I hope this signals a turning point and lessons learned from the historic practice of hoarding exploits in the hopes they can be weaponized.
when you disclose vulnerabilities and exploits, you effectively take cannons off both sides of the metaphorical battle field. it actively makes society safer.
Governments who want power will hoard the knowledge, which is power. Other governments will share. This is perpetual tension: we collectively receive utility when good policy is active (rapid dissemination of vuln info), but we need third parties to seek these exploits out when government cannot be relied on. Very similar to the concept of journalism being the Fourth Estate imho.
(vuln mgmt in finance is a component of my day gig)
Only predictive capabilities & AI trained on data can be more valuable than having perfect profile of the person who turns out to be an enemy of your nation in whatever sense. Taking a person down once you know everyone they have ever talked, been interested about, or thought, is trivial. This can only be acheived by mass surveillance & hoarding.
Arguably US as a nation state has the very best LLMs in the world, which is why I personally think they have been running weak AGI for few years, e.g. for autonomous malware analysis, reverse-engineering, and tailored malware generation & testing capability. Because they can actually store the personal data long term, without habing to delete it, this may be of gigantic strategic advantage due web being highly "polluted" after 2020-2021.
I would from this guess US has bet on AI research since end of WWII, and especially within last 30 years, noting the rather highly remarkable possibility that Surveillance Capitalism is actually part of the nation's security effforts. The warehouses of data they have built are warehouses of gold, or rather, gold mixed in sand since of course lots of it is also garbage.
Has the US done anything that huge and kept it secret? The Manhattan project is the only one I can think of, and that involved sequestering the entirety of the nations top physicists, chemists, and metallurgists in the desert and employed 130,000 people. This was before the internet and during a time when Americans were unified in a war effort in a way that hasn't existed before or since.
It is substantially different from hoarding guns: not hoarding exploits takes away those exploits from adversaries.
If an important factor is the ratio of exploits A and B have, then publishing their hidden but common exploits the ratio does not remain the same.
The ratio is interesting because potential exploitation rate is proportional zero days (once used, the "zero" day is revealed and remediated after a certain time span).
You're the expert, and certainly not wrong, I wrote my comment because I have had to explain this to folks in a professional capacity and thought it might be helpful.
It's just a rhetoric thing. We're talking about the USG "hoarding" stuff, but, in a sense, the government has a conceptual monopoly on this kind of coercive capability. Anybody can find vulnerabilities and write exploits, but using them in anger and without mutual consent is an authority exclusively granted to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This is just an extension of the "monopoly on violence".
The longstanding objection to this is that secretly holding a gun doesn't intrinsically make everyone less safe, and there's a sense in which not disclosing a vulnerability does. That argument made more sense back in and before 2010; it doesn't make much sense now.
Most likely these vulnerabilities were known by adversaries and they decided to report these to make it more difficult for those adversaries to attack.
I’m sure the really juicy zero days they’ve discovered in-house are kept out of reports like these
> when you disclose vulnerabilities and exploits, you effectively take cannons off both sides of the metaphorical battle field. it actively makes society safer
If I know you always disclose, and I find something you haven't disclosed, I know I have an edge. That incentivises using it because I know you can't retaliate in kind.
The hoarding of vulns is a stability-instability paradox.
You can’t know (in the mathematical certainty sense) that they always disclose. But you can know if some entity has the policy of always disclosing. Those are two different things. A policy is about the intentions and the structure of the organisation. How they think about themselves, how they train their recruits and how they structure their operations.
The first hint would be the agency stating that they have a policy of always disclosing. You would of course not believe that because you are a spy with trust issues. But then you would check and hear from all kind of projects and companies that they are receiving a steady stream of vulnerability reports from the agency. You could detect this by compromising the communications or individuals in the projects receiving the reports, or through simple industrial rumours. That would be the second hint.
Then you would compromise people in the agency for further verification. (Because you are a spy agency. It is your job to have plants everywhere.) You would ask these people “so what do you do when you find a vulnerability?” And if the answer is “oh, we write a report to command and we sometimes never hear about it again” then you know that the stated policy is a lie. If they tell you “we are expected to email the vulnerable vendor as soon as possible, and then work with them to help them fix it, and we are often asked to verify that the fix is good” then you will start to think that the policy is actually genuine.
