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Comment by jplayer01 | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, China and Russia don't give a crap. It's nice to dream of a utopia where weapons of death and destruction aren't necessary, but we don't live in that world. We, the West, have real enemies with real weapons and plenty of money going into R&D and military spending and qualms about killing people if necessary isn't stopping them.

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This is the key reason why the United States is the financial power of the world that it is.

It isn't so much about our freedoms or our GDP, although they play a role.

Unlike China and Russia, we have WAY more guns and we're WAY less corrupt. That's a pinnacle of financial security; you can be confident that the United States will honor its treasury securities. China and Russia? Probably, except who knows what internal or external conflicts shake their fragile economies, and maybe they just won't pay out on time or at all.

People hate the fact that we spend so much on our military, but the inconvenient truth is that we have the comfortable lives we have now in large part because we have so many god damned weapons, and very advanced ones at that. That goes for those who live in foreign ally nations; deep down, their leaders know we will intervene on their behalf if shit hits the fan. America has had its share of fuckups, but they're still not eclipsed by the fuckups of Russia or China.

Do we really know that we will intervene for our allies with the current “America First” rants and threatening to leave NATO?

Trump is just (somewhat justifiably) trying to get Europe to step up to the plate and not leave everything to the US. Remember that we fixed their Yugoslavia ethnic cleansing problem while they twiddled their thumbs waiting for diplomacy to work. When the shit hits the fan the US will participate, if only to keep the MIC chugging along.

I think one of main things keeping Europe more or less stable, is that Russia's armed forces are probably more broke-dick than the EU's.

Honest question: we are almost 30 years away from the fall of the Soviet Union, which NATO was founded to defend against.

What specific things in terms of Defense is America responsible for on the European continent?

My basic understanding of NATO is that it says:

- If any NATO country is invaded by anyone, all NATO countries will go to war to defend it. This doesn't apply if the NATO country is the aggressor.

- It outlines some minimum funding commitments, but those are more aimed towards the non-US countries involved.

I think the main thing is still to deter Russia from literally invading member countries. It's hard to call that far-fetched in light of Russia literally invading Ukraine and, before that, Georgia.

That doesn’t answer the question.

Why should we draft a bunch of folks from South Dakota and Kansas (and let’s be honest here ... folks from New York or SF who write opinion pieces about this aren’t going to be the ones paying blood) to fight Russia? Why can’t these countries defend themselves?

Who is being drafted? It's a volunteer army and we are in basically no wars where our soldiers are at serious risk of wartime death. It's far more common for NATO troops to die helping us in our wars than vice versa.

NATO is a low cost way for us to maintain our geopolitical position as a leader and to maintain a reliable group of military allies in case we need them (yeah, we spend a ton on military, but that is not due to us defending NATO countries from Russia).

A war with Russia would require a draft. It’s ridiculous to think otherwise. Everyone is being evasive and not answering the question, which is: why should a guy from the Midwest die to defend Eastern Europe?

Your point about spending is ignorant and silly. We don’t buy billion dollar submarines to fight Islamists in land locked countries.

That's a meaningless hypothetical. No Americans are dying to defend Eastern Europe. History shows us that treaties are easily discarded in the face of actual war with another great power. But the value of NATO for the US right now is not hypothetical.

You don't buy billion dollar submarines because of NATO either. When the DoD talks about preparing for near-peer adversaries, Russia is not the primary concern. Do you really think we would stop spending massive amounts of money on military technology development if NATO didn't exist?

>When the DoD talks about preparing for near-peer adversaries, Russia is not the primary concern.

Are you kidding? Then what's Grafenwöhr for? Entire procurement strategies have been - and are - focused on countering Russian military hardware (the IAV is just one example - there are plenty of others).

>Do you really think we would stop spending massive amounts of money on military technology development if NATO didn't exist?

You should really reconsider that statement, and which clause follows from the other. This has nothing to do with my first point, which no one seems interested in answering. My original question was attempting to tease out why people think NATO is useful in a post-post Cold War world. I don't think it is, and struggle to understand this obsession with Russia that continues to warp people's perception of the global security situation. Instead people pivot to "well it was actually about reducing the amount of nuclear weapons" or "we would spend that money anyway", neither of which address the fundamental question of whether or not NATO in its present form is useful or whether the US should have to continue shouldering the vast majority of the security responsibility in the Western World.

Near-peer is essentially {Russia, China}. New funding is generally "counter the rise of China", especially in maritime spending, but land force "reset from the counterinsurgency back to fighting a near-peer adversary" is basically Russia.

