USAs superpower is their inability to see their own hypocrisy.
Most of the US's power is from being a land of opportunity and of high ideals, with military power being secondary backup. As the US lessens opportunity and openly betrays its ideals, that power disappears. The Greenland and Canada threats alone probably require $500B-$1T/year in additional military spending to try to gain through force wha was previously given freely to the US. Add in the huge cost to the US from the tariff idiocy and cutting things like USAID and we could never spend enough militarily to make up for it.
Look at Putin's weakness in Ukraine. He tried to take by force what was not his, and ended up costing himself far more in lost trust than he could ever have gained with the war, and he has gained so little in the war. Putin had a better chance by continuing to try to divide Ukrainian society internally and have the majority of society side with Russia. Much like what is happening in the US right now.... but attack with bombs and the charade disappears. The US is going to discover the same loss of power through its attempts and threat of force.
With enough power people would rather accept bad in-practice results rather than have to confront the fact that they screwed up. So in practice the people in power don't usually care about hypocrisy. But they would be materially better off if they had actually cared about it. It is a bit like the oligarchs in some traditional communist country. Living the lie got them lifestyles of unbelievable wealth and luxury - but the oligarchs in the capitalist countries got lifestyles of even more unbelievable wealth and luxury, and passed on a much more impressive legacy. Not to say they weren't still hypocritical, but the degree of the disconnect from reality matters.
If you keep your eye on the places where hyper-competent people gather and accumulate power they tend to actually be quite honest. Organised groups of talented people tend to have the easiest time securing a social advantage when honesty and straightfowardness are abundant. The people who would naturally be socially weak are the ones who rely on saying one thing and doing the opposite.
I think its also about the moral ambiguity itself and perhaps even the meaning of life in my opinion.
Because like, I really think that world has its flaws but at the end of the day, this is perhaps still the most rarest moments in the whole universe when we think about it
So I'd much rather do work which benefits other humans that I enjoy (although I sometimes think of it from, I would probably want to do something after retirement, maybe I get retire early or not suppose, but if I can already make the thing I want to do as retirement as job [computer related] and they pay really nicely, why not just do them right now)
It's a shame to me that tech right now feels so inhumane. I don't want really a billion trillion dollars. I just want "enough" and I want to perhaps help people once I get that "enough" not this hyper growth-focused almost will sell you snake-oil kind of tech
Perhaps most people don't have that definition of "enough" or they have materialistic desires or fame desires which one wants to get through money but I don't have many of such desires but I don't really know why people want to be so materialistic.
Like take Elon Musk, richest man in the world, Man, his ego is really fragile. Donald Trump feels like having a really fragile ego to me as well.
I really don't understand what's the point of having all these billions of dollars? Yes nobody is offering me a billion dollars but I'd rather just take "enough" and then give others to some projects I want to help smh
Also logically, it doesn't make sense to lie to me that much. To me trust seems the most valuable resource and the easiest way of generating and securing trust for a long time is being honest. And this helps me grow into a better person (who has his flaws) but still honesty mostly helps I guess idk.
I think we all just want our lives to have meaning in one way or another but it would be so much better if the sources of generation of meaning were human and not inhumane stuff as I was saying
Of course parent's comment is weird anyway. US is a superpower and that's a fact.
It is easy to express opinions about how things should be, but only with power can you make them so. There's of course the fractal complexity of who gets to decide how to spend the power budget of a nation, but that is besides the point. We may decry the human rights abuses of Saudi Arabia, China and the United States, but what good are our cries if we have no power to improve the lives of those affected? Am I saying this to whine about how powerless are we? No, I believe this should be the motivation, the call for greater economic development so that we can attain the power we feel like we need to make a positive change in the world. If not, we will be subjects of those who wield more power - and this isn't even advice exclusively for Europeans. You either build power in groups that are inclusive, or you steal power and form exclusive groups. The quality of life that most of the free world has been enjoying stemmed from the former, and it is the latter groups that will put us back into the dark ages.
Is this cynical? If so, I can confidently say I am a cynic.