Also, not a joke, this program contains the word "equity" ("the Director of National Intelligence is required to annually report data related to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process") so it will probably be frozen or cancelled.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily (exclusively?) for political/ideological/national battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against.
I doubt it. Historically, most government agencies around the world have had appalling security and each iteration is just as bad as the previous with a few half-assed patches on top to cover the known holes.
You're only a contrarian on message boards. The economics of CNE SIGINT are so clear --- you'd be paying integer multiples just in health benefits for the extra staff you'd need if you replaced it --- that vulnerabilities could get 10x, maybe 100x more expensive and the only thing that would change would be how lucrative it was to be a competitive vuln developer.
A lot of things can be understood better through the lens of "what reduces truck rolls".
In theory, I agree. In practice, how do you explain how NSO Group kept the secret for the 0-day exploit for WhatsApp remote execute for its Pegasus product? Or do I misunderstand Pegasus? Maybe it isn't a one trick pony, but a platform to continuously deliver 0-day exploits.
Well, I'm just saying: the preceding comment believed themselves to be a contrarian for thinking it was OK for NSA to have these vulns, and it looked like you were rebutting them. But your rebuttal, if that's what it is, restates a premise NSA shares.
The meaning I took from that comment is that the NSA should always keep any 0-day it finds indefinitely until it uses them. That's what I think "hoard" and "disclose only after they burn" means. It's a mindset of keeping everything you find secret because you might want to use it someday.
My understanding of VEP is that the default is supposed to be to disclose immediately unless an agency has a really good reason not to, presumably because they want to use it soon. Don't hoard, only keep things that you're actually going to use.
For clarity: the word "hoard" to me signals the idea that NSA keeps dozens of duplicative exploit chains around. The public policy rationale for them doing that is to me clear, but my understanding is that the practical incentives for them to do that aren't clear at all.
When I say "burn", I mean that something has happened to increase the likelihood that an exploit chain is detectable. That could be them being done with it, it could be independent discovery, it could be changes in runtime protections. It's not "we use it a couple times and then deliberately burn it", though.
We should stop talking about "NSA", because this is basically a universal LE/IC practice (throughout Europe as well).
Their charter was to take over COMINT from the military into a new joint administrative agency. Their work includes securing communications between allies as much as it does breaking communications from our belligerents. This work necessarily provides them with the types of knowledge and experience that would be highly valuable in securing infrastructure against similar attacks.
Likewise they've involved themselves in both improving and harming civilian cryptography systems and research for years. They're a complex agency and the value of COMINT can be realized under many different root paradigms. It's absurd to think otherwise.
You hoard knowledge by writing it down somewhere and then hoarding the places it's written down. Whether that's books, microfilm, hard drives, what have you
That's definitely the downside in the trade-off, yeah. If you're going to hoard you better also protect or you just get the worst of all worlds. Still, I am generally hopeful about our intelligence agencies' ability to prevent leaks, even if fuckups have occurred.
That's not the real downside. If it were, you'd be seeing mini-"shadow brokers" leaks every month, because the practice we're talking about here is extremely widespread: the economics of being a zero-day broker hinge on being able to sell the same exploit chain many, many times to the same country, and to get recurring revenue each such sale.
The real downsides here are probably economic and have to do with how this shifts incentives for everybody in the industry. But, at the same time, every big tech company with a desktop/mobile footprint has invested mightily on staff to counter LE/IC/foreign CNE, which is something that might not have happened otherwise, so it's all complicated.
People write as if the disclosure of a bunch of IC zero days is like some kind of movie-plot "Broken Arrow" situation, but it's really mostly news for message boards. Organizations that need to be resilient against CNE are already in a state of hypervigilance about zero-days; adversaries absolutely have them, no matter what "NSA" does.
