He's not commending it. He's using it to point out that the reaction, "Well, america had a good run i guess? Hope china can step up and fill the gap," is simplistic, hyperbolic and maybe a little hysterical.
Ah I read it as “the US was corrupt before, and that was OK because GDP was growing! So we are just returning to our roots now”
Now understanding the good faith argument better, doesn’t it even further support the ascendancy of China? The argument is: despite rampant spoils system corruption, the US eclipsed Great Britain on the strength of a large population with low trade barriers alone (both internal and external)
But China is now the country with the largest population and low trade barriers. So aren’t they playing the role of 1800s USA and we the role of Great Britain here in 2026?
Aside, I appreciate the content of your post, but it really does distract your point to sling insults like hysterical towards other commenters
Implying that this particular story ("WH proposes rules") is the final piece of evidence that might cause a reasonable person to conclude that the US is finished as world power does strike me as maybe a little hysterical.
If someone has an extremely simplistic view of how our society works and where our power comes from, then it is regrettable for that someone to even offer a prediction in public about whether our society's power will wane or (continue to) wax, especially a prediction as confident as "Well, america had a good run i guess? Hope china can step up and fill the gap."
And I love how Rayiner got downvoted severely for daring to point out that predicting the effects of this move ("WH proposes rules") is not as easy or as simple as many here seem to think it is.
Final piece of evidence? Of course not. But it's part of a stream of news for some time now that points in the same direction.
(And I have no idea why Rayiner was downvoted. I'm happy for them though—for sticking to principles and posting what may well be downvoted to oblivion. It's something I have become more comfortable with myself.)
Insinuating that the administrative state is racist by genetic fallacy while longing for a return to the era of Jim Crow is hypocritical enough for me to disregard his opinion.
The administrative state wasn’t merely created by the same progressives that gave us eugenics. It has its roots in the same dim view of the common man and how much agency they should be given. Woodrow Wilson and other progressives were deeply skeptical of democracy. He wrote about the how the “unphilosophical bulk of mankind” didn’t know what was good for them. And his solution to that was to have the government run by experts insulated from democratic politics: https://faculty.fiu.edu/~revellk/pad3003/Wilson.pdf.
That’s still the same mentality that underlies the modern administrative state.
> while longing for a return to the era of Jim Crow
Last I checked you guys are the ones who went to the supreme court to defend racial discrimination in college admissions and racially segregated voting districts. Within just a few terms!
> went to the Supreme Court…racially segregated voting districts
How is enforcing the two greatest anti Jim Crow laws (VRA and CRA), somehow, equivalent to returning to Jim Crow itself?
> the administrative state
I’m trying to understand better, but it just seems like you are very opposed to merit based hiring in government and I don’t understand why. I understand your appeal to history, but what could be a better approach than hiring on merit while also making those employees accountable to political appointees? Just replacing the entire ranks of government every 4 years?
> [blah, blah, progressives are the real racists, blah]
I never argued that you don’t believe this. I guess you’re disputing the word “insinuating”? Fine, you’re explicitly saying the administrative state is racist.
> Last I checked you guys are the ones who went to the supreme court to defend racial discrimination in college admissions and racially segregated voting districts.
Nice tu quoque but I’m neither a Democrat nor a liberal. You make this mistake with people a lot! Have you considered not assuming everyone who disagrees with you is a liberal?
The person I actually replied to wondered why you got downvoted. Thanks for the demonstration.
A lot of it is because transportation is quite difficult. Even today huge tracts in Russia are without any roads. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the US, where even before the railroad and the automobile, transportation was quite easy, with navigable rivers flowing through the best farmland in the world.
Another big piece is how easy it is to invade; how hard it is to defend. History records 50 invasions of Russia. For centuries Russian looked in envy at the very fertile land in what is now Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine, but dared not farm it because it was swept regularly by quite fierce nomads on horses. That farmland became secure enough to farm only about 250 years ago.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Great Britain, which has been successfully invaded, but not after Britain got serious (about 4 centuries ago?) about having a good navy. When the risk of the investment's being destroyed by an invading army is low, more investment happens. And a navy profits more than an army does from technological investment: 100 years before Britain's industrial revolution, London was investing heavily in copper mining and copper refining so that it could give all of its warships a copper bottom.
