There's some debate over the type of elephant Hannibal's forces used. They were likely not the African elephants we know today, but North African elephants[1]. This was a physically smaller subspecies that was later extirpated by the Romans. Perhaps analysis of the bone in this story will help settle the debate.
It's also worth noting that, despite the insane effort it must have taken to get elephants over the alps, all but one of Hannibal's elephants died during the first winter in Italy. They made for a great story and were a propaganda coup for the Carthaginians, but didn't wind up making much of a military impact. They were only present for the first couple of battles Hannibal fought.
Hannibal knew the elephants would have minimal impact by themselves, they were mainly an instrument of shock and awe and served their purpose well.
For centuries, Romans had grabbed land and defeated enemies mostly by projecting immense power and using shock and awe tactics. Hannibal of course learnt a lot about Roman tactics from his father, Hamilcar, and the “treachery” with which Rome had taken Sicily off Carthaginians. But he also grew up in Spain, in close proximity to Romans, and studied them and their methods for years.
He knew he needed to have an instrument of shock and awe himself, something the Romans had never seen before, and elephants were perfect for that.
For those interested, the Rest is History podcast did a 4 series on Hannibal last year which is highly engaging and informative
>"Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired."
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Scientists go where science is funded. A large proportion of U.S. scientists are also immigrants, who will tend to go where immigrants are welcomed.
Meanwhile, China has "genius camps" for young people, to skim off the cream of the cream of the crop, so they can go on to do amazing things for their country. It blows my mind what we've done in the last year, to damage our ability to compete on the world stage.
It bears repeating: for everyone who insists that the US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies, what different actions would someone who was compromised and trying to speedrun the destruction of American power, influence, and hegemony have taken?
I just said it in another post today, but I had a family member recently die from colorectal cancer when they were on a list for a new treatment at Yale, which was canceled because of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The doctor who was to perform it literally said "I want you to think of this procedure in terms of a cure" when they were stage 4 for like 7 years at that point.
BBB slashed funding for cutting edge medical research which would not only save, or at least prolong lives, but also generate revenue for this country -- when we export our IP, or when people come here for some of the most advanced medical procedures. To say nothing of immigration policies which actively repel some of the best and brightest and may be leading us to an actual population decline.
Sure we weren't perfect by an stretch before, but it feels like we're getting drowned in a toilet at the moment.
This suggests that our executive branch has fallen under the influence of foreign agents through blackmail or coercion of some sort.
Whereas the simpler and more obvious explanation is that the US President shares the general outlook and values of America’s enemies and thus naturally acts in their interests without persuasion needed.
It's under the control of Israel, let's just put it how it is. The whole Epstein/Maxwell case was an Israeli honeypot to gather blackmail on the freaks at high level positions in the US. They have huge amounts of dirt on Trump, the Epstein files were like the tip of the iceberg lol
Watch as Trump will attack Iran again on behalf of Israel. Absolutely insane how the whole system is compromised.
... I can think of a lot actually. They could try to unilaterally reduce the nuclear arsenal and other military power, for instance. They could close down foreign military bases. A lot of those would even be more left-coded actions. A popular left-ish politician who had a platform of reducing foreign involvement wouldn't even need to hide their agenda.
I get the angle, and I'm not even ruling out that some of the BS is sabotage, but in the big picture it's too easy for me to believe the current admin really is that stupid.
You clearly haven't thought about that question at all yourself and are just repeating mindless political rhetoric. Why even say it? Other people have proposed obvious answers. I hope you learn those answers and stop asking.
When people living otherwise-blameless lives begin getting accosted, beaten, or killed on suspicion of the legal equivalent of unpaid parking tickets, then yes, the new enforcement occurring is indeed "evil."
When they start willfully breaking all sorts of other major laws and violating court-orders to enforce the minor law, yes, that's usually evil.
When rationales last-used to jail innocent Japanese-Americans into US "internment" camps during World War II are being resurrected to declare entire nationalities as foreign invaders, yes, that sure looks a lot like the evil it was before.
When people are being snatched off the streets and then shuffled constantly between prisons purely so that their own lawyers cannot find them to challenge their detention, that is evil.
When you're not just normally deporting people under US law, but start sending them--without trial or even charges--to rot for the rest of their lives in an El Salvador torture-prison run by a paid dictator accomplice, YES, that's f***ing evil!
____
I could continue, but I won't, because those should be ample examples for normal Americans who've had over a year to watch all these well-documented things happen... and there is no amount will be enough for someone that secretly likes the evil when it happens to others.
Go try the same in a non-Western country and report the comparative experience.
Histrionics over normal law enforcement that is tame and well-regulated by global standards is embarrassing — it makes Americans look uneducated and childish.
I would argue that wherever you're getting your news from is lying by omission and you have no idea what's actually happening out there.
Alternatively, you're engaging in willful ignorance.
