Targeting Elon’s companies is a very smart play in this trade war. It has little to no economic impact in the EU but at the same time has a big impact on him, it might drive a wedge between him and Trump and it also pushes him into an obvious conflict of interest. The US started treating everyone else like an adversary, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the favor is being returned.
> Targeting Elon’s companies is a very smart play in this trade war. It has little to no economic impact in the EU but at the same time has a big impact on him
US senators are threatening to withdraw the US from NATO if the EU pushes through with this obvious lawfare.
The thing is, though, minihands’ approach to NATO is such that, a few months in, Poland is talking to France about hosting nuclear warheads. Like “oh, we might withdraw from NATO” is not quite the threat it might have been a few years ago; it’s already somewhat questionable what use NATO is anymore.
Can’t tariff Germany’s factory- how would you even go about legislating that?
The way to go about it so to start mandating that all cars have rain sensors, or dashboard instruments or HUD, or radar if they do TACC or parking sensors - things that most other cars have, but would be a pain for Tesla to add back in for just one region
Everyone except the US is going to come out stronger on the other end of this mess. Too many Americans believe the world would be screwed without the US and the USD, they can’t imagine trading being done in RMB or EUR, yet it is already happening. As a German that has lived in the US for over 10 years I just watch and wonder. Moving back to Germany is a more enticing prospect than it has been for a long time. I know a lot of Europeans that have moved or are planning their move. I don’t mean they talk about plans, they are buying land, building houses, etc.
I don’t agree with the current direction, but I also think most people don’t understand how large the US defense budget is relative to other countries.
The US defense budget is around $850 billion.
Depending on the year you look at, the US defense budget is larger than around 7-9 of the next largest budgets from other countries combined.
If you add up all of the countries in the world, the global total is around $2.5 trillion. The United States makes up 1/3rd of that.
The US defense budget also hasn’t been a target for cuts, which is a topic of debate.
So while there’s a lot of headlines being made about other countries increasing their defense spending, the numbers are closer to a rounding error in the US defense budget than a massive global power shift. People scoff at the idea of the US being a global military powerhouse because they don’t like the idea, but the bottom line is that when you look at the numbers there really is a reason that the US military is so important, and it comes down to sheer size and spending.
The US defense complex is large but it’s also inefficient and sclerotic, partly as a direct result of those fat budgets that have created a many decades old culture of graft and waste.
A country with less of this cost disease could probably be competitive with 1/4 the spend or less, especially if they skip big heavy Cold War era tech in favor of faster cheaper stuff like drones and smart munitions. Aircraft carriers and manned fighters look cool but I’m not sure how much they matter anymore.
What I see from the EU is that while they do also have cost disease, it might not be as entrenched in that sector. They also have Russia directly adjacent to them, which motivates people to actually care.
If Mexico were belligerent with a history of imperialism, had nuclear weapons and a huge army, and had just invaded and taken Cuba, we’d be in a similar situation and similarly motivated. As it stands we have a “big beautiful ocean” between us and Russia and do not face a direct threat. The US is almost uninvadeable unless you sterilized it with nukes first, and we have those too.
> For instance, the cost of German Puma tanks was exploded by regulations requiring them to be able to safely carry pregnant soldiers without exposing their amniotic fluids to munitions fumes.
This sounds like the German version of the bendy bananas lie told to Brits about EU regulations, a lie enveloped around some small fact and overblown to look as ridiculous as possible.
Also, the Greens pushing for money to wean Germany off gas is probably quite good for national security, not directly military related but does help in 2nd order effects (less reliance on fossil fuels saves the German economy from being a hostage to cheap gas as well as helps keeping fuel for the military if the need arises).
Nothing dishonest or overblown about the EU regulating bendy bananas. The EU even admitted its regulation of misshapen fruit was stupid and wasteful in a press release:
You aren't the first HN poster to claim this was some sort of British propaganda, even though the regulations are perfectly readable online and still in effect. You can just search for "eu bendy bananas" and the first hit is a Wikipedia page all about it. Where does this idea that it was British propaganda come from? What are European media telling you about this?
