True. Those who think they are being unfair just now, this is actually the fairest they've been since forever. Fairest in terms of arm twisting and other tactics being applied to everyone equally instead of being selective. Previously it was on the lines of the west and the rest, but now its just America and the rest.
Try continuing this line of thought instead of stopping at one novel half-thought. Perhaps there is something to the western world order that's worth defending?
As an American I will argue against my government's unilateral global adventurism all day long. That certainly doesn't mean that expanding the behavior is progress.
> As an American I will argue against my government's unilateral global adventurism all day long
I'm sure there are many Americans who would oppose this adventurism. I'm not sure whether that's because they believe its just a bad strategy to continue the status quo or because its just plainly a wrong way to treat other nations by force.
> That certainly doesn't mean that expanding the behavior is progress.
I don't mean it as progress. Its a regression but I hope there's a silver-lining at the end of all this for everyone.
You ascribed the label "fairest" as if the current state is closer to a desired ideal. This is a standard pattern of fascist propaganda - pointing out the longstanding normalized hypocrisy in the system in support of going backwards to where we didn't even try to live up to something better.
If you'd focused on what you see as the positive path forward, in spite of current events, then I wouldn't have written my comment.
In what twisted imaginary world is saying that a serial killer was fair to all his victims by being equally brutal with all of them means killing was the desired ideal. I'm not sure who proposed going backwards or what it even means.
Everyone is acknowledging the hypocrisy because it is hitting their bottom line this time.
I would like to see links to your opinions where you pointed to the "longstanding normalized hypocrisy in the systen" as a problem before the tariff nonsense.
> In what twisted imaginary world is saying that a serial killer was fair
Exactly this. One doesn't use the word "fair" to begin with. Being killed is decidedly not fair, period.
> I would like to see links to your opinions where you pointed to the "longstanding normalized hypocrisy in the systen" as a problem before the tariff nonsense.
Write a script go to back through my HN comments as far as you'd like? I don't have a blog or anything.
Off the top of my head - I was against the Iraq War, against Obama's drone assassinations, against intervention in Libya, against Israel's apartheid and genocide except for maybe two weeks after Oct 7 (they burned through their credibility that fast).
The main US international military action I've ever been in support of is helping Ukraine - it seems like a just defensive war of people who earnestly want liberalization and closer ties to the western sphere of influence. But even on that subject, the covert US meddling that set that stage for that conflict is still condemnable.
On a different but related topic, I've been against the surveillance industry ("big tech") from around when the term AJAX was coined.
Is there anything else you'd like my opinion on to show I'm not new to the subject?
you are hung up on the usage of the word "fair" with no room for alternate interpretation but want others to let bygones be bygones because it is normalized and maintains the status quo.
Not letting bygones be bygones, but rather addressing them in a constructive context - where they might even be able to be concretely addressed rather than simply used as fuel for the fire and then dumped in the dustbin of history.
Yes, that is maintaining the status quo. And yes, that is awfully convenient as an American. I'll admit those biases. But even as a critic of US foreign policy for basically my entire life, I do feel there is still something independently-valuable in the post-WWII international order where we at least tried to move beyond overt large-scale aggression.
Defining it as "west vs the rest" is too binary, even if you're coming from a place of being content to see the rest of the west get their comeuppance. Don't you think Gaza is worse off with this new more fair approach? Venezuela?
As a heavily sarcastic and often irreverent person myself, I think sarcasm translates very poorly to online communication in public forums. The main problem is the complete lack of context where you don't know where a commenter is actually coming from, so you lack the ability to interpret them making a particular statement as a deliberate absurdity.
So sure, maybe talking to friends I would find myself using the word "fair" that way as a punchline to a joke. But they'd know I'm not looking to normalize the new dynamic, rather than highlighting its perversity.
Then specifically here, OP doubled down on the argument rather than repudiating it. So I don't think it's really correct to call it sarcasm.
Thanks. It took 6 levels of comments to point the obvious sarcasm. May be I give too much credit to average HN'er skills at recognizing sarcasm without an explicit /s :)
It's not resources (this time), it's the US' sinking relative standing in the world that is causing this. Any self-respecting empire facing the end of its global domination wants to self-destruct violently instead of slowly disappearing. Hence WW1&2 and now whatever will this be.
