lens through which to see Russia's actions as reasonable (if still excessive, even horrible).
What is not clear from your comment is what you think should be done now? Has Russia lost its "legitimacy"? How can the situation in Ukraine be resolved adequately? Is US as the referee the only hope?
George Friedman has written that Russia is one of the natural landmass formations that tends to be a center of power because of the geography of the region. Should it try not to be? What alternatives exist?
> I think the geopolitical view offers a lens through which to see Russia's actions as reasonable (if still excessive, even horrible).
No, they are not reasonable at all. They are the result of total concentration of power into the hands of a single person, allowing their irrational prejudices and paranoias shape the actions of millions of people. History has seen this time and time again, notably with Hitler and his sick obsession with Jews. Why did Hitler murder millions of Jews? What's the reasonable argument? Is there any at all? Or was it just plain hatred, utterly banal in its simplicity?
> What is not clear from your comment is what you think should be done now? Has Russia lost its "legitimacy"? How can the situation in Ukraine be resolved adequately? Is US as the referee the only hope?
Total military defeat. Russians need to see Putin, Shoigu and Gerasimov sentenced and imprisoned like Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic; Ukrainian flag flying over Sevastopol; and their press openly discussing the truth. After that, they need constant international pressure, for decades, until they develop into a modern society. The mistake of Europe and the US in the 1990s was not "encircling" and "humiliating" and "not respecting" Russia, but the opposite - Russia was left on its own, and nothing was done as it gradually grew into a poisonous tree. Where the EU and US were more active, set demands and expected progress - like in Central and Eastern Europe - countries developed into free, prosperous, stable and good places to live.
Russia as it is in 2024 has passed the point of no return. MPs like Gurulyov are saying on television that everyone except a few million retirees must be exterminated in Ukraine, and no-one in the TV studio even dares to say a word to oppose it. Proclaiming how many millions of people must be killed has become socially acceptable, while arguing for human rights and basic decency is met with contempt, hostility and ridicule, and punished with prison sentences. What will make people like these stop, if not a total demoralizing defeat and expulsion to the outskirts of the society?
Bulgaria was hugely important to the Turkish Empire geopolitically and so it should not have been a surprise that it would not want to let Bulgaria become independent.
Turkey already had a mix of rivals both from Christian minority groups and for shipping/port dominance reasons. Not surprisingly, those groups/nations supported the Bulgarian cause as they stood to benefit handsomely.
As usual Russia did a lot of finger shaking and humanitarian atrocity shaming.
From Turkey's perspective, the Balkan wars were significant attacks on its security and economy. Zooming out, an independent Bulgaria would have made post-Ottoman Turkey much, much weaker.
So I think it's reasonable to attribute Turkey's suppression of the Bulgarian and other Balkan rebellions to be motivated by the same desire to protect its territory that has motivated its war with irredentist Armenian regions.
It seems that the only way to say it's unreasonable is to claim that the Pashas are themselves mentally unwell and motivated by mental illness (a common claim in Russia sadly) or that Turkey itself does not deserve to establish its own geopolitical "red lines" for when it will act militarily to protect its interests/territory.
Something that surprised me recently was learning that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a private organization. I assumed it was some office funded by the government in a town, that worked with local businesses—or something along those lines. But no, they're a lobbying group, and they are the biggest lobbying group in the country. I'm not saying they are a monster (I clearly don't know anything about them) but at that size, how could you not be?
The trifecta. If we regulated the supplement industry, ended MLMs and removed the requirement of car companies of having to use dealerships the country would be at a much better place.
A lot of the action has moved upstream now that Citizens United is the law (January 21, 2010: "this decision allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns"). Ideally from the corp. perspective you don't wait until a crisis point. You spend early and shape the narrative to prevent a crisis from ever happening. The Koch brothers created a network of donors who operate on this strategic plane more than the tactical "this specific regulation has to be changed" level. See Mayer's "Dark Money" for a comprehensive history.
I was ostracized at a right-wing small military contractor during covid for being skeptical of the novel medical treatment being offered for free with zero liability for those profiting from it.
I almost stopped trying to rationalize the world around me at that point in my life. I assume my experience was simply because the CTO had everyone under his thumb and he decided it was a good idea.
The authoritarianisms that came from both left and right wing sources during that time continue to baffle me. Very dangerous precedents were set during that time.
Money loves power, silicon valley will continue to vanguard political causes that extend political, economic, psychological, and spiritual control over people, through useful idiots at the IC level that actually love the fart smells and don't care which direction the wind is blowing the farts, an HR machine that marches to the beat of a global borg-impulse, tirelessly filling any structure vacuum they can find with pointless systems in order to restrain any remnant of human spirit, and a psychopathic management class that is unrepentantly self-serving.
One of Microsoft's biggest lessons out of their anit monopoly trial was that they were not political enough.
Before the trial Bill Gates though spending money on lobbying was a waste and its a widely held belief that their anti trust trial wouldn't have happened if they had spent on lobbiest like healthcare, finance, and anything military do.
Post 2000, silicon valley learned this lesson and became one of the biggest lobbyers of the government. To the point where they eclipsed the oil and farm lobbies.
Any time the message is "We should do X because if we don't, the bogeyman will do it," it should be a red flag. Seems to be one of the common themes in the article.
It's always admitting that the thing you want to do is bad, but wanting to do it anyways. And more often than not, it relies on a mischaracterization of the supposed bogeyman: "the democrats eat babies and wouldn't hesitate to do X, so that justifies us sinking lower unless we want baby eaters to win."