You're misrepresenting what the link says, and it doesn't even apply to bananas.
What is does say is that certain fruits and vegetables don't benefit from "minimum marketing standards" and some misshapen products may be sold if labeled as intended for processing.
What all this is is reasonable efforts to define standards for marketing, but it misrepresented by "British propaganda" as something hysterical, just like you misrepresent the press release for the sake of your straw man argument.
They said they wanted to change the rules to allow that, not that it'd always been that way from the start. The original claims that led to them admitting it was dumb weren't "hysterical" (since when is pointing out regulation even the EU admits is bad hysterical?)
Why don't you address the point instead of prevaricating? The narrative you're describing is not based on any facts but simple hate for the EU. Rejecting the plain facts doesn't help you.
The story about Puma being designed with the rules for pregnant woman in mind is widely circulated, but almost certainly false. The Bundeswehr clarified publicly that a tank is not a workplace as defined in those regulations.
There's certainly huge problems with procurement in the German military. But it's also not an uncommon story in other countries that the per-unit costs get really bad because the order is drastically reduced later.
Almost certainly false? The source is the CEO of the manufacturer who complained about specific requirements in the contracts issued by the Bundeswehr itself.
> For example, one of the more than 100 "relevant documents" for the development contract for the infantry fighting vehicle stipulates that the technical regulations for hazardous substances must also be observed. These stipulate that the carbon monoxide content must not exceed a certain limit, as otherwise there is a risk of "damaging the amniotic fluid" in pregnant soldiers. The air inside the Puma must therefore be so clean that even pregnant women can ride safely.
Another problem in a related vein: the Pumas have fire extinguishers which brick the vehicles by spraying powder into the engines. Normal extinguishers that keep the vehicle operational are banned because the gases aren't friendly enough to the ozone layer. This was admitted to be a problem and never fixed.
Manufacturers want to sell vehicles. They usually don't wish to comply with expensive rules as they do so. If they're complaining about regulations that make manufacturing hard, and doing things like equipping their vehicles with fire extinguishers that break the engines, then at minimum the Bundeswehr has screwed up its acquisitions and communications process so badly that its suppliers are confused about what they should do. More likely the manufacturers are correct and the people writing the rules didn't think through the consequences of what they wrote.
If you're not using your defense assets to fight your enemies, but start siding with your enemies, your defence budget is a sink of which I wouldn't be proud that it is big.
I previously cofounded a miltech startup in the US (as a foreigner), and have currently funded a European-based one (again as a foreigner). Nothing big, although we were able to exit the first one at a good-enough situation via an IP sale (which was practically forced upon us).
The US and European defence markets are very different. USA has a larger pie, but it's also very fragmented. More fragmented means more contractors and subs, which keep adding more layers of pricing into the contract. European defence is more consolidated - you have the few big players who get all the contracts, so there's very little room for new entrants to come in but that also means less layers to work with. This makes the final product less expensive compared to the American ones, at the cost of fewer specialized features added in by niche contractors. That's in part due to the nature of the militaries too - the American military will request frequent changes and new features to new battle conditions on the go, to the point of making your product the equivalent of military SAP - very flexible and usable for any battlefield situation, but also very bloated to develop and operate. On the other hand, European military contracts are usually relatively static in comparison, which means that the burden of knowledge acquisition and operating under different situations falls on the operator and not the technology itself. The last bit is also what translates into budgeting - American products are delivered with significant delays and higher costs due to back-and-forth bureaucracy internally, while European products can be delivered sooner if there is a pressure to deliver - like if the customer is a priority customer who has paid significantly upfront (read, Arab militaries).
I would argue that the US military sector is artificially inflated, because it's a significant jobs programme for the huge network of firms, contractors and subcontractors. In a way, it's a military budget that's adjusted for the economy size and not for the actual needs of the military. That lets the US military also fund a ton of whacky pioneering technology that's at the forefront of the innovation (like the internet, or drones, or even social media manipulation), but it also leaks a lot of money through the cracks for ostensibly results that are only marginally better than European countries with comparable militaries such as the UK and France.
