America is a bit overstretched at the moment. As far as I can tell, we spent about 50 years in the cold war talking up liberty and democracy, but that was essentially all kind of a BS cultural-supremacy soft-power fig leaf until the cold war ended. Then we had about 20 years of politicians who thought the soft power stuff was all you needed. About a decade of unwinding that position, and the new paradigm is to get back to creating a global order and dispatching regimes that disrupt our commerce. The security concerns haven't changed, but the way of dealing with them has.
The only trouble is, we are no longer the superpower that we were in 1950 or even 1980. What I think will be interesting from this realignment is how our alliances will probably shift toward countries which are strategically aligned with us even if they're much less ethically or ideologically aligned with our stated beliefs.
South Korea and the Philippines are both "capable allies" in the sense that Israel and the UAE are, and in the sense that much of Europe is not. I'm confused as to why Filipinos are protesting against taking out the Iranian regime; it's a direct blow to Chinese expansionism, as well as the jihadist groups in the south. But America's taking out the weakest links in the Russian-Chinese-Iranian-Venezuelan axis. A short-term rotation away from East Asia doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad strategic move.
> South Korea and the Philippines are both "capable allies" in the sense that Israel and the UAE are, and in the sense that much of Europe is not.
Most of Europe combined (meaning the EU + the most closely aligned non-EU countries) are a much more formidable force than the UAE or Israel... You can't compare using individual European countries since in a hot scenario the vast majority of the EU countries would band together, and the movement towards military integration has already been started.
The US never had a period without flexing its muscles after the Cold War, you can't say that there were 20 years of "soft power is all you need" while keeping wars like Iraq/Afghanistan for 20 years, keeping spending more on the military than the next 10-20 countries combined.
The trouble is that the US has lost the plot, there's no value or vision to defend, it hollowed itself out with hyperfinancialisation since the 80s, the consequence is that there's no rallying inspirational point anymore. It doesn't have a "hook" to attach its vision of the future, I have no idea what's the vision of the USA for the future except for "generating wealth".
As a nation it just seems to be lost, butting heads while moving backwards.
Mm. Reminds me of something I saw a while back, can't remember enough to search for it though.
During the Cold War, there was an easy "US good, USSR bad" pattern for the world to be inspired by, but with the fall of the Soviet Union, the rest of the world no longer needs to (or even can if it wanted to) rally around a call of "hey, at least we're not the USSR".
Now we don't have the USSR in the picture, what does the USA offer? Much of the rhetoric I see from it these days is "We're not China", and true, you're not, but when we're looking in from the outside there's a loss of scale and rightly or wrongly the ICE detention camps and exporting of people to CECOT, looks much the same as Uighurs being put in Xinjiang internment camps.
Meanwhile, increasing fractions of my hardware, from injection moulded widgets to laser welding kits, from 3D printers and PV to computers and smartphones, is made by Chinese firms, so China looks increasingly like the place where stuff actually happens, and conversely the USA looks increasingly like the place where grand visions are pronounced only to fail from lack of awareness of how to engineer anything or what customers really benefit from (e.g. Juicero, Metaverse, Cybertruck).
>The trouble is that the US has lost the plot, there's no value or vision to defend, it hollowed itself out with hyperfinancialisation since the 80s, the consequence is that there's no rallying inspirational point anymore. It doesn't have a "hook" to attach its vision of the future, I have no idea what's the vision of the USA for the future except for "generating wealth".
I'm not entirely sure I buy this. Everything you said feels true, and it's happening in the moment. But I think you're missing the forest for the trees. The way you wrote "hyperfinancialisation" makes me think you are European (German?)
I'd imagine a vision for the country would be explained at places like World Expo right? In 2025 their booth (developed during Biden years even though it launched during Trump) gave a "semi" okay idea of where the country is placing its vision. Was it expressed well at the Expo? Not entirely sure, but it was there.
Historically, they didn't need to really do much at these Expos because who doesn't know the U.S.? And who doesn't know what the country is about? But I guess with the increasing decline of the U.S., they now have to 'advertise' themselves and explain to people what the underlying vision is.
In the end, the underlying theme seems to be "optimistic collaboration led by American innovation". Yeah I know its hard to picture this in the moment after everything that has happened in the last year but as the Biden years ended this was the thinking among government officials.
Watching this video a year later, it just seems so comical that this whole vision of "collaborative innovation": of the future being a collaborative project, with America wanting to lead it but not alone, and the slogan 'Imagine what we could create together' just seems comical after everything that's occurred in the last year. I guess it remains to be seen if this vision will hold once Trump is out of office.
> I'm not entirely sure I buy this. Everything you said feels true, and it's happening in the moment. But I think you're missing the forest for the trees. The way you wrote "hyperfinancialisation" makes me think you are European (German?)
I'm Brazilian-Swedish, living in Sweden.
> I'd imagine a vision for the country would be explained at places like World Expo right? In 2025 their booth (developed during Biden years even though it launched during Trump) gave a "semi" okay idea of where the country is placing its vision. Was it expressed well at the Expo? Not entirely sure, but it was there.
A vision for the country is something that's built upon, across governments and party lines since it's "what the nation is about" more than what policies are being voted on by diverging ideologies, it's something to tether a nation's spirit onto. Advertising something on a World Expo is just advertisement, it's the actions over a longer period of time that can be linked to a vision that actualises it, and that's what I don't see from the USA at all.
> In the end, the underlying theme seems to be "optimistic collaboration led by American innovation". Yeah I know its hard to picture this in the moment after everything that has happened in the last year but as the Biden years ended this was the thinking among government officials.
That line couldn't reek more of corporate-speak than it does, it's something you'd read on a PowerPoint slide from McKinsey. It doesn't inspire anyone, reading it doesn't make you feel "yeah, I want to buy into that". It just cements more of my thought that the vision is "get wealthy", it just states an end without inspiring any of the means for it.
Also, the Biden years already feel long gone, it could've been the beginning of re-steering the ship into a brighter path, barely a bit more than a year without Biden and nothing from the previous USA is recognisable.
> Watching this video a year later, it just seems so comical that this whole vision of "collaborative innovation": of the future being a collaborative project, with America wanting to lead it but not alone, and the slogan 'Imagine what we could create together' just seems comical after everything that's occurred in the last year. I guess it remains to be seen if this vision will hold once Trump is out of office.
