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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Good arguments. I think there's a bit of a bandwagon of schadenfreude whenever things go badly, and people begin to outdo each other in dire and gloomy predictions of the world's end.

In my very first job, I got used to the idea that somebody, somewhere in the project, feels that the sky is falling and the project's about to end - on practically a weekly basis. Yet the project went on. Human activities have a huge intertia, and the "economy", and the "world order", are merely a collection of human activities with some system applied on to help keep track of what's going on (and, ideally, help it go even better).

Things change, but ever so slowly.

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I am 28 with a reasonably well paying job and a small investment in the stock market. As the market falls all I can think about is how much I can buy while it's down. What people forget about is the value of a stock or home is only indirectly related to it's price, there are a wide range of companies in great shape that have tanked.

Long term I think the US GDP is limited by our lack of investment in basic infrastructure. But when you look at the "real" economy things are still looking good. It's going to be interesting seeing how many baby boomers retire and how many are going to wait until the market recovers. But, I think people pulling money out of the market is going to help keep the market realistic for the next few years. (Good for me but bad for the old people.)

"To those of you all excited about buying on the dip"

http://www.winterspeak.com/2008/10/japan-experience.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging

I don't have a lot of cash on hand, so when I talk about buying when the market is down I am fine thinking in terms of the next 5 years. I am cutting costs and increasing my rate of investment not dumping a lot of money into the market at the same time.

PS: If you get a large chunk of money it's best to get into the market over the course of 1-3 years vs going really aggressive the day someone hands you all that cash. You might miss out on a little interest but your odds of buying at a peak are greatly reduced.

I think people from the US need to understand that when you argue that it is right for you to be 'the superpower' you are also arguing that the rest of the world should be subservient. Can you see how that sounds to the rest of the the world? If there is any schadenfreude going on that would be the reason.

Who thinks or argues that it's "right"? As an American, I think we've been on a hell of a ride for the last couple hundred years, and I'm quite thankful for that.

I personally feel do not feel owed anything. I just hope if we're on our way down that we don't piss off enough other countries that {we, our children, our grandchildren} have it harder than it has to be when the tables are turned.

> when you argue that it is right for you to be 'the superpower' you are also arguing that the rest of the world should be subservient.

Small problem, we're not arguing that it's right. And we're not arguing that you should be subservient, but we'll get back to that bit of projection a little later.

We don't argue that it's right, but let's look at the alternatives. China? Russia? The EU? No one? Yeah right.

Speaking of the EU, we've seen them in action. It's not clear that they're the best of that sorry bunch. We all know that if the US announced "hey, you're right, we're just here for the oil, so we're going to redeploy to cover what we need and let you take care of the rest", they'd be running troops into Iraq as fast as they could get transport from the Russians. (They really ought to have some ability to project force.) Then we'll see how Euros run an occupation. Most folks think that Germany is the most brutal, but I've got my money on France.

As a superpower, the US is basically a resource. Whenever something big needs doing, the question is "how do we get the US to do it?" If you don't like that deal, find a better one and take it. We won't be offended.

We don't want you to to be subservient. That's how the alternatives work. (Yes, I'm including EU and subdivisions.) Instead, we think that your responses when you ask us to do something should show some class. They should fall into two categories (1) "thank you" with as much "how can we help" as you can afford and (2) "on second thought, don't bother, we'll do it ourselves". And, we should hear the second a lot more from the EU. After all, 500M people and more GDP than the US should allow you to do most things on your own. (All that wealth and we had to handle your USSR problem....)

Yes, in some ways we do look down on you. It's because you're Monday morning quarterbacks. You want respect - get on the field. Surely there are some problems that you can handle. Show us how it's done.

BTW - We know that you're talking smack because you're not afraid of anything these days. We also know that that will change when you are.

Speaking of "sophistication", it's somewhat ironic that our subprime mortages had a bigger effect on your banking system. We're stupid, so we're supposed to get conned. What's your excuse for getting taken by rubes?

You're right, except I think the EU would look at the half dozen or so barrels of oil that would be left over once the US had covered what it "needs" and think it wasn't worth it.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

> Sorry, couldn't resist.

Since only a small fraction of the US supply comes from the Middle East (the US gets the vast majority of its oil from North and South America), perhaps you should have.

Maybe the EU can subcontract the occupation to China....