Yes, it's reasonable to want to enforce immigration laws, but ICE has been engaging in outright criminal behavior. Arresting and imprisoning US citizens, denying due process, then ignoring court orders to release them.
Meanwhile, ICE and DHS are lying constantly on their social media pages.
In what universe is it unlawful for law enforcement to arrest U.S. citizens? You are trolling. There's no possibility anyone could possibly believe that.
Sure, ICE does have the authority to perform arrests for some crimes unrelated to immigration, that's not what I'm referring to. ICE is arresting US citizens based on immigration charges.
Tacking on: I feel that is also just secondary "icing on the cake" versus the bigger problem you identified in the rest of your sentence, a portion which they ignored.
Actually, hold up for a second... What kind of self-described "lawyer" could possibly ignore that portion... except by operating in bad-faith?:
> denying due process, then ignoring court orders to release them.
Right, even if ICE/CBP were somehow only grabbing non-citizens and only for reasons vaguely within their legal mandate, that other behavior is still criminal. Those constitutional rights, and protections from the court system, apply to everyone in US jurisdiction regardless of their immigration status.
For anyone interested in more detail: "How ICE defies judges’ orders to release detainees, step by step" [0].
The majority of Americans support immigration enforcement, the majority does not support how it's being done. Enforcement of the law is not the evil you see people being upset about.
Other comparable countries also having roving gangs of secret immigration police that are unbound by the law and the only departments responsible for overseeing them are managed by the same boss that controls them?
Let's start with abandoning science funding, abandoning investments in and tax credits for renewable energy sources that are the future. Then there's applying political pressure to academic institutions to drive even more researchers away, abandoning the civil service and science/reason-based governance. Move over to the medical sector and put a dangerous anti-science nut in charge, kill off funding and research.
You pull out of international organizations, trade deals, and treaties. You throw temper tantrums and tariffs around, flip flopping day to day and making it impossible to predict the costs of doing business. You antagonize the rest of the world and give them a constant stream of reasons to stop doing business with you, leaving you isolated, weaker, and poorer.
Then, sure, let's go briefly to immigration. America has been great because it has been where all the smartest people want to be. Our political and academic environment caused the smartest people around the world to want to be here, and the US benefited massively from their contributions and inventions.
So you build a culture demonizing anyone not a specific shade of white. You destroy visa programs. You send thugs to universities to harass people and make them unwelcome. You tell students and researchers who went home to see family that they can't come back to the US. Then you send thugs into cities to terrorize and murder people. So you give all those brilliant scientists even more reason to leave the US, take their contributions with them, and never return.
Idk, I think a much more effective way to destroy the US would be to send armed gangs through the streets and have them kidnap people from their houses at random.
That would cause far more destruction than merely telling people you were doing that without actually doing it.
The people doing the arresting have no ID and wear masks, arrest people without any evidence, throw them in detention centers and then deny them their legal right to a bond hearing and instead detain them indefinitely. Even someone like you should understand, police are not the judges, they can arrest someone but detaining them for a long period of time requires ascertaining their legal status and offering a chance for bond. The judges also overwhelmingly ruled the same thing, while ICE is directly disobeying their legal orders. If they were law enforcement, they would be following the law not breaking it.
Arresting people solely on the basis of their skin color or having an accent is akin to kidnapping. How many legal residents and citizens are you comfortable with being arrested without a sound legal basis? My number is zero.
It always has been in America. Literally, the history of policing starts with armed gangs looking for escaped slaves, and never went away from those roots. You can see this in their "us or them" combative mentalities, their utter refusal to hold officers accountable even when obviously guilty, their tactics when governments try to impose rules on them, and everything else they do.
How are they not? They’re definitely armed, so only the “gang” part is questionable. Wikipedia says:
“A gang is a group or society of associates, friends, or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collectively, in illegal, and possibly violent, behavior, with such behavior often constituting a form of organized crime.”
I’d say that fits some law enforcement pretty well.
Don't be an ass. Someone can be an ethically bad person and still do things that you can learn and benefit from. Moreover, saying China is doing good at research does not somehow mean you support their government.
The US government is now more authoritarian than the Chinese government. Half of what you've been told is propaganda, like the "social credit score" story.
In China they put people to death for corruption, here they just get a well-paid lobbying job.
I think the next 3 or so years in the US are going to be a real awakening for you, if the last year hasn't. It's going to become more and more difficult to shove your head deeper into the sand.
Oh but this game is fun! I see your Uyghurs and raise the Falun Gong. A religious cult that is against pretty much anything liberal, but because they are a thorn in China's side they get US support and are oh-so-persecuted. They even have an anti-Communist acrobatics show called Shen Yun. Yes, that one, the one that spams your mailbox with flyers, and abuses kids.
if you actually think China would even entertain the idea of funding some of the scientific research conducted in the US over the past few decades, you have a fantasy view of what is going on outside the US. That political controversy wouldn't even arise because it's such a nonstarter that it could never even become a controversy.