Exactly, it's comical that it was kept as a pitch given everything we are seeing from post-Trump USA. It's really hard for me to imagine coming back from this, even more if it does last for another 3 years.
It's a real problem that Trump himself and his movement seem incapable of articulating a positive vision of America. It's an equally serious problem that the opposition are equally negative about the country, its history, its promise and potential. Both factions seem to be serving as negative emissaries. No one has less vision of America than MAGA; and no one hates it more than the Democratic Socialists. This isn't really an accident, in my opinion. And it's not just due to "hyperfinancialization" or growing economic inequality or racial disparities - all of those are issues.
Call me paranoid, but I think it's due to one of our greatest strengths being hijacked. Our free speech laws and the openness of our society, the total non-filtering of information - which I support - have created a fertile ground for sophisticated propaganda from China and Russia, Iran and Qatar, to overwhelm the brains of a lot of people on both sides of our political divide through massive social media psyops that have gone on for a decade.
It's reached the point that very few people in America can state why America is a good thing, even for its own citizens, let alone for the rest of the world.
But not very long ago, this was not the case. And there are excellent arguments to be made for why America should remain the keystone of the global order: It's inclusive, it's progressive, its system has been a miraculous engine of economic growth for everyone in its orbit. But the easiest and most banal reason, one which no one says out loud is: If not America, which country would you rather have exercising power to create some kind of international order? The people who think everything America does is automatically evil haven't really made much study of what life is like under the realistic alternatives to that question.
> If not America, which country would you rather have exercising power to create some kind of international order? The people who think everything America does is automatically evil haven't really made much study of what life is like under the realistic alternatives to that question.
Ideally no country of course but a multilateral organisation like the UN.
Definitely not the unilateral bully that is the US right now. That's not even the least bad option anymore. It is what the US was during the second Iraq invasion, everyone knew it was based on lies but we went along anyway because the US still had soft power. But Trump has thrown all that away.
>It's an equally serious problem that the opposition are equally negative about the country, its history, its promise and potential.
I don't buy that at all. Mamdani's election is the latest example of a progressive left that is slowly making inroads and provides an extremely positive vision for the future based on inclusion and respect for all peoples. He is definitely rising to the occasion as well. His win was a 15 years of struggle starting with an extremely disorganized movement in Occupy Wall street, with many events in between to him getting elected as a democratic socialist in the finance capital of the US. His vision pursues economic justice as a way to empower people to build a positive future.
But we don't need to just use him as an example. AOC was also pushing an extremely positive message in her famous campaign ad: a positive vision for the future: Green New Deal, efforts to invest in people and not just corporate graft and the same respect for people of all backgrounds(given her district has 50+ languages spoken there). She knocked out the guy that was the Democratic party's main money man link to the financial institutions that bribe both parties.
Her victory followed decades of struggle of Bernie Sanders's vision who went from being a completely dismissable vision back in his days of trying to become Mayor of Burlington to now being a figure that the Democratic party is forced to recon with because he has built a solid movement in the next generation that has the drive to implement his original vision.
> Call me paranoid, but I think it's due to one of our greatest strengths being hijacked. Our free speech laws and the openness of our society, the total non-filtering of information - which I support - have created a fertile ground for sophisticated propaganda from China and Russia, Iran and Qatar, to overwhelm the brains of a lot of people on both sides of our political divide through massive social media psyops that have gone on for a decade.
Yeah this exists but at the same time are you seeing whats happening on the ground off the internet? Its people using whatever strained institutions are left to slowly hold people accountable and also driving towards a new vision by raising people like Mamdani. Everyone was surprised by his win...except the people on the ground who saw him go on a hunger strike years earlier to help taxi drivers committing suicide because they were trapped or working through the corrupt system to actually get a free bus line funded and helping real people.
China and Russia are benefiting from this war. It is not a blow to them, it is a gift for them.
> I'm confused as to why Filipinos are protesting against taking out the Iranian regime;
Iranian regime was not "taken out". It does not seem like it will be taken out either. Its leader got changed for younger more hard line one with the same name. Edit: also Filipinos are much more affected by oil crisis then USA. It is literally an emergency crisis for them.
> But America's taking out the weakest links in the Russian-Chinese-Iranian-Venezuelan axis.
Venezuela is under exactly same regime as before. Maduro got changed for Delcy Rodríguez, keep regime intact. Trump got personally richer, but that is it.
His father, wife and kid were killed in bombing. He was leading the crackdown on protests. There is very little ground to think he will be making some easy deals. He was chosen as a middle finger to Trump.
I think the IRGC chose him because he's already dead, and they want Israel to go hunting for a dead guy. If he's not dead, which would be some sort of miracle, he isn't doing much now.
And no one needs a deal with him. The Iranian regime doesn't want a deal, and there's no deal to be had.
Trump took out an 87 year old man, converting him into a martyr and ruining any chance of change for another generation, all while causing massive spikes in the price of oil and thus inflation, and of course sacrificing a few US soldiers in the way while he bombed hundreds of kids.
Ruining any chance of another generation to do what? Get shot in the street for protesting? Get imprisoned and murdered for showing their hair in public? Become a martyr to the cause of a dead revolution that provided nothing for its people?
What exactly was ruined for the next generation of Iranians, by taking out that 87 year old man?
When the US went to Iraq the approval rating was in the 90s(correction I mixed up Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraq was 70-80s) because the US had been attacked, and Bush took the time to sell the war to the Americans (with lies) by the time all the disasters kept coming in, support dropped to the 40s.
This war started in the 40s approval rating. If bodies start coming home in mass, I don't know how things will turn out for Trump and his party but its already looking like a disaster for them and it hasn't even hit the really ugly part yet.
I'm curious what you think about Iran killing 30,000+ protestors in the streets last month, going to hospitals to kill the injured, and continuing to review video footage to actively seek out and kill scores of 2+ million protestors?
Personally I find it strange that with all the vocal detestation of "Nazis" so many people aren't in favor of intervening when an undeniably fascist regime commits the largest mass murder since the early days of the Holocaust and has no plans to stop the killing.
It’s indisputable that the Iranian regime is horrid to Iranians (most of them). But what the US just did is actually strenghtening the grip of the Islamic regime, they get unified against an attacker, their aging aytolah turned into a martyr and a new young one was put in place, oil fields set on fire, plenty of indiscriminate bombing on civillians and so on. This is a major fuck-up.
A large chunk will fight for their life to hold onto the old regime. Remains to be seen what will come out of this. Civil war in Iran is still a major fuck-up IMO.
