9 ms·

The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The d

by evilos 3mo ago

The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The damage, physical and social, is incalculable. The unpunished crimes, endless. The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.

matwood 3mo ago
The soft power the US has lost will take a generation or more to rebuild if it's ever rebuilt.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
rurp 3mo ago
The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again. As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morphs into long term almost certainly won't be as nice for Americans as the recent past was. Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.
- KennyBlanken 3mo ago
  > Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment. Uh....that's more the fault of a president who thought a totally normal thing (arms treaties with expiring restrictions) was a "scam" (not to mention, a black man he hates was responsible for said treaty) and ripped up said treaty. We literally were in a treaty, with Iran, that was doing all the things Trump said he wanted. Then thought he could bully a country he probably thinks of as "a bunch of sand", ignoring the fact that a quarter of the world's oil drives right by them. I've heard foreign policy analysts say that it seemed like Iran never realized how much power they did until Trump pissed them off, they responded, the shipping industry universally said "ohhh hell no" and dropped anchor....and Iranian leadership looked around and said "........wait. We've been able to do that THIS WHOLE TIME?!!!" and then their plan become to outlast Trump's administration. Iran realizing they can cripple the world economy is a genie that will not be put back in its bottle, even as countries scramble to decarbonize. Oil is still required for lubricants, plastics, and chemical production. Add in the fact that the US military is being run by a guy who is more concerned about people being clean-shaven than actually running the military as an organization and by all accounts, barely managed ~2 dozen soldiers, then in civilian life failed, repeatedly, at managing businesses. Who has kicked out or pissed off dozens of senior military leaders, as well as pissed off anyone who was remotely debating whether to reenlist.
  - esarbe 3mo ago
    It's more than just "that one president". It's the whole system that brought him to power, where a large part of the population has been trained to hate and fear for almost half a decade now. That the US military is run by a clown is a feature, not a bug. That an incompetent buffoon like Trump is at the steering wheel is not an accident. Trump is doing exactly what the moneyed interests behind him have put him in power for - dismantling the system of checks and balances, of regulations and restrictions that prevent the oligarchs from thoroughly screwing the population. Good luck trying to restore any of your civil institutions after Trump and his ilk - and I don't expect that to be after 2028.
  - lonelyasacloud 3mo ago
    > Uh....that's more the fault of a president Who so far has been put into office twice by?
    - Terr_ 3mo ago
      Voters, but a minority of them.* Then kept in office by a minority (43%) of Republican Senate legislators. * Yes, that is the correct term. In each election >50% chose "Not Trump".
      - try_the_bass 3mo ago
        > Yes, that is the correct term. In each election >50% chose "Not Trump". Uhhh... Not voting at all doesn't count as "Not Trump". It counts as "I don't care," which implicitly means "whatever everyone else thinks". This is such a dumb thing to try to play semantic games about. A majority of voters elected the clown, and the population of non-voters is complicit in that.
        deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
        Terr_ 3mo ago
        Your comment is supercilious and confidently-incorrect. The most-charitable interpretation is that you have been misinformed ever since the last election from some preliminary estimate of incomplete counts. 1. Of all ballots, only 49.7961% were for Trump. [0] 2. Of ballots where someone made a non-blank choice for President, 50.1976% were for candidates who were not-Trump. So when I explicitly wrote about a "minority" of "voters", that really does mean an an actual mathematical minority of the people who actually voted, thankyouverymuchdamnit. [0] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024presgeresults.pdf https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...
- onetimeusename 3mo ago
  I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia. I will give an example. Did we need years and years of funding for a lab to work on an obscure programming language for multiprocessing that basically only that lab ever used? Probably not. How much of funded science is just useless waste for a group of people to play with things like this? A lot, I would speculate. There isn't really a good way to spot what's useful and what isn't but let's not pretend academia is a purely selfless institution.
  - quantified 3mo ago
    The same is roughly true for Silicon Valley investments once the herd mentality sets in. Yet it is celebrated as being the best way for commercial progress.
  - Ar-Curunir 3mo ago
    Almost all advances in deployed PLs come from academic research. Not sure what kind of point you’re trying to make
  - ribosometronome 3mo ago
    The majority of your argument has little to do with your initial complaint about China and India. What does poaching less of the world's best and brightest to contribute to our market and universities have to do with ensuring people are working on meaningful projects?
    - onetimeusename 3mo ago
      They are about 50% of all foreign grad students. Can you explain why the disproportionate representation? Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us? The thing about the academic job market is it's paper thin. I argue we produce too many PhDs. People seek out prestigious degrees. Our immigration system rewards more highly educated foreign students, sensibly, but that means there's more incentive to get advanced degrees. There's absolutely not just pure science going on in academia. Grad student wages are depressed and more foreign grad students does not help that.[1] There's a lot of careerism. I would argue some people exploit grad students. I don't think this is even very debatable. So I think put together, we likely print too many PhDs. One could argue that's not true relative to the overall job market but relative to tenure track positions, it is absolutely a fact. [1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-earnings-doctorates?page=1&perPage=50 https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-ea...