OK, hoarding discovered zero-days might not be the best strategy, BUT if we actually create a backdoor and don't tell anyone about it, then this should be safer right? right? /s
Probably not, trump's first term he was all for allowing ransomware. And the only reason we started seeing a strategy for mitigating was because of Biden. Since trump is all in on crypto and the fact that russia is the main beneficiary of ransomware, I highly expect cybercrime to ramp up as the current admin is positioned to benefit directly.
All major governments hoard 0days or buy them to use for espionage. I dont see this being some kind of "turning point" and more of a feel good easy PR win for the US gov but really they are still using many 0days to spy.
Yeah, this is more like "these vulnerabilities are no longer useful to us" or "adversaries have discovered these and began using them, so here you go."
Americans may not think of themselves as an “empire,” but much of the world does. The average age of empires, according to a specialist on the subject, the late Sir John Bagot Glubb, is 250 years. After that, empires always die, often slowly but overwhelmingly from overreaching in the search for power.
Thinking about, that's around 5 generations, if we calculate, with each generation having roughly 50 years of power and relevant impact. So we have the first generation build the empire, the second solidifying it, and the next three upholding and slowly losing it. Interestingly, this mirrors how many rich families develop over time until they fall back into "poverty".
If you're talking about that book, he handpicked the empires and the "dates of decline" to fit the narrative harder than undergrad writing their thesis night before deadline. ;)
That's true, but those empires also had periods of traumatic decline and upheaval. Given if you grant those entities continuity for those time scales, there were absolutely periods in the middle where everything went to shit. Using a 1500 year number for Rome includes having half the empire drop off and die.
The more important idea isn't the 250 years (I agree), the idea is that it's not unreasonable to model aspects of America as an empire.
I’d argue that the US is experiencing the transition from republic to empire that Rome did — also during a period of decline and political corruption.
My point was that decline and regrowth, or even political transition as with Rome, happen frequently — not just decline followed by collapse (or “death”).
That's fair enough, but I feel like more modern examples are probably more relevant than Ancient Rome or China. The modern world offers significantly more ways for rival powers to assert influence in periods of weakness.
I'd also argue that for most people anxious right now, the idea that America might be in a transitional period of turmoil, but that it'll emerge stronger in 20 years (I made up that number) is of cold comfort.
China is also a modern example: they endured a political collapse and century of humiliation, but successfully reconstituted themselves into a world power comparable in many ways to imperial China. Russia at the end of the USSR has also successfully endured a period of collapse, during which Putin rose to power and successfully navigated to being an influential country. (Though, less so than China and with remaining challenges.)
> I'd also argue that for most people anxious right now, the idea that America might be in a transitional period of turmoil, but that it'll emerge stronger in 20 years (I made up that number) is of cold comfort.
Trump is popular precisely on that platform — that we can do hard work now and reverse the decline in the US.
I think people would be comforted to know that it would only be twenty years — a lot of Millennials in that movement don’t believe they’ll see it, but are nevertheless doing it for their children (or relatives). A not infrequent sentiment is “it’s over for us bros, but do it for the kids!”
That's cool, I didn't understand that about the movement. I'm honestly very skeptical and dismayed about many aspects of the movement. For example, I'm instinctively skeptical that the timescale and depth of turmoil and rebirth is truly understood and accepted amongst the majority of movement supporters. And I'm afraid of the tools being unleashed to achieve and lock in changes.
But it was also clear that there were many aspects of status quo that were deeply problematic. So I understand the urge at least.
So time to retrench and look inwardly instead of projecting power?
Maybe instead of meddling in international affairs via cover NGOs, let those people work out their own problems like we did in our early republic. We don't have to be captain save-a-hoe for the world.
disingenuous headline. America desperately needs to reform ATC hiring.
This is the same headline as the professional trucking shortage in the USA and glosses over the real reasons no one will take these jobs. mandatory overtime, low wages, miserable benefits, high stress and a well documented history of retaliation against organized labor.
Certain immigrants actually seem to excel in trucking and even enjoy it (Punjabi truckers especially in California - I always see the Sikh logos on the back of their trucks between LA and SF!). A quick policy adjust would resolve any shortage in truckers with other people who'd probably also enjoy the work.