I'm curious why do you think that a half-assed undercooked invasion at Israel's beck and call is the only possible solution to this issue when we have ample historical evidence that invading Middle East literally never worked?
Sudan is the classic example. 90% of Americans could barely point to it on a map. Most Europeans have no idea there's a civil war raging for the last 3 years and created millions of refugees, killed hundreds of thousands, subjected tens of millions to famine.
The problem is you can't paint it as "good guy" and "bad guy"
Israel is a country without oil. Over 2 years, it killed 60,000 people in Gaza - about twice as many as the Iranian regime killed in 2 days. The former was described as genocide, the latter was widely ignored. And for 2 years, Israel's war against Hamas was the headline story every day on every media outlet in the world. There was no end of people screaming for intervention.
You're right, no one pays attention to Sierra Leone, or Sudan, or Myanmar. And no one here or in the media would care that some country was fighting a war with the Iranian regime either, as long as the country country fighting it wasn't populated by Jews.
My country doesn't sell Iran any weapons they used to kill protestors and independentists. I am allowed to boycott Iranian products, like my father was allowed to boycott SAF products. I just want my country to stop selling weapons that help killing civilians and end up in west bank terrorists hands. And be allowed to boycott what the fuck I want.
Iran's mass murder after the protests was not ignored. We had a mass protest in my city. I'm not sure if you can call it genocide because it's their own people, the same race and identity. It's certainly mass murder and terrible but not an attempt to change the population racial makeup. Thus the label genocide doesn't qualify, but yes the actions are morally equally bad. Just a different label.
The reason there's less attention is twofold:
First of all our countries support Israel so we are complicit. That calls for more protest among us who don't agree because there's actually something we can change. Iran is not going give a crap when they see people marching in protest in Europe.
Another thing is that Israel has no business being in Gaza in the first place. Iran's government unfortunately does have a legitimate claim to governance in Iran.
I'm not against Jews at all but I am against my country supporting genocide.
Also I don't think one country unilaterally bombing a place they have nothing to do with is the answer to any problem.
Why so many words to say "anyone who criticizes Israel is an antisemite"? If you really think Gaza gets too much attention, then instead of silencing others, why don't you just start talking about the injustices that you think are underrepresented.
it’s so obviously a farce when you’re bombing girls schools and when Israel starts hitting oil fields, suddenly fucking Lindsey Graham wants restraint.
Very good at fighting last centuries wars. Then Millennium Challenge 2002 came out
Of course now we have cheap drones, putting massive asymmetric financial power. Every time Iran fires a $1k drone, America fires a $1m missile to stop it.
That's a great way to lose a war of attrition.
America has been losing wars for 50 years, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. 11 carrier groups or 110 doesn't make any difference.
But are they really 1 million dollars? I've always had the feeling that the cost of military equipment in peacetime has an extreme inflated price because it's a tax payer black hole with so much bureaucracy, middlemen and some level of corruption that you can charge almost any price you want.
In a war economy where the goal is to make as many missiles as possible, would governments really pay 1M a piece?
Patriots are 4m a missile and depending on target you may need more than one. Trump gov was already averaging 50b in loans per month, cost of this doesn't matter. MIC will get just as fat as hegseth is getting on lobsters.
> Then we had about 20 years of politicians who thought the soft power stuff was all you needed
Actually, about 9 years. Then Afghanistan happened, followed by Iraq. Hard power was back baby!
> The security concerns haven't changed, but the way of dealing with them has.
The security concerns were never there to begin with, unless you mean the security concerns of Israel. With the US as the hegemon, it is in the US's interests to maintain the security of key trade corridors, the most volatile and important of which is the Hormuz strait (arguably even more than the Suez). Post Iranian Revolution, every action of the US has only served against its interests, to further destabilize the corridor - whether it was funneling weapons to Saddam, invading Saddam 20 years later, not to mention the constant sabre-rattling against Iran throughout.
> I'm confused as to why Filipinos are protesting against taking out the Iranian regime; it's a direct blow to Chinese expansionism, as well as the jihadist groups in the south
Lol no. Getting involved with Iran means fighting a country that has every intention to bog down the US in a long war, at no cost consideration for its citizens. China loves the war - it's a repeat of Vietnam. China is literally dishing out intelligence to Iran and helping them skirt sanctions. Also Iran, which is Shia, isn't involved with the terror groups in Mindanao (which are hardline Sunni and funded by the US GCC allies).
> But America's taking out the weakest links in the Russian-Chinese-Iranian-Venezuelan axis
The weakest link in the axis was literally Venezuela - proximity to the US, a hated president, and competing factions vying for power. Well, at least before the US decided it was a dandy idea to kidnap Maduro.
> A short-term rotation away from East Asia doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad strategic move.
The Iran war is going to be anything but short-term, as the Iranians have stated. Even if the US wants to exit the campaign, the Iranians will not let them, and if the US decides to unilaterally stop bombing Iran, it leaves Israel open to the Iranians, which is something Israel and AIPAC won't let the US do.
The Asian allies know this, which is why everyone from South Korea to Japan to Philippines to Australia has been worried - because they know that this leaves fewer American resources for them. The US has already begun diverting THAADs and Patriots from SK to the Middle East because they've been depleted. The UAE was begging around for interceptors from Italy (at a 125% premium) and then Russia, because the US failed to provide for its "capable allies". The Gulf states internally already see the US, including US defence products, as unreliable in supply and are already moving to lock in deals with EU providers such as Rheinmetall.
Maybe the Asian countries can finally get together and hash out a way to deal with Israel. It seems like an insurmountable problem. The elites in the US either fall in line or when they try to push back they are eventually forced to relent(ex. Musk in the early Twitter days).
This entire saga has been a wake up call to the middle eastern states. They thought all the money they paid to the US over the years got them a first class ticket when in reality they are sitting way back in economy.
There aren't many options on the table. Cozy up to China? Maybe the middle eastern and OECD countries can do it but not the Asian countries. The right strategy would be to join forces to try and help the US get back on track because what other superpower is there? And that means somehow dealing with Israel as they are going to continue causing trouble for everyone.
They don't need to deal with Israel when Israel itself is a ticking time bomb. This war and this presidency with their kompromat on Trump was their only shot at becoming an expansionist regional hegemon. Israel is facing a demographic timebomb, and a reverse-Aliyah exodus of top talent to literally anywhere else, including the UAE and the US. Turns out, nobody likes living in a military state, except for a bunch of ultra-orthodox emigres and Hasidic Jews, who are both growing like crazy and have zero inclination to serve in national defence, and have piss poor technical aptitude.