That being said, it's much easier and more lucrative to start up in the US than anywhere else, at least till now. Second would be the UK, although with their exclusion from the recent European defence loans programme, that's questionable now. France is increasingly pulling its weight now, and I'm expecting a lot of growth here. The French government has been exceedingly friendly for miltech companies for a while now.
I worked for an FFRDC on a DARPA project a bit more than a decade ago having to do with communication jammers. It was terribly managed. There were two projects going on at my organization that were basically the same thing but with two different PIs, teams, test beds, etc. We ended up wasting so much time and money doing non-R&D work with very little oversight from DARPA.
I honestly feel that US military money is thrown around like you said in such a fragmented way, that I can't imagine other countries NOT being an order of magnitude more efficient. It kind of reminds me of our healthcare spending and how much we spend but for such little ROI compared to other developed countries.
> I can't imagine other countries NOT being an order of magnitude more efficient.
I can. I imagine that, while the US military bureaucracy is horrible, it is not uniquely horrible. Other countries have bureaucracies, too, and they are not an order of magnitude better than the US ones.
Or so I imagine. I confess that I have no first-hand experience with non-US military R&D bureaucracies.
Exactly. It's like saying healthcare is big business in America when it's because it's unnecessarily bloated and super inefficient only due to America's own idiosyncratic quirks and regulatory capture. Like there are countries with similar private systems which still manage to do better with far less resources, simply because they have some form of government oversight.
Europa spending on defense was around 280 Billion in 2023. IIRC this is the second highest after the US. But this is just changing now, without the US as a partner anymore.
I have difficultly understanding this point of view, although I'm sure it is not uncommon.
Why do people believe it would it be an economically good decision to buy land and build houses in Germany, a place with negative GDP, no long term energy independence solution except for returning to coal, sharp curtailments on basic free speech, press, and assembly, and a massive military build-up which will require high levels of debt, cutting social spending, or both?
Is it more about a question of national feeling and patriotism and the details aren't as important as the national pride, or is there an underlying economic analysis? It's also possible that Germany will simply deindustrialize, financialize, do debt-based stimulus, and accelerate the pace of mass migration further, which would indeed be good for home prices for remote owners who continue to live abroad.
The big difference is if you are comparing the situation of a German citizen in Germany to a US citizen in the US or to a German citizen in the US. If you are an immigrant in a country where you don't have a subjective right to live, you obviously have fewer basic rights than a German citizen in Germany.
Thats not true. There are another 1000 Billion going into social and infrastructure in germany right now. It's not like in the US, where you only can have military or social spending.
Overall the military spendings was 280 Billion in 2023 in the EU. This is just increasing since the US is not a trustworthy partner anymore. FR and Germany just building up a stronger nuclear defence system for the EU and stronger borders to the east.
Are you saying FIRE is teutonphobic and the report is false, that those were all irish nazis engaging in terrorist plots, or that immigrants should have fewer rights to speech than citizens?
There are certainly some problems in Germany that need to be solved, but you're painting a very extreme and absolute picture here that is pretty far from the truth.
Free speech is different in Germany than the US, that doesn't mean we don't have free speech in Germany. The US doesn't have the one and only true definition of free speech. And right now Trump is assaulting free speech in the US, so those lectures from Vance and others are just blatant, partisan rethoric.
We're not returning to coal. The economy could be better, but it's not as terrible as you imply.
If you're not returning to coal, and you're anticipating further hostilities with Russia, then you're buying liquid natural gas from the US at much higher prices than are paid by both US and Chinese industry + domestic consumers.
Germany returning to coal would be a bitter pill to swallow, but insisting that Germany will remain competitive despite much higher energy costs which only get worse with scale by saying "it's not that bad" is not convincing.