However, there isn't a massive pool of people abroad who can handle US airspace demands (which now seems to include helicopters flying in the approach pathways of active runways in VFR while wearing night vision goggles and ignoring their radar altimeters all so some DC asshat doesn't have to sit in a car for 20 minutes, and also includes people like my former college hallmates who take handheld aviation radios, ask for permission to depart, and run on the taxiways with their arms extended, to great dismay of ATC)
> and also includes people like my former college hallmates who take handheld aviation radios, ask for permission to depart, and run on the taxiways with their arms extended, to great dismay of ATC
You can't just drop a tidbit like that without elaborating.
IMO this is only going to be a thing for as long as:
0. it takes the reigning POTUS to realize its causing problems that are impacting wealthy elites (24 hours in the case of tariffs)
1. 4 years.
If i were product owner/manager of any of these teams id recommend we fork the codebase for 4 years and call it done. keep the forked version on standby with backports of major content updated in case you wind up with this sort of situation again, but dont start ripping all this stuff out of prod.
Or if on a longer timeline, build culture war into the release as a feature flag (culture=1, culture=0, etc..)
If this is the case, incepting everyone with the idea in advance subconsciously lowers resistance right now, when nothing can be done, because this is all hypothetical.
And if it isn't the case, you can't be taken seriously.
Simply respond to the moment, in the moment. That is already enough.
Plus remember: he doesn't need to be a dictator, because he won a democratic election. If anything, liberals should be focusing on how to avoid JD Vance simply winning in 2028.
It's not "histrionics"; they tried it last time and they'll try it again. This time they seem more organized, so I wouldn't be surprised if they succeed. If you care about the US remaining a functioning democracy, you should work in whatever way you can toward removing the current administration from power.
"They" are not any more organized now than they were then, they're simply better staffed. This is precisely why Trump has to use executive orders (many of which are rescinded instantly) and send Elon on dummy missions instead of just doing the durable thing: whipping Congress into passing law.
As it stands, the only durable policy win of his term so far was achieved on a bipartisan basis and mostly passed before he even took office: the Laken Riley Act. Why isn't the opposition party acting as opposition?
> If you care about the US remaining a functioning democracy, you should work in whatever way you can toward removing the current administration from power.
The U.S. is already not a functioning democracy (see 2016 and 2020), and removing the current administration from power (illegally?) will not change that.
This constant cycle of ineffective freakouts that America's liberal bloc find themselves in every 4 years is a large part of the reason why Trump won to begin with.
not disagreeing with anything you wrote, well, except that very last line.
he won because many groups of people were promised exactly what they wanted to hear. majority of america is very dumb. to the point it seems intentional. they reject any attempt to be informed about this subject. people routinely having abortions voted trump. people on SSI voted for trump. unemployed people voted for trump. disabled veterans voted for trump. literal nazis trump -- and i'm not saying HE is one, i'm saying that his campaign made sure they see him as one, and it absolutely worked ... over and over again against many of these groups whom are just frothing for fellow haters
i get really upset trying to figure out how to resolve this. but i can't even talk to the couple of relatives i have who are in this cult. if they detect you aren't praising the leader, things get hostile fast.
I think the way out is to offer an alternative vision for the future that speaks to their wants and needs. The problem is that it can't happen overnight -- attacking the cult leader just raises their hackles. People have to come to that conclusion themselves. The Democrats don't have the ability to raise an effective counter to Trump at the moment that isn't an attack on the man himself. There's no substantive positive vision for the future -- because part of mainstream liberal politics is the idea that things are mostly ok as they are, minus some egalitarian tweaks in terms of rights for certain minority groups, etc.
But people have the sense -- in some cases rightfully and in some not -- that their lives aren't going great. So they look to someone to offer an opportunity for change. And they're willing -- really primed, by all of American society -- to throw under the bus whatever boogeyman is necessary as dictated by the Fox News monster of the week™
Doesn't change the facts on the ground. He loves the uneducated, and is doing everything he can to make sure future generations are less educated than their parents were.
You're fooling yourself if you think they're not doing this for their own ends and that it's an attempt to end an oligarchy rather than have it persist.