BTW - One of the advantages of having being a superpower is that you have options like "hmm, if the Middle East goes to hell, we'll keep oil from North and South America from being exported outside of North and South America".

Since when do yanks not have a sense of humour? I thought you people were all chuckles. I mean, post a roundly ridiculous, off the cuff, nationalistic comment and expect something similar in return, no?

If you want to get serious, I'm kind of sick of this "But the US doesn't need the oil in Iraq anyway" argument. I'm sure you know as well as anyone else around these parts that it's not about required resources, it's about control of resources, which in turn provides desired leverage.

Ah yes, joke. Ha ha.

It's nationalistic and ridiculous to suggest that the EU should show the US how things should be done instead of criticising? Wowsers.

It's not so much control of the Middle East oil resources as stability of the resources so those who actually depend on them (that is, not the US) don't go belly up.

Like I said, we have options. It would hurt us if the EU went belly up, but not as much as it would hurt the EU.

Trying to move attention away from the ridiculous and nationalistic parts of your post to a part of it that was less so, isn't going to work. Take a look over your post again and I'm sure you'll see the portions of it that refer to.

The fact of the matter now is politics doesn't run on altruism. If you truly believe that there isn't an overwhelmingly large portion of your establishment doing their damn best to make sure the US stays the one and only true super power and that their reasons for doing this are not largely selfish, then you are lost, my friend. Call it "stability" if you like, but it doesn't change what it really is underneath. Need for control, the desired end product being alleviation of fear. I have a problem with anyone telling me they know what's best for me.

Smart people in the rest of the world try hard to make a distinction between the US government and the US people (especially at the moment), maybe you should start doing the same.

OK Firstly I'm from Australia not the EU.

> Yes, in some ways we do look down on you.

That was my point. Most Americans know so little about the world but they are so convinced they are the best. In my experience most first world countries are better to live in than the states.

> It's because you're Monday morning quarterbacks. You want respect - get on the field.

So we have to start a war or something to get respect? Is that what the invasion of Iraq was all about?

> We don't argue that it's right, but let's look at the alternatives. China? Russia? The EU? No one? Yeah right.

Why does any one nation have to be nominate itself as the sheriff? I haven't seen much clamour for the US to exercise military power recently, more the opposite.

In truth I don't think the US has anywhere near as much power as it thinks. Most times it has tried to exert that power it has backfired. When you have about 20-25% of world GPD and you try to continually exercise more than 50% of the control something has to give.

So we have to start a war or something to get respect? Is that what the invasion of Iraq was all about?

There is absolutely no reason, other than bickering and incompetence, that the European powers couldn't be operating an airlift capability equivalent to or better than the US C17 Globemaster fleet. If we were we could have saved countless lives in the wake of the Asian tsunami. The only people in the world able to undertake a massive logistical undertaking at short notice is the USAF.

Militaries do an LOT other than blowing stuff up.

I'm not sure of the relative efforts applied to the Asian Tsunami. I didn't think that the US devoted a great deal of their military capacity to the problem. Of course the US. unlike Europe, actually shares an Ocean with Asia so it would make sense for them to offer more help.

You seem to have a very indepth knowledge of the logistics of these situations. Perhaps you could explain what happened to the rescue effort in New Orleans when Huricane Katrina hit?

What happened there was a failure to learn from history. It's like the Irish Potato Famine. Conspiracy nuts like to think it was deliberate but the truth is that it was hugely embarassing for the British Empire to have a disaster like that in their own back yard. What sort of imperials think they can rule the world when they can't even deal with a local crisis? The far-flung reaches of empires are glamorous and exciting, but what matters really is the bread-and-butter stuff at home.

Ireland was never a british colony (apart from northern ireland)

That is an interesting historical perspective, one that I had not considered before. Still, if anything, it supports the notion that the US is faltering as the world power.

BTW I'd be interested to see a comparison with deaths in rural Soviet Union under Stalin with the Irish situation. Seems to me like a similar situation and yet the deaths are pretty much attributed as murder under Stalin.

Ummm, that's because it was murder. See the (well written) works of the historian Robert Conquest. By the way, when the Soviet archives were opened up during the Yeltsin era, his estimations of the number of Soviet murders turned out to be almost exactly right (actually, a little on the low side).

I think of this sometimes when I think of my wife. She survived, with years of hunger, Mao's "Great Leap Forward", when 77,000,000 human beings -- men, women, children dying as their mothers held them and watched -- were systematically starved to death.