Or maybe it's just inevitable that anything structurally resembling a race to the bottom ends up with everybody on the bottom.
328 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 365 ms ] threadCrypto = Crypto
Goes to show that most political op-eds are just entertainment.
A while ago software companies where taking every kind of abuse from the US government, coming from well represented entertainment, finance, and all kinds of other industries. This suddenly stopped when they started to lobby.
As you pointed out, this is nothing new. When companies or entire industries feel threatened, they ramp up lobbying – even Huawei hired Tony Podesta to advocate for them.
Hillary Clinton's call to repeal Section 230 for stricter social media regulation will likely prompt tech companies to boost their lobbying efforts.
Sooner or later, companies in emerging industries will start lobbying to protect their interests or advance their agendas.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/23/huawei-hires-tony-p...
Ain't no point adding morality to lobbying - it's just what it is.
Understanding how that could be and articulating what the politics were before is key to deciding what to do about the changes now.
The prior incumbents were the way they were because they were incumbents. all incumbents end up doing these things. Because they work.
At least until someone figures out the chink in the armor, and it stops working.
Welcome to the new set.
Die young a hero, or live to be a villain.
Do better, voters.
Pottery, agriculture, control over the electromagnetic field, basket weaving, LANGUAGE, formalized society, written language, MATH, metalworking etc
and you posit UNREGULATED MARKETS as the greatest innovation?
NONE of the above monumental achievements of humanity are even remotely related to people being able to do business with slightly less regulation and slightly fewer taxes. Nearly all human innovation has occurred when being murdered by your king for petty reasons was the norm.
Integrated circuits as a commodity mostly exists because the US air force wanted it to. None of that is about liberalism.
The Navy trained up hundreds of thousands of people essentially to the level of electrical engineers, basic information sciences, and computers and computation and electric fields for WW2, to improve radar and targeting, including building and deploying a networked computer system for automated fleet defense and intercept tasking in the fifties, and then these people are mostly just let go, to spread their paid for knowledge to anyone in the commercial space, no non-competes. Wouldn't you know it, training up a bulk of people in a brand new but important field, with minimal cost to them, and then just freely giving that away reaped insane rewards for the next 50 years!
Lobbying makes it worse bc the response (populism) will have credible grievances, which is why you will see populist candidates all over the west.
actual material changes do very little to defuse populist cultural moments in modern wealthy societies
Making your people first world is extremely good at defeating "populist cultural moments" like communism, unless of course you consider may 68 in France of evidence of the contrary.
I'll even go further and claim that Occupy Wall-Street died because the US economy boomed from 2012 on (return to embarrassed millionaire)
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliveri...
HN is a safe space from anti-intellectualism, thankfully
Even bringing up immigration policies leads to vitriol online, and all I can do is think "to whose advantage is this really"..
Tax cutoffs have this habit of drifting downward over time (the whole, "eventually you run out of other people's money" thing). See the original revenue act of 1913 (modern US income tax). At first it was 1% starting at today's equivalent of $93K and didn't go any higher until you made the equivalent of about $500K. And today, well, it's a little different.
New taxes are always pitched this way -- "oh it'll never affect you, just those rich people, what's your problem?"
I just don't see this as "SO much better."
This dude is a certified ghoul.
In May 2017, Wyden co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, Senate Bill 720, which made it a federal crime, punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment,[88] for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories if protesting actions by the Israeli government. The bill would make it legal for U.S. states to refuse to do business with contractors that engage in boycotts against Israel.[89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden#Israel
You're confusing a big-state authoritarian word "corporatist" with the thing that's the opposite of big state - private citizens forming corporations.
The reality is that the courts would never uphold the validity of this law, and it's not enforced because the legislators know it's BS.
Here are his accomplishments: https://www.congress.gov/member/bernard-sanders/S000033?q=%7...
If you look at co-sponsored, its more of the same fluff. I'd say he's pretty ineffective.
"According to The New York Times, "Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his ideas are usually far to the left of the majority of the Senate ... Mr. Sanders has largely found ways to press his agenda through appending small provisions to the larger bills of others."[146] During his time in the Senate, he had lower legislative effectiveness than the average senator, as measured by the number of sponsored bills that passed and successful amendments made.[147] Nevertheless, he has sponsored over 500 amendments to bills,[148] many of which became law."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders
I don't want to ban you because you clearly know a lot of things and have posted quite a few good things over the years. But your comments include so much name-calling, swipes, snark, and nastiness that you're not leaving much choice.
Here's one of many examples, on an unrelated topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630774. That's a great comment, ruined by name-calling and personal attack. On the subject of cartoons of all things! There's no need to treat other people this way, or use the comment section to vent bile like that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'm certainly not trying to shame you or anybody—I'm trying to persuade you to follow HN's rules! and obviously not succeeding, but the last thing I want is to add shame into it.
It's common for people to underestimate the nastiness in their own comments and overestimate the nastiness in other people's. Those two factors multiply into quite a perception skew. Your posts to HN seem to me to be so nasty so often that I wonder if this might be a factor here.
It's also the case that certain types of veteran internet commenter have sharpened their weapons (snark, derision, etc.) to such a degree that they don't realize their own power. Often this type of commenter is quite smart and a good writer. I wonder if this may be a factor here too.
It's in HN's interest to have smart, good writers in the threads, but only if they're willing to leave those weapons at the door. There have been other cases where people have agreed to do this and stuck to their agreement, and I wish you would agree to do that too, because we'd all be better off. I mean it when I say I don't want to ban you.