Past being the key point. Because, right now it's all Dumpty all the time, until we boot his weak tools and fools November. I'm confident we are stronger than that two bit corrupt fraud, and will get back to where science funding is a priority. Hopefully our state of affairs is much more temporary than what China is subjected to. But there's absolutely no question whether the dunce parade in the US is anti science.
Did you miss Trump's plan to censor the internet except for party approved propaganda? It was on the front page here a few days ago. The propaganda site will be called freedom.gov.
have you seen our school systems, k12. Its terrible and in dire need of a revamp. No child left behind really screwed kids over that want to learn. We cant just let kids pass because of feelings. Made schools better, have alternative paths for kids that are not excelling like some of their peers and find school hard to sit through.
It's really not about this - it's that for decades we've been able to draw top global talent to the US. We've cut research funding so heavy that we can't even support post docs who are American citizens now. My friends are going to Europe, Canada, Hong Kong.
>America’s only real competitor technologically is China
this is a very shortsighted view. america's only real competitor technologically right now is china, because america has typically attracted the top talent from everywhere else.
if america is no longer capable of attracting top talent from everywhere else in the world, and other countries can start attracting american talent, it won't be long before america has a whole lot of real competitors.
Ask this again in 40 years. The people we're losing are early career researchers, so this is really a generational loss of talent that we've created. Brain drains can become self-perpetuating once they start.
America has a very good education system against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration. In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry.
The American education system has major and important challenges, such as how to educate the large share of kids whose parents are economic migrants from non-English speaking countries. But those challenges aren’t relevant to the question of whether the U.S. can produce sufficient highly educated people domestically. China, meanwhile, doesn’t even participate in PISA outside four wealthy provinces.
The facts are in the PISA data collected by the OECD. If you drill down by subpopulation, the majority group in the U.S. goes toe to toe with the majority groups in Asian countries, and beats the majority groups in western european countries: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
National competitiveness and distributional equity don’t go hand in hand. China has made tremendous achievements by focusing investment on key provinces instead of trying to bring everyone up together.
They imported top graduate student talent that went to the us and might have wished to stay but could not or wouldn't put up with the H1-B indentured servitude or was better paid back home or just patriotic.
Also - less financialization. In US, a statistician goes to work for any 3-letter agency or high finance. In a less financialized economy they might devote themselves to crystallography instead.
Don’t forget campaigning to remove standardized testing from admissions processes even leading to UCSD having to create remedial math classes for their engineering students.
White students in the U.S. do comparably to students in Korea in the international PISA test, and better than students from western europe (excluding the immigrants in those countries).
You have to compare like with like. A huge fraction of American kids grow up to parents who are not native speakers of English. That’s not true in Japan or Korea.
Even looking at the entire population, the U.S. has higher reading scores on PISA than the big western european countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy): https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2019/12/pisa-2018-resul.... In reading, the U.S. was basically tied with Japan and the Scandinavian countries.
That is consistent with other international measurements: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1. For example, the U.S. is one of the top performers in the world in the 4th grade literacy--behind Hong Kong but ahead of Macau. In 4th grade math, the U.S. isn't as good, well behind Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. But still comfortably ahead of Germany, Italy, Spain, and France.
You don't want there to be good schools that some people can get into and and garbage schools for everyone else. What you need is a high minimum standard that every last school in the nation has to adhere to and it shouldn't be possible to graduate from any of them without being able to read at grade level.
Whether you want that or not depends on what you're trying to achieve. China has pursued basically the approach you're talking about: focusing on key province to advance them to the cutting edge. The last time China participated international high-school testing, they published scores only four Beijing and three other wealthy provinces: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... And those scores were spectacular! Clearly that approach has some merit if your concern is competing with other countries rather than domestic equity.
I do think it'd be smart to support programs for gifted students and to screen for them. Those programs should be available to anyone in the US who qualifies regardless of where they live or what kind of money they have. Every student should be allowed and encouraged to reach their potential.
Your first point is in tension with your last point. A large fraction of the student population has a low ceiling of potential, and it’s very expensive to try and push them past that ceiling. The focus on doing so sucks up vast amounts of money and teacher attention that then gets pulled away from gifted kids.
That’s why sober and clear-eyed countries like Germany conventionally sort students into tracks starting around age 10.
> Your first point is in tension with your last point.
It really isn't. Every student should have access to quality education that meets them at their level and challenges them. Money spent doing that is not wasted on the vast majority of students. We do not need to have trash tier schools for the majority of the population so that a select few can get better ones.
Identifying where students are at and what their needs are is a good idea that would enable kids to be moved to classes where teachers can work with them at their level. It doesn't necessitate refusing a quality education to anyone. Even students with special educational needs and disabilities deserve a good education.