Free speech, free press, and free assembly is under another round of attacks many places, including Germany, The United States, Russia, Israel, and Turkey, among others. Some are relatively better than others and some had very little left to fall, but all are in absolute decline.
As I'm in favor of free speech as a universal value and not an apologist for anyone's domestic authoritarianism, I don't consider the hypocrisy of the speaker to be a good justification to sweep aside mutually unflattering facts about state policy.
> Germany returning to coal would be a bitter pill to swallow
Impossible. Net zero was put at constitutional level to get the necessary votes from the greens. (And they were losing that voting power in the elected congress)
The funny thing is that if you listen to Trump and the MAGA folks, they explicitly do not believe that the world would be screwed without the US and USD, and further do not believe that the US should care if they were. Trump's whole schtick with NATO is that Europe should be defending itself, not relying on the US.
So while the left and center of the US largely views this whole saga as a catastrophic loss of the US brand and foreign policy aims, this kind of rearmament is exactly what Trump promised his base he'd make happen.
That sounds true to me, at least related to the MAGA-adjacent people I know from the US.
The thing is that I never expected the US to just willingly throw away what I (and many others) perceived to be its actual greatest source of strength. The US had built, along with its impressive military, an equally impressive web of friendly nations that allowed it to project its power to a degree that was impossible to match. Even in a world where China kept rising, they would have trouble to compete with the US in this field, because the window of opportunity to build this was like 70 years ago.
China was trying for the next best thing, wooing countries in Africa and Latin America to slowly build a web of friendly nations of its own. Not the same, if you ask me.
That the US would freely squander all their multi-decades investments in a matter of months was unthinkable.
I personally enjoy what is happening. As someone that lives in an EU country, I thought the EU needed this kind of nudge to further integrate, and the US influence always irked me. I am cautiously optimistic for the next few years here.
"We have a lot of leverage, and even if we don't, then we don't have to pay to be the worlds police" - is largely how I (also a european) have seen Trumps actions.
The "issue", is that this is a populist take.
It's weirdly not in Americas interest to take that stance, because they are a defacto world government with the amount of soft power they are able to exert, militarily and in trade.
So, the GP is quite right, people are waking up to the idea that this soft power was running kinda deep and we shouldn't just allow ourselves to get soft too.
Just like an insurance company will find a way not to pay: the US may never have actually come to the aid of Europe; and nobody thought about that, they just accepted most of what the US was asking in the hope that they would.
The lesson will be painful in the short-term, but I'm also hopeful that we take it seriously and start investing in ourselves.
> So while the left and center of the US largely views this whole saga as a catastrophic loss of the US brand and foreign policy aims, this kind of rearmament is exactly what Trump promised his base he'd make happen.
It's a catastrophic loss of influence. It's a good thing for Europe but terrible for the US. I think that Trump will end up fulfilling his promise is co-incidental. Trump's a lose cannon who's alienated all of America's friends, that he achieved some relatively minor goal is like being proud of losing weight because you have cancer.
Europe has a chance here to become a political superpower, strongly eroding the US centric world view and having influence though something other than brute force of money or military power, which is what China and US are trying to project.
Saved monies can be used to reduce taxes, to rearm or rebuild.
Also, military spending can be reduced by reducing military costs in the USA. Wait until DOGE gets it's scalpel on the Pentagon's budget: likely much can be saved there.
Remember Eisenhower's warning about the "military-industrial complex"
The defense industry has run rampant since long before Eisenhower's presidency. Trump is likely to make some serious cuts in the defense budget, deeper than we've seen in decades.
One promise i would love to see him keep is turning the liabilities in europe into an asset. Instead of paying for european security, if we can charge them for security and sell them weapons and tech from our big contractors, the US wins.
Yeah, that's not happening. Summarily burning down bridges is a great way to stop people from mooching off you, but that's because they now know they can't rely on you to be a stable foundation.
If they can't trust us not to break our previous promises, why in the world would they trust us with their national security-critical business?
What threat to its integrity? The 40 bases that have kept peace for the last 80 years? The massive amounts of funding that we have sent to aid europe through USAID and other orgs? The tech, and drugs and discoveries?
