You are very much missing the point. If you read the one thousand page postmortem on the invasion of Iraq - lots of blame to be placed on civilian leadership and intelligence.
A few:
The core reasoning (WMD) was the CIA misinterpreting Saddam grandstanding to his generals as a serious WMD program. This was due to the CIA having an insufficient grasp of the local situation, largely due to the fact that we had only infiltrated isolated parts of the regime and couldn't corroborate.
Slightly before Obama's election, the US forces were effectively ordered to stop patrolling and attempting to take and hold territory in order to reduce the American bodycount for political reasons - this allowed forces outside the green zone to maintain continuity of operations and simply wait for us to get bored and leave.
Similarly, lack of a clear set of objectives, and lack of frank expectations setting with the US population lowered the ability of the DoD to prosecute the war in a winnable fashion.
These aren't small nitpicks, these are core reasons why the GWOT didn't go so well - and almost none of them have anything to do with defense procurement or military mismanagement.
You are missing the point; none of what you said refutes what you were replying to. While the civilian leadership does have the authority to order the military to stand around, get shot for a while, and go home having achieved nothing, presumably that's not what they actually asked for or wanted. Getting into the situation where you go to war that you're not going to be able to win absolutely represents a failure on the part of the military; perhaps not a failure of procurement or management, but very much a failure of leadership, which is exactly what OP originally said.
> Getting into the situation where you go to war that you're not going to be able to win absolutely represents a failure on the part of the military; perhaps not a failure of procurement or management, but very much a failure of leadership, which is exactly what OP originally said.
Good God, what are you on? The military literally does not get to make these decisions. Only the civilian leadership in the form of the President and Congress gets to decide when and where the military goes to war. And as much as US military officers learn from Day 1 that it's their duty to refuse illegal orders (and it is), the day a combatant commander or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs tells the President or Secretary of Defense "no, this war is illegal" is the day we have ourselves a constitutional crisis, for good or ill.
> The military literally does not get to make these decisions. Only the civilian leadership in the form of the President and Congress gets to decide when and where the military goes to war.
Sure, but it's the responsibility of the military to be clear to them about what they can and can't do (or, more likely, what it's going to cost, in money and casualties, to achieve x). Obviously yes if the President actually orders you to fart around and get shot then you do it. But if the President thinks sending three brigades to $country is going to keep the civilians there safe in the current crisis, it's the responsibility of the military leadership to know and advise whether that's a three-brigade job or not.
VC is like that because many of them missed many boats of very profitable startups in 2001 thru 2010, where "stupid business trick, now with software!" was almost always an OK bet.
AI is the new dot com, which means we are at least one more bubble away from mass usefulness
There's a difference between not being a big fan of drugs and wanting the onerous law enforcement and incarceratorial regime which was eventually implemented. Without much meaningful input from the CBC, I imagine. Your "Ehh, sort of," is quite weak. Going back to marijuana, opiate, and even alcohol prohibition policies, drug laws have always been more about controlling the conjured threat of minority populations than anything else.
I had never heard of prohibition as a tactic to oppress racial minorities. It seems like you’re trying to shoehorn a narrative.
“nearly every major Black abolitionist and civil rights leader before World War I—from Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth to F.E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington—endorsed temperance and prohibition.”
Hardly the group I would associate with oppressing minorities.
Again, the Black congressional representatives (which, due to districting were mostly representing Black people) were rather openly upset with him...for not going even harder.
That is difficult to square with Nixonian plot to use the carceral apparatus to keep Black people from gaining power.
I guess it does track with revisionism to make anything we currently disagree with to be a product of original sin.
The state does not like those drugs because society does not like those drugs, and in the case of certain drugs, like heroin and other harder drugs we have decided that it is rational to attempt to keep them off the streets rather than agree to legal use.
It's fun to declare it "things the state doesn't like", but I legitimately don't see anyone legalizing meth or heroin anytime soon.
The state has a legitimate interest in limiting the number of people taking opioids in public. It's self-defeating to do that through mass incarceration. To be determined how well decriminalization works. But it's definitely not that the government just doesn't like drugs - hard drugs really do have societal costs.
I think the article makes a point that is overlooked:
>After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
Can't decriminalize drugs if you stop funding drug treatment programs and chuck it all onto underfunded NGOs who have their own motivations.
I think this underscores that these problems are more complicated than may want to acknowledge. I don't think you're doing this, but part of this thread started as a pushback to the simplistic sentiment that implied we just need to decriminalize.
As you point out, we can simultaneously criticize our current policies while acknowledging simplistic replacement policies aren't really solutions.
I believe they meant recreationally legal. There are lots of medications that are also used as recreational drugs (cocaine, opiates, etc.) but their use shouldn't be conflated.
Breakneck capitalism, so to speak is why I can get almost any material , consumer or professional, delivered to my door in a few days - including things that would be considered exotic a year ago, at a tenth the price they would have been (even adjusting for col).
Corporate raiding is nothing new, and financialization does let it happen at a pace that it couldn't previously - but just saying "but that's capitalism!" is quitting
Worker owned collectives have the same problems, people want to acquire power and then use it to be ahead when strategies fail and someone has to take responsibility.
How do you prevent that looks different in a market economy than a planned one (planned ones having more widespread but also more small scale corruption issues like these) - but you still do need to do the work to prevent it.
