It isn't so much about our freedoms or our GDP, although they play a role.
Unlike China and Russia, we have WAY more guns and we're WAY less corrupt. That's a pinnacle of financial security; you can be confident that the United States will honor its treasury securities. China and Russia? Probably, except who knows what internal or external conflicts shake their fragile economies, and maybe they just won't pay out on time or at all.
People hate the fact that we spend so much on our military, but the inconvenient truth is that we have the comfortable lives we have now in large part because we have so many god damned weapons, and very advanced ones at that. That goes for those who live in foreign ally nations; deep down, their leaders know we will intervene on their behalf if shit hits the fan. America has had its share of fuckups, but they're still not eclipsed by the fuckups of Russia or China.
"We" = the 1% which reads Hacker News? Speak only for yourself
You uses fallacies to spread misinformation about war. No source, no number, no reference. Convenient.
No, actually "we" as in most Americans and many other countries in multiple senses of "comfortable". Yes, there is poverty and many social problems present in America. At the same time, many aspects of the average American life, as well as life in Europe and other parts of the world, have consistently improved, and millions of people still choose to live in America instead of even other places of comparable rights and opportunities. Contrasted with many parts of the world, we're pretty damned comfortable.
But you know what? That doesn't even matter. If I were to alter my premise to only encompass the "1% which reads Hacker News", it wouldn't affect my comment at all. Why do you think Silicon Valley continues to exist in America and not the UK?
Fallacies are specific, and you haven't mentioned what "fallacies" I've made. What I wrote was a comment on an industry forum, not an academic paper. You want citations? Work it out yourself. You're on the internet. Nothing that I wrote hasn't been said before by others with greater authority than mine.
You haven't made a single argument, yet you accuse me of using fallacies and misinformation. By not justifying your claims, you're being very unfair.
Just because an internet search puts America as less corrupt than the likes of China and Russia. Doesn’t mean it’s actually less corrupt.
The perseption of America is that it’s less corrupt but in reality we have absolute no idea what’s going on behind closed doors and what deals are being done.
What specific things in terms of Defense is America responsible for on the European continent?
- If any NATO country is invaded by anyone, all NATO countries will go to war to defend it. This doesn't apply if the NATO country is the aggressor.
- It outlines some minimum funding commitments, but those are more aimed towards the non-US countries involved.
Why should we draft a bunch of folks from South Dakota and Kansas (and let’s be honest here ... folks from New York or SF who write opinion pieces about this aren’t going to be the ones paying blood) to fight Russia? Why can’t these countries defend themselves?
NATO is a low cost way for us to maintain our geopolitical position as a leader and to maintain a reliable group of military allies in case we need them (yeah, we spend a ton on military, but that is not due to us defending NATO countries from Russia).
Your point about spending is ignorant and silly. We don’t buy billion dollar submarines to fight Islamists in land locked countries.
You don't buy billion dollar submarines because of NATO either. When the DoD talks about preparing for near-peer adversaries, Russia is not the primary concern. Do you really think we would stop spending massive amounts of money on military technology development if NATO didn't exist?
Are you kidding? Then what's Grafenwöhr for? Entire procurement strategies have been - and are - focused on countering Russian military hardware (the IAV is just one example - there are plenty of others).
>Do you really think we would stop spending massive amounts of money on military technology development if NATO didn't exist?
You should really reconsider that statement, and which clause follows from the other. This has nothing to do with my first point, which no one seems interested in answering. My original question was attempting to tease out why people think NATO is useful in a post-post Cold War world. I don't think it is, and struggle to understand this obsession with Russia that continues to warp people's perception of the global security situation. Instead people pivot to "well it was actually about reducing the amount of nuclear weapons" or "we would spend that money anyway", neither of which address the fundamental question of whether or not NATO in its present form is useful or whether the US should have to continue shouldering the vast majority of the security responsibility in the Western World.