Because defending themselves would necessarily require acquiring their own nuclear deterrent, and the US correctly realized that a world where every country had nukes was a world where they'd eventually be used. Alliances like NATO reduced the risk of human extinction while pulling countries closer into the US orbit. It's ridiculous to look at that from an ROI perspective; the ROI is not dying in a nuclear war.

I think you need to reevaluate your understanding of Cold War history if the argument you're making is "we started NATO to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons".

Would your argument hold equally for US intervention in Europe in world war 2?

Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. That wasn't a US "intervention".

“Way less corrupt”

Just because an internet search puts America as less corrupt than the likes of China and Russia. Doesn’t mean it’s actually less corrupt.

The perseption of America is that it’s less corrupt but in reality we have absolute no idea what’s going on behind closed doors and what deals are being done.

Well, for starters, try bribing a police officer in USA vs. Russia over a speeding ticket and see how far it gets you. My money is on you going to jail in USA and getting off scot free in Russia.

Well, there's certainly less low-level corruption.

how can one imagine at a higher level, it will just magically get better then?

This is not the discussed point.

AKA pervasive corruption. See, also, Vietnam.

Less high level corruption, too. Jeff Bezos probably worries about a lot of things but I highly doubt that he worries Trump will throw him in jail and seize all his assets. Now if Bezos were in Russia? Putin would do it in a heartbeat [1]. There's no way you would get away with criticizing Putin the way WaPo does with Trump.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky

I have a different perspective after moving from America to a developing country. Where I live now corruption is commonplace and everyone knows it. But it is relatively petty in most cases and costs everyone a little. But America is rife with what I call legalized corruption. Laws passed to enrich government cronies. Excessive licensing requirements to eliminate competition and enrich encumbants. The list goes on. And it costs everyone much, much more.

> we have the comfortable lives we have now

"We" = the 1% which reads Hacker News? Speak only for yourself

You uses fallacies to spread misinformation about war. No source, no number, no reference. Convenient.

> "We" = the 1% which reads Hacker News? Speak only for yourself

No, actually "we" as in most Americans and many other countries in multiple senses of "comfortable". Yes, there is poverty and many social problems present in America. At the same time, many aspects of the average American life, as well as life in Europe and other parts of the world, have consistently improved, and millions of people still choose to live in America instead of even other places of comparable rights and opportunities. Contrasted with many parts of the world, we're pretty damned comfortable.

But you know what? That doesn't even matter. If I were to alter my premise to only encompass the "1% which reads Hacker News", it wouldn't affect my comment at all. Why do you think Silicon Valley continues to exist in America and not the UK?

Fallacies are specific, and you haven't mentioned what "fallacies" I've made. What I wrote was a comment on an industry forum, not an academic paper. You want citations? Work it out yourself. You're on the internet. Nothing that I wrote hasn't been said before by others with greater authority than mine.

You haven't made a single argument, yet you accuse me of using fallacies and misinformation. By not justifying your claims, you're being very unfair.

I hope MS doesn't succumb to this kind of activism, but to put in perspective, this doesn't even deserve an article, from the first parr:

>Several Microsoft Corp employees on Friday demanded that the company cancel …

Three employees. Since when do three employees make these kinds of demands and have management take heed? This isn't some Morton Thiokol and an O-ring issue where you need management to listen to a real issue.

If I were Russia or China, this is exactly the kind of agitprop I'd like to create for a foe.

Three employees were the representatives leading the effort. The petition was signed by far more MS employees.

How many more? How many Googlers signed the anti-Maven petition? Something on the order of 1% of the workforce, maybe less?

Also, it's not like Palantir won't pick up the project if they drop it.

Also, LOL if they think Microsoft is going to drop $450M in revenue -- even if was hand-delivered by Satan himself.

Palantir is not in the market of augmented reality headsets.

Magic Leap on the other hand... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/magic-lea...

They can get in the market for $450M...

The US has done fine until now, in fact much better than China or Russia defending itself without getting into the business of blurring the line between private business and military to the degree that autocratic states do.

So honestly I find these sorts of responses misleading, irresponsible and agenda driven. The US does not need to be afraid of China or Russia, it dwarfs their military capacity ten times over.

And that American workers in the tech industry are conscious of the risks of having the military seep too closely into consumer facing businesses is a very good thing in a liberal society. US tech workers always had a libertarian streak, be that right or left, and the US wasn't defenseless as a result. We'd be very wise to listen to the people who want to keep private American businesses out of government weapon development.

We’d be very wise to listen to the people who want to keep private American businesses out of government weapon development.

How is it wise? Most weapons are developed and manufactured in a kind of public-private partnership.