The US is even more secure than Great Britain because any great power or middle power contemplating an invasion of the US would need to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific to start the attack. (Yes, the invader could try to get Mexico to agree to host the invading army, but the US would probably find out about that plan and respond by either blockading Mexico or invading it if it doesn't immediately abandon the plan.)
Policies that work great for secure countries like the US and Britain work terribly for countries like Russia, China, Iraq or Iran that must always worry about a land invasion. The basic strategy the US and the UK used in WWII had been worked out by Britain during the Napoleonic wars. Japan and Australia can follow the same basic strategy. Russia cannot because except for a few heady decades during the Soviet Union and maybe in the 1890s, the best way to increase Russian security was always to invest more in the army what with the country's being so hard to defend against a hostile army.
On the other hand, this doesn't explain why Poland, which was even wiped off the maps for a few times, has a GDP per capita almost twice of Russia, which wasn't really invaded much throughout more-or-less-recent history (au contrary).
Russia has paid an economic cost (from e.g. sanctions) for invading UKR. In the year before the invasion, the ratio of Polish GDP per cap to Russian was only 142%. (Also in that year, Polish GDP per cap differed from the GDP per cap of the entire Warsaw-Pact region by only $200.)
I think a country like Russia is still influenced by its experience centuries ago (when it was invaded for a time every single year) and by its experience in WWII. One can argue that (because of nukes and because satellite recon and cheap drones give a tech advantage to the defender) Russia is in a new situation where it can relax and start worrying much less about invasions, but I think that even if the leaders of a country realized that, it would be hard for them to actually change the country. I think for example a big reason that the US is so rich is that (for the white settlers) life in America was always easy. The economy has changed drastically since Colonial American times, when most adults were farmers, but the experience of plentiful high-quality farmland (especially when the settlers started crossing into the Ohio Valley) and plentiful timber and rivers that were a great help to transportation even without doing much work to improve the river system (by adding canals for example) produced a culture that remained adaptive and useful even as the economy was transformed by steam, railroads, the telegraph, cars, electricity, etc.
Germany for example introduced a welfare system in 1871 IIRC. For the average commoner to make a living in Germany was hard enough that the German government of that time (who cannot be accused of having been bleeding hearts) considered it essential to national security for the government to help the commoner out. In contrast, when (many decades after Germany introduced welfare) the Dust Bowl devastated large regions of the US in the 1930s, there were no governmental programs to assist them because most Americans and most American decisionmakers considered such programs to be largely unnecessary.
I believe these governing traditions in the US (which started to change in the 1930s with the election of FDR, who transformed the country more than any previous president except maybe Lincoln) of small-government and individual freedom were conducive to wealth generation whereas the Russian governing tradition where a powerful state is seen as essential to protecting the nation from invasions and where the population tends to depend heavily on the government for its economic security tends to keep a country poor. And again I hypothesize that these governing traditions are difficult to change.
And maybe the reason Poland never develop a strong national-security culture like Russia did is that it was in a hopeless situation with respect to invasions and such (except during the ascendancy of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, but I don't think that coalition lasted long) because it was surrounded by more populous, more-cohesive neighbors and did not have much in the way of mountains or bodies of water to slow down invasions from those neighbors: namely, France, Germany, the Austrian empire and Russia. In fact, I believe even Sweden invaded Poland at one point (although it had to cross the Baltic Sea to do so). No matter how much the government of Poland invested in national security, it wouldn't have been enough to move the needle much.
In contrast, Russia was a big enough country with enough natural resources (e.g., good farm land, timber) that if it tried really hard over a span of decades, it usually could increase its national security considerably, which led to a national culture that emphasizes a powerful state with a powerful army (and a powerful spy system to suppress uprisings by already-conquered ethnic minorities).
Also, it is in the national interest of the US to prevent Russian re-expansion westward, and between 1989 and 2022 its main two allies in this regard were Poland and Romania (with NATO taking a secondary role), so after 1989 Poland could feel secure (at least till Trump came to power) without having to spend much on defense whereas Russia has felt (and still feels) that they are 100% responsible for their own national security.
Poland threw off the Soviet corruption far faster than Ukraine has, and Russia has just accelerated the corruption and made it worse.
Which is why the current Paypal Mafia obsession with inflicting the US with Russia-style oligarchy and corruption should be so terrifying to anybody in Silicon Valley that isn't already a billionaire: it will crater the future of the US as leading market for developing new tech, and hand it all over to China, to the extent that China wants to be the home to new tech.