One of the larger issues that is causing problems is the misnomer of "maximizing shareholder value" which took hold in the late-1970s and especially the 1980s (unsurprisingly the same era as Reagan).
I for one can’t get all the things I want in a few days: I want ethically sourced clothing, or milk from local cows gently pasteurized. Sometimes I want a particular kind of cheese from a farmers market and they’re sold out that day.
When you start looking for quality material produced in a way that minimizes human suffering, no, capitalism doesn’t make this available to me in a few days or for cheaper.
People were given the choice between having lots of things made with shortcuts or having a few things but made the right way.
People, completely as expected, chose lots of things made with shortcuts.
A gallon of locally sourced, ethically made milk is awesome. But so is a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, and a pack of cheese slices for the same cost.
Because the externalities are completely hidden from them, and because their own situations are precarious enough that they have no real choice but to choose the cheapest options.
Make it clear at the point of purchase all the negative tradeoffs made to enable that Low, Low Price, and some significant percentage of people will choose to buy things that cost more.
Make sure that everyone—yes, everyone, no exceptions—has a decent amount of disposable income on a reliable basis, and that percentage will grow a lot more.
No it will not. Larger incomes are only larger because of industrial machinery, the same process that makes it more expensive to buy "organic' is what drives income up.
Software engineering is so well paid due to these dynamics.
All of those came from public investment in infrastructure, funded by taxing the shit out of robber barons and trust busting at a never before seen scale starting in the 1930s and going until we went to Vietnam.
It’s like capitalists completely forgot about the massively successful Great Society program (which is the only thing holding this all together still) that literally created from whole cloth most of the roads, sewers, electricity, social security, elderly healthcare, consumer protections, etc… that we all rely on everyday.
So no. That’s totally wrong, the world you live in much worse than it could have been for MOST people had generations of psychopaths not divested the public benefit aspect of organizing
It's nice that you can get things. But there's a cost - increasingly large numbers of people can't.
I'm sure as the game continues you won't become one of them.
IMO the real problem is that maybe 5% of the population are amoral sociopaths, and being absolutely heartless and uncaring - often with a liking for outright abuse and violence - gives them a competitive edge in almost any political and social system you can imagine.
Normal people just can't imagine that another human might operate like this.
But worse - many people seem to have some kind of bizarre deferential herd instinct to follow these crazies off the suicide cliff.
It may not be a fixable problem. We're a flawed species. Perhaps it won't be long before evolution - the ultimate owner of the casino - shrugs and moves on.
Those are difficult questions. Are we talking about how "happy" people are? That's the goal for some people, and an official goal for Bhutan according to its constitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness). But I don't think we know very well how to measure it accurately.
It has been claimed that the move from hunter-gathering to agriculture brought a lot of misery while improving efficiency according to economic measures.
>IMO the real problem is that maybe 5% of the population are amoral sociopaths, and being absolutely heartless and uncaring - often with a liking for outright abuse and violence - gives them a competitive edge in almost any political and social system you can imagine.
Absolutely. Bob Menendez's indictment is the definition of: this is a powerful, already wealthy individual selling out the US people to a foreign government for, frankly, not a lot of money. Why? He may spend the rest of his life in prison.
How can anyone but a sociopath think that's a good trade?
I unironically disagree with this, structured data is incredible and powerful.
But an important part of the early internet was "its Just Text".
And in fact, the reason why JSON is so great is that if you want to use it as Just Text it works just the same!
It's a translation layer between systems that really demand highly structured data and flexible systems where as long as you can thunk about it, you can get from anywhere to anywhere else with a few simple programs that are on every machine in tbe known universe.
Alternatively, you have gotten used to Google providing you free services out of the goodness of their heart.
This model was sustainable when the internet was adding millions of users per year, but as internet access reaches saturation - Google must do something.
I'd prefer if it was "pay for your email" - but internet users have been openly hostile to paying for anything for 39 years
Livelihood of employees is also a false start, unionization and the accompanying high wages are also a significant factor in the disparity between Western industry and China.
So the ideal blub language will be whatever language is too new to really be the legacy thing with tons of black magic you just have to know, but also too old to include tons of new ideas in language design the programmer has to grapple with.
Old languages force you to understand really core issues because the stack is 1m+ lines of code and you need an operating model for all that magic.
New languages do the same thing, but it's because half the really good stuff is <experimental>
Python and JS are in the current sweetspot, go is up next, and after that, Rust.
Nobody cares about invisible good solutions, because invisible solutions are simple - and developers are to one degree or another, rated on the degree of complexity they can deal with and how smart they can be. It is common here to understand the cleverness behind just doing the dumb thing, but it is not common in many places.
A few: The core reasoning (WMD) was the CIA misinterpreting Saddam grandstanding to his generals as a serious WMD program. This was due to the CIA having an insufficient grasp of the local situation, largely due to the fact that we had only infiltrated isolated parts of the regime and couldn't corroborate.
Slightly before Obama's election, the US forces were effectively ordered to stop patrolling and attempting to take and hold territory in order to reduce the American bodycount for political reasons - this allowed forces outside the green zone to maintain continuity of operations and simply wait for us to get bored and leave.
Similarly, lack of a clear set of objectives, and lack of frank expectations setting with the US population lowered the ability of the DoD to prosecute the war in a winnable fashion.
These aren't small nitpicks, these are core reasons why the GWOT didn't go so well - and almost none of them have anything to do with defense procurement or military mismanagement.