We do not have to protect you forever, and us forcing you to step up military spending to comply with the UN mandates as there is an active war on your doorstep? Ensuring equal tarrifs from both sides?
I don't know why the US taking itself off massively taxing it's citizens and increasing government revenue through tarrifs, is called a "Trade war".
People seem to be so reliant on the US that the slightest sign that we aren't going to continue to hand out everything, people start getting hysterical.
Annexation of Greenland. It is part of Denmark as of now, even if it is not exactly a part of EU. The fact that you don't even seem to know that shows that you sre either arguing in bad faith or is ill informed.
> We do not have to protect you forever
Then leave. This arrangement benefits primarily the US.
> I don't know why the US taking itself off massively taxing it's citizens and increasing government revenue through tarrifs, is called a "Trade war".
You don't seem to understand how tariffs work either. Honestly, having this conversation with you is a waste of time.
> People seem to be so reliant on the US
Pehaps not anymore. We shall see. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
this could have happened if he tried to get this worked out behind closed doors. doing this shit he’s doing it would be a political suicide for any country to go along with it. if our former allies are no longer such, they won’t come to US to pay for shit - they will go elsewhere
But i think the states should take responsibility of the casualties of the wars they started.
The people seeking shelter here wouldnt knock on our door if foreign people funding their rebel groups or religious extremists.
Ever wonder why they got so many weapons and ammo? Russia and china was also interfering there so they grab the assets.
We provided airbases and barracks for the us-army, time to cash in the rent for so many years.
We dont have to take the risk getting our cities bombed because our lords and saviours found it funny to start a war in a foreign country...
I would suggest Trump should seek another country housing his war gear...
Also, if you are referring to Hitler's and Napoleon's failed campaigns on Russia, it's important to mention that those were fighting wars of aggression on multiple fronts against their European neighbors. It was not a united EU propping up defenses against real threats.
Funny. For me it's the other way around. I'm just laughing out loud at all the craziness. Maybe it depends on where you're living, on your citizenship status, wealth, whatever.
When I read this, as an American it really strikes me what a trade-off the implementation of social democracy is. It does seem like they are correlated.
I wish that the USA did better on taking care of people, (because it sucks right now) but some on the left act as if there are no consequences to deciding to implement these things.
I don't think there is any connection between lack of VC capital and whatever "social democracy" you have in mind. I think it is actually just culture. Europeans are risk averse, pessimistic and cynical. And society is still more elitist than in the new world. Because of these reasons a startup culture cannot flourish.
In the sibling thread I made the argument that culture might be the biggest reason why it's true.
Elitism / classism might be part the reason why social democracy is possible- if you believe that there are simply a group of people who need help in society you might be more willing to give to them.
If everyone is completely equal it might seem like no one actually deserves anything "more" than anyone else.
It's not social democracy, otherwise Sweden and Finland wouldn't punch so much above their weight.
It's most likely an artifact of smaller, less liquid capital pools and the fact that the US is a really easy large market to tap into, leading to European startups investing into the US market in preference to their own.
> When I read this, as an American it really strikes me what a trade-off the implementation of social democracy is. It does seem like they are correlated.
In my experience working with some former European entrepreneurs, the startup problem isn’t really directly related to anything about social democracy or safety nets or even taxes.
They talked about how difficult, painful, and risky it was for them to start and operate a company at every turn. Even things like bankruptcy and allowing founders to move on with their lives if their startup fails, which we take for granted here, are not a given in European countries.
It’s not just the government to blame. The private banking and even societal norms are very different in ways that we don’t even consider in the United States.
The US is very friendly to funding and building startups. I didn’t appreciate it until talking to ex-founders from various European countries as well as many founders here who explicitly left EU countries for America because they wanted to start a company.
Bankruptcy law is a big one. Another big one is the reputation hit that you are going to incur if your startup fails. Europe does not believe in learning through failure. It is puzzling to a European, that there could be serial entrepreneurs with a history of 3 failed startups who still get funding for their fourth attempt.