I have repeatedly said this but it doesn't even matter if they are a putin asset or what but what they are doing is literally what Russia wants and one can realize it when they think about it for soemtime but America's literally at the weakest right now.
So, since there's a lot of talk like this, how are we leeches?
If anything, surely it's the Americans who are leeches, what with the fact that they're living off software exports and monopolies as opposed to production of actual useful goods?
Do you think we didn't invest in our defence? Here in Sweden we put in 5% of GDP until the Soviet Union dissolved. It was pro-US politicians like Carl Bildt, a man who associated with US intelligence, who reduced defence spending. We had nuclear weapons and refrained from assembling them on a US request in return for being under your nuclear umbrella.
Not to take away from the larger point, but the US remains a manufacturing juggernaut compared to anyone that isn't China. It's still the #2 manufacturing nation in the world and produces more than the EU as a whole. It's just become a small aspect of a much larger economy.
Yes, but I think the US industrial output is overvalued.
The US has a very small value of total exports, and this lead me to assume that the goods it makes a lot of are not always competitive on the international market even though they sell for a great deal in the US.
I find this narrative in some corners of American politics fascinating because of how completely it misunderstands US power.
Hegemony isn't charity. It's expensive. What the US gains is an invitation to exert power all over the world from bases and ports within countries playing a willing role in the US position. It gains the US dollar as the reserve currency and petro-currency of the world. In particular, without the world accepting the US dollar as the reserve currency, the US's ability to maintain a large budget deficit evaporates.
To gain this sort of power without invitation and strong alliances built on shared understanding and trust will cost the US much, much more in the longer term.
As an American, that's not how any of this works. You've bought into foreign propaganda aimed at destroying the US's leadership position in the western world.
The US is a GDP ponzi scheme disguised as an economy. The silly prices exist to shuffle money between pharmaceutical companies, PBMs, insurers, pharmacies, hospitals, and who knows what other intermediaries. Everyone takes a cut and can put large revenues on their balance sheet.
The US today is structurally dependent on this sort of cash migration. If all Americans suddenly began to save 10%+ of their income every month (also structurally impossible for most), GDP would dramatically contract.
Another social issue on GitHub: you cannot use the "good first issue" tag on a public repository without being subjected to low quality drive-by PRs or AI slop automatically submitted by someone's bot.
I think the issue with centralization is still understated. I know developers who seem to struggle reading code if it's not presented by VS Code or a GitHub page. And then, why not totally capture everyone into developing just with GitHub Codespaces?
This is exactly what well-intentioned folk like to see: it's solving everyone's problems! Batteries included, nothing else is needed! Why use your own machine or software that doesn't ping into a telemetry hell-hole of data collection on a regular basis?
Every industry building at scale makes the same tradeoffs. Manufacturers that create physical products use thinner metal, cheaper fasteners, and not-top-quality plastics. That's not because their engineers are bad but because good enough ships and is profitable, while perfect doesn't ship and isn't profitable.
A $20 IKEA chair is not "bad furniture". It's just optimized for different constraints than a Herman Miller. Most consumers are totally happy with the $20 IKEA chair.
An underrated part of engineering skill is knowing what corners to cut. I think large tech companies have structures that impose this on engineers who view this as dereliction of duty.
I feel like that's the whole point of the OP. I agree with the overall post but mentioning the ICE relationship seems to detract from the main point.
"I hate GitHub because X Y and Z features are bad" is a good reason to move away; "I hate GitHub because one of their thousands of enterprise customers does not align with my political views" is not, in my opinion.
People protesting ICE do not do so out of political concern, but humanitarian concern.
This seems like a minor nitpick as those two are intimately tangled up, but it matters to make the distinction. Standing up for others is not petty or self-serving and that's exactly what this sort of conflation can falsely imply.
Just because people have a revolutionary fetish and fantasize about being the ones to stop Hitler in 1933 (they would not have) does not make their delusions a reality. These dorks make anti-establishment vibes so lame. Just because you say something doesn’t make it real.
Hello there (new-account){name}{number}! When did you discover that {you, a real person} believed that the only way to protect the {women!} and {children!} was this new agency founded under Bush in the wake of 9/11?
