The US requires a fairly high minimum age and for someone to be born American. Those requirements seem also a bit silly and stand in the way of voters expressing their wishes.
For some fun times, have a look at the requirements to become president in Singapore. Basically, you either have to have been a senior civil servant before or the CEO of a large and profitable company.
> Having someone born in the country they are looking to lead seems silly to you?
Whether it is silly or not, I'm not sure, but it certainly doesn't seem very democratic.
IMO Arnold Schwarzenegger, to pick a random foreign born politician, should be able to stand for President. People can choose not to vote for him if they've bothered by him being foreign born.
FWIW, in Australia, no member of Federal Parliament (so Congress equivalent) can be a dual citizen (and they must be Australian citizens), so an equivalent to Arnie in Australia would need to renounce their foreign citizenship before standing for election. This seems like a better middle ground than "must be born in the country" to me.
> would need to renounce their foreign citizenship before standing for election
I'm really glad we all live in a world where nobody lies to gain position, or no foreign enemy has ever tried to infiltrate their operatives into key positions by becoming double agents and renouncing anything
It's right up there with the question on the form that asks if you are a subversive or not (or whatever the actual wording is). If you were a subversive, wouldn't you be exactly the type to lie about the answer?
I think Arnie is a great example, especially because he was a governor for two terms for one of the richest and most populous states, California. If he was allowed to run for president, he would be an excellent candidate.
As a modern compromise, I think the US should allow people who moved to the US before a certain again (maybe 10 or 12) or have lived in the US for 20+ years. If you want to go a little further, you could require them to renounce any other foreign citizenships upon successful election.
The Australia law caused a bunch of trouble in the last 10 years because a bunch of MPs accidentally had US citizenship by birth to Oz parents living in US or one parent was a US citizen, but they never lived in US. (US citizenship is a bit viral in that sense!) I don't remember all of the details exactly, but it did make me think more deeply about a nationality policy for MPs. I think it is a reasonable requirement.
> The Australia law caused a bunch of trouble in the last 10 years
It has, although the case you mention isn't really my main worry.
In theory some random rogue state (Hello North Korea!), can just grant all of the Australian parliament citizenship. Suddenly they're all ineligible under the constitution.
That said, I assume modern scholars would make the definition more robust than the 19th C definitions used in Australia (which was an attempt to take the best of the UK and USA models, particularly following the US with regards to being a Federation of States, while still maintaining a proper Westminster system without a "King"/Executive branch like in the USA).
> In theory some random rogue state (Hello North Korea!), can just grant all of the Australian parliament citizenship. Suddenly they're all ineligible under the constitution.
It's funny how Russia, of all the countries, had this problem - there are a lot of immigrants from ex-USSR countries, and some of these countries make it very hard to relinquish citizenship. For example in Ukraine this is done only by a presidential order, after a long bureaucratic procedure, and the last such order was signed in 2021. So Russia had to invent a mechanism which allows to write an affidavit certifying you would not exercise any rights given to you by foreign citizenship, and with such an affidavit your citizenship is considered "effectively relinquished" by Russian authorities.
> As a modern compromise, I think the US should allow people [...]
Your compromise would probably work well as a compromise, but honestly, it feels a bit superfluous to have all those restrictions, when you have voters who can apply any criterion they like anyway.
Voters can already resolve by themselves to vote only for people who are native born, or who are of a certain age, or under a certain age, or who like the right football team, or have the right haircolour.
> Have you looked at trying to even just immigrate to Japan?
Here I am again to dispel this HN myth about immigration and Japan.
Ignoring that the Japanese economy is currently weaker than the US economy (which affects your chances of getting an offer in both places as a foreigner), in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy, Japan is much easier to get (and keep) a skilled work visa compared to the US. If you are not looking for a skilled work visa, there is a long term tourist visa (6mo+6mo) that is also easy to get, but you need to have about 200K EUR in liquid assets. Again, the US doesn't have anything as low friction.
>The reservoir of potential candidates is vast. The risk this mitigates seems important enough to give up on additional potential candidates.
