Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

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colechristensen

I mean Henry Ford was only not a Nazi in the sense that he wasn't a card carrying member of a foreign political organization. There were plenty of similar Nazi supporting executives in corporate America in the 1930s. And why wouldn't there be? It wasn't like fascism was a one time thing led by one person, it was all over Europe and spread to America, much like Communism in the other direction who similarly wanted to remake the world in their image.

It would be a mistake to associate either just with wealth and tax brackets.

Those kinds of documentaries muddle the water by being too conspiratorial and not building an idea of things that actually happened in context instead they're just raising the spectre of one cabal or another. They just make you afraid and say whacko things which is counterproductive to actually recognizing and forming actual resistance to real threats like present day reality show themed fascism by insecure idiots in power. (it was a much scarier time when the fascists were competent)

It was a much scarier time because far more people were far more competent.

I doubt that if you took the smartest people today and equipped them with the knowledge and resources around at the time - and no more than that, so no modern insights or historical knowledge - they'd be able to do what Turing, Flowers, and the others did.

Reverse engineering and breaking an encryption protocol by hand and then mechanising it with just math and valve technology was an astounding achievement.

These people still exist, there just isn't the same institutional push to promote them to prominence so you don't know about them.

Hogwash. Humans are masters of innovation, and are highly motivated to solve problems. None of these men worked from the ground up, but built on the groundwork laid down by others (Turing especially).

The world was arguably also less complex back then, so there was plenty of low-hanging fruit to snatch in terms of information theory

Don't let the Hideo Kojima's of the world fool you into believing they did everything themselves. It's an effort of many, many who do it for the love of the craft and are content to receive no praise for it

Their adversaries had the same knowledge and resources: gears, relays, vacuum tubes. It was a fairly level playing field.

They were scientific revolutions ripe for the right people at the right time. These people are uncommon but they're always around, there was nothing particularly special about that generation or those few that found themselves where they did. If the events of the world wars didn't collapse civilization to the degree of the late bronze age collapse, the fall of the western roman empire, the Maya collapse, etc. then computing machinery was pretty inevitable in the span of a few decades.

You can usually make the argument that any particular scientific or engineering revolution would have happened anyway with different people nor more than 25 years or so later, at least any advancement since the mid 19th century.

Except, why didn't the ancient Romans or Egyptians invent the Internet? They had enough civilization to build empires.

There's a tech tree, more or less.

You need steam power, chemical batteries, basic metallurgy, and the telegraph to make global communications networks obvious.

With constant conquest and expansion Rome was full of slaves which distorted the market need for mechanical power.

Hero of Alexandria made a little steam powered spinning toy which could have been the inspiration for steam power and the industrial revolution but it wasn't and the western empire was already on the path to decline. When the expansion hit its practical limit Rome fell apart instead of industrializing under the effects of Christianity and a series of decadent or just bad emperors.

Rome made ENORMOUS strides in the advancement of civilization when it came to organization and institutions it just didn't hit the industrialization spark and stopped advancing.

It's important to remember that Nazi Germany was not seen as an enemy at first, and many people admired how Hitler had supposedly lifted Germany out of the economic catastrophe of Weimar. Years passed between the Nazis taking power and the outbreak of war. It was not an uncommon sentiment that democracy was weak and the Nazis showed us a better way. This sentiment was extremely wrong-headed, but it wasn't a matter of outright sympathizing with the enemy.

>Years passed between the Nazis taking power and the outbreak of war.

Sure but the rhetoric of hate and disastrously racist things were happening well before the war took place and soon after the party took power. It wasn't some mystery that these were terrible people, the extent of awareness of what they were capable of just got gradually worse. In an age of bigotry they were still extreme but not THAT extreme if that makes sense so some people were overlooking their words and actions in order to praise the return to prosperity. But anybody with good sense and a decent disposition knew very early on that these were bad people and not a desirable change.

My point isn't to defend the Nazi sympathies of Ford et al, but merely that funding and trading with Nazi Germany happened before the war, and doesn't mean that it's some cabal getting rich while the rest of us fight.

The US (without any ‘Nazi idealogy’) literally locked up all Japanese Americans in places like Manzanar and stole all their property, roughly when all this was going on.

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