Except that anyone who has even basic knowledge of history understands that democracies fall to democratically elected leaders. Those leaders tend to share a number of personal attributes, and a style of rhetoric that remains similar with only the specific social group or identified problem changing. They often are supported only by small minorities of the population but control much of the apparatus of government. Consolidation of power, unwillingness to tolerate alternative views, legislative and court systems which abdicate their responsibilities, and dozens of other attributes. On a case by case basis its only taken a handful of those situations to install a dictator. The specific personality types who believe in their holy cause over the norms of following the rules and are willing to bend or break the rules to support it. It comes from the understanding that congress doesn't actually control the debt ceiling if the guy sitting in front of the treasury computer decides to press the button to raise it without congressional approval to "save the country" or whatever other rules need breaking in order to save us from a plausible sounding emergency. And Trump has again, shown he is willing to invent emergencies to win political battles.
So, relecting a person who has already shown a tendency to want to bend and break rules to stay in office, and is willing to simply ignore laws that aren't convenient is a problem. When that person starts installing sycophants into positions that actually control the military, financial and other fundamental levers of governing it becomes that persons choice, not the people or other democratically elected leaders whether to step down, or for that matter do anything else. The people who founded the USA understood that the president was just a step away from being a king and tried their best to counteract that. But, those people are a hundred and seventy years dead and the country has survived because the people elected to those positions were willing to adhere to the norms of governing, even if they didn't believe in the results.
So, I don't think anyone with any critical reasoning skills who has paid even the slightest attention over the past 12+ years believes that to be true of Trump or many of the people he is surrounding himself with this time. The McMasters who say "no you can't do that its illegal" are gone and daily any remaining resistance is being removed. Frankly at this point even if Trump steps down after 4 years. The Senators who have allowed it to progress this far have repeatedly abdicated their fundamental duty and are unfit for office (and that is putting it mildly).
If you can cut off funding to congressionally appropriate USAID programs, its just a likely you can cut off funding to the military unit that won't kiss the ring.
This is a give and take, both branches the congress and the executive are equal, and both are democratically elected. Some situations call for more of one.
Since WW2 we have had a growing unelected federal bureaucracy (staffed by college graduates more and more left-leaning), that is controlled by congress as you mentioned. Congress is run by seniority, most are re-elected every year and are elected along party lines without much thought. And most legislation is written by lobbyists and activists. People are apathetic about congress, there is not much democracy there. People care much more about the presidential election.
I think if you look at the actions of our federal government over past decades you will see it has not been very good for the health of the American people. I think any action by a president to take back some power from Congress to upend that order is a good thing. Throughout our history certain presidents have completely changed the federal government during their terms in office, and afterwards the title goes back to more complacent presidents. Over time systems decay and you may need to start with something new.
The FBI and 51 Intelligence officials signed a document saying Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation 2-3 weeks before the last election, when in fact it was actually Hunter Biden's laptop.
The FBI never made such a statement, and the 51 *former* intelligence officers made a statement that, in their opinion, the laptop contained hallmarks of Russian disinformation, and all of this occurred 2 weeks before the 2020 election for maximum political effect.
I mean, he's literally gone on live TV, in an official briefing, saying he's going to take over the Gaza Strip. With no authority except his own. This is exactly how dictators across the world operate after they're initially elected.
With the best healthcare in the world available, I definitely won't be getting my hopes up on that. And furthermore the order of succession isn't much better.
I actually agree with you, I don’t think a constitutional amendment will be ratified in my lifetime. But a lot of things I didn’t think I’d ever see have happened in the last two weeks
I wish that in 100 years Hitler becomes truly synonymous to "Satan", and instead of "satanic" or "demonic" people would say "hitleric". Because it sounds cooler and it suits the way how people throw "hitlers" at each other online.
> it takes the reigning POTUS to realize its causing problems that are impacting wealthy elites (24 hours in the case of tariffs)
He didn't "realize" anything. All of the show we're seeing was planned posturing and "deal-making by leverage". We shouldn't be accepting even talking about the US annexing Greenland FFS - but here we are, with credible proposals for installing new US military presence on Greenland being discussed. That's alarming.