> This entire saga has been a wake up call to the middle eastern states. They thought all the money they paid to the US over the years got them a first class ticket when in reality they are sitting way back in economy.
This is the biggest change. The Gulf states were completely blindsided by the war, and are now rethinking their alliance with the US. Expect to see more Chinese and EU bases in the region - China already has a military base in the UAE. Al Udeid is going to be massively downsized. And these guys are going to be shopping in the EU for weapons systems, not the US.
> Cozy up to China? Maybe the middle eastern and OECD countries can do it but not the Asian countries.
The right strategy is for the Asian countries to stop quarreling between themselves and forge new defensive alliances. Or alternatively, submit to Chinese hegemony as tributary states (tributing natural resources that is), as they used to do in the past.
>Israel is facing a demographic timebomb, and a reverse-Aliyah exodus of top talent to literally anywhere else, including the UAE and the US.
While I generally agree that Israel is on shaky ground, I'm not sure this is fully accurate. Ok to be fair, yes a lot of liberal educated Israeli seem to have left a while ago but if you look at their demography they are one of the only few countries that has a positive demography. As other countries begin to degrade from this population decline many more Israeli's may return as well.
>Turns out, nobody likes living in a military state, except for a bunch of ultra-orthodox emigres and Hasidic Jews, who are both growing like crazy and have zero inclination to serve in national defence, and have piss poor technical aptitude.
This contradicts the timebomb narrative and yes this will definitely cause problems just like the decline in education in the US will rear its ugly head years down the line....but having population means possibility, it does not matter how educated a person is if they don't exist.
>This is the biggest change. The Gulf states were completely blindsided by the war, and are now rethinking their alliance with the US. Expect to see more Chinese and EU bases in the region - China already has a military base in the UAE. Al Udeid is going to be massively downsized. And these guys are going to be shopping in the EU for weapons systems, not the US.
Its really unbelievable to see how the US has destroyed many relationships in real time and the Trump loving crowd continues to pretend like nothing is wrong. They are gearing up to blame the other side as well once things become visibly painful. Just like the Afghanistan withdrawal under Biden I suspect this mess will become visible after Trump is long gone and the successor will get all the blame.
I generally try not to believe in conspiracy theories but is the US being set up to fail by multiple advisaries (including Israel) or is it really just stupidity and a broken system of accountability?
>The right strategy is for the Asian countries to stop quarreling between themselves and forge new defensive alliances.
Thats the thing, I don't know if they are capable of this given their poor demography. I was thinking that maybe the correct move is to swallow their pride and try and patch up relationships when Trump is gone while also doing more themselves(whatever they can). In fact that might end up being the default move for the EU as well. Bringing in more of China so as to not be completely dependant on the US but ensuring the US is still part of the game in a significant way. I have not seen anything other than tepidness and strongly worded letters from EU since Trump came back and it makes me think there isn't a real life and death motivation for them to become independent. Its much easier to patch things up and hope for the best.
Apart from the demographic counter you put out, agree on all points. The Hasids vapidly oppose any participation in the military, and are already contesting and protesting it in the courts, which are hearing none of it, much to their chagrin. These are a bunch of folks who haven't had the typical education geared towards scientific talent, who haven't had even the necessary hardening needed to function in modern society - the Israeli state massively subsidizes their lifestyle as long as they're engaged in religious education. Changing community mindsets is much harder than training afresh.
About the Asian countries, you're right, but I'm still optimistic that with a looming Chinese threat, they might consider strengthening regional bodies like ASEAN. But again, imperialistic China might end with Xi, and China hasn't even been traditionally expansionist outside their core regional claims. Yes, they are strongly irredentist, but that's also a relief for Asian countries - yes, they will be threatened at sea, as China claims more sea, but apart from Taiwan and maybe Amur Russia, China has no interest in actually landing boots on the ground in most of Asia.
I think this is a bizarre comparison. The people of Vietnam hated the French colonial occupation, and most of them despised the American-backed regime as well. They were fighting a 20-year-long anti-colonial war for independence (something that China, by the way, does not want any of the people they've colonized to emulate).
On the contrary, there's every indication that the people of Iran, as well as Venezuela, legitimately hate their repressive regimes and want nothing more than a chance to overthrow them. This isn't imposing regime change on some country that had never thought of it. It's clearing the path for the people of that country to execute regime change for themselves.
In that sense, our role here is quite a lot more like the Soviets in Vietnam, than America in Vietnam, or of either country in Afghanistan. We're not in the position of needing to prop up a puppet regime or find ethnic groups or exogenous actors. All we really need to do is target the existing oppressors.
>> if the US decides to unilaterally stop bombing Iran, it leaves Israel open to the Iranians, which is something Israel and AIPAC won't let the US do.
Stop with the AIPAC > blaming Israel for getting America into this. Israel did great work taking out Iran's defenses and gaining air superiority in the previous 12-day war, and it was only held back from continuing by the US - temporarily losing the total control it held. Furthermore, in no way is Israel going to be open to attack after this, whether or not the US remains involved.
Consider what happens if this war does succeed in weakening the Iranian regime to the point where the people can come back into the street and overthrow it: Russia loses its drone and missile manufacturer, the West has a bargaining chip in oil against China's control of rare earths, and conceivably there is a broad peaceful order in the Middle East between Sunnis, Shia and Jews, all relatively Western-facing, potentially progressive and aligned with the US and Europe. Would that be a terrible outcome?
> It's clearing the path for the people of that country to execute regime change for themselves.
That is fundamentally untrue. In Venezuela, regime ended up completely intact, except the change on the top. There is no "clearing the path" and there is no "regime change".
In Iran, protests stopped. The lead was replaced by more hardline lead. Nationalists now wont go against the regime, even if they dislike it.
If they loose control over country, there will be civil war and unrest, but all chances of some moderates consolidating power went down. Or, even more likely, regime wont fail and will have stronger grip over the country.
> Russia loses its drone and missile manufacturer,
This war is massive gift to Russia. The sanctions are removed, the oil prices go up. Russia wants this war to go on as long as possible, it is like a lifeline for them.
>> That is fundamentally untrue. In Venezuela, regime ended up completely intact, except the change on the top. There is no "clearing the path" and there is no "regime change".