When students are placed in classrooms according to their level it means that no teacher is pulled away from gifted kids, because those gifted kids have their own teacher working with them. It doesn't mean that children who aren't gifted can't get a high quality education. Putting kids in a class too far above or below their level is not delivering a quality education to them.
Giving every child an environment where they can learn to the best of their ability is expensive, but it's nowhere near as costly as not doing it. Uneducated illiterate children become uneducated illiterate adults and voters. It's not a coincidence that most prison inmates are functionally illiterate. Having a good education enables more children to have a successful future.
The way it works now is that 20% of the bottom students eat up 80% of a teacher’s time and resources. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing depending on what your goals are. What I am saying is that you can’t have everything. You have to choose. This system this comment describes and the system your comment below describes cannot coexist.
That just means that we need to move the bottom 20% of students into their own classes where they can get the extra attention they need. That means they can get a high quality education and so can everyone else. You do not have to choose. You can have both.
If teacher pay made a big difference in outcomes, expensive private schools would have very well paid teachers. But private schools typically have lower teacher pay than public schools.
Teacher pay doesn't have as large an influence on student success as it does on how many people are willing to enter the occupation and stay there. Private school teachers typically deal with far fewer students in the classroom and in much better conditions.
Not everything is about money. The killer app of the US used to be that the US was rich and welcoming to foreigners and politically quite free.
China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.
Their cultural insularity does not help either. You can live in China, but you will never be accepted as Chinese. The US was quite unique (together with Canada, Australia etc.) that it was able and willing to accept you as an American even with a funny accent, as long as you wanted to be one.
Just to add one more point that makes the US attractive to global talent: citizenship. In particular: 1) citizenship at birth and 2) viable path to citizenship via green card.
Of course, both of these are in the crosshairs for “revision”.
That has always been true, and for everywhere. However very few countries are anywhere near as accepting for foreigners as the US as a whole despite the many who are not. Canada is just as accepting from what I can tell - I don't know enough about Australia to know. Most other countries are far worse - though many will not admit it just how bad their country is.
Sadly Australia is very welcoming to foreigners until you get about 50km out of the major cities. Our xenophobe political party (One Nation) has had a significant rally in the last few years, to the point where by some measures it is the second largest party.
Big cities and metropolitan areas are very progressive and welcoming to well educated foreigners, and the countryside is filled with racist idiots who live in fear of something they only know from the television
To be fair, they're still welcoming to foreigners in the bush, just as long as they're white. Rural Australia has many towns that have a strong Italian or Greek heritage (for example).
One Nation are flat racist rather than xenophobe, I think.
And it's being pushed by our billionaires for some reason. You'd think Gina would want cheap immigrant workers on her mines
The problem with billionaires is that they truly have more money than they need. The only thing left for them to pursue is power. Cheap labor only helps them get more money. Racism on the other hand can be used to justify the destruction of democratic institutions which are a billionaires only competition.
It’s the same in the US. Proximity to a city correlates strongly with all forms of openness. It holds nationwide. There aren’t really blue or red states, just predominantly urban or rural ones.
I still don’t quite understand why. The contact hypothesis makes some sense but can that explain the whole urban rural divergence?
Rural populations will even vote hard against their own interests in other areas over culture war stuff.
There's more pressure in rural areas to conform in the sense that people know people that can make your time more difficult if you don't. If you get blacklisted in the bush gl finding any work and that's a survival issue. In the city you can walk around anon most of the time and people are more used to others being different. Dump a new high rise of foreigners that don't speak the local language in a metro area and no-one will notice. Do that in the bush and LOL.
The dilution factor is something I hadn’t thought about.
Dump a few hundred foreigners in a town of 5000 and that’s very noticeable and some people will find it jarring. Dump ten thousand foreigners in a metro of three million and nobody will notice.
The point about conformism and exile cost is good too. Cities present endless options for social circles and employment. Little towns not so much.
To expand on this, consider the historic importance of culture for improving survival odds and thus conformism as a natural consequence. So it makes sense that people in smaller groups would exhibit associated tendencies, and also that people who exhibit those tendencies would tend to gravitate towards smaller groups.
That's probably all that matters TBH. If you can attract top talent to major cities where top schools, research firms, and companies in general, what does the opinions and attitudes of people 50km away matter?
Ok It probably matters during elections and the policies that lead up to them (must appease the rural vote with mostly symbolic and emotionally wretching anti-immigrant rhetoric) but cities need skilled (and unskilled) labour and when they get what they need they stand to generate a lot of money (re taxes to the policy makers from earlier).
> what does the opinions and attitudes of people 50km away matter?
Well, using Texas as an example, it's those people 50km away that win elections. Of course, gerrymandering helps, but even with large metro areas leaning left, there's enough of those 50km away that swings that lean to the right.
Ignore the people in the rural areas as your own peril
When the part of the country that was less unique took power, they immediately did what everyone else that was not unique did and became unwelcoming of foreigners.