"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." -- Stalin, an expert on the subject

I was, of course, refering to the agricultural deaths. To some extent those seem similar to the situation in Ireland and possibly China under Mao. To what extent can attribute a failed policy as murder? Is the US responsable for the 1 million or so deaths in Iraq? Probably not.

> I didn't think that the US devoted a great deal of their military capacity to the problem.

We devoted a carrier group. We have more than one, so it wasn't a huge deal for us. And, since we have several, there is always at least one fairly close to almost anywhere there's an blue-water ocean.

However, a carrier group has a lot of capacity. It's at least one fairly significant medical facility, an airstrip and transport, a lot of housing and trained personnel, a huge amount of desalinization, and so on.

It would be a huge deal for the EU to provide the same capacity.

A single USN carrier group probably has more capability than the current Royal and French navies combined. The EU nations spend in total about half of what the US does on defence, but have about a tenth of the capability to show for it. That's what I mean about bickering and incompetence.

The British govt is finally realizing that, hence the RN will in a few years have 2 near-US-equivalent carrier groups (the US has 14 IIRC). The rest is a joke. The EU "rapid reaction corps" would take 2-3 months to deploy anywhere...

> So we have to start a war or something to get respect?

Not at all.

There are no shortage of problems in the world. Rwanda is basically over, but there's the Sudan and the other hell-holes of sub-saharan Africa. Surely you've got more to contribute than "the Americans dropped the ball again."

Then there's Bosnia. Right in the EU's backyard. Why should the US be there at all?

The world is full of problems. Pick some and solve them. We don't care how you do it, but we do notice that you're not even trying.

Is it really unreasonable to expect the EU to handle fairly big problems?

Apparently so - you can't even manage to provide reasonable capacity in Afghanistan. (Man for man, fantastic, but there aren't many men.)

> you can't even manage to provide reasonable capacity in Afghanistan.

Am I misunderstanding you or are you really arguing that one should expect the EU to clean up after the US?

Apart from that the EU is actually doing things in Afghanistan as far as I know -- but more like the friendly-negotiative style, not the world's cop style.

I am an American, but I have been thinking the EU is more a supper power when it comes to basic science than the US. IMO if you want to see what the next supper power's are doing look at who is building ITER. In today's word tech > power and a military is just a dead weight without the economy to back it up.

PS: Web 2.0 sounds great but look at Iceland to see what happens when you build an economy on Ideas.

Mmmm....supper power

> We don't want you to to be subservient.

Are you sure you don't? Can you explain to me why your new foreign policy states that "The United States must remain the world's only superpower, unchallenged by any other nation."?

( http://web.archive.org/web/20071012015838/http://www.crf-usa... ) ( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/wolf.... )

BTW, Tell me how it goes with China...

> Whenever something big needs doing, the question is "how do we get the US to do it?"

Please give me examples of "something big that needs doing" that the US did, so that I can refute you. The US mostly only does what is best in its self-interest (actually, nowadays, in the self-interest of a small elite, but let's not have that discussion) - and this is perfectly reasonable. Do we need a group of self-appointed cops of the world?

And if we do, do you think the US would be a good model (start a war - were people die, woman get raped, etc - for nothing - remember - there were no WOMD and Bush knew it)?

> BTW - We know that you're talking smack because you're not afraid of anything these days.

Of course. Because the US is currently driven by fear, right? Fear of terrorists - ok, "let's drop all our freedoms to pretend to be doing something about another attack - the rich and powerful can surely take something of this."

And if you think about, it is scary how many of your freedoms were dropped (if the government want, they can have you arrested right now, with no charge, for as long as they want), how many laws were broken and ignored (immunity for the telcos - hahaha), etc.

Fear the economy will collapse? "ok, let's take 700 billon dollars from the taxpayers and give to irresponsible and stupid (well, maybe they are not so stupid after all...) bankers - this will surely help."

Fear your kids will get violent? "ok, let's ban violent video games and stuff. They must be the reason why kids fight so much each other."

Yeah, right. I wonder what comes next.

> Are you sure you don't? Can you explain to me why your new foreign policy states that "The United States must remain the world's only superpower, unchallenged by any other nation."?

You do realize you're citing (1) what someone wrote as an interpretation of some cobbled together quotes and (2) a draft document that the cite itself admits was changed in the relevant part.