I think there was massive disappointment in Venezuela that we didn't go further, and that the regime is still in place. I'm extremely disappointed that we let it off there. I'm sick of America making promises to people, since Budapest, since Prague, since the Syrian rebels...
>> In Iran, protests stopped. The lead was replaced by more hardline lead. Nationalists now wont go against the regime, even if they dislike it.
In this case, I hope we don't let the people down. And I think it's far too soon to say that the protests stopped. The Basij are out in force, they're more heavily armed, and bombs are falling. Next week or next month, the entire situation may be different. The people are certainly waiting until the bombs stop. No one goes to protest in the middle of a war. The idea is to create the conditions so that when the bombing stops, the regime is too weak to kill 30,000 more people in the next protest.
It's incredibly naïve to think regime change supported by the people is actually the objective. It's a good thought but which is absolutely out of control of the military actions by Israel or the USA.
The main objective is to neuter the Iranian regime to diminish how threatening it could be to Israel, behead the government, destroy military targets, destroy its lifeline from the oil industry. If regime change happens because conditions worsen it's a good bonus but without forcefully removing the regime with boots on the ground it's just wishful thinking that it's the main objective.
Iraq was also under a brutal dictatorship with Saddam, it took more than a decade of ground operations to actually change it. Iran is more populous, has a much more loyal regime security force, is more ideologically driven, and has a much worse geography for any ground invasion.
When the bombing stops there will be so much destruction that the regime can point towards the USA and Israel that it will keep having loyalists behind to defend them, the IRGC will absorb the more loyal ones and grow to keep stamping out revolutionaries.
The US leadership knows they can't destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program or cause regime change. The objective seems to be mainly destroying lots of missile launchers, boats, and drone factories (which Iran demonstrated could do enough damage and use up enough interceptors to make Israel stop attacking them and sue for peace during the 12 day war). When the bombing stops and Iran restarts production, the US will go bomb them again. The US also didn't seem to expect that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, and currently has no plan as to how to get it safely back open.
In essence the war is about making Iran less of a threat to Israel no matter the cost to the US or to the rest of the West.
I'm amazed by the lengths Americans will go to try to convince themselves they're the good guys. America never has and never will go to war to liberate a people from oppression and spread democracy or other fairy tale. America goes to war for one thing and that is defend the interests of America and its proxy in the middle East, Israel.
So the interests of the US are the continuation of its imperialist control over the world through oil and the dollar, and those of Israel the expansion of its hegemonic domination over the middle East.
However this time, while Israel does indeed extend its hegemonic ambitions over the region by invading and bombing Lebanon, the US seem not to be in total control of what's happening in oil markets, the strait of Hormuz, and the toppling of the Iranian regime. There are many factors why, among which the fact that the regime has prepared for years for such a scenario and can not easily be killed by decapitation, and that it actually has partisans and the Iranian people is not going to simply revolt as one.
This war is also a highly assymetrical one, and that's why the comparison with Vietnam is valid.
Trump and Co. have already mentioned they have no interest in changing the regimes from the party bodies, either the communists in Venezuela or the IRGC in Iran. He has repeatedly stated that he prefers an insider. Too bad, in Iran's case, he got the toughest insider possible and had Israel kill that guy's entire family too. He even snubbed Machado for Delcy Rodrigues, just to claim a skin-level victory, even though Delcy is much more a hardliner than Maduro.
I don't think people have the patience for this orwellian bullshit anymore in 2026. While we watched the United States kidnap a country's leader in order to "take their oil", while we are watching them literally starving another country with a blockade in a "friendly takeover" (or unfriendly) while simultaneously bombing a third country in order to (according to Lindsey Graham) control a third of the world's oil supply. And before i forget, threaten the territorial integrity of a fourth country and NATO and European ally to boot. But sure, tell us how the Chinese are the real bad guys that we needing to be watching out for.
One of those better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt kind of situations. Replace fool with incapable.
A short term rotation that revealed US isn't just overstretched but systemically incapable of honoring mild security obligations. US failing to protect CENTCOM vs Iran... an opponent like 2% of PRC GDP and even less industrial output. Abandoning CENTCOM infra to IR counter attacks, running out of interceptors... losing regional ABM shield assets... Ultimately it's still Iran, and US has overmatch if sufficient will to power through... (insert at what cost meme). On paper, anyone not retarded knew US posture in 1,2IC not sustainable or US MIC not calibrated to fight adversaries more than 50% it's GDP, let alone PRC 150% by PPP (more by industrial capacity). There is functionally no doubt US can't protect 1IC vs PRC if it has to dedicated this much hardware to Iran in CENTCOM. SKR and PH are going to have hard time convincing their constituents where even delulu can only sustain so much cognitive dissonance, all while paying war premium of MENA fossil, whatever that leaks through, which again breaks retarded narrative that they are unsinkable aircraft carriers vs PRC... who is in fact a land power with resources capable of sustaining regional hegemony, and in Indopac war, US partners would starve/suffer/be blockaded long before PRC suffers. US no longer sole superpower, when it tries to insist upon itself, current aligners are seeing limitations of power and cost of alignment.
Not to mention what US+Israel has normalized... PRC has munitions in 1/2IC to decapitate/gaza US partners, which is now permissible.
Oh hey - the TLA/milspeak guy (gal?). I wouldn't wish more typing upon you but I would love if you could do a bit more 'longhand' so I could have a better grasp of some of the stuff you say - genuinely not being snarky, you seem to have great and informed insights! Thanks!
1IC / 2IC: First Island Chain / Second Island Chain.
ABM: Anti-Ballistic Missile.
CENTCOM: United States Central Command, combatant command for Middle East
MENA: Middle East and North Africa, in this case oil that comes from gulf to asia.
IR: Iran
MIC: Military-Industrial Complex.
PRC: People's Republic of China.
SKR: South Korea (Republic of Korea).
PH: Philippines.
The broad analogy is imagine a boxing match. US is aging heavy weight with finesse, Iran is a teen whose been training for a few years. The super weight's day job is protecting other teens from Iran.