During the Second World War, for example, the vast majority of industrial capacity turned towards building war equipment was private, dwarfing the capacity of government arsenals by a fair margin. Much of the design and development occurred in the context of public-private partnership, with national proving grounds and military agencies collaborating with aircraft manufacturers and other manufacturers of heavy equipment to design and develop weapons systems.

Boeing, Lockheed, Texas Instruments, Browning — and to go further afield, Supermarine, Marconi, Glock — these are all private names, not the names of government agencies. There are few cases of states where all, or even most, development of weapons systems is in state hands: totalitarian states.

Yes, but Lockheed has the label on the door. You know that you're going to be building defense technology that is used in (foreign!) wars. Building technology that can just as well used at home at a company that faces consumers and puts funny colored letters on the door is very different.

When Amazon develops facial recognition technology that can just as easily be thrown at migrants at the border the line isn't as easy as talking about building aircraft to fight fascism in Europe.

In liberal democracies there's a line between civilian technology and military technology, and you generally know what you sign up for. This is also precisely what the engineers here talk about, they did not join Microsoft to build weapons.

In liberal democracies there's a line between civilian technology and military technology...

This isn't true. Consider Boeing, Colt, Texas Instruments, CamelBak, AM General. Even companies, like Colt, that are dedicated to making arms also sell products into the civilian market. That is in part because in a liberal democracy the government can not restrict a company to doing business solely with them: companies are allowed to recycle their know-how in the civilian market.

Working with private enterprise and repurposing civilian capabilities is how liberal democracies do defence. Should it be otherwise? It would seem to imply even greater scope for secrecy and mismanagement, and even less civilian control and input, if defence agencies didn't work with private enterprises for most of their needs.

I’m not seeing how Glock fits here? They are an Austrian company founded in 1963

Like Supermarine (British) & Marconi (Italian), Glock is a private company. Most weapon systems in liberal democracies are manufactured by private companies which also sell goods and services in the civilian market.

Just because the US has better tech now doesn't mean the US can sit back and think "ah, well, they'll never catch up, let's just stop with the technological progress". That's entirely unrealistic. 30 years ago, China was a country of poor farmers. They're now an economic superpower that is increasingly sinking tons of money into their military and research.

I'm not sure you realize how much of our modern technology is thanks to defense technology grants and DARPA. Military, academia and private business have always been tightly coupled in the US and it's dishonest to pretend otherwise. Microsoft has always had plenty of defense contracts, hell , they have the largest or second largest R&D division in the world. These moral qualms are entirely new.

I don't think they're entirely new, but consider that the average tech employee is in their late 20s or early 30s and the only major exercises of US military power they've seen were in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US has squandered its goodwill among that group by engaging in wars of aggression that were only marginally necessary. They didn't experience the cold war when the threat of nuclear annihilation was hovering over everyone (until very recently; it seems to be returning). Couple that with the highly employee favored labor market dynamics in tech and it's not surprising people don't want to take military applications up.

Also, it has to be said: it's a verdict on US leadership. The man in the oval office isn't someone I'd feel comfortable arming, nor was Bush. Even Obama had the thing with the drone strikes. When US Presidents demonstrate carelessness and unpredictability in their use of force, it turns reasonable, peace-loving people off.

That unraveling of goodwill began much earlier, with Vietnam, imo.

"it dwarfs their military capacity ten times over" ... as measured per spending, right? How do we account for spending efficiency? How much more does the U.S. pay for the same thing?

Yep, and China's authoritarian outlook and lack of privacy concerns might allow them to win a future AI race, because there's no western concept of rights. Sweep up as much data as you want and throw it into models. Track every citizen, every click, every purchase.

The US may fall behind simply because we believe in ideas like privacy.

Kai-Fu Lee's book goes into this in detail.

Although if we're being realistic, less scrupulous companies such as Amazon will step in and take the contracts.

Or they may fall on their face, like every other attempt at central planning has.

The economy is basically a distributed optimization heuristic.

If you're talking about "falling behind" in the global sense (using "AI" to centrally plan), then you're hypothesizing that we can essentially port the distributed algorithm into the silicon realm and further optimize it (eg prune destructive adversarial behavior). We certainly have more computing power now than say that past attempt based on fluid flows, but that's still a huge if.

If you're talking in the local sense (that "AI" will help companies themselves optimize better), than whatever extra percentage gained from that will not be enough to outrun the State deploying the same technology (as in the above goal), and destroying the individual businesses.

One thing I do know is that even if this turns out to be the winning strategy, sacrificing our values in an attempt to compete at it will still only net us second place!