However, a more interesting question is why you think that US policy matters. The Chinese and Russians don't think that they have to have the US' permission to develop their capability.

Why would the EU need the US permission to build some carrier groups or some airlift capability? (The latter was part of the point of AirBus, right?)

>>> Whenever something big needs doing, the question is "how do we get the US to do it?" > Please give me examples of "something big that needs doing" that the US did, so that I can refute you.

It's not the "did" but the "needs doing" - my point being that unless the US gets involved with something, the rest of the world stays out as well.

I'm amused that you're asking me for world trouble-spots; you keep telling us that Americans are clueless about the rest of the world.

I mentioned Sudan and the other things in sub-saharan africa. Or, is that too small or unworthy of your attention?

Surely you're not going to claim that the world is fine except for Iraq. As a sophisticated "citizen of the world", surely you've got a long list of things that need doing.

Go down that list and ask "why isn't my country (or the EU) handling this?".

> Fear the economy will collapse? "ok, let's take 700 billon dollars from the taxpayers and give to irresponsible and stupid (well, maybe they are not so stupid after all...) bankers - this will surely help."

At last count, the EU had put in over 3x as much.

> ..a more interesting question is why you think that US policy matters.

I didn't say I think this. You are the one that claimed the US doesn't want the rest of the world to be subservient - I am just pointing out you might be wrong. And the fact that they changed the document doesn't mean the person who wrote it changed his intention.

> ...unless the US gets involved with something, the rest of the world stays out as well.

This claim is absurd.

> I'm amused that you're asking me for world trouble-spots

I am not. Read my question again.

> ...you keep telling us that Americans are clueless about the rest of the world.

I never said that or anything similar in my entire life. Not sure who / what are you are referring to as "you". I guess you (specifically you - I don't like to generalize) bought into all that paranoid stuff...

> Go down that list and ask "why isn't my country (or the EU) handling this?".

I live in Brazil. It improved remarkably in the last 10 years or so, but it still a poor country. Still, this doesn't mean Brazil does nothing for the rest of the world: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/03/58274 . There are many more examples, if you care to look for them.

people from the US need to understand that when you argue that it is right for you to be 'the superpower' you are also arguing that the rest of the world should be subservient

I'm not American. Not one bit.

Except in the sense that we in the western world are all americans to some extent.

Also, although America may not be very good at holding up to its own promise, at least it symbolises freedom, democracy, etc. If America's not the superpower, who do you suggest? China? Russia?

America may have flaws, but, like capitalism and democracy, it's still better than the alternatives.

You are making the same mistake as many Americans in equating the values of freedom and democracy with being American. There are many other countries of the world that are at least as democratic and free as the US. Nor is America the originator of western democracy. America just happens to be the largest and loudest.

Why does there have to be a single superpower? It doesn't make sense and it isn't sustainable. With 20-25% of the world GDP the US just can't do it even the world wanted it to (which it generally doesn't).

Nor is America the originator of western democracy

Just curious, were there other western democracies in 1776 when America was founded? Or are you referring to ancient examples like Athens?

I would consider Great Britain to be the originator of western democracy. The earliest roots of this are in the English Bill of Rights in 1689. Admittedly it wasn't initially what we would expect from a democracy but access improved over time. When America was founded the version of democracy was undoubtedly a significant improvement but it would have been influenced by the British model.

Over time other nations have created arguably better versions (proportional representation for example) and of course the US and Britain have improved their system as well by allowing more people to vote.

Have a look at The Economist 'Democracy Index' you'll see that the US currently ranks 17th of all countries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index.

I personally believe the Parliamentary system originated in the UK is more robust than the US's presidential system. In a parlimentary system the prime minister is immediately accountable to the parliment. Their party (or a majority of parliament) can chose to dump them at any time which means that you are less likely to be stuck with some wack job in power for 4 years.

I alse believe the lack of preferential voting makes it virtually impossible for any other party to gain significant traction or become president. The only choice is Rep, Dem or waste your vote. This effectively denies genuine representation to people who's views are different from those a both parties. The preferential voting system is resonable for this but in my view proportional representation is the curent 'state of the art' in democracy.

> I got used to the idea that somebody, somewhere in the project, feels that the sky is falling and the project's about to end

yes I go through that on a weekly basis. Its mild manic depressive, but you can ignore people like me. Fight on.

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