>Several Microsoft Corp employees on Friday demanded that the company cancel …
Three employees. Since when do three employees make these kinds of demands and have management take heed? This isn't some Morton Thiokol and an O-ring issue where you need management to listen to a real issue.
If I were Russia or China, this is exactly the kind of agitprop I'd like to create for a foe.
Also, LOL if they think Microsoft is going to drop $450M in revenue -- even if was hand-delivered by Satan himself.
So honestly I find these sorts of responses misleading, irresponsible and agenda driven. The US does not need to be afraid of China or Russia, it dwarfs their military capacity ten times over.
And that American workers in the tech industry are conscious of the risks of having the military seep too closely into consumer facing businesses is a very good thing in a liberal society. US tech workers always had a libertarian streak, be that right or left, and the US wasn't defenseless as a result. We'd be very wise to listen to the people who want to keep private American businesses out of government weapon development.
How is it wise? Most weapons are developed and manufactured in a kind of public-private partnership.
During the Second World War, for example, the vast majority of industrial capacity turned towards building war equipment was private, dwarfing the capacity of government arsenals by a fair margin. Much of the design and development occurred in the context of public-private partnership, with national proving grounds and military agencies collaborating with aircraft manufacturers and other manufacturers of heavy equipment to design and develop weapons systems.
Boeing, Lockheed, Texas Instruments, Browning — and to go further afield, Supermarine, Marconi, Glock — these are all private names, not the names of government agencies. There are few cases of states where all, or even most, development of weapons systems is in state hands: totalitarian states.
When Amazon develops facial recognition technology that can just as easily be thrown at migrants at the border the line isn't as easy as talking about building aircraft to fight fascism in Europe.
In liberal democracies there's a line between civilian technology and military technology, and you generally know what you sign up for. This is also precisely what the engineers here talk about, they did not join Microsoft to build weapons.
This isn't true. Consider Boeing, Colt, Texas Instruments, CamelBak, AM General. Even companies, like Colt, that are dedicated to making arms also sell products into the civilian market. That is in part because in a liberal democracy the government can not restrict a company to doing business solely with them: companies are allowed to recycle their know-how in the civilian market.
Working with private enterprise and repurposing civilian capabilities is how liberal democracies do defence. Should it be otherwise? It would seem to imply even greater scope for secrecy and mismanagement, and even less civilian control and input, if defence agencies didn't work with private enterprises for most of their needs.
I'm not sure you realize how much of our modern technology is thanks to defense technology grants and DARPA. Military, academia and private business have always been tightly coupled in the US and it's dishonest to pretend otherwise. Microsoft has always had plenty of defense contracts, hell , they have the largest or second largest R&D division in the world. These moral qualms are entirely new.
Also, it has to be said: it's a verdict on US leadership. The man in the oval office isn't someone I'd feel comfortable arming, nor was Bush. Even Obama had the thing with the drone strikes. When US Presidents demonstrate carelessness and unpredictability in their use of force, it turns reasonable, peace-loving people off.
The US may fall behind simply because we believe in ideas like privacy.
Kai-Fu Lee's book goes into this in detail.
Although if we're being realistic, less scrupulous companies such as Amazon will step in and take the contracts.
The economy is basically a distributed optimization heuristic.
If you're talking about "falling behind" in the global sense (using "AI" to centrally plan), then you're hypothesizing that we can essentially port the distributed algorithm into the silicon realm and further optimize it (eg prune destructive adversarial behavior). We certainly have more computing power now than say that past attempt based on fluid flows, but that's still a huge if.
If you're talking in the local sense (that "AI" will help companies themselves optimize better), than whatever extra percentage gained from that will not be enough to outrun the State deploying the same technology (as in the above goal), and destroying the individual businesses.
One thing I do know is that even if this turns out to be the winning strategy, sacrificing our values in an attempt to compete at it will still only net us second place!