I've recently grown to value this idea of "No single person is special or necessary for the government to function." According to the Census Bureau, there are over 150,000,000 native US citizens aged 35 and older. We could have a new president every month and still have a massive number of people to choose from. The only problem would be disruptions from rapid hand offs. The pool is not the issue. Taken to the extreme, this means political assassinations are only meaningful in dissuading replacements from taking the same views and causing temporary disruptions. The lives of politicians aren't inherently worth more than any other person.
Well the American born presidential policy is just strange because it seems so un-American. You’d think the country would have had at least one range to riches president who was a refugee from some war torn country by now, it’s just such a fundamental part of the nation’s mythos.
> Regardless of how you feel, a country should be able to set its own policies.
And in a democracy that means that voters should be able to set the policies.
Voters can already resolve by themselves to vote only for people who are native born, or who are of a certain age, or under a certain age, or who like the right football team, or have the right haircolour.
We don't need to further restrict who voters can and can not vote for.
Unless you don't trust voters. But then, why have a democracy in the first place?
If voters care so much, they can change the policy. Everything is mutable with enough will.
America was founded as a colony fleeing its imperial oppressor. The fact that the rules are so strong here is a testament to the bloody and deep scars we gained from overthrowing our foreign oppressors.
It's a direct consequence of our nation's founding. There was a lot of pain felt at the hands of foreign powers, so we encoded it into the DNA of our governing rules.
> America was founded as a colony fleeing its imperial oppressor.
Haha, no. That's nice propaganda, but the Brits weren't oppressing the colonists. In fact, they ran just about the most liberal regime in existence at the time (with perhaps the Dutch being the main competition for top spot).
North American colonists were also paying less taxes than people back in England.
See also Canada for what happened to the colonists who stayed 'oppressed'.
Btw, did you know that only a minority of people in the 13 colonies were even in favour of insubordination against the Rightful Authority of the Crown?
Born in the country lessens the likelihood that you are beholden to more than one master. Born in another country then naturalized still does not rule out sleeper agent situations. Seems pretty obvious to me.
I'm one that questions the whole pledge of allegiance forced to be recited by children that have no wherewithal to understand what allegiance even means or the ramifications of that pledge. Yet, I'm okay with born in country and of a minimum age.
The UK's recent prime minister Boris Johnson was born in the US two British parents who happened to be studying in Manhatten at the time. They all moved back here a few months later. The idea that he could be some sort of US sleeper agent is hilarious, though.
Well, formally the Prime Minister is just some random bloke appointed by king to help him run the country. The PM doesn't even need to be a member of parliament!
Now the king, that guy can't even be catholic! And until recently, couldn't even be female with living brothers.
Tradition does dictate that the PM is an MP, and tradition in UK parliament is pretty binding. However, an MP does not even need to be a British citizen: an Irish or a Commonwealth citizen can become an MP and go on to command the confidence of the house.
> Tradition does dictate that the PM is an MP, and tradition in UK parliament is pretty binding.
I hope it stays that way.
The US had pretty strong traditions in politics, too, but they are increasingly being eroded.
To give an example that's hopefully far enough in the past to be non-controversial: when they banned alcohol in the early 1920s, they felt that their constitution did not already explicitly give their federal government the power to do so. So they passed the 18th amendment to give the feds that power to specifically ban alcohol.
Decades later, in the context of the war on drugs, everybody seems to take it for granted that the federal government can obviously ban arbitrary substances.
And yet when you look at the great espionnage stories, the perpetrators were citizens of the country.
When you look at people who were "almost born" (came to the country as toddlers) or naturalized because of the love of their new country, purple claiming that they are second category citizens are hard to listen to.
Maybe because the policy exists that people have not so easily been able to get to the top position. Remove that policy and Putin himself could run for the office. It's an idiotic comment for an idiotic misunderstanding of why the policy exists
You seem to put people in the category of "born here, so good" and "birn elsewhere, less good". Fair enough.
If you are a supporter of, say, Trump you therefore say that Biden or Harris are much better than any other, naturalized citizen, as presidents?