- xnx 3mo ago
  American exceptionalism is regressing to the mean.
  - josephg 3mo ago
    Strangely enough, america's tech sector is still exceptional on a global stage. I'm not entirely sure why. There's something magic that happens in the bay area as a result of funding and talent density. Its weird - I'm australian. We have the same caliber of software engineers here. But there's not the same ambition amongst skilled engineers to solve problems at the world stage. And its far more difficult to convince investors to give you the capital to try. The technology sector is propping up the US economy. The AI race is - so far - making this even more true.
    - sunrisetiger 3mo ago
      Likely because California is not beholden to other interests. Even rural voices in California are subdued when it comes to big city politics, especially San Francisco.
    - fwipsy 3mo ago
      My half-baked sense is that America is good at making the best things for the highest cost, but tends to be meh at making good or adequate things at a competitive price. Our military seems like the strongest example, but I feel like it also describes healthcare/biotech, education, and maybe housing. This works well for tech, because a good design can be scaled to serve the whole world, and we can outsource manufacturing to companies like China or Taiwan who are better at cost-effectiveness. (And have lower wages. Maybe that's the entire explanation.)
    - runako 3mo ago
      > The technology sector is propping up the US economy Probably more accurate to say the healthcare sector is propping up the US economy. The only sector broadly hiring through all the layoffs of recent years. Tech grabs the headlines and has extremely valuable firms concentrated in a handful of cities. On the other hand, those firms tend not to employ a lot of people. Healthcare is less flashy, but every city has a hospital (or a few) that (each) does a few billion $ in revenue while providing thousands of recession-resistant jobs.
- lenerdenator 3mo ago
  The world didn't want American leadership.
teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
If we want to prevent this from happening people need to be able to trust their government and feel their interests are shared by their representatives.
- spankalee 3mo ago
  We need people to be less racist and stop voting for politicians they hope will hurt the right people.
  - teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
    Less motivation for people to be racist if they have their needs met.
    - quantified 3mo ago
      Except their need to be racist. Sorry, it's pretty easy to be any kind of bigot with all your needs met.
      - teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
        Yeah there are plenty of rich racists. But I think the racism party would take a haircut if people didn't feel screwed over.
    - x-complexity 3mo ago
      > Less motivation for people to be racist if they have their needs met. If and only if what they'll be given is not taken away by anyone under any reason.** Loss aversion bias innately exists within us for a reason: How can anyone live if someone else seeks to take what they have away?
    - david422 3mo ago
      I think this is true. When needs aren't met, they are more likely to follow a cult leader.
    - 3mo ago
vjvjvjvjghv 3mo ago
I honestly think the decline started sometime in the 80s when it was accepted that everything is solely about profits and nothing else. It took a while but the enshittification of the country is accelerating. The latest developments are in my view just a symptom of this much longer trend.
- anon84873628 3mo ago
  Bingo. Michael Wolff illustrates nicely how Trump is the literal embodiment of the "greed is good" 80's culture. Of course we also have Ronald Reagan to thank. And that administration spawned the career of John Roberts, which we can now see as a through line to the destruction of The Court.
  - jarjoura 3mo ago
    It's a bit reductive to pin this on Ronald Reagan. The entire western world had been shifting towards neoliberalism as a direct response to the eastern world shifting towards communism since WW2. Trump also isn't the embodiment of anything other than the guy who didn't take it seriously and suddenly ended up with the job because the voters in the country decided it couldn't be any worse under him than whatever the current situation they were living with was.
    - 0xbadcafebee 3mo ago
      Or you could go all the way back to Reconstruction. The same way that an embittered Germany led to WWII, we are living with an embittered, mutant form of Confederate culture taking its revenge on the Union that put it down 160 years ago. The current culture war intermingles Southern Christian Conservative and Neoliberal interests. They're angry that the world has rapidly grown more progressive, as much as they're angry they lost their war. It might only take 5-10 years and eventually swing back, but it could also get worse, if their leaders become more extreme (strongman leaders often do get worse, as do religious extremists).
      - giardini 3mo ago
kurthr 3mo ago
I for one welcome -the ̶̶̶̶̶screw ̶̶̶̶worm- our new AI overlords.
programjames 3mo ago
"A handful of years"? This is like the trend in K–12 education of blaming all issues on the COVID-19 pandemic. No, education was in a visible decline for five years before COVID, which means it had probably been declining for another decade or two before that.

by evilos 3mo ago

matwood 3mo ago

The soft power the US has lost will take a generation or more to rebuild if it's ever rebuilt.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

rurp 3mo ago

The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again. As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morphs into long term almost certainly won't be as nice for Americans as the recent past was. Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.

