Comment by aurizon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aurizon | Hacker News Reader

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This is the end result of the 'old boy network', where the aged rise to the top on the basis of how many ticks they have groomed off the fur of the silverback's fur, in the USA/Japan, with no fur, it is the ass licks ledger that counts. Sadly, this is fully operational in the USA military, where billions are spent on old weaponry whose life in a modern war will be measured in minutes when they meet modern drones. (by drones, I mean land based drone attack tanks etc, with costs only 5-10% of the cost of the manned equivalents, air based drones, surface water drones as well as submarine drones) We see China and Russia unfettered by this old boy network that are allowing their brains unfettered freedom to make modern stuff. This has happened before, when the blitzkrieg fought horse drawn gun carts at the start of WW2, when allied armies in Europe were prime examples of the old boy network.

Why do we have it? We have a bribery and feedback mechanism in Congress that quantifies bribery and ass licking to perfection. An elected representative HAS NO SECRET BALLOT!!. We can all see how he votes, as can all the bribers, who can call him to account. We say this exists to allow the voters to see that there rep did their bidding YADA-YADA-YADA - we all know it allow the bribery effectiveness to be watched and measured, so you can threaten to cut them off if they do not dance to the briber's tune. RANT/ How to get a better way? Empower all, with online voting of all eligible voters, in the style of the original Greek democracy. Pay people for their votes, hold back tax refunds for people who do not vote etc. This needs to be fine tuned. Chance of success = zero, as all the well bribed elected officials do not want their gravy train to end. /RANT

> (by drones, I mean land based drone attack tanks etc, with costs only 5-10% of the cost of the manned equivalents, air based drones, surface water drones as well as submarine drones)

Don't you mean guided missiles and torpedoes?

The whole unmanned weapon concept is much older than toy quadcopters.

> We see China and Russia unfettered by this old boy network that are allowing their brains unfettered freedom to make modern stuff.

What? Are you familiar with the terms "oligarch" and "guanxi"?

> Empower all, with online voting of all eligible voters

Online voting is a bad idea. It's far more easily and cheaply subverted than most paper-based analog voting systems.

Wel, AI guided and long loitering capabilities, more or less evolutionary from current designs - butb Russia is ahead in many respects. We tend to forget that Russia focusses their education on applied engineering to a higher degree than in the USA = more engineers per capitac and their level is quite high on average

Oh grasshopper, how little you know.

Just to pick one point, the allied forces in WWII were led by men who had fought in WWI, just a generation earlier. WWI was a technological arms race that moved along just as fast as technology moves today. For example, warships built less than a decade before WWI were obsolete, unable to compete range-wise with ship artillery built just a few years later. Technologies like tanks got introduced midway through the war, and the most important technology was arguably barbed wire.

Why use horse-drawn artillery in WWII? Because it was there. Because they still had it, and they weren't fully recovered from WWI yet. Because cars and trucks and tracked vehicles were unreliable and dependent on imported fuel - fuel that everyone remembered would be very hard to get once war blockades started. Because they needed every gun they could get.

The blitzkrieg was the result of very modern technology, and new strategic and tactical thinking to go with the technology. A couple of years later, it was obsolete...

It's a little funny how we have this picture of the Wehrmacht as blitzkrieg and super-nazis in Panther tanks, crushing everything in lighting advances. Most of the german army slogged along on foot, with the same Mauser 98k bolt-action rifles that their fathers carried, with horse-drawn artillery and supplies. Motorized equipment was concentrated in the elite Panzer and Panzergrenadiere formations, of which there were never many.

Right. Elite units did "blitzkrieg" and quickly broke holes in defensive lines, and then the regular army poured through those holes. Fundamentally, it wasn't that different from how armies used mounted cavalry units centuries earlier.

Awesome name, tho.

They had the same problem in WW1, the name tank was a code word for a mobile steel bunker, and it broke the trench stalemate. After WW1, the old boys ruled. Hitler broke this mold and pioneered new mobile armored warfare. We are lucky that most of the German army was the old style

Repealing the Minimum Bribe Quota is a necessary first step in solving any political issue where a monied interest opposes the will of the people.

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