I admire those skills—it's just that HN isn't the place for them. For that sort of combat to work on the internet requires a smaller, more cohesive community. HN can't be that. What ends up happening when people post in that style is that it degrades quality drastically as others (usually less smart and not as good writers) start taking cues from those posts. In the end we'd just have scorched earth, which is not interesting.
There's no way the situation can stay like that forever. There will be regulation like there's regulation of TV, radio, press, etc.
Without regulation you don't get a libertarian utopia - you just get oligarchy.
Most libertarians aren't rational egoists, they are just naive losers oligarchs take advantage of to get more power.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/05/28/what-is-s...
https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/trump-and-section-230-what-know
I'm curious as to why you conclude that Democrats are better than Republicans in terms of IT liberty. Trump ended operation choke point, a program of essentially harassing banks into dropping certain customers [1]. De-banking is, in my opinion, one of the most important threats to "cyber liberties" since it's absolutely crucial for any business to survive. Individuals who are de-banked also find it incredibly difficult to survive: Plenty of services, including apartments and HOAs, do not accept non-electronic payments.
The censorship of "misinformation" (much of which later turned out to be true) also grew considerably under the 2020 administration, which did in fact reach out to social media companies to try and influence their decision making. One of the more salient examples was covered by HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365868 To be clear, I'm not concerned about private companies autonomously deciding what to host. I take issue with the government coercing companies into making moderation decisions. This has huge potential for abuse, such as forcing the takedown of politically disadvantageous material.
Both Republicans and Democrats are in favor of getting rid of Section 230, but for essentially totally different reasons: Republicans seem to want to return to the precedence set by Cubby Inc. vs. CompuServe [2]. Democrats seem to want to narrowly repeal Section 230 to empower the government to dictate the contents of social media. Both are negative in my opinion, but the patter seems more insidious and prone to long term harm.
And to be clear, these issues are far, far from enough to get me to vote for Trump. I'm interested in hearing the counter-claim, that the Democrat party is better in terms of cyber liberties.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
Do you understand how you are the problem here?
Silicon Valley didn't care about politics until politicians started getting involved and attempting to impose censorship regimes, aggressive unrealized gains taxation, and killing crypto assets. Tech startups were find being ignored.
But as you illustrate, you can't ignore DC if it chooses not to ignore you. If people like you want to use the power of the state to "shatter" anyone you politically disagree with, well, of course the tech companies will hit back.
She was running against Adam Schiff, who had much broader name recognition. It also didn't help that she's overweight and "Porker" became her nasty nickname.
This is a shoddy piece of reporting. Tech lobbying didn't start with Chris Lehane, Uber, Lyft, or crypto. Anytime government is capable of helping or hurting an industry, they form a lobbying group. The more money involved, the bigger the lobbying effort.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-06/californ...
But they ended up exactly the same. Helping the worst regimes, all-in in military complex, taking advantage of screen addiction and teen insecurities.
But hey at least they don’t wear white collars like the old bad guys.
This implies all. I then said I don’t doubt their impact.
They’re not all like this is my point.
I admit that's a large ask for a consumer, to keep track of a larger organizations abusing you.
I would hope a YCombinator news site of all places would see that.
And its a grey business so to say, you can see various justifications for it also here since many folks here work for them, its not some Zyklon-B factory. At the end, everybody under certain circumstances has a price, and kids tend to blur this even more for many.
It’s not surprising, but it is kind of disappointing.
When I was young, I was convinced that all the bad in the world, was the fault of evil, greedy old men. If young folks ran things, we’d be empathetic, kind, ethical, and positive.
As SV is basically completely run by young folks, of various races, genders, and backgrounds , I have to admit that it is actually worse, than the evil old men.
I think OP meant the opposite -- that when people have children in the Bay Area and want to support them, they'll make moral compromises to do so, given the cost.
The very young may not grasp what they are doing, and they may be easily "boiled as frogs", but I think they are more likely to believe that they are not making moral compromises.
They started with the same values: make as much money as possible, even if it destroys the world. Any entreaties to the contrary were a smokescreen to deflect criticism until they could shore up their position. This is the natural end-state of incentivizing profit maximization.
If you are bad you will continue to be so before and after money.
They aren't saying SV is firing the missiles. Rather, the suggestion is SV is helping those that do.
So when you say
> I don't see Silicon Valley firing missiles in the Red Sea
You aren't countering the original claim. Instead, you'd have to argue that you don't see SV helping those firing missiles in the Red Sea. And, in that regard, I'm not so sure of that. Just look at crypto as a clear example of helping those regimes actually doing the firing.
Today Silicon Valley is the establishment. It seems less like the nerd mecca it used to be (remember Weird Stuff?) and is now a place that is much more obsessed with money. When a basic 1960s suburban tract house within a reasonable commute from work costs more than $2 million, it’s hard not to be obsessed with money. There are still good people and awesome technologies in Silicon Valley, which is one of the main reasons I’ve decided to stay in the Bay Area, but it seems like some companies in Silicon Valley have gone absolutely mercenary, and they have eroded the goodwill the area had as recently as a decade ago.
But I think this is part of the natural evolution of industry. The same could be said about the history of the railroad and car industries in America. Think of how essential telecommunications and electricity are to modern society, yet I’ve yet to meet a person who loves Comcast and PG&E.
Hell I’m guilty of some myself. I was surprised early in my career when I found out that most of my peers did not have a computer and internet access as children in the early 90s
I checked Ritchie, Thompson, McCarthy, Sussman, Wirth… none had blue name parents.