> 4 years.
Bold of you to assume there will be elections in four years, that these elections will be anywhere close to fair, or that the people who voted for the 47th won't just vote for him (or his successor, assuming the 47th goes six-feet-under) again.
There has been no revolutionary change in governance since FDR. The federal apparatus has been tightening the screws with ever vaster and more expensive compendium of regulations and laws. End result, about the largest incarcerated population of the world.
The parties in power failed to unwind any of this so instead they got an unhinged strongman who promised to do it with a sledgehammer. Trump is a symptom rather than a cause.
> The parties in power failed to unwind any of this so instead they got an unhinged strongman who promised to do it with a sledgehammer.
... and will do just the opposite of what he promised and they were hoping for. Recent news about how scientific grants are being retroactively reviewed for any signs of "woke" language - if that isn't a vast expansion of governmental authoritarian powers, I seriously don't know what is.
> Expansionism may be out of style, but I don't see how it's inherently evil.
Any society IMHO has the right to self-determination and self-sovereignty, as long as they adhere to at least the minimum standards of civilized societies aka UDHR - and the governments of those that don't even pay lip service to it should be fair game for everyone else to depose, we've seen the horrors of Syria, the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the genocides of Russia (against Ukrainians), Myanmar and China (Uyghurs and Tibetans) or the kleptocracy that was Gaza under Hamas, enough is enough and someone has to at least enforce the basic laws of humanity.
In the end, the people of Greenland should be the ones that have the say about what happens to their country, not the Americans, and for all I care the question if Denmark should have authority over Greenland should be seriously reconsidered as well given the atrocities of the last decades - among others, kidnapping children and forcibly sterilizing women [1].
We put a business executive in charge of the federal government. There's no such thing as term limits or checks-and-balances in the mind of a business executive, just taking a good horse out of the race and inefficiencies. On the first count, if Trump's still in relatively good health, I could absolutely see him making that case for scrapping the term limit on the Presidency.
> On the first count, if Trump's still in relatively good health, I could absolutely see him making that case for scrapping the term limit on the Presidency.
He isn't. Even absent any impact that catching covid may have had on his body, he's visibly obese. More detailed reports on his health are hard to come by thanks to (a) that being private, and (b) the extremely noisy people who either want to demonise or deify him, but it's not unreasonable to think he's got a 25% chance of old age catching up with him fatally by the end of this term.
But if the term limits get scrapped, I wouldn't be surprised to see a return of Bush or Obama as alternatives. Or Bill Clinton. Bill, George, and Donald were all born in 1946.
(1946 was also the same year the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council started meeting. Coincidence, or the secret world government? Coincidence, obviously).
They're aiming for "scrap term limits, but only for Presidents who have served non-consecutive terms". (Or it's all just "notice me senpai" from the soulless minions in Congress. Maybe both.)
> I could absolutely see him making that case for scrapping the term limit
They're already working on a constitutional amendment to allow a third term[0] and right wing lawyers have suggested that there are legal strategies Trump could try employing to stay in power. That along with Trump himself "jokingly" saying that we won't need to vote again if he's elected does not inspire confidence.
Luckily a constitutional amendment has 0% chance of being ratified by enough states, even if they're somehow able to get a supermajority in both houses of Congress. Any legislation in that direction is just a distraction. It's the other strategies we need to watch more carefully.
Where do I put money on the MAGA-Nazis pulling a Putin on future elections? I suppose Putin isn't the first one to do rigged elections, somehow he's the only one currently in my mind.
Sadly Wikipedia doesn't have an article entitled "List of Rigged Elections"...
I really do expect them to try. I am slightly hopeful that this clown show of an administration is too incompetent to pull it off. The judicial branch appears to be bought and paid for, so maybe my optimism is unfounded.
> My point was more that if "liberal" == "clean" and "conservative" == "incompetent apparatchiks" then you're (the royal you) a shill
If I consider all the ones who voted for Presidential immunity corrupt does that make me a shill? It's a decision with no constitutional basis (the constitution grants no presidential immunity, but does grant other immunities, implying if it was intended it'd be in there) and ahistorical (we can find plenty of examples of presidents assuming they or their predecessor could be prosecuted).