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Having written that, I think this implicit assumption that it will be economically beneficial for AI to be directed at individuals and individual behavior needs to be directly examined. How much individual productivity is actually being left on the table? The US system is quite good at motivating people, so much so that it's common for lower classes to see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". There are a few deviants, but for the most part lack of individual productivity is a failing of the larger structure. Heck, most of the US's criminals are in jail for engaging in economic activity!
Rather, the narrative seems like the age-old keep-the-plebs-in-line play, not a legitimate approach to economic success. If AI has something to offer for planning the economy, then wouldn't that be properly applied to the government-company interface? That's where the structural gains are actually available to be had!
China isn't centrally planned anymore, and hasn't been for a long time.
But there are two motte-and-bailey terms in the above comment - "ahead" and "AI".
If we're only talking about the narrow scope of China being ahead in AI, with "AI" meaning predicting outliers from large populations, then that is not so worrisome! Google (et al) can simply buy the better population surveillance technology from China and apply it to their own business, as the US will still be generally ahead.
But rather such talk seems to be aimed at invoking a worry that a lack of individual rights means China will succeed at a more generally useful "AI" (whatever that means), and that it will then be applied to their economy to get them "ahead" in general. This is the underlying idea I am addressing.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is about operating with zero knowledge from and coordination with the other parties. Diplomacy lets us avoid that in the real world.
What if they aren't? You can have all the peacekeepers and diplomats in the world, but if the other side isn't willing to play by that game, then they wont.
Our duty is to find better ways, not bullshit excuses to indulge in the old, horrific ways.
U.S. prosperity is built on the U.S. military. From our acension to the world stage after WWII, to the spawning of the Internet through military R&D. The pointy end of America is an essential part of what makes your life so fat and comfortable. It’s what allows you to consume a vastly disproportionate share of global resources. To live a life where you can worry about finding dates in Tindr and finding the best avacodo toast place, instead of surviving in a hostile world.
Nuclear weapons have no proportionality, so it's bad to rely on them for defense. If you do rely on them, you're either going to start WWIII over a border skirmish, or your enemy is going to chip away at you because you won't.
Russia never threatens to attack first.
Apparently, the desirable situation for the US is that it can fuck any country and no country cannot harm it back? And if it isn't so, the country is threatening the US, right?
That's going to end liberalism way faster. The military / real politik foreign affairs are dirty parts of life that we'd prefer not to have, but we live in a world where we must have them.
I would rather have America be dominant than any other nation. With all our faults, we excercise incredible restraint with our immense powers. This of course could change if we end up electing more leaders like Trump. We need to stay strong militarily but also need good and intelligent leaders which unfortunately we don’t currently have.
However, entrenched interests and Trump haters (both Dem and GOP) can't let that happen.
Simple words by a country's leader could ruin relationships between nations for decades or between different parts of society.
You don't just start hating {insert favorite target jews|blacks|muslims|christians|whites} overnight, it takes time. You plant the seeds of hate and let them flourish into ethnic cleansing|holocaust|interment camps|etc.
It's our duty to nip that shit in bud right now :). We have come so far to let that sort of shit take us back.
I apologize for taking this discussion in a political direction. In any case, I think it's important for us to have a strong military and Microsoft helping our military build better weapons/systems/tools is a good thing. A strong America is a good thing - as long as we have no Trumps :)
Except for a few never-ending wars that last so long that are basically a new normal so we can count them off.
And if you were working for a company that wasn't a defence contractor, but is becoming one, you can yell and shout if you think it might deter the company and let you stay where you like staying.
Do you have any idea how many decades Microsoft has been getting millions in income from the Pentagon? The whole DoD runs on Microsoft products. Windows. Office. Outlook. Sharepoint. Access. All of that stuff has expensive licenses and enterprise support contracts.
Any employee who joined Microsoft after, say, 1995 and thinks they weren't joining a "defense contractor" is just willfully ignorant.
But, winning over China as only Trump would say, is more about economics than anything else, isn't it?
Ie. a big thriving economy and by implication a high quality of life gives power and influence -- how does military R&D factor into that?