Edit: you’ve got luminaries like Stallman too, who didn’t have the rich family but did get the university they worked at to cover their living expenses. An uncomfortable amount of leaders in the Free Software and Open Source communities openly advocate for people to give away their time and effort for free, while living on the largesse of others
What I was critiquing was the fact that a seemingly inordinate number of people who advocate that your work in software should be free for anyone else to take without payment, also happen to not ever need to consider how they put food on the table due to wealth they inherited or were given due to their celebrity status
This reminds me of the tycoon's thunderously semi-religious speech from The Network [0], which has aged pretty well for a movie 50 years old.
> The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35DSdw7dHjs&t=0m43s
Turns out this is bullshit.
It's fine I bought into it too. But it's a pretty unbroken path from today back through the history of business in Silicon Valley. It's always been a smokescreen.
I recommend this book, it's highly illuminating and specific: https://www.amazon.com/Palo-Alto-History-California-Capitali...
To play devil's advocate a bit, I think those old industries started out just as idealistic as the tech sector. The oil companies pursued amazing feats of science and engineering to power the new industrial economy. The defense companies made remarkable technological advances to help deter Soviet aggression and win the space race. And before the link to lung cancer was discovered, tobacco was like coffee: it gave people a nice cognitive boost, as well as possibly helping them stay thin.
However:
Amidst all the talk about the causes of obesity, surely "not smoking anymore" is in there somewhere?
There's a large subset of people, the majority in my opinion, who are somewhat prone to addiction. Most are just a wee bit prone. They certainly won't peruse the streets for drugs. But, if something is readily available and socially accepted, they'll do it.
Before this was smoking, now its ultra-processed foods. Fast food, junk food, sweets type stuff.
It's probably still a boon, I'd say. I mean, I think being obese is probably healthier than smoking. But we didn't really "solve" anything, we just moved the problem.
It's heart and lung damage. Congestive heart failure, heart attacks, COPD, etc. A lot of these are slow, painful, and terminal.
Smokers used to claim that it suppressed their appetites. Not being a smoker, or obese, I wouldn't know. But it seems plausible as a (partial) cause.
But when people are dying slowly, and painfully, by their own hand and they can't stop, I personally consider that an addiction. In addition, we know ultra-processed foods are designed to invoke as much pleasure in the user as possible. In many ways, they suffer the same hyper-optimization that modern cigarettes do.
There's also some* evidence that part of the Tobacco industry shifted to food as Tobacco in the US died off. This is more circumstantial evidence. I think the "hard" evidence is that everyone smoked and was thin, now nobody smokes, and everyone is obese.
Regardless, I think we need harder and more proven solutions to the obesity epidemic. I think "willpower!" isn't working out for us, on a large scale. I'm rooting for Ozempic. And, fun fact, Ozempic also curbs nicotine and alcohol addiction.
No, but you're being purposefully hyper-sensitive.
If you're replying to someone higher, you should hit Reply on that comment. Not on someone lower down.
Now you can just buy nicotine products for that boost with a substantially reduced risk profile (it's not a carcinogen). Some writeup on it: https://gwern.net/nicotine
Does nicotine give a cognitive boost, or does it return one to their pre-addiction baseline?
I'm curious what definition of "addiction" you're using to arrive at the conclusion that caffeine isn't addictive.
There's no one standard definition of "addiction", and most concise definitions (one or two lines) are extremely fragile and break down when you try to apply them in any meaningful context.
By this definition you're putting forth, caffeine certainly could be addictive, as could any substance - and in fact, nearly any behavior, which is why professionals generally frown upon using this measure definitionally, because it leads to pseudoscientific terms like "X addiction", for absurd values of X.
You may also be interested in studies on caffeine dependence, like: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777290/
> Numerous controlled laboratory investigations reviewed in this article show that caffeine produces behavioral and physiological effects similar to other drugs of dependence. Moreover, several recent clinical studies indicate that caffeine dependence is a clinically meaningful disorder that affects a nontrivial proportion of caffeine users.
https://peterattiamd.com/ama23/
This is an exception and other common drugs like caffeine that do not have any positive effects at all. Or any other drug for that matter.
Theatre at its finest. But this shan't ever be discussed.
Anyone care to suggest what money "wants" or where it wants to go?
I know it's a flawed question, because money is in many ways inert, but we have similar caveats around genes and evolution. Non-sentient things can still create persistent structures that we can label with our human values. Or something :)
The modern wrinkle is that our effects on the world are more significant. This design has side effects (re: the climate, to name just one). These are side effects which we may not be able to tolerate forever. I think that money, being a status-quo preserver, "wants" us to ignore them for as long as possible, but since they're cumulative, that's going to be tougher sell as time goes on.
Also, It's an information technology. As the makers of such things I think it's up to us to figure out what the next version should look like.
The only way to interfere with it is by using other unrelated forces, like kindness, just like we can move masses around with electromagnetism.
People want food, housing, entertainment, and many more things so there is money to be made providing them.
Sometimes people do a bad job at picking what they want.
Sometimes people dont like what other people want, and when other people get it.
--Charlie Munger
Nothing ever has changed
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switc...
Now asset owners have the whole thing comfortably under their thumb, every large tech co has MBAs throughout and schools have been pumping out engineers for 20 years so workers have no leverage. It has become the same as every other large industry.
The Citizens United decision will be a cancer in American politics and a boon for the ultra-wealthy for generations.
The vast majority (97% ?) of voters are low-information voters. 1 such vote is equal to 1 high information vote (3% ?), those who research, read bills, etc.
So the process is already not maximally equitable - in fact, the system severely punishes high information voters via opportunity cost.