Having written that, I think this implicit assumption that it will be economically beneficial for AI to be directed at individuals and individual behavior needs to be directly examined. How much individual productivity is actually being left on the table? The US system is quite good at motivating people, so much so that it's common for lower classes to see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". There are a few deviants, but for the most part lack of individual productivity is a failing of the larger structure. Heck, most of the US's criminals are in jail for engaging in economic activity!

Rather, the narrative seems like the age-old keep-the-plebs-in-line play, not a legitimate approach to economic success. If AI has something to offer for planning the economy, then wouldn't that be properly applied to the government-company interface? That's where the structural gains are actually available to be had!

> Or they may fall on their face, like every other attempt at central planning has.

China isn't centrally planned anymore, and hasn't been for a long time.

Yes, and perhaps they'll even continue on that path if it is really an attractor.

But there are two motte-and-bailey terms in the above comment - "ahead" and "AI".

If we're only talking about the narrow scope of China being ahead in AI, with "AI" meaning predicting outliers from large populations, then that is not so worrisome! Google (et al) can simply buy the better population surveillance technology from China and apply it to their own business, as the US will still be generally ahead.

But rather such talk seems to be aimed at invoking a worry that a lack of individual rights means China will succeed at a more generally useful "AI" (whatever that means), and that it will then be applied to their economy to get them "ahead" in general. This is the underlying idea I am addressing.

Well luckily there are people who do seek peace and diplomacy, because if everyone treated the world like a giant prisoner's dilemma then we'd all be fucked.

Aren't you just hoping that people who seek peace and diplomacy are on the Chinese/Russian/etc side when shit hits the fan?

What if they aren't? You can have all the peacekeepers and diplomats in the world, but if the other side isn't willing to play by that game, then they wont.

They're strongly incentivized to play by the game when the alternative is annihilation. For 70 or so years, that kept everyone safe.

The optimal strategy for iterated prisoner's dilemma is tit for tat.

We have plenty of diplomacy. But diplomacy only goes so far. Military exists because diplomacy doesn't always work and there are plenty of reasons why it might not work.

Yes. But there is a very real difference in escalation as a last resort and as the default.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is about operating with zero knowledge from and coordination with the other parties. Diplomacy lets us avoid that in the real world.

We all know that someone else's bad behavior is not a justification for our own bad behavior. At least I assumed we did.

Our duty is to find better ways, not bullshit excuses to indulge in the old, horrific ways.

So tell me what better way there is to defend yourself when somebody is throwing an army at you.

drum circle? /s

Some people seem hellbent on self-destruction. As an Asian person I find it completely impossible to comprehend. I can’t even understand where these people are coming from. Obviously you need the best weapons. Your enemies have weapons, and if they thought they could get away with it, they’d totally use them to dominate you. The only reason they don’t is because for the moment your weapons are bigger than theirs.

U.S. prosperity is built on the U.S. military. From our acension to the world stage after WWII, to the spawning of the Internet through military R&D. The pointy end of America is an essential part of what makes your life so fat and comfortable. It’s what allows you to consume a vastly disproportionate share of global resources. To live a life where you can worry about finding dates in Tindr and finding the best avacodo toast place, instead of surviving in a hostile world.

The neat thing about nuclear weapons is that if you only care about self defense, you don’t need anything else.

Is a person’s way of life and economic prosperity also worth defending? If so, nuclear weapons are not sufficient. All another country needs to do is cut that person’s country off from the rest of the world. Bring it down from the inside. No invasion or war required.

> The neat thing about nuclear weapons is that if you only care about self defense, you don’t need anything else.

Nuclear weapons have no proportionality, so it's bad to rely on them for defense. If you do rely on them, you're either going to start WWIII over a border skirmish, or your enemy is going to chip away at you because you won't.

As a tech worker who doesn't want to do work for the military, I know I'd be much more open to it if our military were primarily focused on defending us from genuine threats (ie., China and Russia) instead of playing imperialism in the Middle East.

Boots on the ground actions certainly aren't targeting China and Russia, but what about capability improvements which will pay off if we have to defend ourselves from 'genuine threats'?

The HoloLens case seems pretty boots-on-the-ground to me, and many of the other tech sector contracts you read about have to do with drones/machine learning/image recognition, i.e. taking humans even further out of the equation when it comes to patrolling third-world countries. I won't be a part of that.

Out of curiosity, how do you view America A-bombing Japan? Do you think that it would have been preferable to go forward with operation downfall? In that case, it was a situation where America weighed massive losses on both sides through brute man-on-man mayhem versus using technology to inflict massive casualties on only one side.

And how exactly is Russia threatening the US?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/inf-treaty-exit-...

