Comparing the two, Europe is in a pretty good place right now thanks to its regulations. I'm glad it isn't as "far" and there are still some vestiges of treating people as humans.
Meanwhile thousands of Americans don't have access to lead free running water, your public transportation system is about as good as ours from 150 years ago, parents have to be back in the office instantly after having a baby, if you don't have insurance a cancer will bankrupt you, your average lifespan is going down, &c.
Keep your llms and iphones, we're more than fine on our side lmao
* Our satellites are giving us by far the best understanding of our universe, capturing one third of the visible sky in incredible detail - just check out this mission update video if you want your mind blown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ
* Not only that, the Copernicus mission is the world's leading source for open data geoobservation: https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/
* We've given the world mRNA vaccines to solve the Covid crisis and GLP-1 antagonists to solve the obesity crisis.
* CERN and is figuring out questions about the fundamental nature of the universe, with the LHC being by far the largest particle accelerator in the world, an engineering precision feat that couldn't have been accomplished anywhere else.
Innovation isn't just about the latest tech fad. It's about fundamental research on how our universe works. Everyone else is downstream of us.
He's not wrong though. A Europe that has to be responsible for its own defense either has to substantially reform its economy and society, or rely on France with its ASMPA doing the geopolitical equivalent of a drunk guy waving a knife around saying "stay away!".
He's not right either because he makes large vague claims. If we want to discuss it on clear subjects.
The "free" Europe has, and always will, thank the US for their help during WW2.
The US didn't protect us until now, because there was nothing they had to protect us from. US pulled it's allied NATO members into war in Iraq, if we're tallying things up.
With the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, both the EU and the US came to aid because a sovereign, close to EU, nation is invaded. No one was forced to do so. It's a matter of adhering to principles, that in theory are, shared by the "western" countries.
Realistically the US would have to jump to our aid if Russia's attempts outreach their Ukraine war. But that is because that's part of the deal we all made when becoming members of NATO.
And in terms of "subsidizing". That's the most outlandish claim, the US military industrial complex is so large for a reason. It's due to benefitting directly from the international government contracts, the technology it's building and selling (let's leave aside the shady and corrupt aspects of it for this topic)
The small amount of investment spent on military by European NATO members is a fair claim, but let's not kid ourselves, the grander scope of such spending will, and is going, towards US military tech. In a sense having higher spending is all about pushing more money to the US.
And if the US doesn't jump to your aid? If in 2028 Trump goes "you guys had six years to prepare and pissed it away, why should we bail you out?" what can Europe do? They could certainly try putting together a multinational European army and taking it into combat but I doubt there is much political will for that in France or Britain, who crucially possess a lot of the air and seapower.
Even without NATO, the EU countries already have a defensive pact.
Which as a sidenote is why the dismantlement of EU looks like appealing proposition to both Russia, and the US (for different reasons).
The US would make such a war easier, and fewer lives would be lost, given it's tech, and intelligence network. With or without the US, Russia would lose such a war.
Only way nukes play into it is if a shithead like Putin says "fuck it", seals himself in the bunker and hits the nukes. But then we are all cooked, whichever country does that, since mutual assured destruction comes into play.
In terms of political and societal effects, really interesting question worth pondering about. How would the other NATO member countries retaliate if the US wouldn't join in defense. That would be a big betrayal, so I hope that at the very least all US assets are seized, and US companies nationalized across the EU.
That is X propaganda. The U.S. actively prohibits additional EU states getting nuclear weapons and does not really want a super strong EU. The U.S. profits from the military strength and "protection" with an overvalued dollar and people irrationally buying U.S. bonds.
The EU spends at least three times as much on defense as Russia. But hey, perhaps it should spend EUR 1 trillion and get active in the Middle East again, after the U.S. has kicked it out in the Suez crisis.
All republics are democracies. Not all democracies are republics. Some people seem to get confused about this and think that "democracy" means "direct democracy" only, and not any of the various sorts of indirect democracy.
To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is something poli sci departments break their freshmen of every single year.
The colloquial, broad sense of “democracy” is also how political scientists employ the term in most contexts. That is: the people who study this for a living are entirely OK with that usage. If they didn’t use that sense of the word they’d need another one to mean the same thing, because it’s very useful.
> To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is ...
it's not a democracy, when a large part of the population is barred from voting, and / or if your idea of a vote is giving power to legal persons more than to natural persons during the voting process.
but fine, let me rephrase, the US is not more a democracy than China, North Korea, Russia, or any other clown state that says "wE aRe dEmoCraCy". Having large swathes of your mostly illiterate and poverty-stricken population so badly brainwashed that they fly their flag in their personal LinkedIn Profile, or pride themselves as "patriots" with a red cap, does not make the country "democratic".
To put it even more bluntly: the way the US sees its population in Appalachia is how the rest of the world views the US.
On the upside it all makes great entertainment (see Sacha Baron Cohen's "Who is America" which first and foremost is a documentary and only secondly is Satire).
I'll do you one better, it's always been a bureaucracy, but even moreso following the end of the 1960s, after the beginning of the "meritocracy" myth within academia. In reality, the incoming well educated migrants (usually European) in the mid 1950s were extremely nepotistic to their own groups, such as the Irish entering Wall street, and hiring only other Irish stockbrokers, or Italian small business owners in New York. They essentially replaced or married the old money and became a noveau riche that's still in the American status quo to this day. There is a new clique of sorts acting as a nepotistic noveau riche, mostly stemming from South or East Asia. Nepotism affects everyone and everywhere, but it's especially prevalent in the United States.
Also the great entertainment has been declining in quality, and it was always funded directly by the U.S. Government and Military to support their ideologies and agendas abroad. The Koreans are recently doing this to great success, and possibly China as well.
I hope Hashicorp survives. A few higher ups I’ve talked to there made it seem like IBM wants to learn from them, not force their old ways onto Hashicorp. We’ll see. That one is still pretty new.
HCP wasn't any prize when they got bought, though, right? HashiCorp Cloud was more like a fog in terms of growth. A bunch of products got lost a long the way (Boundary? Waypoint?) HCP lost 50% of its IPO value by the time it was bought. Yes, I know IPO's are high and always go down, but it went from around a $14bn valuation to being bought for something like $6.5bn.
And even if there is a 20% of executives actually believe in "We should learn from HashiCorp", usually not even that is enough to counter-act the default mode of operation which is squeezing customers. GLHF to remaining HashiCorp believers, but personally I'd try to find alternatives for the software you use from them if you haven't already.
Executives will say anything to boost the next quarter results. After that they get rebooted and start again, and nothing they said before counts for anything.
Usually the internal stakeholder that made the case to acquire the business leaves/gets promoted and new managers come in and start the assimilation process.
Judging from what my contacts say, I would not hold my breath. HCP is going to get smashed by bureaucracy and bigcorp bs just like all other IBM acquisitions. All you have to do to verify this is look at linkedin and track the departures of the the acquired staff.
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