At that point dollars positively affect your outcome because with paid mediums , low information voters can now get more information, despite being unwilling to inform themselves via hard work. So that's a benefit. That information flow is subject to competition, so the best ideas (and information) will win out. That's another plus. Money competes for eyeballs, and your dollars are just as good as mine. If you have more $$, i can pool my friends and beat you. There's nothing more equitable than that we have discovered so far.
Now, enter someone with a ton of money, Musk. You could argue that he would tilt the game. But we then observe the opposite: Billionaires are also subject to the law of diminishing returns. 'Donations' will only buy so much favor, and then they become a losing proposition. So, do you want a billionaire burning his cash in the political process? The answer is absolutely: it signals a level of credibility and conviction, when business opportunity is already a loser.
So in short, you want people to risk all their chips in something they believe, instead of limiting their bets and just get rich off the house, playing the long game .
Perhaps we start from the other side of the table. Maybe money is not the problem. Perhaps it is the power concentrated in too few individuals ? How about cutting off power from those that are selling favors to the highest bidders ?
Our constitution does not begin, "We, the highly-informed people..."
Anything else, and you are no longer talking democracy.
I don't believe in this rosy view of the "marketplace of ideas", fear wins out, populism wins out, not the best ideas. The best ideas have nuance, they demand to be understood in context, they aren't catchphrases nor explore scapegoats for societal problems. All of that demands a high-information voter to parse through and judge what's the "best idea" within their context, environment, community, etc.
No, I do not believe that allowing ideas to fight it out inevitably leads to the best ideas raising to the top, people don't vote intellectually, they vote emotionally and the person who tries to fight strong emotions (such as fear) with ideas will lose out.
Did you miss all of COVID era on social media?
I didn't make a claim on how long conflict would last, but money is not infinite.
Noise is part of the system, and the system is not perfect, but that's a reflection of our imperfections, vs anything wrong with the final outcome.
Add to that the fact that bullshit is cheaper to produce than truth. Sprinkle in the notion also that bullshit is likely more profitable too. Consider what might happen if the bullshitters control orders of magnitude more money in the first place, and then filter through Brandolini's Law:
Add to that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Democracy is too sacred to be left to the loudest.
To even get power you now need to nod to crypto, nod to a certain middle eastern country and so on. Eventually politicians will be entirely impotent suits. Look at the current "choice" the electorate has.
I joke, but the current system is so much more vastly corrupt than this imagined scenario where small potatoes money gets handed out equally to all candidates in a race, that I just can't really imagine what your actual nightmare scenario might be.
If corrupt incumbent politicians have complete control of the finances of an election, how could they be held accountable? Anyone wanting to run against them on this issue would simply be denied the money to do so.
The exact same way any relief is sought against the government: the court system.
But what you are proposing is a different government, one in which leaders could operate without the primary accountability that they face now: that anyone can organize a campaign against them.
In fact, this money would be available to anyone who met whatever threshold was legally enshrined, a far better alternative than having to kiss the ring of an oligarch, as you propose.
I will be waiting for the American exceptionalism arguments on why a thing that well functioning democracies/countries do wouldn't work in the USA.
The only candidate in American politics that lives up to your idealised, independent politician of the people, is Bernie Sanders. And guess what? He strongly opposes billionaires buying themselves a government.
You can also establish campaign spending limits without it being funded by taxes. In other words anyone can raise money for their campaign but only up to X amount (and no PACs).
What's not limited is independent expenditures. You can, for example, organize rallies or put up billboards advocating more serious efforts to combat climate change without limit.
Really? Because there are many countries with far stricter regulations on campaign financing than the US had pre-Citizens United, that also have much more working class representation in their politics than the US.[0]
[0]https://www.noamlupu.com/Carnes_Lupu_ARPS.pdf
If you read my comment as a response to the parent, I believe it will make more sense.
---
CU opened the floodgates of anonymous, unlimited political contributions to "independent", but not really independent, organizations which can campaign on behalf of candidates.
The goal was/is to replace our democratic republic with an oligarchy. And we're now in the end game.
Wrong, if the candidates are directing or otherwise leading ostensibly-independent donations this is illegal. Independent donations are exactly that: independent of a candidate's campaign. If they're carried out on behalf of a candidate, they're not independent donations.
You can put up billboards saying, "X candidate's record is the best on climate change, tax policy, etc.". Your spending in this manner is not subject to limits. If the candidate calls you up and says "It'd be really good if you put up billboards saying X, Y, and Z" then that's breaking election laws.
Citizens United is not even remotely close to replacing our republic with an oligarchy. You can't buy elections, no matter how much people try to say so. Clintion received about twice as many donations as Trump in 2016, but still lost the election.
A lot of people have a, let's say filtered understanding of the decision, which has become a sort of shibboleth rather than a direct reference to the Supreme Court's ruling.
I encourage reading up on the ruling itself, at least the Wikipedia summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Or should you prefer primary sources (as ideally you should) just read the ruling https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/
The canonical source, just for completeness. Justia has the same text https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/boundvolumes/558bv.pdf
Man with wide eyes and stock photos and nordvpn sponsorship on set with full makeup and steampunk costume rambles through various headlines, not forgetting to show you how to (mis)interpret facts, and how to manifest life as a rabid political fanatic, ready to ruin any dialog you come across with barking and screeching and red eyes.
There is nothing in that video that even resembles thought or rationality, it is just classic mainstream media non-sequitur that adorns the regalia of knowledge and batters the viewer with meaningless "facts" and "figures" until they are in a state of ready-to-be-filled aporia.