That still leaves us in the same place a Supreme Court where the majority is beholden to the current President, not the constitution.
No it doesn't, if you're trained in constitutional law and actually know what you're talking about. Disagreeing with something doesn't make you a shill. Saying everyone who disagrees with you is a $PEJORATIVE_OF_CHOICE does. Maybe even it doesn't matter if you know what you're talking about or not as long as you approach it in good faith.
"The judicial branch is bought and paid for" is a ridiculous shill thing to say because 1) it assumes that smart, well-educated, successful people only believe a thing because of corruption. 2) it obviates the need to address any of the other side's claims on their merits, because they're just corrupt so who cares. 3) it sets up your side as the victors-by-default, because the other corrupt and you hate everything the other side does so by definition you're Good. It used to be a common refrain of the right when most judges and justices and most courts were left-of-center. But now that federal circuit courts are evenly split between R-appointed and D-appointed justices, and SCOTUS has more Republican appointees than Democratic, the judiciary is farcical.
"This is a hallowed, storied institution just so long as it does things I like, and a corrupt oligarchy when it doesn't" is the very definition of shill.
I didn't address that claim because it's a pointless ad hominem. Tell me what I could respond with that would have you say "oh actually you're right, I was wrong, my apologies" even if just internally.
"when different social interests seek their own short-term benefits rather than coalescing behind a vision of social development."
German economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck paved a lot of this theory in his book "how will capitalism end?"
Streeck posits that because contemporary capitalism is beset by five disorders—declining growth, oligarchy, starvation of the public sphere, corruption and international anarchy—for which at present no political agency exists to confront them, it will continue to regress and atrophy until at some point it might end.
If you look back at Germany in the 19th century, nations like Prussia and Austria had this sort of power struggle between the merchant class and the nobility at the advent of steam power.
in this case the de-facto US nobility (rank-and-file career politicians) are being usurped by the bourgeouise (billionaires like Musk) at the advent of AI and tech by promising the working class a combination of culture war policy and relief from the very capitalist excess they themselves endorse. by reducing congress and senate to a simple debate team (conversely similar to the German National Asssembly) the tech-elite are able to seize power once reserved for the crown.
the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
I laughed when those people self-identified as accelerationists... but holly shit! they knew what it means and were honest.
Historically, they are just a bunch of rich morons that got lucky, got power, and decided to stage a coup. This is not some enlightened movement trying to replace the social norms. It's just your run of the mill personal power switch, and the only notable things about it are it's on a country that has been extremely stable before, and those people are stupid enough to willfully destroy it.
> it's on a country that has been extremely stable before
The US is a known bad design, nation builders working for the United States stopped trying to use this design for new countries in the 20th century, it doesn't work. It's inherently unstable and you previously got very lucky, although you have had a civil war and numerous close calls.
It's like oh, why don't we make coal-powered cars. Well because it's a known bad idea. We actually did try that, it's a bad idea, don't do it again.
While I absolutely do not like what is happening right now, I cannot agree with your general statement. Could you elaborate?
The US has proper separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. The legislative has a per-state and popular representation. Which part of this is "inherently unstable"?
The only part lacking a proper proportional representation (as in a parliament).
The US Executive is way more powerful than the other powers. It can act as it wishes, and consequences only come years later, if ever.
Also, the per-state representation doesn't seem to lead to good results at all. As you said, the popular representation isn't proportional, what is a more relevant flaw than anything before this point on this comment.
And that is before you get into the details that are actually bad. It's incredible that they managed to stay stable with that electoral system, for example.
That said, looks like they will have an almost perfect opportunity to fix some of those in a few years...
The core is the President is kept from becoming a dictator by nothing more than norms. If Trump staffs the military with loyalists, there isn’t much anyone can do to make him do anything. Most other countries have power over the military, particularly in domestic contexts, much more shattered.
