FearOfReprisal

Ignoring your first two comments because they're boring. The third one, can you give me a good argument as to why it is not possible to be "too mighty"? Does this state not just create a heightened sense of fear amongst those countries who see us for the warmongers we are?

By all means, have a strong national defense, but at some point the rest of the world will decide it's time to join together to destroy the 'murikkkan empire? The rest of the world would be a lot happier without having our freedom forced upon them through violence.

You have never flown anywhere but Canada, then. I Have to come to GR 2x per year from abroad, and in order to afford it I fly into Chicago and take the train, or buy separate tickets on the 45 minute puddle jumper (which is an Embrayer Air 150, most uncomfortable plane in service in the states). Flying into Detroit or Grand Rapids from SFO is always 50% higher than flying to New York.

I had to buy a family member a flight from Seattle -> Detroit for next month, it cost $600. I'm about to fly myself from Istanbul to San Francisco, that flight cost $500.

There's a reason they're called the flyover states.

The US military is mighty, but not terribly effective. I mean, we're 17 years into the second gulf war. 17 years and we still can't pull-out because we screwed up the first one so royally.

I'm writing this from a refugee community center here in Istanbul, the Ad'Dar Center, where I volunteer a couple of hours every day helping helping kids with their lessons, especially in English and Math, cooking, making music, talking, and listening. (To a lesser extent I help people with paperwork and UN refugee processes, but I don't really have the patience for bureaucracy, so I leave that to the experts).

I'm not a political or military expert, but over the past five years 25% of my life was spent backpacking around the middle-east / balkans / black sea / eastern block regions studying languages and music, while the other 75% has been spent living / studying / working in Istanbul. I say this so that you know my perspective is not that of a SJW sipping $10 lattes while pigging out on $20 avocado toasts in SOMA. I haven't been in a war, but I've been through a coup, bribed my way through checkpoints, volunteered at refugee camps in Bulgaria, Greece & Albania, and have spoken to many hundreds of people who have been privvy 1st-hand to direct and indirect American "wars". Back stateside, I grew up in Michigan and 1/2 of our family friends were Afghani & Iraqi engineers who had fled to the US in the 1980s (the other 1/2 were white-trash patriotic biker gangs. Michigan is a weird place).

As you would expect, the feelings and views about America here are quite varied and diverse, but the two constants that come up in every conversation:

- America should stop policing the middle-east, we do more harm than good. - Supporting Israel and Saudi Arabia makes us the real financiers of terrorism - America is using the Kurds, our best allies in the war against terror, and will be stabbing them in the back at the first opportunity for political favor

ISIS isn't defeated, by the way, they've just re-branded.

An act of war by whom? Which nation? Osama Bin Laden was trained in the United States by Reagan's authority when he funded/supported the Mujahadeen in a proxy war against Russia.

Fast-forward 20 years to 9/11. Osama Bin Laden is funded by his family, and by other rich Saudis, which means the government of Saudi Arabia because all Saudi wealth is owned by the House of Saud.

But they're our allies, so instead, we attacked Iraq and Afghanistan, even though none of the 9/11 attackers were from either country. To get approval, we lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, which we never found, because they didn't exist.

I'm not really following your war narrative, but I am finding a lot of cronyism and false flags.

To be fair, America didn't really win WW2, we hardly even fought, mostly we just supplied Hitler with arms, and when that wasn't fashionable anymore, we supplied the allies with arms.. Then we swooped in at the end to take all the credit and the fat construction contracts.

Is our military capable? We've failed horrendously at two wars in Iraq and one war in Afghanistan. We like to claim that we defeated ISIS, but let's be real, we defeated ISIS in about the same way we defeated Germany, we let everybody else fight for us, then took the credit.

ISIS? PKK & YPG defeated ISIS, and as a thank you we're about to throw them under the bus to stay in the good graces of the Turkish dictator.

We hear a lot about the great might of the US military, and yes I will concede that we do manage to destroy a lot of countries, but we don't seem to win wars.

America isn't based on free-market capitalism, it's cronyism at it's worse.

Take Kansas, for example. Israel buys a lot of weapons from us, and they commit war crimes against Arabs for us, so in thanks Kansas has made it illegal to boycott Israel.

Yet I cannot legally buy a musical instrument from Iran without fear of going to jail for violating federal sanctions.

Hey what's your name? I keep a blacklist of patriotic amurrikkkans like yourself so I can make sure that if your resume comes across my desk, I'll get to mock you on Instagram before round-filing your application.

's/defending what you already have/stealing what others have/g'

There was a study a decade ago, they found that something like 80% of all bills signed into law in the United States are never read, debated, or even considered by their proponents.

When a big business says bend over, American politicians ALWAYS bend over, be they Democan, Republicrat, or Liberterrorist.

Perfect description of AirBNB, Uber, and Facebooks's operations.

PS, I've also been told by several friends who have gone through YC, and one who currently works there, that there's an unofficial internal blacklist, and I'm on it.

For what it's worth, in the 3 months after I was fired I referred a few dozen new customers, and I had no animosity towards them until I found out about the blacklist last year.

I was the 7th hire at a YC start-up which is now worth at least $1bn. I negotiated 2% of the stock in exchange for a 60% discount in salary, and an understanding that my work would primarily be evangelism/marketing, as I was burned out on engineering and just didn't want to be a sysadmin/devops/whatever anymore.

Anyways, I signed our two biggest customers, organized our tradeshows, did some tech work, and protected one of our employees from assault at a conference.

When I'd been there for 3 months, in the midst of a conference (where we were kicking butt, by the way), most of AWS went down and we scrambled to figure out what to do.

When I got back from the conference I was fired without severance. After I let them know I'd be speaking to the customers I'd signed, and that three of the engineers in their hiring pipeline were friends of mine, they came back with a "generous" offer of 2 weeks severance.

The funny thing, is they were really nice kids, and I do mean kids, they were children. I'm quite sure they used this as an opportunity to get rid of me because Paul or some other greedmonger at YC ordered them to screw me over so that they could sell more stock to investors later.

After that point, it hasn't mattered if I work for a start-up or a big company. YC taught me that all companies are the same, and now I just view myself as a mercenary.

It doesn't matter where you work, how much they lie to you about "culture" and "family", or how much they try to convince you that you should take a salary discount because "your stock will be yuuuuuuge and we're changing the world", or "this is a greenfield environment with a chance to do something entirely new" (it isn't. all start-ups are really just rip-offs of other start-ups. )

Your main response to every sales pitch they give you should be, "fck you, pay me".

Repeat it, memorize it, live by it. Fck you, pay me.

"This kinda shit happens all the time. You gotta get yours, but fool I gotta get mine" -- Snoop Dogg.