_djo_

If you regard The Economist as far left I can only assume your politics are so far to the right that you no longer know where the centre is.

It is, and always has been, a socially liberal centre-right pro-business pro-Capitalism news magazine.

What kind of evidence are you expecting? Detailed photographs of the satellites on orbit?

These are credible institutions, with their statements regarding unusual orbital movements backed up by observations made by several independent groups.

If they did, then all three are equally guilty of breaching the treaty and making weapons in space a new norm. That's plausible, sure.

If they didn't, it makes sense why they'd choose to compete on the same playing field now, as the norm is already broken.

None of what I'm posting is about saying the US are the 'good guys' here. Neither the US, Russia, nor China are 'good' for creating a new space arms race that puts everyone at more risk. It might be something we can understand from a purely rational perspective while disliking that it's happening.

Russia also seems to have tested the release of a sub-satellite from another satellite, perhaps a precursor to a kinetic space-launched weapon.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/secretive-russian...

Sure.

https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/current-and-future-trends-ch...

https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2026-global...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2024.2...

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4431/1

https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Annual_Report/Chapt...

There have been detailed and credible claims of Chinese space weapons for some time now.

https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/202...

https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/current-and-future-trends-ch...

https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2026-global...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2024.2...

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4431/1

https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Annual_Report/Chapt...

To be fair, this move is coming after fairly strong evidence that Russia and China have been breaking the treaty by deploying weapons into space for years. Which the US has highlighted many times in the past.

At some point you have to acknowledge that the treaty is no longer being respected, and match capabilities to avoid being left at a disadvantage.

That said, I'm sure there were tons of people in the US military establishment who had been pushing for this for decades and were ecstatic at being allowed to do it at a broad scale.

Human rights violations, violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, violations of related UNSC Resolutions, sponsorship of terrorism, and many others.

We can wholeheartedly disagree with the US's war on Iran without pretending Iran is a 'good' international actor. It's a rogue state and has been for decades.

It's optimised for distance to and from the depot and in-city store locations. Presumably it charges at the depot while loading.

Trucks have a lot more space for batteries, so with EV trucks it's all about balancing range and weight for the task. More range means less useful load.

Fair call on the funding, I know the US was paying for the French military's involvement for years. Still, by active support I meant troops on the ground, which happened significantly later.

Who resumed the fighting does matter, as even though Diem refused the 1956 reunification elections that didn't justify resorting to an armed insurgency by the North. It's also not ambiguous, Hanoi's 15th plenum officially authorised that insurgency in 1959 and formed groups 559 and 759, and later the NLF (Viet Cong).

They were already killing hundreds of innocent South Vietnamese village chiefs, teachers, and officials by the late 1950s, trying to create a local insurgency and insurrection. That's what the US got involved with to oppose, and I really can't say it was a morally wrong decision at the time. Hanoi had the option of sticking with diplomacy and chose to send guerrillas south instead. You're giving only the US agency here.

These, again, are export control restrictions at the point of sale and transfer, and the US follows them too. It's not the same thing as what we're discussing regarding the US's changing requirements regarding systems that embed its components.

Note that dual-use items (which Wassenaar regulates) and MTCR are not the same as the US's ITAR 'see through' rule which it uses to block third party sales of systems that contain even small numbers of US components.

For dual-use items, the EU's Directive 2021/821 governs things and broadly authorises exports to the United States through EU General Export Authorisations (EUGEAs) that don't require individual approval.[0]

[0] https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/help-exporters-and-importe...

The US only became actively involved in supporting South Vietnam a decade after it had achieved independence from France in 1955, after the negotiated division into North and South Vietnam in Geneva, and after the last French forces left in 1956.

The cause of that intervention was North Vietnam sending Viet Cong insurgents into South Vietnam, attempting to overthrow the government, and ignoring the South's sovereignty.

That doesn't justify the US's later transgressions while engaged in the war, but their initial support to South Vietnam was neither unjustified nor illiberal.

It doesn't matter how much you go on about 'NATO propaganda', the simple truth is that Russia invaded Ukraine, illegally and without reasonable cause, and did so for its own interests.

What's more, Ukraine was nowhere near joining NATO, and in any case Russia's invasion would still have been illegal and reprehensible even if it was.

Can you name any examples? European countries and the EU as a whole don't have an equivalent of the US's ITAR 'See-Through' rule, which lets the US control the usage of a system that has any US components.

I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government. It has been done within Europe, but only for major components, such as Germany's blocking at one point of sales to Saudi Arabia.

Leave them be, they retired at the top of their game and they’re enjoying life doing something different. If they rejoin and tour again it’ll be because they feel the desire to, not because of ‘fan’ campaigns like this.

Also the whole thing feels weirdly commercial and is mostly AI-slop.

No, Hubble didn't reuse any components from spy satellites. However, the chosen mirror diameter was decided by the size of the mirrors being produced for the Keyhole programme, as it meant NASA would be able to reuse Perkin-Elmer's existing fabrication facility.

It used to. The deeply ideological current administration has decreed that it may no longer do so, and must instead pretend that climate change doesn't exist. [0][1]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/14/pentagon...

[1] https://www.eenews.net/articles/pentagon-starts-purging-clim...

Correct. It's also often forgotten how much the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) had done to make government more streamlined and efficient between 1993 and 1998. That took care of pretty much all the low-hanging fruit that those behind DOGE falsely believed was still there.

