It's why the UN has an obsession with a tiny democracy in the middle east and ignores the multitude of brutal dictatorships which oppress and kill far more people around it and across the globe.
We allow brutal dictatorships to continue subjugating tens of millions of people and killing millions in the name of convention. Our international organizations (the UN in particular) are basically ruled by authoritarian regimes. Is there no justification for external powers to effect regime change? We just have to wait and watch as the dictator kills a ton of people? Oh, and of course there is Maduro's support for Putin via sanctions evasion. Even now, Venezuelans face a brutal security force that is likely to retain power, but hopefully that power fragments.
Imo we should have done this right after the last election which Maduro stole.
Something like 50% of the population of the world live under rulers who were not democratically elected. Should the US taxpayers fund all of their removals?
On top of that, removing a ruler without any plan for follow-up frequently makes things worse, not better. We seem to have already forgotten that removing the leadership of Iraq led to the rise of ISIS and its horrifying consequences.
> Something like 50% of the population of the world live under rulers who were not democratically elected. Should the US taxpayers fund all of their removals?
If it's in our interest, absolutely. Venezuela nationalized (which is a nice way to say they stole) American oil interests and companies decades ago, has assisted Russia in flouting US sanctions, and has in part enabled the drug cartels. Each of those things cost us money. We're also getting a ton of immigrants from Venezuela that we have to spend money dealing with. Venezuela could also be a much better trading partner for us in the future with a liberal democratic society. All of that is directly in the best interest for the US. Believe it or not, sometimes our interests lie outside our borders.
Isolationism is a failed policy by every nation that tries it, and this is something that used to be taught to every school child in America about our past policies. It's a shame those lessons seem to have been forgotten by our people.
> On top of that, removing a ruler without any plan for follow-up frequently makes things worse, not better. We seem to have already forgotten that removing the leadership of Iraq led to the rise of ISIS and its horrifying consequences.
This is absolutely true. You have to destroy the security forces as well, and support the elected democratic leadership. We may fail to do so in this case.
This is a point worth discussing imo. To what extent is the state of a nation and the conditions of its people, the responsibility of the people itself, even if they're oppressed?
The Russians were oppressed and had a revolution about it. Then they didn't like Communism anymore and broke up the USSR about it. Taiwan had a military dictatorship that was killing and jailing people in the thousands, and managed to overthrow it with absolutely zero outside intervention in the 90s, all while the PRC salivated over taking the country even back then.
I'm not sure I think "citizens should just be left to suffer under brutal regimes," but I also want to avoid a prejudice of low expectations. I also wonder, to what degree do citizens bear shared responsibility for the crimes their government commits against others? How responsible for the invasion of Ukraine are Russians for not deposing Putin? How responsible are Americans for the destabilization in southeast Asia, the middle east, south America?
There are videos of Venezuelans celebrating in the streets, singing in large groups, cheering. I saw a video of someone from a balcony and it sounded like the entire city of Caracas was cheering. You can wait a few years for a survey or throw one up yourself.
The reaction I'm seeing from second-hand and direct reddit comments from actual Venezualans seems really positive.
> more than a fifth of the entire S&P 500 market cap is now just three companies — Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple — two of which are basically big bets on AI.
These 3 companies have been heavyweights since long before AI. Before AI, you couldn't get Nvidia cards due to crypto, or gaming. Apple is barely investing in AI. Microsoft has been the most important enterprise tech company for my entire lifetime.
Nvidia market cap has increased about 10x since the crypto-shortage years. It wasn't small before, but there's a big difference between ~1% of the market and ~10% of the market in terms of systemic risk.
Also, as of last year about 80% of their revenues were from data center GPUs designed specifically for "AI", and that's undoubtedly continuing to grow as a share of their revenues.
You’re missing the point. Whether one buys it or not to one side, the author is saying those companies, whatever their history have pushed a significant amount of their … chips into a bet on AI.
I agree that his position is right wing, but is it far right? Most nations explicitly exist for the people native to the place. Very few nations allow foreign immigration on the scale that the US, UK, Canada, do. And European countries make it pretty difficult to migrate normally- unless you’re a Muslim “refugee”. Being anti-immigrant is a default position in the world.
I think the average person on the left likes to believe they have the position that “all immigration is good”. In reality, they mean all migration by nonwhite people is good (see how they talk about white or near-white people in the US, Canada, Israel). It’s this hypocrisy and obviously racist stance that bugs me.
What makes Muslim migration to Europe “good” but Jewish migration to the stateless land of Israel from 1890-1948 bad? What makes Muslims moving to the US “good” but makes all white people in the US colonizers? Either everybody gets the colonizer notation (foolish imo) or migration is a human right (like it was for the million years before the modern nation-state) and everybody needs to fucking deal with it, stop killing each other and stop condemning people for moving or for the past crimes of people who may be barely related. And if you’re going to migrate: don’t be an asshole to the people there first.