In those "newer designs" there is no electoral college. Also various alternative electoral systems have been tried. The winner-takes-all system of the US is known pathological and inevitably results in a two party system. Democracies in Europe most often result in many parties and a necessity to form coalitions. Ireland even goes as far as using IRV and STV.
The issue isn't even in how votes are counted, it's in parliamentary versus presidential republics.
The latter inevitably slide towards autocracy. Too much power is concentrated in one person, who is almost impossible to legally remove before their term is up, and who will happily punish dissenters within the party.
In parliamentary republics, every PM is one internal party vote away from being deposed. You tend to see less of the tail wagging the dog in them.
>the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
You honestly think that's a question?
Power corrupts. You saw Trump, who in 2016 said he'd get everything done so he'd see no need to run again, he'd have Made America Great Again. He then tried to rig the 2020 election so he could stay in power, despite saying "if I lose the election you'll never hear from me again", and 4 years later, here we are.
These people are here to entrench themselves permanently.
I know that Trump was something of a bad loser when Biden was elected, and that he encouraged the riots on Capitol Hill, but I had not heard (from the media media here in Britain) that he attempted to rig the election. Could you provide a source for this please?
Possibly a reference to the fake electors plot [0], although there was also the phone call to the Georgia secretary of state asking him to find 11,780 more votes [1], the pressure he applied to his VP to reject the election results [2], the subsequent Jan 6 riot that disrupted the certification...
At least some of these were covered by BBC [3, 4].
He also tried to get the DoJ to label the election as suspicious. Don’t have an immediate reference for that but it was surfaced by the Jan 6 committee.
> the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
Musk, Thiel, and their friends clearly intend to consolidate power, and the people they associate with openly advocate for the creation of independent corporate fiefdoms with authoritarian control over society. There is no doubt at this point. These are not good people. They are oligarchs. They are the bitter nerds that just want power for themselves so they can be the bullies.
There are far more nerds (bitter or not) who were not so successful yet are far more clever than these "leaders" are, and they aren't the type to tolerate intolerance...
Yeah, no. This is a coup and they are all in. They would not be this blatant about taking control illegally and fast if they expected to leave any institutions to still enforce the law against them.
The Federalist Society has been a 40/50 year project to install a judiciary loyal to this coup project. This mix of Christian nationalist theocracy and unitary executive has been their aim all along.
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.
They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
Yea, these guys don't seem like the kind to do any abdicating, voluntarily.
A lot can happen in 4 years though. Maybe self-inflicted catastrophic wounds will drive down support for Trump enough where it becomes possible for R pols and oligarchs to abandon him. Or maybe they'll choose the dark path, and go farther into repressive authoritarianism to stay in power.
The problem for Musk et al is that they are concentrating power directly to Trump, not themselves. They're shackling themselves to the leopard and betting it will never eat their face.
> Maybe self-inflicted catastrophic wounds will drive down support for Trump enough
They will blame women, minorites and especially trans people for all of that.
And when dust settles, those who supported Trump and Musk will see themselves as primary victims - and will blame minorites, women, democracts and trans people for consequences of their own actions.
Looking at the human nature while interacts with Capitalism, looks like they will try to concentrate it.
I found it shameful that we hold so much a power hungry war while however as Memento Mori teach us, the only certainty is death, and that power is simply gone.
what i get is Palantir is mostly the USA's home-grown answer to SAP with an aerospace/defense slant, and since a lot of aerospace is ITAR export controlled, they get cloistered in the robe of government secrecy.
whole bunch of "strategists" and management types getting hired, and of course the usual truckloads of "backend" and "full-stack" engineers to make the wheels on the bus go round.
Nothing. the US did the very same thing to circumvent export controls by other countries during the cold war in order to obtain sufficient titanium in order to construct the SR71 aircraft.
China has a graphics processor company thats apparently good enough to land it on an entity list.
The sheer number of Chinese companies the US as entity listed for export controls is comical as its basically a blacklist of the entire PRC's tech sector.
export controls work well to do one thing: create a US competitor. china already fabs domestic 3nm chips. theres no reason to think they wont emerge as a serious competitor to NVidia.
reply