The expression should not be understood to mean that might makes things morally just. In the weak form it means the strong can do what they want because what are the weak going to do about it? The stronger form of the expression is the idea that strong players set up the rules (legal code, etc) and as such they rig the rules in their favour.
Beautifully explained.
And I want to ask is there anything we can do bottom line about it?
I think like stricter rules against corruption should be in check, but that requires the govt. to do something and I feel like govt.'s themselves are being corrupt
It's this cyclical loop and I don't know if there is rather anything that we can do to break out of it.
We have the rights to vote, but those end up being squandered in most/all countries with corrupt politicians, those right to vote aren't really used mostly to bring real change, maybe a different name perhaps
At the end of the deal, its more so an faith in overall humanity that we can figure out what's right for all of us but we just fight over petty differences sometimes.
Do you guys have faith in overall humanity in aggregate? At times I feel like some instances restore my faith whereas others reduce it so its all just feelings for me perhaps.
Regarding your comment, its very interesting, where have you shifted now if I may ask or more details about it?
I am not really American but I still hear that its startup culture is well although with all of the other downsides we have mentioned, it does become moot.
A lot of people feel like the system is unfair but they want to be on the other side of unfairness rather than making the system fair from what I've observed. And this observation kind of fits globally sometimes imo
If you want to be in startup culture SV is still the place to be. I didn’t like it because of all the trend following, if you want to succeed there it’s best to jump on a trend. I’m more of an applied researcher and had my own ideas I wanted to explore.
As inequality continues to get worse those who initially benefited from it will generally find themselves on the other side of the transition and losing out.
AI is going to increase inequality far more than economic policy, I’m 5x more productive with AI and am able to compete with much larger orgs. What happens when they lose their job, what happens when someone does the same to me. The Pareto distribution of productivity is about to get a hell of a lot steeper.
So I guess India's the best option considering all factors I guess.
but one of the problems especially in India is the saturation of the market for software engineers and the competition to get into college is so cut throat that I can't even start to tell smh
I think perhaps remote jobs from india might make more sense but I clearly am not the only one with this idea so might be hard to differentiate I suppose
> AI is going to increase inequality far more than economic policy, I’m 5x more productive with AI and am able to compete with much larger orgs. What happens when they lose their job, what happens when someone does the same to me. The Pareto distribution of productivity is about to get a hell of a lot steeper.
That's great but I think I have nuanced discussion on AI, I think that we are gonna have much bigger financial issues all around the world because of the AI bubble itself
The USA's might is highly dependent on the world order it fostered after WW2, and especially after the Cold War.
Erode that, and the USA as we've known the past 70 years starts to crumble. If in a couple decades the rest of the world works to decouple from the dollar as the main reserve currency; decouple from the dependency to sell to the USA; and decouple the dependency on American tech you still have a rich country but definitely not the superpower with the might as it exists today.
It's not possible for the USA to be funded with the astronomical deficits it runs to keep its war machine, it's not possible for the US, culturally and politically, to majorly increase taxes to cover this deficit. Slowly there would be cuts to its defence spending, diminishing its might.
Not sure why Americans decided this was a good path, didn't expect to see the era of Pax Americana to be so abruptly shaken during my lifetime but here we are.
I was discussing this with my cousin today and about how here in my country, we have multi party system. Sure, there is still two major parties but there are definitely small parties as well and we were discussing that even India should move towards more decentralization akin to switzerland.
I really hope we have a more decentralized option and where people from all around the world feel that their vote, in fact, does matter.
What interests me about this comment is the statistic that 50% of US consumer spending comes from people in the top 10% of earnings (first google link, probably not the best source: https://www.warc.com/content/feed/top-10-of-wealthy-american...)
So while the US might look like a really juicy market, I start to wonder how much juice is in the lemon?
Why the dependency to sell to the US if 90% of the US population doesn't have the free cash to buy things?
Yes, I know I'm stupid, and look at all the cheap stuff americans buy; I've seen the miles of warehouses from companies like 5 Below. My concern is how long this lasts?