In your estimation, what’s an example of a fact that Boyle misinterprets in this video?
But, neither of those is thinking. I mean that, the problem is not that the ambiguity of the situation provides for two or more interpretations, which it seems to me that it does, but that this mode of investigation, which outwardly accounts for itself like "Each side go to your corner and gather as many facts as you can, then we'll gather in the middle and compare, whoever has the more and heavier facts shall be found truthful!", but is really more like, "Let's all divide ourselves in two, randomly, and amass as many facts as we can that back up our point-of-view, while dismissing any that support the other, and just for fun let's add in hating the other corner too, because it makes all of this more exciting."
If you hang your thinking on the results of some surveys, and one account of what happened in some particular historical event, plus some truistic phrase like "All's well that end's well" and a couple of well-timed stock photo gags to pull it all together, you will find yourself 1. impermeable to any ideas that don't fit in the point-of-view or framing of the question you already have and 2. completely and willfully uncurious about the world and questions you aren't already asking about the things you don't already have preconceived notions of.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41720799
When tech was scrappy and didnt have billions at stake, its products seemed to benefit humanity. Now it is (the most powerful?) part of the oppresive regime.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...
It’s not unique to the wealthy in tech, most nouveau riche seem to forget at some point that the only reason most people attend to their needs or are in their orbit is to get money and if that becomes useless or turns off they will be dropped like a bad habit
According to what? I've never heard him say anything positive about Putin. He also reportedly tipped off the FBI when the Kremlin invited him to meet with Putin.
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Both quotes by Peter Thiel in a Cato Unbound[1] blog post, 2009. The second quote is - let's call it "interesting" - considering Thiel is the patron of a VP candidate who may be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
1. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
I can believe that, but one has to be willfully ignorant to believe that such voter self-interest started in 1920, and that previous cohorts voted in an objective manner, always devoid of self-interest and for everyone's benefit.
The underlying question is "Whose interests does (or should) the government concern itself with"
Are you seriously suggesting the voter pool received no monetary benefits from the government before 1920? President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862 - does getting 160 acres from uncle Sam for a token fee count as "monetary benefit" in your books? The act grant was for "heads of households" 21 years and older. I bet there were similar land grants in the original colonies predate the declaration of independence.
I posit that the distinction is arbitrary. There is no qualitative difference between civil war pensions of 1862 vs the G.I. bill of 1944. If there was a change in government doctrine, I'd love to see concrete contrasts rather than hand-waving. Or perhaps Thiel's gripe is quantitative rather than qualitative?
Prigozhin had never own an army. He was just high-ranking Putin's clerk. He "owned" a 60k army in a meaning, in which any general owns an army.
>Russian style oligarchical hellscape
Russia has nothing to do with oligarchs. There's none left. Because oligarchy is about political power via the money, political will of capitals. And capitals have about zero political power in Russia.
>he is rich and powerful either way.
In Russia it works the other way around: you are powerful - and because of that you have money, and Zuck is NOT powerful. Literally one government decree - and he owns nothing and decides nothing, and considers himself lucky enough if after that decree he is allowed to get tenth of the marketprice for meta, or maintain his position as formal owner of de facto government controlled meta
Except going by the estimates of casualties inflicted on government forces -- to a non-trivial extent they were loyal primarily to him, not Putin:
The closest thing to a private army that you can find in Russia - is Kadyrov's ~2k core forces. Everything else - is de facto government forces.
I'm really not sure what you're trying to get at with this "not a private army" angle, when it by all indications it was exactly that, or with the idea that Prigozhin was just like any other commander in a regular army, when of course he wasn't.
But that's okay, you can model and label this information however you want.
Yes, and North Korea is a Democratic Republic.
>by all indications it was exactly that
There is no such indications, only name. Other than name - PMC Wagner had nothing to do with a private army. It was a government-organized, government-funded, government-chai-of-command-integrated experimental military force
>idea that Prigozhin was just like any other commander
Rather something like government-appointed director of the special service
Whose members shoot down government helicopters and an airborne command center when its government-appointed director orders them to. Following the government-chain-of-command, we imagine.
I don't believe this, as there are way too many glaring contraindications: his quick cooperation with the FBI, the fact that Palantir does significant business with Ukraine, lack of any statements in favor of Putin (or in support of his narratives), etc. Remember also he's gay, and so fundamentally at loggerheads with Putin on the whole "traditional values" issue.
A better reading would be: since he's cast his lot squarely with Trump, ipso facto he'd be fine (enough) with whatever dirty deals Trump might wish to make with Putin (as Trump has essentially promised he would try to make). That doesn't mean he has to love these deals; but if it's the cost of maintaining his access with the Trump-Vance administration, then fine.
Civil rights of the LGBT community in Russia, and civil/property/existence rights of Ukrainians be damned.
What proof do you have for this assertion? I find cryptocurrency influencers to be incredibly distasteful and lame, but I am unaware of any evidence that supports this theory.
If you notice, Trump had started collecting large amounts of money from Crypto. At approximately the same time when normal channels to transfer money from Putin’s proxies dried up. This channel, on the other hand, is still wide open. A known vulnerability, easy to exploit.
Most were libertarian and continue to be libertarian.
The minor shift is from being left libertarian to more right libertarian, though that's mostly due to the political landscape where there isn't much room for contrarian leftists.
What has changed is that the proportion of people who wind up in tech primarily due to passion has drastically dropped as it became more prestigious. I'll paraphrase something I read elsewhere that rang true to me. In the 80s and 90s, amoral,greed-is-good, get-rich-by-any-means people got into banking and finance because it paid well. Now they go into tech.