KennyBlanken 3mo ago
> Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment. Uh....that's more the fault of a president who thought a totally normal thing (arms treaties with expiring restrictions) was a "scam" (not to mention, a black man he hates was responsible for said treaty) and ripped up said treaty. We literally were in a treaty, with Iran, that was doing all the things Trump said he wanted. Then thought he could bully a country he probably thinks of as "a bunch of sand", ignoring the fact that a quarter of the world's oil drives right by them. I've heard foreign policy analysts say that it seemed like Iran never realized how much power they did until Trump pissed them off, they responded, the shipping industry universally said "ohhh hell no" and dropped anchor....and Iranian leadership looked around and said "........wait. We've been able to do that THIS WHOLE TIME?!!!" and then their plan become to outlast Trump's administration. Iran realizing they can cripple the world economy is a genie that will not be put back in its bottle, even as countries scramble to decarbonize. Oil is still required for lubricants, plastics, and chemical production. Add in the fact that the US military is being run by a guy who is more concerned about people being clean-shaven than actually running the military as an organization and by all accounts, barely managed ~2 dozen soldiers, then in civilian life failed, repeatedly, at managing businesses. Who has kicked out or pissed off dozens of senior military leaders, as well as pissed off anyone who was remotely debating whether to reenlist.
- esarbe 3mo ago
  It's more than just "that one president". It's the whole system that brought him to power, where a large part of the population has been trained to hate and fear for almost half a decade now. That the US military is run by a clown is a feature, not a bug. That an incompetent buffoon like Trump is at the steering wheel is not an accident. Trump is doing exactly what the moneyed interests behind him have put him in power for - dismantling the system of checks and balances, of regulations and restrictions that prevent the oligarchs from thoroughly screwing the population. Good luck trying to restore any of your civil institutions after Trump and his ilk - and I don't expect that to be after 2028.
- lonelyasacloud 3mo ago
  > Uh....that's more the fault of a president Who so far has been put into office twice by?
  - Terr_ 3mo ago
    Voters, but a minority of them.* Then kept in office by a minority (43%) of Republican Senate legislators. * Yes, that is the correct term. In each election >50% chose "Not Trump".
    - try_the_bass 3mo ago
      > Yes, that is the correct term. In each election >50% chose "Not Trump". Uhhh... Not voting at all doesn't count as "Not Trump". It counts as "I don't care," which implicitly means "whatever everyone else thinks". This is such a dumb thing to try to play semantic games about. A majority of voters elected the clown, and the population of non-voters is complicit in that.
      - deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
      - Terr_ 3mo ago
        Your comment is supercilious and confidently-incorrect. The most-charitable interpretation is that you have been misinformed ever since the last election from some preliminary estimate of incomplete counts. 1. Of all ballots, only 49.7961% were for Trump. [0] 2. Of ballots where someone made a non-blank choice for President, 50.1976% were for candidates who were not-Trump. So when I explicitly wrote about a "minority" of "voters", that really does mean an an actual mathematical minority of the people who actually voted, thankyouverymuchdamnit. [0] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024presgeresults.pdf https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...
onetimeusename 3mo ago
I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia. I will give an example. Did we need years and years of funding for a lab to work on an obscure programming language for multiprocessing that basically only that lab ever used? Probably not. How much of funded science is just useless waste for a group of people to play with things like this? A lot, I would speculate. There isn't really a good way to spot what's useful and what isn't but let's not pretend academia is a purely selfless institution.
- quantified 3mo ago
  The same is roughly true for Silicon Valley investments once the herd mentality sets in. Yet it is celebrated as being the best way for commercial progress.
- Ar-Curunir 3mo ago
  Almost all advances in deployed PLs come from academic research. Not sure what kind of point you’re trying to make
- ribosometronome 3mo ago
  The majority of your argument has little to do with your initial complaint about China and India. What does poaching less of the world's best and brightest to contribute to our market and universities have to do with ensuring people are working on meaningful projects?
  - onetimeusename 3mo ago
    They are about 50% of all foreign grad students. Can you explain why the disproportionate representation? Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us? The thing about the academic job market is it's paper thin. I argue we produce too many PhDs. People seek out prestigious degrees. Our immigration system rewards more highly educated foreign students, sensibly, but that means there's more incentive to get advanced degrees. There's absolutely not just pure science going on in academia. Grad student wages are depressed and more foreign grad students does not help that.[1] There's a lot of careerism. I would argue some people exploit grad students. I don't think this is even very debatable. So I think put together, we likely print too many PhDs. One could argue that's not true relative to the overall job market but relative to tenure track positions, it is absolutely a fact. [1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-earnings-doctorates?page=1&perPage=50 https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-ea...
xnx 3mo ago
American exceptionalism is regressing to the mean.
- josephg 3mo ago
  Strangely enough, america's tech sector is still exceptional on a global stage. I'm not entirely sure why. There's something magic that happens in the bay area as a result of funding and talent density. Its weird - I'm australian. We have the same caliber of software engineers here. But there's not the same ambition amongst skilled engineers to solve problems at the world stage. And its far more difficult to convince investors to give you the capital to try. The technology sector is propping up the US economy. The AI race is - so far - making this even more true.
  - sunrisetiger 3mo ago
    Likely because California is not beholden to other interests. Even rural voices in California are subdued when it comes to big city politics, especially San Francisco.
  - fwipsy 3mo ago
    My half-baked sense is that America is good at making the best things for the highest cost, but tends to be meh at making good or adequate things at a competitive price. Our military seems like the strongest example, but I feel like it also describes healthcare/biotech, education, and maybe housing. This works well for tech, because a good design can be scaled to serve the whole world, and we can outsource manufacturing to companies like China or Taiwan who are better at cost-effectiveness. (And have lower wages. Maybe that's the entire explanation.)
  - runako 3mo ago
    > The technology sector is propping up the US economy Probably more accurate to say the healthcare sector is propping up the US economy. The only sector broadly hiring through all the layoffs of recent years. Tech grabs the headlines and has extremely valuable firms concentrated in a handful of cities. On the other hand, those firms tend not to employ a lot of people. Healthcare is less flashy, but every city has a hospital (or a few) that (each) does a few billion $ in revenue while providing thousands of recession-resistant jobs.
lenerdenator 3mo ago
The world didn't want American leadership.