We can agree to disagree without name-calling, but the impact of compounding growth vs intentional stagnation is going to continue to widen the gap that's already opened up over a few generations.
You'll discover that compounding growth is useless to YOU, when Trump and Musk are taking 99.9% of it. Wages are stagnant. The US is #24 on the world’s happiest countries list, and has been dropping for a long while. At the top of the list, we find socialist countries with access to world-class public services like healthcare and education -- which the US is currently trying very hard to gut. The last time something like this happened, it took a Great Depression and intense widespread economic pain for Americans to snap out of it. Inequality is destabilizing and Americans are clueless (see inflation leading to Trump), so I think Europe is likely to do better in the long run.
These socialist countries that are so happy because of the money they pour into healthcare and education, do so at the expense of their future growth and their own self defense.
This seems unsustainable.
The US is also a much larger and heterogenous society compared to the countries above us on most lists, such as the scandinavian countries or Lichtenstein.
Anecdotally, when the homeless have smart phones to accept donations and obesity is an epidemic of the poor, we're not suffering for material wealth. A poverty of virtue, maybe so.
This comment is sadly wrong, like saying "the sky is green". I recommend you talk to chatGPT (4o+) and learn something. Nordic countries combine high taxes and spending with competitive, open economies. Denmark and Sweden have high labor productivity and GDP per capita, etc. These societies are no longer homogeneous.
Talk to the bot. Ask open-ended questions, ask for sources, read those sources. I don't have the patience to work with blind ideological bias. Like I said before, usually the only thing that helps Americans snap out of it is intense economic pain, which should happen between 2025-2035 with high cost of living, social safety net collapse, climate disasters, and maybe even AI job displacement at scale.
In a hypothetical hacker news guide for how to win friends and influence people, I'm pretty sure "you're so wrong you should go talk to a chat bot" is not a recommended approach.
I hope you're right, for what it's worth. It's a better world than "the only thing that helps Europeans snap out of it is intense economic pain combined with a Russian invasion of the Baltics"
Go debate creationists for a while then come tell me I'm being abrasive. Believe me this is the easiest way when we disagree on basic facts.
US culture (especially among white men) has a lot of internalized individualist, anti-union, and anti-government views, despite the incredible success of the New Deal (combined socialism+capitalism) in creating their entire world. The bot is really the best way to counter these attitudes. It beats spending hours on google.
Keep in mind: republicans are low information voters, and additionally they tend to be single issue voters.
So 99% of them probably don't care about this particular thing. They care about abortion, or "corruption", or welfare queens, or something else.
They have no idea the entire point of this exercise is to gut our public infrastructure so they can give hand-outs to their cronies companies to do the exact same job, but more expensive.
> Too many Americans believe the world would be screwed without the US and the USD, they can’t imagine trading being done in RMB or EUR, yet it is already happening.
Most Americans who voted for this (and to some extent their representatives) genuinely and seriously do not think about this matter with any depth and don’t care about the knock-on effects one bit.
They lack any desire to know if the world would be screwed or not by US actions. They really just don’t care.
They (think that they) want isolationism, less trade, less immigration, less interacting with others.
I’m finding that the basic backend functionality of Pulumi and Terraform managed cloud is fairly easy to build (especially Terraform, I can’t quite believe how absurdly simple their cloud is…)
Do you have a good story that will resonate with hiring managers on why you are making the switch from small to big? Most won’t be excited to hire the guy that pushed hard for years and now “wants to coast”. I’m not saying that’s you, but it can easily come across like that.
I think plenty do. I'm a startup guy and corporates have been asking when I want to coast for a while. Personally, I'd rather work hard writing code than writing performance reviews and such.
"While I do feel like I am proactive, I feel I can do my best work when the structure around me is solid enough, my productivity goes up when I can consistently produce work and avoid the extreme ups and downs of a startup."