On paper one would expect US to absolutely brain Iran in first round. Before fight, heavy weight had to spend months training / prepping. Which is strange vs fight against teenager, but we can charitably interpret that as diligence. Fight starts, teenage Iran somehow lands a few blows. Which is concerning. Maybe got lucky, a little embarrassing but as long as US heavy weight knocks out teen emphatically in first round. Then teenager survived first round, spent rest period between rounds to punch the other teens US was obligated to protect in the face. Fight continues, what if that knockout doesn't happen until round2... 3... 4... etc. What if heavy weight drags out and wins by TKO in 10th round, what if heavy weight gets tired and forfeits by 5th round. Other teens in protection racket gets nervous, because PRC is not Iran, PRC is like 10 super heavy weights with homefield advantage watching US heavyweight borrow equipment to finish a minor fight with Iran. Some will fixate on the fact that yes, in deed the super weight can probably murder that teen eventually, but the amount of effort required feels insane.
Maybe the strategically dignified / smart thing was for US not to accept (pick) that fight in the first place. Especially if staking credibility/reputation on fighting PRC one day. I'm 50/50 on this, there's medium/long term reason why Iran missile complex is existential for US regional posture (and Israel), taking it out is strategically sound. Taking it out while revealing that's about the limit of what US can take out is... not.
>> but this is totally distinct from your recordings ending up getting labeled
The distinction here occurs wherever the data is processed, and it sounds as if the difference between using your video for labeling versus privately processing it through an AI is deliberately confusing and obscured to the user by the way the terms of service are written. Once the video is uploaded, which is necessary for the basic function, it's unclear how or whether it can be separated from other streams that do go through labeling. This confusion also seems to be an intentional dark pattern.
Sure, there are valid scenarios. LA certainly has some terrible and legal vehicle crossings. (The fast, windy portion of beverly ranks.) I agree that it's hard to navigate without some cooperation. It's just that almost all of the crashes I've witnessed involved someone giving a bad go-ahead.
I wasn’t clear, but yes I meant in a car. During morning commute there are whole hours where certain roads are gridlocked leaving no space to cross. Beverly is one example of this.
There is no way to cross unless someone yields to let you through
I was a taxi driver in LA - I've lived the past 10 years in Portland. One major difference in driving style (at least before a lot of New Yorkers moved to LA) is that in LA, people merged late in a fluid style, and traffic shuffled. In Portland, people line up a mile before the sign for the exit lane, and aggressively don't let anyone in. Which means you have to be extra aggressive to get in if you don't want to wait in a voluntary Soviet line behind a hundred idiots with two brain cells and nowhere to be. Thankfully, Portlanders are all passive-aggressive, and much less likely to get out and attack you than Angelenos.
Personally I always let people in when they need to go. What does that cost me? A second or two? When people actively try to cut you off from merging it leads to more accidents and more road rage. Just merge peacefully and let people merge without getting your ego involved. That's more or less how LA used to be, at least before a million New Yorkers moved there who didn't know how to drive.
When humans, or dogs or cats for that matter, react to novel situations they encounter, when they appear to generalize or synthesize prior diverse experience into a novel reaction, that new experience and new reaction feeds directly back into their mental model and alters it on the fly. It doesn't just tack on a new memory. New experience and new information back-propagates constantly adjusting the weights and meanings of prior memories. This is a more multi-dimensional alteration than simply re-training a model to come up with a new right answer... it also exposes to the human mental model all the potential flaws in all the previous answers which may have been sufficiently correct before.
This is why, for example, a 30 year old can lose control of a car on an icy road and then suddenly, in the span of half a second before crashing, remember a time they intentionally drifted a car on the street when they were 16 and reflect on how stupid they were. In the human or animal mental model, all events are recalled by other things, and all are constantly adapting, even adapting past things.
The tokens we take in and process are not words, nor spatial artifacts. We read a whole model as a token, and our output is a vector of weighted models that we somewhat trust and somewhat discard. Meeting a new person, you will compare all their apparent models to the ones you know: Facial models, audio models, language models, political models. You ingest their vector of models as tokens and attempt to compare them to your own existing ones, while updating yours at the same time. Only once our thoughts have arranged those competing models we hold in some kind of hierarchy do we poll those models for which ones are appropriate to synthesize words or actions from.
I meant visual patterns, too. You're thinking about what I said on too granular a level. JEPA is visual, based ultimately on pixels. The tokens may be digested from pixels until they're as large as whole recognizable objects, but the tokens are not whole mental models themselves.
Here's an example of humans evaluating competing mental models as tokens: You see a car, it's white, it's got some blood stains on the door, and it's traveling towards a red light at 90 miles an hour in a 30 mph residential zone, while you're about to make a left turn. A human foot is dangling from the trunk.
You refer to several mental models you have about high speed chases, drug cartels in the area, murders, etc. You compare these models to determine the next action the car might take.
What were the tokens in this scenario? The color of the car, the pixels of blood, the speed, the traffic pattern? Or whole models of understanding behavior where you had to choose between a normal driver's behavior and that of someone with a dead body fleeing a crime scene?
The hell with with whatever speed boost I might get. I still write all my code by hand every day, and own what it does. I know it. And I don't have to worry about atrophy.
Could've outsourced a long time ago to humans, if I wanted to deal with reading code most of the time instead of writing it.
If programmer speed and efficiency was truly such a significant competitive factor, we wouldn't be packing them like sardines them in noisy and stuffy open floor plan offices.
I've worked places that actively acknowledged they were paying a productivity tax for people to have unexpected encounters, and they'd recover the losses at a higher level.
Do you have management pressure to use these tools? I don’t have any data but me and virtually every software engineer I talk to regularly is feeling or has felt pressure to use these tools.
FWIW, I'm responsible for our engineering team, and I'm the one starting to put some gentle pressure on the developers right now. Velocity used to be one of the bigger issues we had: Features used to be in development over weeks, while customers, product management, and engineers iterated on the feature, until it was finally deemed stable enough and shipped. With AI, we can shorten that cycle considerably, and get stuff out of the door in days or even hours instead. Doing so requires adapting your processes accordingly, give up some control over the details, take good care of tests, and do proper code reviews.
Given all that, I just cannot ignore AI as a development tool. There is no good justification I can give the rest of the company for why we would not incorporate AI tools into our workflows, and this also means I cannot leave it up to individual developers on whether they want to use AI or not.
This pains me a lot: On the one hand, it feels irresponsible to the junior developers and their education to let them outsource thinking; on the other hand, we're not a charity fund but a company that needs to make money. Also, many of us (me included) got into this career for the joy of creating. Nobody anticipated this could stop being part of the deal, but here were are.