It's hard to see the logic here, probably because I am an idiot, but if where you were birn defines the man for you then fine - everyone has their opinion.
it's so unamerican it is part of the constitution that defines america and deliberately placed there by the founding fathers. i'm sure they were concerned that the king would try to undermine the new country the first chance he got by placing someone loyal to the crown to undo all of the work that led to the constitution.
it's not a good better best situation like you seem to think. at this point, i really think the unwilling to see how attempting to limit the new nation from being led by a foreign operative would be so important to the survival of the new nation. only, new is now 200+ years old (yet still a babe in the woods to other national histories) so the "threat" seems lessened by people like you.
i also started the entire thread by stating we have a foreign operative in place now, so if you can't read between those lines in who i didn't vote for then you're really just being deliberately obtuse about the situation is the only logical explanation i can see.
> it's so unamerican it is part of the constitution that defines america and deliberately placed there by the founding fathers.
Apparently, as of last year, the constitution also says that the president is actually above the law. Given that they've written it after having just gotten rid of a king, I'm assuming they also put that part in deliberately. Truly, their wisdom and foresight was boundless.
It's an interesting document, but as time passes, its practical uses seem to become more and more limited. We're now at the 'people are getting disappeared into a gulag in El Salvador because the president decided they are criminals' stage, by the way. No judge, no jury, just an executive order that makes a person go away, and no mechanism to stop it from happening.
(I don't actually have strong opinions about that provision. It's certainly saving us from, heaven forbid, a Musk presidency, but only by an utterly uninteresting accident of his birth. People like him aren't foreign adversaries, trying to subvert the country, they are domestic adversaries, who bear no allegiance but to themselves.)
The dream is probably dynamic voting through some login system where it's not done every X years but whenever you decide to change your vote maybe using ATMs as physical voting terminals for accessibility. Then voters can change their mind at any time and cause a change in leadership should the vote not be corrected over Y time. Then on top of that you can add multiple parties, individual person voting, etc. It probably won't happen in my lifetime since governments aren't built to be flexible\agile but one can dream.
Good gawd that's a nightmare system. Election by mood based polling.
So if a person's poll numbers drop below some threshold, they are automatically recalled? Do you then set a minimum amount of time to keep the polling below that threshold. 0s? 24hrs? 1 week? You've now also limited the number of eligible voters to those with cards that work in ATMs, so people with some form of wealth which is probably in line with how the framers intended
The ATM bit is just because we already have a system of safe terminals all over every country that are used to deal with personal data on the daily. It doesn't have to use a bank card per se. The idea is just to provide options outside of PC/phone login though even grandma has an Android nowadays.
The solution to the mood based polling is the "should the vote not be corrected over Y time". Y can be determined depending on what gov can handle but is it really mood voting if you get voted in, a year later you've not been in the lead position for over Y time (say 3 months) and you get replaced by the new favorite?
> You've now also limited the number of eligible voters to those with cards that work in ATMs, so people with some form of wealth which is probably in line with how the framers intended
Calling them ATM cards was probably just a short cut in describing how the system would work. Not a suggestion to connect with the banking system.
In any case, it might actually be an interesting idea to perhaps give everyone a base vote for free and then let them have some bonus votes in proportion to actual net taxes paid. Gotta give those billionaires an incentive to not dodge their taxes so hard after all.
> So if a person's poll numbers drop below some threshold, they are automatically recalled?
That's a relatively simple flaw to fix, if you'd actually want to fix it. You already made some suggestions, and there are other ways.
In general, I would suggest trying these kinds of innovations out more locally before you go for the federal government.
That could either be in states or counties, or even for running local clubs and cooperatives and companies.
There's some standard ways for shareholders to vote on the board of directors etc. But it's relatively easy for willing companies (especially new startups) to experiment with alternative forms of governance.
That's a nice dream. Let me shatter it: what you suggest might make policy reflect public opinion better, yes. But alas, public opinion is crazy and we can be lucky that policy by and large isn't quite as crazy.
Have a look at Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter" for more background.