However the kind of moralization, where the industry has suddenly become amoral greedy monsters is imo wrong.
Tech has alway been ruthless. It's always been a cutthroat business. We even valorize that kind of character as the founder. That hasn't changed.
What has changed is the political opportunity. SV can now influence and leverage real political power. That political opportunity is why so many are switching away from being Left leaning Libertarians (with even re-distributive ideas like UBI), to more Right leaning libertarians.
And this is all because the incumbents on the Left aren't willing to make room for the new players in Tech. So path of least resistance is to move Right.
This realignment has happening for a decade plus now.
It started off that way—remember people buying pizzas and domain names with bitcoin? That is the sort of thing that people do with dollars.
But it became quickly apparent that cryptocurrencies suck as currency because they are so strongly deflationary. However, that makes them work great as commodity financial instruments.
So viewing crypto as a financial market (not a currency), it benefits the U.S. to have as much of the market transacting within the jurisdiction as possible. Then you get the tax benefits, and ancillary benefits (e.g. rich crypto owners buying things).
US has enough cultural and institutional flexibility to accommodate dissent. First amendment protects almost any speech against the government, including insulting the president.
Compare that against China, who simply cannot tolerate citizens having any freedom of expression beyond what the party allows. See "tanks of tiananmen" smart contract[1] or "winnie the pooh" NFTs [2] - the only thing CCP can do at that point is to ban the entire blockchain ecosystem. But if blockchains are a big success in the rest of the world, CCP also has to cater to it just to keep pace with the West's tech progress.
[1] https://bscscan.com/token/0xb79c9c73e8c7b4be7244e697e6bdb9f5...
[2] https://opensea.io/collection/poohsnft
As an aside, one could easily replace 'crypto-currency' with 'fascism' in your comment to accurately describe why Republicans are following a similar tact in spite of the benefits of a democracy
The best coup would be Bitcoin as a gold that backs USD. This would force the price up well above a million. It might also make the world dark. $1 per kwh. $10 per kwh and so on.
Other coups would be lebanon style power interruptions while energy is diverted to mining with various subsidies.
Too many years in a bubble of undeserved wealth where people suck up to him constantly.
YC helped fund/promote Palantir, the dystopian surveillance company.
The Iraq war defense contractor boom pumped tons of money into pro-war entities and this is just the result of that capital finding its way into new ventures. Ideology comes along for the ride. It's the very definition of dystopian, government propaganda and big-lie-driven malinvesment and (in hindsight) massive financial fraud on taxpayers.
I'm personally shocked that PG touches any of this dirty money. When is enough enough?
But they didn’t fund Palantir or Anduril or any of the companies that blew up during the Border Panics of 2016-2020.
Unless you’re playing guilty by association games in which case ..carry on.
[1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ares-industries
With respect to the ares industries, YC buys into the neocon view strongly enough that it wants to help create the next wave of military tech. The only reason anyone perceives these "threats" and perceives the US to be "woefully unprepared" because of the marketing budget the defense industry has after profiting handsomely from the Iraq wars, etc.
The US is not in danger and does not need new and state of the art weapons systems. We are not losing in Ukraine because we don't have adequate weapons but because we are playing a very stupid and risky strategy. See the comments of Jeffrey Sachs on all of this.
Try reading this letter and see if you still believe him. Note the number of signatures at the bottom.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230806172854/https://news.berk...
The aggressive aspect of NATO is also minimized, which I think is naive.
I was in Ukraine in 2016 and saw the US fighter jets flying formations on Russia's doorstep. Calling that "defensive" is absurd. We now know that since the 1990s there has been a US goal to aggressively expand NATO mainly to suppress Russia.
The problem with this strategy is that it does not care at all about Ukrainian lives. As someone with family in Ukraine, I do not want my country (the US) wreaking havoc in the region. Thousands of Ukrainians are dying every single day right now, all because the US doesn't want to respect Russia's security zone. Mearshimer calls this the US nostalgia over the "uni-polar moment" when the US was briefly the only superpower.
Too much of the modern notions of American exceptionalism rely upon biases from that brief moment in history, to everyone's peril.
Until then, a multi-polar world among authoritarian aristocracies is a pipe-dream. Everyone hates American hegemony until you ask them what other hegemony they would like.
So missiles we must make, and make them cheaper we can.
[1] https://www.voanews.com/amp/new-poll-reveals-how-ukrainians-...
1. Nobody was providing military aid to Ukraine before Russia invaded, and even then it was initially of non-lethal nature.
2. NATO expansion was an initiative of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, against heavy skepticism by existing NATO members (including the US) -- and not something that the US "promoted". The initiative was in large part a reaction to the Russian war in Chechnya, and overall Russian hostility towards its European neighbors. Whatever glimmer of hope there was in early 1990s for different kind of relations, seeing Russian atrocities in Chechnya squashed them overnight.
3. If by "apparent" assurances you mean the conspiracy theory that someone promised Russians that NATO would not accept new members in Europe, then this has been refuted by USSR's top leaders - Gorbachev himself, his foreign minister, defense minister, and others. It's total nonsense.
> Of course now in 2024 Ukrainians support the war, but if one were to ask them in 1994 if they would want what they now have in 2024 or would it be OK to continue to be neutral, they would undeniably prefer neutrality and peace.