I guess to you other countries that the US is becoming more like would also not be of a hive mind by having people that are welcoming of foreigners. Where's your hive mind comment about that part of the original comment?
Well, perhaps it is time for large, ethnically-homogenous countries that are on the ascent to adopt diversity policies of the sort that the US was approaching before the "vibe shift"
How could they not be? If people cannot emigrate to the US then they won’t settle there. A relatively open immigration policy absolutely helped make America diverse. I’m pretty sure that’s what OP is referring to, not DEI or whatever the latest boogeyman is.
Canada is largely still homogeneous but still welcoming to immigrants and very close to the US. Rather than China totally changing cultures, I think it’s more likely that US-based companies will have large satellite offices in middle powers.
I'm Canadian and unless you're talking about the middle of Saskatchewan I don't know what you mean - no city over a hundred thousand here is homogenous.
I have been in small towns in the Maritimes where people looked shocked to see an Indian immigrant with me, probably for the first time ever. I meant more in relation to the US, though, which is a much more diverse country.
Canada is 70% white where the US is close to 50%. That 20% puts them far above the majority line though. Not at all homogeneous, just much more so than the US.
I will say that perogies are amazing and were much cheaper in Alberta than Newfoundland so you get an upvote. But don’t discount that this is also true of the white population in the US.
"White" is not one ethnicity or culture -- a lot of that 70% are French-speaking Quebeckers who surely cannot be considered part of a homogeneous mass with Anglo-Canadians.
I’m upvoting you because you’re 110% right but don’t discount how diverse the US is too, without an obvious divider like that. The New Orleans Cajun are also French immigrants, for example.
> Are you suggesting that anyone who lives and works here in the US can be accepted as “American”?
Whether you're born in Moscow and named Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, or born in Pretoria and named Elon Reeve Musk, or born in Hyderabad and named Satya Narayana Nadella, born in Frankfurt and named Peter Andreas Thiel - America has a place for you. Maybe even your own government department.
In America a man can find acceptance regardless of the circumstances of his birth, and irrespective of race, creed and colour, so long as he has a billion dollars.
> The killer app of the US used to be that the US was rich and welcoming to foreigners and politically quite free.
Yeah, it used to be the that the US only committed ethnic cleansing against people that were here first, not foreigners, and was so welcoming to foreigners that it would expend resources to have them shipped here as property.
> China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.
I mean we are literally putting people in concentration camps right now. Kinda hard to take the moral high ground at the moment. Scientists are fleeing the United States for their safety, just like they did from 1930s Germany.
"Concentration camp” is a term that predates its (somewhat euphemistic, when done in retrospect) use for the camps eventually used in the extermnation campaign by the Nazis (which also started out as concentration camps, in the more usual sense, as part of what was nominally a deportation program.)
Though concentration camps are almost always part of systematic, ethnically-targetted abuse, even when they aren't part of genocide campaigns.
Yes. For example, the U.S. also had ethnically-based "concentration camps" (but not extermination camps) during WWII.
But these are not like the concentration camps of the 1940s.
"Detention camps" are a more accurate descriptor -- both technically and connotatively -- when they are holding foreign nationals prior to repatriation.
I’m having a hard time understanding how the ICE detention facilities do not meet the Wikipedia definition of concentration camp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp. Can you help me out?
“A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for internment”
Internment is long-term (see Wikipedia), whereas the ICE detention centers are short-term (average stay < 30 days but depends on time for deportation ).
The Wikipedia page for Internment [1] doesn't include the words long-term when I view it.
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime.
> ICE detention centers are short-term (average stay < 30 days but depends on time for deportation ).
Seamus Culleton has been held for 5 months so far [2]. I'm willing to accept this is an outlier but to my knowledge ICE isn't providing transparency on much of anything, including how long they are holding people. Do you have a source for your average 30 days claim?
E: According to AP [3] this is not an outlier:
With the number of people in ICE detention topping 70,000 for the first time, 7,252 people had been in custody at least six months in mid-January, including 79 held for more than two years, according to agency data. That’s more than double the 2,849 who were in ICE custody at least six months in December 2024, the last full month of Joe Biden’s presidency.
This looks even worse when we consider [4]:
Bond eligibility changed drastically in July 2025. ICE issued a memo eliminating bond hearings for most people who entered without inspection. They’re now classified as “applicants for admission” subject to mandatory detention.
Cases moved faster before 2025. New policies have expanded mandatory detention. Court backlogs grew worse. The detained docket now averages 60-90 days for initial hearings, but stretches to years for final decisions.
As of November 2025, ICE held over 65,000 people. Three-quarters had no criminal convictions. Average detention length climbed from 47 days in FY2024 to over 50 days by mid-2025. Complex cases take much longer.