But now you have a system where the general public still decides who leads the caravan but a potential leader can straight up lie about what they're gonna do and it'll be a pain to replace them before their term is over.
To fix that you need either unequal votes or to remove the voting rights of those with incorrect opinions and understandings. Maybe education but then you'd have to make reeducation camps for those of incorrect opinions and understandings since educating the entire populace will mostly just move the average bar higher.
I'm not talking about doing referendums on every single issue direct democracy style and I am aware that to correctly implement something like this you'd need to do it gradually so that the populace has time to adjust to their increased political power which will hopefully increase their interest in politics in general.
> To fix that you need either unequal votes or to remove the voting rights of those with incorrect opinions and understandings.
Not necessarily. You could also punish liars several after the fact, ie after their term, and hope that incentives will do the trick.
Though my favourite idea is to make voting with your feet easier. If you have more issues decided at more local levels, then it's easier to up sticks and move to the next town over, if you disagree with a policy.
I call that the "McDonald's flavour of democracy": McDonald's doesn't let you vote on their menu, but if you don't like it, you can always just head over to Pizza Hut.
You can either (A) do that inside an existing system by aggressively pushing responsibility down. That's what subsidiarity is meant to capture. And also how the US was supposedly meant to be structured; but over time centralisation won out.
Or (B) you can ensure that by having smaller independent countries. Ideally city states.
That's one of the reasons why Singapore is my adopted home.
Moving with your feet is about the most direct democracy you can get, but you also don't have to worry about the usual downsides of direct democracy.
Punishing the liars after the fact, to me, sounds like a very slippery slope. What percentage of promises have to be upkept? Do they have to be kept if the situation changes and they're no longer the correct decision? Do they have to be upkept in special circumstances such as Covid/WW3/etc? Though I would love a system where applicants list their main plans and their progress (not as done or not but as references to legsilation changes, etc) gets officially documented after their term. It won't be wildly useful but it doesn't sound like too much work either.
I like local governance but you have the same issue on a different scale. Whether the president or the governor runs the show I'd want them to be replaceable in a timely manner and to have a little fire under their ass.
Moving your feet is something I also do but I'm not sure is sustainable. What you get is people going to more social places in the beginning of their adult life to get as much support as possible and then move to the most capitalistic places possible once they start earning big money to pay less taxes/have more buying power. How many people do that, I don't know. In my circles it's a lot and I'm one of them.
It's one of those perfect is the opposite of good things though since centralised politics isn't really better either..
Though I would just directly fill up parliament with a few hundred MPs picked at random from among volunteers.
Parliament can then make laws and pick leaders for the executive (like in Germany or the UK).
As a slight complication, I would allow people to pre-declare proxies that would sit in parliament for them. Proxy declaration season would be akin to traditional election season.
---
In the UK or Germany, this way you could keep most of the existing political architecture intact. You'd just change how MPs get selected. Compared to your proposal, you also get the benefit of the law of large numbers, and you don't have to have a judge etc.
I would argue against picking a singular leader at random, just because the variation is too high. But in the US, you could re-use much of the existing system: fill up the electoral college at random.
Though probably not: by German law Hitler could already not have been in power, because he wasn't properly a German citizen at the time. (It's all very murky.)
Hitler was already in power illegally. The law we are discussing here would have just made it 'even more illegal'.
(I'm using the weasel wording 'in power' here, because I forgot whether he needed to be a citizen to be a member of the Reichstag at all, or only to become chancellor.)
Hitler was a "foreign puppet"? This is news to me, can you tell us who the puppet master was? Because it seems to me that person should be as widely reviled as the man himself.
Wait so the real issue you have is with foreigners, or what's the point here? If he was born in Germany it would've been ok? Don't dance around your point, just be explicit.
If you go back up the thread, you will notice that I originally (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43407532) brought up the point that restricting who Americans can vote for is a bit silly, and that includes banning them from voting for foreigners. If the voters want a foreigner, they should get a foreigner. (As long as the foreigner is willing.)
I have no issues with foreigners. I think voters should be free to vote for any willing candidate, and people should also be free to move and work wherever they feel like, as long as they find a willing landlord (or house seller) and as long as they find a willing employer. I myself am a foreigner in my adopted home.