"Neutral option" is how they arrived in the present day. Ukraine was too slow to follow other CEE countries in joining EU and NATO, and wasn't covered by mutual defense guarantees by the time Russians invaded. Ukraine remaining out of strong alliances made the invasion less risky for Russians. That was a mistake. Sweden and Finland -- the last two neutral countries near Russia -- immediately learned from that mistake and joined NATO.
Russia already had a mix of rivals both for political Islamist reasons and oil/gas pipeline dominance reasons. Not surprisingly, those groups/nations supported the Chechen cause as tehy stood to benefit handsomely.
As usual the US did a lot of finger shaking and humanitarian atrocity shaming.
From Russia's perspective, the Chechen wars were significant attacks on its security and economy. Zooming out, an independent Chechnya would have made post-Soviet Russia much, much weaker.
So I think it's reasonable to attribute Russia's suppression of the Chechen rebellions to be motivated by the same desire to protect its territory that has motivated its war with US-backed Ukraine.
It seems that the only way to say it's unreasonable is to claim that Putin is himself mentally unwell and motivated by mental illness (a common claim in the US, sadly) or that Russia itself does not deserve to establish its own geopolitical "red lines" for when it will act militarily to protect its interests/territory.
This is simply not the way a modern country treats people, even in war.
Combined with the rhetoric about Russia deserving to rule over other nations (which you too demonstrate so clearly), it doesn't take much for people in Eastern Europe to put 1+1 together and run for whatever military alliance they can find.
I completely reject the notion that Russia has some inherent right to invade European countries and kill and enslave at their will.
If Russia was worried about national security as apologists claim, it would support EU and NATO memberships for its European neighbors - instead of desperately sabotaging such aspirations like in Ukraine. These organizations have produced the most peaceful, stable, reliable and predictable neighbors.
I think the geopolitical view offers a lens through which to see Russia's actions as reasonable (if still excessive, even horrible).
What is not clear from your comment is what you think should be done now? Has Russia lost its "legitimacy"? How can the situation in Ukraine be resolved adequately? Is US as the referee the only hope?
George Friedman has written that Russia is one of the natural landmass formations that tends to be a center of power because of the geography of the region. Should it try not to be? What alternatives exist?
No, they are not reasonable at all. They are the result of total concentration of power into the hands of a single person, allowing their irrational prejudices and paranoias shape the actions of millions of people. History has seen this time and time again, notably with Hitler and his sick obsession with Jews. Why did Hitler murder millions of Jews? What's the reasonable argument? Is there any at all? Or was it just plain hatred, utterly banal in its simplicity?
> What is not clear from your comment is what you think should be done now? Has Russia lost its "legitimacy"? How can the situation in Ukraine be resolved adequately? Is US as the referee the only hope?
Total military defeat. Russians need to see Putin, Shoigu and Gerasimov sentenced and imprisoned like Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic; Ukrainian flag flying over Sevastopol; and their press openly discussing the truth. After that, they need constant international pressure, for decades, until they develop into a modern society. The mistake of Europe and the US in the 1990s was not "encircling" and "humiliating" and "not respecting" Russia, but the opposite - Russia was left on its own, and nothing was done as it gradually grew into a poisonous tree. Where the EU and US were more active, set demands and expected progress - like in Central and Eastern Europe - countries developed into free, prosperous, stable and good places to live.
Russia as it is in 2024 has passed the point of no return. MPs like Gurulyov are saying on television that everyone except a few million retirees must be exterminated in Ukraine, and no-one in the TV studio even dares to say a word to oppose it. Proclaiming how many millions of people must be killed has become socially acceptable, while arguing for human rights and basic decency is met with contempt, hostility and ridicule, and punished with prison sentences. What will make people like these stop, if not a total demoralizing defeat and expulsion to the outskirts of the society?
Turkey already had a mix of rivals both from Christian minority groups and for shipping/port dominance reasons. Not surprisingly, those groups/nations supported the Bulgarian cause as they stood to benefit handsomely.
As usual Russia did a lot of finger shaking and humanitarian atrocity shaming.
From Turkey's perspective, the Balkan wars were significant attacks on its security and economy. Zooming out, an independent Bulgaria would have made post-Ottoman Turkey much, much weaker.
So I think it's reasonable to attribute Turkey's suppression of the Bulgarian and other Balkan rebellions to be motivated by the same desire to protect its territory that has motivated its war with irredentist Armenian regions.
It seems that the only way to say it's unreasonable is to claim that the Pashas are themselves mentally unwell and motivated by mental illness (a common claim in Russia sadly) or that Turkey itself does not deserve to establish its own geopolitical "red lines" for when it will act militarily to protect its interests/territory.
They’ve been this way for decades. The whole “don’t be evil” facade slipped away once the money started flowing
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders
They like to get puff pieces in the news with their analysis on legislation and most people have the same misconception as a result
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying
I almost stopped trying to rationalize the world around me at that point in my life. I assume my experience was simply because the CTO had everyone under his thumb and he decided it was a good idea.
Before the trial Bill Gates though spending money on lobbying was a waste and its a widely held belief that their anti trust trial wouldn't have happened if they had spent on lobbiest like healthcare, finance, and anything military do.
Post 2000, silicon valley learned this lesson and became one of the biggest lobbyers of the government. To the point where they eclipsed the oil and farm lobbies.
It's always admitting that the thing you want to do is bad, but wanting to do it anyways. And more often than not, it relies on a mischaracterization of the supposed bogeyman: "the democrats eat babies and wouldn't hesitate to do X, so that justifies us sinking lower unless we want baby eaters to win."
Or maybe it's just inevitable that anything structurally resembling a race to the bottom ends up with everybody on the bottom.