Seamus Culleton is allowed to leave detention, he just can't stay in the US. He is choosing to stay in detention while he pursues legal challenges to his deportation order.
The Germans ran work camps, concentration camps, and death camps. Right now the United States is only running two of the three. We have work camps (prisons) and concentration camps (detention facilities).
That you know of. The German people didn't even know about the death camps running in their own back yards; they thought they were just "regular" concentration/work camps. The Allied troops rounded up lots of German civilians near these camps after the war and forced them at gunpoint to walk through the camps and see for themselves what they had been supporting.
It is abhorrent, that these days, just because it serves one’s domestic political narrative, one is willing to paint the victims of state-organized industrial killings as mere illegal border crossers. The Nazi’s victims were German citizens, not illegal migrants.
I’m not sure who told you that the Nazis only killed German citizens, considering that they famously invaded Poland (a sovereign nation at the time) and started executing Jews there.
I also don’t know who told you that they’re only putting illegal migrants in Alligator Alcatraz. It’s not hard to find examples of people who had legal visas being rounded up because of the Trump administration’s idiotic quota policy.
Don't get it twisted. While what is happening is not right, explain to me what happens when there is criticism of China from within China on their treatment of Uyghurs.
America is hostile to science and technology. I'm not sure how anyone with a functional desire to improve humanity decides "Hey, those americans, they sure do deserve better vaccines."
> I'm not sure how anyone with a functional desire to improve humanity decides "Hey, those americans, they sure do deserve better vaccines."
Because people understand that people don't get to choose their government or culture and that everyone deserves better healthcare. Every child who is at risk from the rise of anti-vax 100% deserves better vaccines and ought to bear 0% responsibility for what the adults do.
Lots of folks vote against better healthcare. Perhaps they “deserve” better healthcare regardless as they’re human, but perhaps they deserve the outcomes they specifically voted for. Otherwise it feels a little paternalistic.
Some people will switch careers, but I do doubt that in an economy with very low unemployment amongst qualified people, any actual scientist will literally starve and become homeless.
DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic pay quite well for research and have better "labs" than most places on Earth. I don't believe they're struggling to hire either.
This article is using a relatively outdated definition, functionally speaking, of "research institute".
Traditional research institutions, especially academia, have been declining for decades and current funding problems are just another one of many problems thrown into the mix.
I remember well a world where most serious research happened in universities and was publicly funded. I personally think that was a better world, but that is not the world we live in today and I don't see us going back. Even China's most impressive research is not coming from publicly controlled research institutes or universities but from VCs and large corporations.
To be fair, the time of open public science was a relatively brief in it's long history.
For every scientific discipline that is well represented across modern corporate labs there are a dozen that are not. Most "serious" research is not directly connected to making money.
There has also been debate about which species of elephant Hannibal's forces used. Elsewhere, Hellenistic Greek forces used Asian elephants, but many believe Hannibal used North African elephants, a sub-species that was extirpated by the Romans. Their proportions might have been a little different than living elephants. It will be interesting to see if the bone can help settle this debate.
The article suggests that AI-related productivity gains could follow a J-curve. An initial decline, as initially happened with IT, followed by an exponential surge. They admit this is heavily dependent on the real value AI provides.
However, there's another factor. The J-curve for IT happened in a different era. No matter when you jumped on the bandwagon, things just kept getting faster, easier, and cheaper. Moore's law was relentless. The exponential growth phase of the J-curve for AI, if there is one, is going to be heavily damped by the enshitification phase of the winning AI companies. They are currently incurring massive debt in order to gain an edge on their competition. Whatever companies are left standing in a couple of years are going to have to raise the funds to service and pay back that debt. The investment required to compete in AI is so massive that cheaper competition may not arise, and a small number of (or single) winner could put anyone dependent on AI into a financial bind. Will growth really be exponential if this happens and the benefits aren't clearly worth it?
The best possible outcome may be for the bubble to pop, the current batch of AI companies to go bankrupt, and for AI capability to be built back better and cheaper as computation becomes cheaper.
I've heard similar theories put forth about amoral wall street bankers. The gist of it was that old-school WASP bankers were relatively trustworthy because most of them believed that God was watching them. They were smart enough to outsmart the law, but not their religious sensibilities. Then amoral papists, Catholics, and whatnot came in and everything went to pot. (Some of the people spouting this theory were explicitly racist on top of it all.)
This theory was mainly used for discrimination, but there might have been a small grain of truth. Some people will do the right thing because they see that society functions only if most people behave in the common interest. Some people only do the right thing because they fear consequences, and fear of God can be good enough for people who are firmly convinced they're too smart to be caught by anyone else. Perhaps a decline in religion has unfettered the inherently amoral. In reality, it may just have been that enough bankers started doing amoral things that the rest decided they had to as well in order to keep up.