> There is no good justification I can give the rest of the company for why we would not incorporate AI tools
Is there definitive proof of long term productivity gains with no detriment to defects, future velocity, etc?
If so I’d say you’re irresponsible at best to put this much trust in a tool that’s been around for a few months (at the current level). Absolutely encourage experimentation, but there’s a trillion dollar marketing hype machine in overdrive right now. Your job is to remind people of that.
So you struggled to improve velocity without AI tools, are you worried that using the AI tools as a crutch will just lead to a death spiral of bad code being shipped increasingly faster? I've only ever seen the AI adoption approach work on fully functional teams.
The concern as well is that by forcing the AI onto developers, they eventually throw their hands up and say "well they dont care about code quality anymore, neither should I" and start shipping absolute vibeslop.
> I've only ever seen the AI adoption approach work on fully functional teams.
It's not that the team isn't functioning, it's that it's a pretty diverse team in terms of experience, which means things just used to take a while to finish.
> The concern as well is that by forcing the AI onto developers, they eventually throw their hands up and say "well they dont care about code quality anymore, neither should I" and start shipping absolute vibeslop.
This is IMHO avoidable by emphasising code reviews and automated tooling; my general policy is still that everyone is responsible for what they push, period. So absolute vibeslop isn't what I'm seeing, rather an efficiency miscalculation on which parts should be written by humans and which by the AI.
In my experience the bottleneck was never with writing code. If this is the case how can a developer be expected to increase their output while still being responsible in the same way? Seems like a recipe for burnout.
The vast majority of workplaces have never cared about code quality (with the exception being the actual engineers that write the code). Everyone else has no clue what programmers do, other than, "they write arcane symbols, and our product works, and our business continues to function". They do not know that code can even _have_ quality. It does not help that they only ever have to interact with engineering when something is going _wrong_, which conditions them to associate engineers with stress and failure and angry customers. Nobody ever thinks of engineers when everything is going well. The LLM mandates stem from a combination of mistrust and resentment.
I know, from second hand experience, that long before coding LLMs became a thing, engineers would ship slop when it became clear that their superiors cared about deadlines uber alles (i.e. not shipping slop would be the same thing as quitting, but without the paycheck -- slop code is often a form of quiet quitting).
Most people would _prefer_ to be able to "program" their entire business from a spreadsheet. LLMs have enabled them to get involved, and they cannot understand why engineers reject this "help" (it is for the same reason that a pilot would reject a copilot that thinks he knows how to fly because he played a flight simulator or read Jonathan Livingston Seagull; flight simulators are used in training too, but they are not a substitute for actual piloting experience). This refusal and resistance feeds into the mistrust and resentment. We live in a world where managers and administrators do not understand what they are managing and administrating, nor do they think that this is part of their job description. In the worst cases, they believe their job is to extract compliance from their subordinates.
There is a _lot_ of alpha in being part of a company, where authorities understand how the internals of the business (including software and IT!) _actually_ function. (One engineer told me that clueless yet demanding managers are, for all intents and purposes, unwitting saboteurs, and that the best a company can do about this is get him a job interview at a competitor). In some sense, the economy is just a machine for transferring wealth from those who do not know something essential, to those who do know something essential. This can veer uncomfortably close to exploitation. If we want to avoid crossing that line, we need to cultivate an economy where a lack of understanding is not seen as an _opportunity for profit_, but rather _as an opportunity for illumination_.
Your team is creating code you don't really grok to "get stuff out the door". Guaranteed a month or year from now this is going to bite you in the ass, hard.
And it is. You are going to end up with a wreck of a product and not a single person you can call upon to fix it. It is your choice and you will pay for it.
A wreck of a product is still better than being out of business by not being able to release fast enough. Unfortunately, the market in general does not reward slow high quality.
Who says that is my view of the importance of quality? My second sentence starts with "unfortunately"...
I'm just recognizing that businesses have challenges to deal with besides quality. Being able to generate revenue is just as important as software quality. And seeing how easily consumers switch to a competing product if it has a few more features, you can't neglect time to market if you want to survive as a company.
Many customers are pretty shallow: "meh, the new version looks just like to old one, nothing has changed" even if under the hood the product has significantly improved.
Yes, market dynamics are a bit of a catch 22: customers looking for the best deal, companies looking to reduce costs to still make profit. Customers always looking for the newest features, companies releasing faster before the product is done.
This is a starker tradeoff, but still the same logic that engineering leaders have used for years to eliminate time for exploration, learning, mentoring, role-switching, and every other activity that makes a better engineer but doesn’t move tickets off the queue. These developers are all going to work somewhere else in a few years, so why should we invest in growing their skills? This isn’t a charity, after all.
I’m sure you’re smarter than that, but a lot of leaders aren’t. And that’s based on the past, when they had an established playbook they could choose to follow, not the situation we’re in now where you have to make it up as you go.
I absolutely see your point there, but I don't have a better answer. It feels like the table stakes for feature development speed have risen all of a sudden, whether we like it or not.
Well, only if the increased speed doesn't result in a quality or staffing time bomb. Which none of us really knows at this point. You could always write code faster if you don't care if it works or is maintainable (and indeed many companies work that way for a while), and you could always put your developers in a pressure cooker until they leave from burnout.
So, you have a duty of care to make a safe workplace, at least in most countries.
Consider what a job with no joy means for the ongoing mental health of your staff, where the main interaction they have all day is with an AI model that the person has to boss around; with little training on norms.
Depression, frustration, nonchalance, isolation, and corner cutting are going to be the likely responses.
So at the same time as you introduce new tooling, introduce the quality controls you would expect for someone utterly checked out of the process, and the human resources policies or prevention to avoid your team speed running Godwin's law because they dont deal with people enough to remember social niceties are important.
Examples off of the top of my head of ways to do this are:
- Increased socialisation in the design processes. Mandatory fun sucks, a whiteboard party and collaboration will bring some creativity and shared ownership.
- Budget for AI minimal or free periods, where the intent is to do a chunk of work "the hard way"; and have people share what they experienced or learnt
- Make people test each other's work (manual testing) or collaborate, otherwise you will have a dysfunctional team who reaches for "yell in all caps to make sure the prompt sticks" as the way people talk to each other/deal with conflict.
The way to justify this to management above you is the cost of staff retention - advertise, interview, hire, pay market rates, equip, train, followed 6 months later by securely off boarding, hardware return, exit interview means you get maybe 4 months productivity out of each person, and pay 2 months salary in all of the early job mistakes or late job not caring, or HR debacle.