And? It's all about possible tit-for-tat if the US threatens Russia.

Russia never threatens to attack first.

Apparently, the desirable situation for the US is that it can fuck any country and no country cannot harm it back? And if it isn't so, the country is threatening the US, right?

Yea, this is what people on the Left (which I am myself) turn a blind eye. Sure, the US has done plenty of awful shit with our military, but would you prefer the West to not be the dominant block in the world?

That's going to end liberalism way faster. The military / real politik foreign affairs are dirty parts of life that we'd prefer not to have, but we live in a world where we must have them.

I'd prefer to not having a dominant block at all .

So how do you get the other actors to concede and play nice?

Remember that multi-polar worlds tend to have far more wars. Even the bi-polar Cold War was highly dangerous. Having a good single block is preferable.

Yeah, right. Almost no wars in the last 30 years.

Except for a few never-ending wars that last so long that are basically a new normal so we can count them off.

I'm not denying there aren't still huge conflicts with high loss of life, however defined, but I'm glad we don't have many true state on state open wars like the past few millennia where large percentages of the population were killed.

That's not an option that you have.

Well said. It’s definitly a tough position but that is reality. I am an immigrant and lean more to the left of center but we got have common sense.

I would rather have America be dominant than any other nation. With all our faults, we excercise incredible restraint with our immense powers. This of course could change if we end up electing more leaders like Trump. We need to stay strong militarily but also need good and intelligent leaders which unfortunately we don’t currently have.

How many wars has Trump started? I haven't kept count.

Literally... zero?

How many has he ended?

It seems like he is trying to end at least a couple.

However, entrenched interests and Trump haters (both Dem and GOP) can't let that happen.

Fair question, it's not just about the wars he starts/ends. It's about the rhetorics and the planting of seeds of conflict and hate and what becomes of it in 4 years or 10 years or 20 years.

Simple words by a country's leader could ruin relationships between nations for decades or between different parts of society.

You don't just start hating {insert favorite target jews|blacks|muslims|christians|whites} overnight, it takes time. You plant the seeds of hate and let them flourish into ethnic cleansing|holocaust|interment camps|etc.

It's our duty to nip that shit in bud right now :). We have come so far to let that sort of shit take us back.

I apologize for taking this discussion in a political direction. In any case, I think it's important for us to have a strong military and Microsoft helping our military build better weapons/systems/tools is a good thing. A strong America is a good thing - as long as we have no Trumps :)

Fair enough. I knew pushing back here on HN with even one fact would buy me some downvotes.

One cherry-picked fact tends to earn, rightfully, downvotes.

Orange Man Bad and all that. There is plenty to jibe at Trump about, however, starting wars is not one of them. That's the exclusive realm of professional Ivy league educated politicians and diplomats AKA our betters.

Do Twitter wars count?

But surely, people who want to work for defence contractors can and will.

And if you were working for a company that wasn't a defence contractor, but is becoming one, you can yell and shout if you think it might deter the company and let you stay where you like staying.

"And if you were working for a company that wasn't a defence contractor...."

Do you have any idea how many decades Microsoft has been getting millions in income from the Pentagon? The whole DoD runs on Microsoft products. Windows. Office. Outlook. Sharepoint. Access. All of that stuff has expensive licenses and enterprise support contracts.

Any employee who joined Microsoft after, say, 1995 and thinks they weren't joining a "defense contractor" is just willfully ignorant.

If liberalism surviving is defined as “western military hegemony” then I think there’s a problem with liberalism, but the military tools used to enforce it.

How should liberalism respond if 100 liberals can be silenced by 1 authoritarian with a machine gun, and the ratio of authoritarians to liberals is 1:99?

I don't think liberalism has an answer to this question. It appears to me that as liberal democracies become more democratic the likelihood that an authoritarian can take power, from the left or right, increases. So it's somewhat of a paradox.

These conflicts are unlikely to become hot. Maybe some cyber security is worth doing.

But, winning over China as only Trump would say, is more about economics than anything else, isn't it?

Ie. a big thriving economy and by implication a high quality of life gives power and influence -- how does military R&D factor into that?

Unlikely does not mean impossible. There are global tensions with 2 world powers that are now both led by dictators and smaller conflicts happening everywhere. Hoping that another major war won't happen isn't a good plan.

I'm merely arguing that like the cold war, these conflicts are likely to be determined by economic might, rather than armed conflict.

To support this goal, you really need to figure out how the military can be prevented from engaging in further elective wars. In recent history, the main result of contributing to the military has been creating war to benefit private business interests at the expense of our domestic and diplomatic wellbeing, and it's not surprising that enthusiasm for doing so has waned.

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