Did you know that all {women!} (over 12 million every year) are actually most endangered by their intimate partners, who are predominately within their same race and class?
Do you think this is more or less concerning than this inflammatory anecdata you've created an account to provide? Do you think that domestic violence prevention (less than 1 billion) should be more or less well-funded than ICE (170 billion)?
> (Under the Trump admin): Teams responsible for violence prevention have been decimated, and a reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services has eliminated divisions wholesale.
It's virtue signaling plain and simple. People who crafted their identities around the current thing in ~2017 are religiously attached to having to be part of the in group and can't let it go, and it inevitably bubbles up like this.
This will no doubt rankle those who align with that group, but they are a pathetic remnant of a terrible period of rampant sociopathy.
Though you will no doubt assume you're getting downvoted because you're speaking truth to sociopaths, I just wanted to say I'm downvoting you because your comment violates multiple HN guidelines. Reminder, those are here:
It's disappointing to see such a long-term community member engage so thoughtlessly. I know the guidelines also say I should just flag and move on, but this will only reenforce your narrative, and I am hoping to break the cycle.
Politics in the US is so extremely binarized these days that I think it’s hard to assign motive for political issues beyond “my friends say that our team feels this way.” Which I would argue is much more political than anything fundamental.
If they had not mentioned github's association with ICE,
then we'd be in a situation where everyone would be questioning whether or not the relationship had anything to do with the decision.
You got one. And how many good neighbors were dragged out of their cars, how many parents torn from their children, and how many American citizens wrongly harassed or dragged out of their houses for it? How many preachers praying peacefully in the streets were shot in the head?
This is not, and has never been, about the murderers. The murderers are the excuse, the people who are actually being harassed and brutalized are not them. And as mentioned, many of them are American citizens.
You can support sane border policies without also supporting racial profiling, the militarization of our cities and warrantless searches and detention. These two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but arguably much of what ICE has represented recently is what many people would consider to be unconstitutional behavior.
Ok, if you want to go down this road, should I start posting articles of religious leaders caught raping children? Should we be spending 170 billion a year trying to shut down all churches?
One or the biggest ironies in US politics to me is the complaints about the degradation of the rule of law in this country under Trump. While simultaneously arguing that federal immigration law should be actively ignored and blocked by cities and states. Of course the details are all messy and complicated. But if you feel both of those things are true, you owe it to yourself to take a moment and reflect on the irony of your own views. Empathy for people you disagree with is in dangerously short supply these days and is fundamental to a functioning democracy.
Cool. This concept is useful for adult language learners also. Depending on the language you are learning it can be very difficult to find reading material in the age 5 - 10 range to practice with.
> So I urge that community, at COP30 and beyond, to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare.
Like addressing the exponential growth of income inequality? Unsurprisingly not mentioned at all. Might mean that billionaires have to give up their carbon credit purchases and then how could they be dismissive about their own emissions?
Bill is one of the better ones with his personal capital allocation. He could've just tried to create the fastest sailboat racing team or something. But I find it extremely difficult to take the wealthy seriously when they speak about carbon emissions and climate change. It’s like hearing an arsonist lecture on fire safety.
> Thirty years ago, when I was running Microsoft, I wrote a long memo to employees about a major strategic pivot we had to make: embracing the internet in every product we made.
Is this the one that lead to the term "embrace, extend, extinguish"?
Excellent way to stay busy producing revised editions over the next few years.
I really enjoy writing Zig and I think it's going to be an important language in the future. I do not enjoy porting my code between versions of the language. But early adopters are important for exploring the problem space, and I would have loved to find a canonical source (aside from the docs, which are mostly nice) for learning the language when I did. A text that evolves with the language has a better chance of becoming that canonical onboarding source.
My experience adding types to un-typed Python code has convinced me that static typing should be required for anything more complicated than a single purpose script. Even in old and battle tested code bases so many tiny bugs and false assumptions are revealed and then wiped out.
It's not perfect in Python, and I see some developers introduce unnecessary patterns trying to make type-"perfect" `class Foo(Generic[T, V])` (or whatever) abstractions where they are not really necessary. But if the industry is really going all-in on Python for more than scripting, so should we for typed Python.
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