The Democrats have, in the past forty years, been the only party to have consistently been able to reduce the deficit, even creating a surplus by the end of Clinton's presidency.

They've also been the only party to have successfully reduced the cost of government and made it more efficient in the process. Clinton's bipartisan National Partnership for Reinventing Government was what DOGE claimed to be, as it sharply cut the number of federal government staff without affecting delivery. [0][1]

Obama and Biden were less effective than Clinton, but still drove the deficit down toward the end of their terms, and Obama in particular tried to implement a series of reforms to improve efficiency such as creating 18F which saved a bunch on government software contracts in the years it was active. The Republicans have not seriously done anything similar, and DOGE doesn't count because from the start it was clear it wasn't a serious attempt to reduce actual waste but an ideologically-motivated exercise run by unskilled and inexperienced people.

This isn't to say Democratic administrations have been all good or that the Democratic Party hasn't also loved its pork, but overall at least when in control of the presidency the party has tended to stabilise America's finances, improve tax revenue collection, make government more efficient, and reduce deficit spending far more than the Republicans have.

The Democrats retain at least some elements of their technocratic side, but the Republicans have gone all-in on populism and thrown theirs out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...

[1] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/ls1088

You’re supposed to believe it’s factual because you have investigative reporting by multiple newspapers with good track records, on the record statements by bookstore owners, and evidence presented in court cases like the one regarding Anthropic’s Project Panama.

Notably, one of those piece of evidence from that Anthropic case was an internal presentation clearly stating the intention of Project Panama was to “destructively scan all the books in the world.”

Beyond that, some book sellers have named specific titles, such as “an Estonian translation of John le Carré's The Mission Song, a specific edition of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, and the October 1983 issue of Warship monthly magazine” and “everything from 18th-century African agricultural implements to biographies of 1950s racing drivers.”[0]

But getting a full list of all those sold globally is difficult. I imagine we’ll start to see some efforts to try to encourage booksellers to contribute to public lists though.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/15/uk-irelan...

Those poor AI companies, they’re the real victims here! /s

There are several things to criticise here, including the US’s terrible copyright laws and the publishers involved in that case who care more about in-print than out-of-print books.

But it’s the AI companies that are actively buying up and destroying books at an unprecedented scale, which is an action they’re choosing do to and certainly don’t have to do. Therefore that’s also where the immediate focus and attention needs to be

Of course they’re not more profitable, they’re negative externalities that aren’t being priced into a finite commodity.

That’s the whole point: Companies are doing this because it’s easier and cheaper for them, and those doing it now are first-movers who don’t care about how catastrophic the end result will be for the rest of society as they’ll have their training data moat.

It should be obvious, but the things that are most profitable are not always the things that are best for society as a whole. That’s why we have regulation.

X and Threads do this too. I wish they all wouldn't, messing with screenshots should only ever be done when preventing them as a security measure.

Plus, the physical copy of the book has additional value in terms of forensic verifiability. You can prove the originality of the text and the absence of alterations, and can easily track changes between editions.

Digital copies can be altered at whim, as the only means to provide any sort of tracking or verifiability is through another external software system that itself has to be trusted.

We really need to be thinking about the long-term implications of what Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, and others are doing here.

Because it's not just one company doing this, it's dozens if not hundreds of them, all with huge budgets and all competing over the same dwindling supply of older books. What those talking about library disposals and similar measures are missing is the sheer scale that destructive book scanning for AI ingestion is operating with. It's unprecedented.

It's not impossible that in a few years the number of older physical books for sale anywhere will plummet to almost nothing and that in many cases that'll include the last copies anywhere of particular titles. Second-hand book stores will close, and a ton of niche knowledge might be lost forever. It'll also all have been done in relative secret, without any transparency or public record kept of what was lost.

Worse, it's something that can only be done once. If our societies don't do something about this now there isn't going to be a chance for a do-over. Once a physical book is destroyed it's gone forever, and we'll be lucky if there's a digital copy left. But even then digital copies don't provide the same level of forensic verifiability that physical copies do. Future researchers looking for material that might've been contained in books like these will be out of luck.

If our societies do nothing to stop this, we'll all be poorer for it.

I'm not failing to understand that, I just don't think it's an insurmountable barrier.

You could overcome it through various means, including helping to set up a clearinghouse for bulk rights, implementing a data clean room approach that models could train on in situ, lobbying Congress for copyright law changes especially around orphan works, using Section 108 of the Copyright Act to set up a specific preservation vehicle like the HathiTrust, and other options.

I find it ridiculous that so many in this thread are acting as though AI companies are simply powerless to do anything but buy up and destroy these rare books.

Have you seen AI companies making any effort, with their newfound immense power to get the attention of lawmakers, to lobby for amendments to copyright law to make this exercise a less destructive exercise?

Because none are.

That copyright law is a mess doesn't mean that companies that buy up rare books, destroy them, and keep the contents locked up are beyond criticism for their actions.

They don't have to scan and destroy these books, it's an entirely voluntary choice.

Then find a way to make them digitally available, verbatim, like Google Books attempted to do. I'm sure with the power that AI companies have they can have legislation amended to make it happen.

You're defending the indefensible here.

Making the contents of the books available verbatim afterward would be a less bad option, yes.

That's not happening though.