We might be seeing something similar in U.S. colleges. Some students have no fear of the consequences of being caught in a lie, and many more are simply reacting to seeing obvious frauds being rewarded with real advantages. Prof's and TA's are probably quite aware of what's going on, but are afraid to call it out. If a prof denies a student's bogus disability entitlements they could be sued or fired.
So, how do you walk this back? Unlike finance scams, it's relatively easy to spot fake disabilities. Universities could do their own assessments instead of relying on whatever outside doctors students can get to say they have a disability. They could strongly support profs who take action against fakers. This may cost them donations from upset parents, but failure to reign the fakery in could tarnish the brand of elite colleges and, eventually, cost them even more. Then again, it may already be the case that an ivy league degree says more about connections than competence.
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Edit:
I just wanted to add that I really dislike the above theory and in no way endorse hiring religious people over non-religious people. In my experience, religious people are every bit as good as rationalizing immoral behaviour as everyone else, and are frequently even better at it.
The point I was trying to drive at is that some people act badly when there is no accountability. It's clear that both investment bankers and college kids need to be policed, but it's comparatively easy to catch college kids faking disabilities.
For the university disability question, an answer could be to give everyone the same advantages like more time on an exam, or give no one any. The current situation is almost designed to incentivize pretending to have a disability. This is what university is now teaching; lying works.
> They're highly religious and you can't trust the mostly atheist Whites like that
I have ethnic Indian heritage. This argument is B.S. It’s commonly lofted, including by WASPS. But the truth is familiarity in tribal dynamics predates such rationalization. There is more trust in tribe. But that isn’t because its members are more trustworthy. Just familiar.
It's not that AI is intrinsically better at software engineering, writing, or art than it is at learning how to clean toilets. It's not. The real issue is that cleaning toilets using humans is cheap.
That, sadly, is the incentive driving the current wave of AI innovation. Your job will be automated long before your household chores are.
It's possible to put holes through things without a drill. People can get onto islands without boats. How do you define rope, and what else might cause similar wear? Are you certain you can distinguish them?
Archaeology has come a long way over the last couple of centuries. It used to be little better than grave robbing and crackpot (often racist) theories. Archaeologists made all sorts of assumptions that turned out to be ridiculously (and sometimes tragically) wrong. Excavations once involved dynamite and bulldozers. Things have changed. Techniques for re-analyzing and extracting new information from old finds are allowing archaeologists to make discoveries without digging at all. Even a careful, modern dig is a destructive act that can only be conducted once.
If you find a man made hole with a perfectly vertical shaft and high aspect ratio (tall and narrow), it was drilled. Individuals can float or be washed ashore on an island, populations can't. If you find entire civilizations on distant islands, they got there by some sort of boat or advanced raft. Rope generally implies twisted or braided fibers, so maybe it's difficult to tell if this was artificially twisted or a natural one like a vine. But if it looked like a rope, and was used like a rope then it was a rope.
DS9 and B5 came out at roughly the same time and shared a similar concept: The (mis)adventures of the crew of a bustling space station. The divergence from there is extreme.
DS9 very quickly brought in the Defiant so that its characters could escape the station and go on more traditional Star Trek adventures. The station was home base, but the crew got out a lot. It typically felt like the station was well under control, with only minor differences between it and a star-fleet vessel. (Toss Quark and Garak out an airlock and you'd pretty much have a standard starship.)
B5 did send its characters on excursions, but they were fewer and far between. The station was not a safe home base. It was a bigger and wilder place than DS9 ever was. It always felt like some crisis or another was ready to spiral out of control and the staff generally needed all hands on deck to deal with whatever was happening. DS9 had the occasional crowd scene, but B5 had bigger crowds (in record shattering amounts of alien makeup) every episode. DS9 felt like a sleepy frontier fort. B5 felt like a city.
Then there's the continuity. There just wasn't a lot of continuity in anything other than soap operas in the mid 90's. TNG occasionally had multi-part episodes and sometimes referenced earlier episodes, but it was always careful to explain things so you could jump in anywhere and not be lost. DS9 was initially episodic, but had some larger arcs in later seasons, perhaps as a response to what B5 was doing. B5 broke the mold. The first season seemed episodic at first glance, but each episode advanced the central story-line. You could jump into Season 1 at any point and be a little confused, but figure things out. That swiftly changed. Later seasons became completely continuous, and frequently relied on bits of story that happened in earlier seasons without any kind of hand-holding. This caused big problems that probably prevented B5 from being as well received as it should have been.
This is for the young whippersnappers out there who grew up with the internet, streaming, and home video: Today, if you decide to jump into a show, you can call up every episode on demand. If it's not on a streaming service, it's on DVD or VHS. Failing that, there's always piracy. When B5 came out, it was not a given that a TV series would be released on VHS or DVD. The internet was there, but it wasn't yet up to distributing video. There was no such thing as streaming. The era of Netflix mailing you physical discs was years in the future. If you wanted to watch a TV show, you had to tune in when it was broadcast. It was, essentially, live TV.