I'm actually downloading one right now off Steam, and I'm limited more by IOPS on the drive I'm installing to than I am my internet speed due to the compression/encryption/unpacking. Not even using much more than 100Mbits consistently here, but I am installing to a microSD on a gaming handheld. But devices like this are getting more popular especially for a multi-kid household.
But even then, it's not something most people are constantly doing. Maybe a couple of times a month.
I'd still probably go with more than 200Mbit for a family, but knowing how many of the families I know use their home internet they're rarely coming even close to routinely maxing out a 500Mbit connection even with several kids.
This is not standard operating procedure worldwide, in part because there aren't that many countries folks are trying to flee to:
> America granted him asylum and he settled in New York, becoming the leader of Chinese pro-democracy groups. But in August 2024 he was arrested by the FBI. He admits to having used his position to collect information for the Chinese government and to report on his fellow activists. He did this so that the government would allow him to return to China to see his ailing parents.
Do you have an example of a western government only letting someone come home to visit ailing parents in exchange for spying on their countrymen in a foreign nation?
I’m sure it happens just because there are lots of people. But I’m having a hard time coming up with a western nation that has a significant political dissident diaspora. I’d guess that the war on terror might generate one somewhere?
The FBI targeted an Canadian scientist of Chinese origin and his family members because he declined to spy on China for them.[0,1]
After he declined to spy on China, the FBI accused him of being a Chinese spy. The accusations turned out to be completely spurious, and the FBI agent involved was found to have knowingly spread lies about the scientist. But before his name was cleared, he was fired by his university, and the FBI made all sorts of public declarations that he was a spy.
Do you have any numbers that would verify that? Or even any other statement on that issue? Pretty sure determining the "scale" of any kind of intelligence activity is unbelievably murky, as you might be able to imagine.
Nice a Wikipedia article. Where can I find any indication of comparative scale compared to any other nation, like I asked?
Just going by a blind guess and knowledge of the world, I guess it's pretty much correlated with economy and geopolitical dominance, so I'd expect America to be number one simply as a result of it's wealth and strategic dominance in the last century, and then China somewhere around the level of the rest of NATO or Russia or something (though I'm sure rapidly rising, which would explain the growing anxiety of the corporate mouthpieces in The Economist).
In a nutshell, it has a unique structure, a wider mandate, and operates a bit differently than your typical intelligence service - especially domestically.
"One of the largest and most secretive intelligence organizations in the world, it maintains powerful branches at the provincial, city, municipality and township levels throughout China."
>operates a bit differently than your typical intelligence service - especially domestically
Fair enough.
But as wild speculation with no real insight, I'd guess that such a large mass organizational structure probably also precludes the same rigid centralization and advanced capabilities of other intelligence agencies i.e. it probably operates more as a snitching hotline to gather less specific intel on a wider range of people with less ability to perform any actionable espionage type operations, instead of a horde of spies illegally infiltrating every western government, university, and business.
The AI answers are nowhere near good enough to always be at the top, without any clear indication that they are just a rough guess. Especially for critical things like visa requirements or medical information. When you search Google for these sort of things, you want the link to the authoritative source, not a best guess. It’s very different for queries like say “movies like blade runner”.
I doubt that was the decision process. It’s much more likely that there is a directive coming down from the top that “we need to go all in on AI”, which then gets amplified down by middle management and the result is AI smeared over all results irregardless if helpful. That then drives up some vanity metric like “searches answered by AI summaries”, while metrics like “bad AI summaries shown” don’t get attention. As a result the organization is happy, people can get promoted, etc.
Not all queries are the same but I agree with you that the authority of source is crucial. That's why for example .gov sites rank high and should rank high because government is usually the most trusted source.
But when you are looking for new shoes to buy or food recipes then .gov sites can't help you and that's where things get ugly....SEO spam ugly.
An example: I was looking up what a good diet is to follow after a child has been vomiting. The AI said to avoid giving fruit juice … yet the authoritative sources said the opposite. I already knew not to trust the AI, but this was nail in the coffin for me.