Completely absurd projection not supported by any serious sources. That would mean 1 in 3 Gazans dead, and 10 deaths per reported death, which would be completely out of line with other conflicts.
> at least two in every 10,000 people die each day from starvation, or from malnutrition and disease.
Gaza population is 2 million * 2/10000 = 400 people dying per day in order for it to be a famine.
> After more than 700 days of war, 455 Palestinians have died of malnutrition or starvation, including 151 children, the health ministry in Gaza reported on October 1. One hundred and seventy-seven of the total number have died of malnutrition or starvation since the IPC confirmed famine on August 15, it said.
Is 455 in 700 days more than 400 per day? I don’t know, I’m having trouble doing math. Perhaps the people of HN can tell me the IPC standard is being met as the CNN article states?
Media and general literacy is apparently impossible even for journalists.
In August, the IPC found about 514,000 Gazans are Phase 5 (famine / humanitarian catastrophe) [1][2]. It projected by September that was around 641,000. So the threshold you're looking for is a crude death rate (CDR) between 100 and 120 per day.
CRD "needs to be directly attributable to outright starvation or to the interaction of food consumption deficits and disease" and does not include trauma [3]. So it will be more than just confirmed deaths from malnutrition or starvation (which is, in practice, impossible to procure for anywhere on even the brink of famine).
The mortality exceeding the rate I mentioned is a prerequisite for declaring stage 5. It has not been met. You don’t declare stage 5 until it has according to their own standards.
The rate of death in Gaza from those causes is nowhere near that CDR. The total death rate from all causes is substantially below that number (by a factor of 4).
> The mortality exceeding the rate I mentioned is a prerequisite for declaring stage 5
Source?
> The total death rate from all causes is substantially below that number (by a factor of 4)
You're still making the mistake of taking statistics from across Gaza and pretending that's relevant. Based on your method, there has never been a crime wave anywhere in the world because the global crime rate tends to be somewhat stable across time and countries.
> The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.
So the software can't work with arbitrary drones. The article also talks about the high cost of some of the drones.
> Of the dozen or so autonomous systems acquired for Replicator, three were unfinished or existed only as a concept at the time they were selected, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Among Replicator’s shortcomings, officials said, is that the Defense Innovation Unit was directed to buy drones that had older technology, and it didn’t rigorously test platforms and software before acquiring them, other people familiar with the matter said.
So the military bought promises and basically funded some research. That's fine imo, they do that all the time, but their expectations did not align with results in these cases. And they didn't set good requirements for the platforms.
I expect the hopes for AI-driven drones with the ability to target individual humans by identity is probably not quite here yet. You have to get around jamming, fit any tech on a small platform, and it has to be cheap and disposable. And you don't actually want "AI", because you don't want it to mistakenly kill civilians, you want highly accurate computer vision.
In Russia and Ukraine, they are manually piloting drones that are attached by fiberoptic cable. It's cheap and effective, but requires a human pilot. At least for now, I would guess this is a much more effective (in results and cost) way to go. A human can pilot dozens of disposable drones in a day that drop their payload and are then discarded.
This played out much like many coffee shops that I’ve seen in my city and others [0]. Basically some leftist with a little money and little to no business acumen opens a low margin business and hires far-left employees. Those employees, dissatisfied with their low wages - they are, after all, baristas at coffee shops that are barely profitable, if at all - form a union. When the owner tells them they can’t pay more and offer benefits because they are literally losing money, the employees then take to social media, destroying what little customer base the business had. The business closes, and the employees are now unemployed, having destroyed their own livelihood and a place they actually liked working, because they had this absurd idea that their queer/trans owner that was scraping by was some maniacal oligarch that deserved to be crushed by the workers.
The real lesson is that if you’re opening a small coffee shop or bookshop or similar small business, you have to work full time and not hire people unless absolutely necessary. And if you do hire others, avoid the communists.
If I’m a barista at an indie shop shitting on my small business employer for not giving me more money, then I’m sort of by definition not much of a communist. The handful of sincere communists I know would absolutely label those people (correctly) as ignorant dipshits larping as communists (or at the very least, deploying convenient tropes as cudgels for their own narrow self-interests). No one who’s serious in their communist ideals would seek validation from their capitalist employers in the first place, and anyone who does should take the opportunity for some self-reflection.
The best people I’ve known from all over the political spectrum shared a capacity to bring me into their corner, for a few select issues anyway.
They could only get to the point in the conversation where my mind is changed because they were sincere, humble, informed, curious, empathetic, and open to having the discussions.
I feel like so much of contemporary public discourse is shaped by the worst, most transparently dishonest idiots in society. This perspective of mine is also probably bent by the fact that I left Facebook around 2012, and haven’t really spent much time on social media since. I logged onto Instagram not long ago, and it all feels really weird from a naive point of view.
It's why the UN has an obsession with a tiny democracy in the middle east and ignores the multitude of brutal dictatorships which oppress and kill far more people around it and across the globe.