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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

YC does fund defense companies, esp tech innovative ones, a posture change they made due to the situation in Taiwan and Ukraine [1]

But they didn’t fund Palantir or Anduril or any of the companies that blew up during the Border Panics of 2016-2020.

Unless you’re playing guilty by association games in which case ..carry on.

[1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ares-industries

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YC gave Palantir a massive platform at startup school to present the company and vision and recruit talent. Far more than the seed investment would have been worth.

With respect to the ares industries, YC buys into the neocon view strongly enough that it wants to help create the next wave of military tech. The only reason anyone perceives these "threats" and perceives the US to be "woefully unprepared" because of the marketing budget the defense industry has after profiting handsomely from the Iraq wars, etc.

The US is not in danger and does not need new and state of the art weapons systems. We are not losing in Ukraine because we don't have adequate weapons but because we are playing a very stupid and risky strategy. See the comments of Jeffrey Sachs on all of this.

Jeffrey Sachs is unfortunately a misinformation machine. His words sound convincing but lack truth. Unrelated to Ukraine, he is also very friendly with Chinese oppression and refused to acknowledge Uyghur torture.

Try reading this letter and see if you still believe him. Note the number of signatures at the bottom.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230806172854/https://news.berk...

I read the letter and it sounded like the "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive aggression. The claim is that Russia is by nature aggressive (based on a very long-term historical trend that does not include its current regime) and so aggressive action against Russia is warranted, regardless of the current government or any existing treaties.

The aggressive aspect of NATO is also minimized, which I think is naive.

I was in Ukraine in 2016 and saw the US fighter jets flying formations on Russia's doorstep. Calling that "defensive" is absurd. We now know that since the 1990s there has been a US goal to aggressively expand NATO mainly to suppress Russia.

The problem with this strategy is that it does not care at all about Ukrainian lives. As someone with family in Ukraine, I do not want my country (the US) wreaking havoc in the region. Thousands of Ukrainians are dying every single day right now, all because the US doesn't want to respect Russia's security zone. Mearshimer calls this the US nostalgia over the "uni-polar moment" when the US was briefly the only superpower.

Too much of the modern notions of American exceptionalism rely upon biases from that brief moment in history, to everyone's peril.

Unfortunately this narrative is imperceptibly different from Russian propaganda (eg, leaving out that Russia regularly buzzes American airspace in Alaska). So if you want to make this case, you’ll have to find a narrative that works for Ukrainians (who overwhelmingly support the war[1]) and the Taiwanese. Convince them that an American pullback will be fine for them, and I’ll support America pulling back.

Until then, a multi-polar world among authoritarian aristocracies is a pipe-dream. Everyone hates American hegemony until you ask them what other hegemony they would like.

So missiles we must make, and make them cheaper we can.

[1] https://www.voanews.com/amp/new-poll-reveals-how-ukrainians-...

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