Too much centralized power at the top destroys economic growth, whether it's officially a socialist one, or merely a corrupt one, or just unchecked capitalism where disruption has been squashed by those at the top.
> (Yes, the invader could try to get Mexico to agree to host the invading army, but the US would probably find out about that plan and respond by either blockading Mexico or invading it if it doesn't immediately abandon the plan.)
Curious, how viable would this strategy be when invading via Canada?
>built on a standard Linux foundation. Instead of ChromeOS or Android as the base, treat them as subsystems for compatibility.
What Google is planning for the Googlebook is about 1000 times more secure that the "standard Linux foundation" you refer to.
I'm writing this on a standard Linux desktop, of which I am a happy user. It breaks my heart that so many people put so much work into building such a comfy software environment on a foundation with a very severe flaw: namely, it would prove so difficult to secure it to the standards required by our modern heavily-computerized society that it will be easier to start over on a different foundation. Android Open Source Project strikes me as the best candidate for that new foundation now that Google has decided to do a lot of work to adapt Android to desktop-style workflows (large displays, pointing devices, detached hardware keyboards).
The US has become less of a high-trust society than it was.
In the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey (SCCBS), 40 US communities were studied, some high in ethnic diversity, some low. In the communities high in diversity, people trusted neighbors less,
had fewer close confidants,
volunteered less,
and withdrew from community life more generally.
One of the principals (namely, Robert Putnam) behind this study described this behavioral pattern with the phrase “hunker down.” In diverse neighborhoods, according to his analysis, residents of all ethnic groups became more socially isolated, including from members of their own ethnic group.
Rust has uses you haven't mentioned. For example, each compiled language from the ML lineage (and almost every language period) has its own runtime, particularly, its own assumptions and contracts about heap-allocated storage. In contrast, Rust famously does not need a runtime library -- and it is low-level enough that it can usually (with enough cognitive effort by programmers) interface with an arbitrary foreign runtime library -- so when the goal of the code to be written is to interface with code in a compiled language from the ML lineage, you usually have only 2 memory-safe options, namely, the same language as the code-to-be-interfaced-with and Rust.
The situation is a little more complicated than what I just wrote because two programs written in different ML-style languages could communicate via inter-process communication. But I don't see that. (Maybe my experience is not broad enough?) What I see is, e.g., Python libraries written in C and C++ (and Fortran, which is also not memory-safe) for performance reasons where the only memory-safe language that could have been used instead is Rust.
From my point of view those uses are misplaced, hence why I not referred them.
Likewise those Python program should have use a dynamic managed compiled language, like Common Lisp or Julia, which was originally designed exactly to avoid that.
Maybe one day replaced by Mojo, if they get lucky with it.
Too many devs see a specific language as their solution for everything, and when it doesn't fit we end up in such sandwiches.
Yudkowsky has never predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years. He has been saying frequently for years that it is easier to predict how the AI juggernaut will turn out (i.e., very badly for us) than to predict when the very bad things will happen.
(I don't know about the other guy mentioned above.)
As usual for HN, you do not indicate which passages in the article you cite support your assertion, so I guess I have to do that work for you. "expectancy" occurs 3 times in the article. Correct me if I misunderstand, but I think none of the 3 support your assertion:
>The initial wave of poor health during the industrial revolution gave way to increased life expectancy and decreased levels of infectious disease during the later 19th century, linked to various public health measures.
>By the latter part of the nineteenth century, life expectancy and health improved, and the growing health disparity between rural and urban areas started to decrease.
>Our knowledge of the living conditions of the 19th century, particularly amongst the urban poor, has led to a strong assumption that a significant decline in health occurred at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. We must be cautious not to overly sentimentalise the medieval and early modern periods, when air pollution (primarily from woodsmoke and also sea coal) was common (Brimblecombe, 1976) and adult life expectancy was lower.
I would have guessed that a very large fraction of the US's decisionmakers still want education to prepare young people for citizenship, not just labor-force participation.
“Citizenship” is an empty label that we use out of habit. It’s not attached to any substantive concepts that schools can meaningfully socialize into children. Where “citizenship” is a paper label and defined mainly in terms of economic relations and pop culture references, what “preparation” is there for schools to do?
If instead of "prepare young people for citizenship", I had written, "teach young people things useful for maintaining and improving their community and their country", would your reply be essentially the same?
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