Do you or your next level up want to spend 30% more time doing this process? Or would you rather focus on generating revenue with a team that works well together and are on board for the long term?
The answer most of the time is "we want to make money, not spend it". So do the math on what staff replacement costs are and then argue for building in enough slack to the process that it costs about half of that to maintain it/train the staff/etc.
Your company is now making a "50% efficiency gain" in the HR funnel, year over year, all by simply... not turning the dial up to 10 on forced AI usage.
I'm applying gentle pressure, not forcing everyone to use it. If necessary, I will fight for my team as much as I can, but that's not where we're headed and I would think about switching jobs if it ever is.
Having said that: The dichotomy expressed in the threads here is a bit too extreme for my taste. It's not like working with AI is pure Yes-clicking review dread; there is joy to be found in materialising your ideas out of thin air, instead of the Lego-like puzzle solving experience many developers are used to.
And as mentioned in TFA, There's risk in both using it too little and too much. This also applies to employees, of course: If I shielded junior developers from AI tools, they'd end up in their next job utterly unprepared for what may be required from them as the world keeps spinning.
> Framed like that, sounds a lot better doesn't it?
Sure does, but that's not the situation I'm in. I'm trying to figure out the local maximum of keeping my company afloat in a world where AI has kicked the PMF from under our feet to the other end of the playing field, and ensuring my team stays happy, curious, and engaged. And I'm not the only one in this spot, I suppose.
> It's not like working with AI is pure Yes-clicking review dread; there is joy to be found in materialising your ideas out of thin air
I think that's true for some developers, and not for others. My guess is that one subset of developers has more ideas than they have time/resources to implement, and they enjoy programming because they love seeing the finished product emerge. I think this subset is more likely to go into management, because it's a force multiplier for them. They're the ones getting joy out of seeing AI make their ideas into reality.
But there's another subset who enjoys programming not because they love to see a product emerge, but because they enjoy the process itself: the head-scratching, the getting past "why won't this work" to the moment when the build starts working again or the site comes back up or the UI snaps into place. It's the magic of finding, among all the possible wrong answers, the exact right combination of bits that solve the problem. This subset is not getting any joy from AI: they're seeing AI take away that whole process and turn it into the kind of work their managers and their project owners do. It's made even worse because their managers don't even understand why they're so unhappy. I think managers would do well to consider how they're going to keep these folks happy and engaged and productive, because they're the ones who are going to be fixing the production bugs introduced by their teammates' AI commits. If they've all gone off to retrain as electricians, we're going to have a problem as an industry.
You are feeling that pressure because the people that use them are more productive and the next pressure you are going to get is to remove yourself from the loop completely.
I personally do not. But I don't work in the software industry. I write custom software in an industry that's as far away from tech as you can imagine. My management tells me what features they want, and doesn't care how it gets done. They only care that it works, and the priority is never to get a feature out fast. The priority is to never break their logistics software that's used 24/7. The deployment cycle is still fast, but bugs can be catastrophic, and it's on me to fix any bugs that crop up whenever something goes into production. Usually, when a bug filters up to me, it's within a few hours, because edge cases arise quickly. I know almost immediately what lines of code in which files are the most likely culprits. Because I wrote them, and I tested them manually, and I thought long and hard before hitting the button. If someone else (or something else) wrote them, I'd have to go hunting at the exact moment when time is critical and there's an open bug in a live deployment, and my phone is ringing and people are yelling.
The term "vibe coding" is new, but I've described what I do as "jazz coding" for a couple decades.
yup. no effort - no bliss. and for rare bouts of wanting to shepherd cats I just got meself some actual cats. At least they don't pretend to be engineers.
Am I alone in thinking atrophy might not happen? I use a keyboard all day but it doesn't mean I can't write by hand anymore. Predictive text didn't make me forget how to spell. If i buy coffee it doesn't mean I forget how to make it
Counterpoint: my handwriting is way harder to read and my hand tired faster than when I was in high school. And I am worse at spelling and my vocabulary has stopped expanding much since I started typing more and reading less
>> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success. It’s fungible from a macro perspective, so isn’t a moat by itself.
Broadly true if you have $10M to throw at it, and know exactly what you want, or if what you want isn't something involving a "secret sauce".
But between competing startups doing something novel, original software is a moat. No moat is permanent; you leverage it into market share while you have time.
And no software itself is a secret, but the business logic and real-world operations it distills and caters to may be. The software is the least obfuscated part of encoding that set of operational logic, or even trade secrets, which are the DNA of a business and dictate the tools it goes into battle with.
Software being a moat (which it rarely is for long) is more of a question for the software industry. For other industries, software that amplifies best practices and crystalizes operational flow from the business logic can absolutely extend whatever moat the company already has.
In the small bore, if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested $1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.
> if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested 1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.
Counter anecdote: about a decade ago I was brought in by the new to the company director to lead the modernization of their in house Electronic Medical System software that was built on FoxPro in 1999 running with SQL Server 2000 and was maintained by two “developers” who had been their for a decade.
I led another project there first that was more pressing - in house mobile software maintained by two other “developers”. It was built on top of a mobile framework by a local startup. It was used by home health care nurses for special needs kids.
After I got my head around the business, what they were trying to do - PE owned and acquiring other companies whose systems they need to integrate and their margins were low - mostly Medicaid reimbursements - I decided the best thing I could do was put myself out of a job.
I told the director we have no business trying to build up a software development department. We moved everything to various SaaS products and paid consulting companies to make all of the customizations. Meaning they sign a statement of work and come back with a finished product.
Software development was never going to be this company’s competitive moat. They got rid of the two developers maintaining the mobile app and contracted that out. The two other developers who had maintained the FoxPro app became “data analysts” and report writers.
The only trouble is, we are no longer the superpower that we were in 1950 or even 1980. What I think will be interesting from this realignment is how our alliances will probably shift toward countries which are strategically aligned with us even if they're much less ethically or ideologically aligned with our stated beliefs.
South Korea and the Philippines are both "capable allies" in the sense that Israel and the UAE are, and in the sense that much of Europe is not. I'm confused as to why Filipinos are protesting against taking out the Iranian regime; it's a direct blow to Chinese expansionism, as well as the jihadist groups in the south. But America's taking out the weakest links in the Russian-Chinese-Iranian-Venezuelan axis. A short-term rotation away from East Asia doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad strategic move.
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