The kicker is that most broadcasters were utterly irresponsible in how they aired shows. Episodes would frequently be pre-empted or aired out of order. Broadcasters were used to purely episodic content. Who cared if people saw episode 5 before episode 2, or missed episode 3 until it got reran the following year? This royally fubar'd people's ability to follow B5. My personal memory of B5 when it first aired was fragmentary and frustrating. I'd watch an episode and really enjoy it, try to tune in next week only for it to be pre-empted by golf, and then be lost when an episode from much later in the season was aired the week after that. It wasn't until B5 came out on DVD (years later) that I was finally able to watch the show in order and finally appreciate how special it was.
Continuity between episodes is normal now. Everyone is used to shows that play out as one long narrative instead of hitting the reset button every week. B5 blazed the trail for them before TV distribution was really ready for continuity. There are a lot of warts to overlook. CG was in its infancy back then. DS9 was still using physical models in its first few seasons. B5 looks like it came out of somebody's Amiga because it literally came out of somebody's Amiga. There probably won't ever be a quality up-scaling of the special effects because a lot of the files from that Amiga were lost. The set design is clever, but stagy. The budget of B5 doesn't even add up to half a shoestring by modern standards for a show with 10 episodes a season, and B5 had 22 episodes a season! The story is so grand and detailed that it still feels rushed at times. (They thought the show would be cancelled at the end of S4, so they crammed most of S5's plot into S4. The result is fantastically dense and frenetic!)
In the end, DS9 was a fantastic show but felt a lot like the station featured in it. It was always well under control and its creators got everything they needed to deliver a compelling show. They knew how far to reach and chose their battles wisely. B5 feels like a wild and overreaching fever dream by comparison. It nearly span out of control, much like its titular station was always threatening to. If they decided to re-make B5 today, they'd probably simplify it immensely. It's story still seems too ambitious for a single TV series to tell. If you can get past the warts, B5 is still a unique and rewarding series to experience. Nothing quite like it has come along since.
> Continuity between episodes is normal now. Everyone is used to shows that play out as one long narrative instead of hitting the reset button every week.
It actually feels more like most shows make things up along the way for each episode or at least each season, always trying to one up previous universe-shattering changes in order to give the audience their dopamine hit. While the continuity was well done in B5 it's been mostly a disaster for the industry afterwards.
1. Given the bad press, they may reverse their decision to do this.
2. If they don't about-face, there's a lot about the implementation that remains to be seen.
Personally, I use discord for things that should be completely unaffected by this. I will not verify my age if there are surprises. I'll leave. If the communities I'm a part of decide to move, I'll support them and move even if I don't run into surprises.
There is absolutely no way we should support giving identifying information to a U.S. company given what's going on right now. The trust is no longer there. If you verify your identity, anything you say on Discord could be used against you if you ever pass through American borders.
They've done this because AU, NZ, and the UK all require this today. At least 5 EU countries are voting on it [0] with several led by Denmark encouraging it to be an EU-wide law. Most US states have a law in some part of the process as well, with at least a handful with laws on the books [1].
At some point every social media service is going to have to do this. Discord got a ton of bad press by being the first to say it out loud (and ask for feedback about it!) and give a timeline for worldwide roll out (early May). Discord isn't going to be the last to announce it. I think we all expect Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) to roll out whatever their solution will be under the cover of darkness (and dark patterns), just shows up one day with no easy opt-out and worse than what Discord is currently planning.
> There is absolutely no way we should support giving identifying information to a U.S. company given what's going on right now.
For what little it is worth, so far Discord has been using a third-party vendor for handling this information called k-ID [2]. k-ID looks like it is fully remote and has a globally distributed workforce including many in the US, but its press kit and job posting imply it is a company registered and based out of the Republic of Singapore.
Corporations do whatever is in their financial interest, provided it is legal. They're neither good or evil. (If they were DnD characters their alignment would be "lawful greedy".) What is legal is determined by governments, who are elected by individuals like you.
This is why people need to be reminded of the impact and causes of climate change. You can't just say, "Oil corporations are evil" and absolve yourself of responsibility. That's how nothing gets done. Corporations are not going to stop being "evil" of their own accord. They're going to obey the laws and regulations set forth by the governments they operate under.
Americans elected a president who openly campaigned on bringing back coal and said, "Drill baby drill!". Oil executives made campaign donations but, ultimately, this is the fault of Americans. They're not educated enough and they tolerate too much money in their politics. Scapegoating oil companies does nothing to solve these problems.
It's also worth noting that, despite the insane effort it must have taken to get elephants over the alps, all but one of Hannibal's elephants died during the first winter in Italy. They made for a great story and were a propaganda coup for the Carthaginians, but didn't wind up making much of a military impact. They were only present for the first couple of battles Hannibal fought.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_elephant
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