teaearlgraycold 3mo ago

If we want to prevent this from happening people need to be able to trust their government and feel their interests are shared by their representatives.

spankalee 3mo ago
We need people to be less racist and stop voting for politicians they hope will hurt the right people.
- teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
  Less motivation for people to be racist if they have their needs met.
  - quantified 3mo ago
    Except their need to be racist. Sorry, it's pretty easy to be any kind of bigot with all your needs met.
    - teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
      Yeah there are plenty of rich racists. But I think the racism party would take a haircut if people didn't feel screwed over.
  - x-complexity 3mo ago
    > Less motivation for people to be racist if they have their needs met. If and only if what they'll be given is not taken away by anyone under any reason.** Loss aversion bias innately exists within us for a reason: How can anyone live if someone else seeks to take what they have away?
  - david422 3mo ago
    I think this is true. When needs aren't met, they are more likely to follow a cult leader.
  - 3mo ago

vjvjvjvjghv 3mo ago

I honestly think the decline started sometime in the 80s when it was accepted that everything is solely about profits and nothing else. It took a while but the enshittification of the country is accelerating. The latest developments are in my view just a symptom of this much longer trend.

anon84873628 3mo ago
Bingo. Michael Wolff illustrates nicely how Trump is the literal embodiment of the "greed is good" 80's culture. Of course we also have Ronald Reagan to thank. And that administration spawned the career of John Roberts, which we can now see as a through line to the destruction of The Court.
- jarjoura 3mo ago
  It's a bit reductive to pin this on Ronald Reagan. The entire western world had been shifting towards neoliberalism as a direct response to the eastern world shifting towards communism since WW2. Trump also isn't the embodiment of anything other than the guy who didn't take it seriously and suddenly ended up with the job because the voters in the country decided it couldn't be any worse under him than whatever the current situation they were living with was.
  - 0xbadcafebee 3mo ago
    Or you could go all the way back to Reconstruction. The same way that an embittered Germany led to WWII, we are living with an embittered, mutant form of Confederate culture taking its revenge on the Union that put it down 160 years ago. The current culture war intermingles Southern Christian Conservative and Neoliberal interests. They're angry that the world has rapidly grown more progressive, as much as they're angry they lost their war. It might only take 5-10 years and eventually swing back, but it could also get worse, if their leaders become more extreme (strongman leaders often do get worse, as do religious extremists).
    - giardini 3mo ago

kurthr 3mo ago

I for one welcome -the ̶̶̶̶̶screw ̶̶̶̶worm- our new AI overlords.

programjames 3mo ago

"A handful of years"? This is like the trend in K–12 education of blaming all issues on the COVID-19 pandemic. No, education was in a visible decline for five years before COVID, which means it had probably been declining for another decade or two before that.