Now to your question:
In this subthread we were looking at the question of any actual examples of foreign born leaders causing trouble for their host country.
In the interest of intellectual honest, I have to admit that a US-style banning foreign born leaders might have conceivable stymied Hitler's rise to power in Germany.
Especially because by the time Hitler entered government in the Weimar Republic, the economy had already started to recover, unemployment was going down. So any roadblocks and delays might have conceivably gotten us over the limited time window where inviting the extremist to share power was even seen as a good idea to try.
Now obviously I could argue against this point; or argue that Hitler would have just put a local-born puppet to be his front man in government, etc.
But that's a more nuanced and fragile argument than the one I would have liked to make: that the US-style ban on foreign leaders is silly and never ever hindered any would-be bad guy.
Having a minimum age to get some life experience is fine, and 35 I would consider a good age, however the minimum age in the USA these days seems like 70.
As for being born in the country, I'm sure with the challenge to birthright citizenship that will get changed in short order to both being born in the country and having your parents and ancestors also be citizens.
Maybe it will change to more of a hereditary system where people had records to prove their ancestry was noble.
> Having someone born in the country they are looking to lead seems silly to you?
Yes and it looks especially silly for a country which used to pride itself on being composed primarily of immigrants. In fact the current president is one of the people who was pushing conspiracy theories about a previous president not being eligible - the "birther" movement around Barack Obama. At the time that movement was small enough and the far right was distant enough from the levers of power that people could laugh it off. But it would not surprise me whatsoever if in the future the US right pulled something similar to what Turkey did here, stripping a rival candidate or a portion of the electorate of their status to strengthen their own bid.
And we should celebrate it for the civilisational advance that it is, promoting it all over the world, instead of continuously attacking its legitimacy.
We have long rejected the idea that blood should dictate your social position in the tribe; but somehow we cling to the idea that it should dictate whether you belong to the tribe at all. Why? It's not with this mindset that we will reach the stars.
> And we should celebrate it for the civilisational advance that it is, [...]
Well, as far as I can tell, it's only in your constitution sort-of by accident.
They didn't put this 'advance' in original, it was just the simplest and most face saving way to free the slaves without directly mentioning slaves in the text. (Compare the 3/5 compromise for 'other persons', which also avoids mentioning slaves by that term.)
If it wasn't silly apartheid kid psychos like Elon or Peter Thiel could run for president. But fortunately they can't because of those silly requirements. Unfortunately that's not enough to stop psychos that can actually run, as we have all witnessed.
Although I agree on the silliness of the citizenship-at-birth rule, a maximalist approach to democracy can be very dangerous. The most unstable democracies of the past century were, often, the most democratic ones - Weimar, various French republics, etc.
The democratic paradox is real, and finding ways to minimize its worst outcomes can be legitimate.
I agree that this is a valid concern. However, we should then carefully review which restrictions actually help with stability and which restrictions are a nuisance.
It's instructive to compare the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany with the Weimar Republic. For example, while modern Germany still uses proportional representation, you need 5% of the votes to get any seats at all. (I'm simplifying a bit.) And you can no longer have a pure 'vote of no confidence' in parliament to bring down the government, you need to simultaneously put a new one in power, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_vote_of_no_confid...
As for the US president: I think the requirement for a minimum age and for citizenship are fair enough, because these are fairly easy to verify once and for all. But I think that the requirement for citizenship at birth is, if anything, bad for stability: remember the birthers?
Now imagine that in Obama's 6th year in office, some random birther had actually found some reasonably compelling evidence (but not compelling enough to make even Obama supporters agree). Can you imagine the chaos?
If you believe in democracy and the will of the people, it seems more appropriate for voters to decide whether they want Arnold Schwarzenegger as president, instead of banning him over a technicality.
The US does have some very weird rules for its Presidents though, both written rules - the "natural born citizen" clause for example, or the minimum age (thirty five years old) and the unwritten rules - no women have ever been elected to this role although the rules don't forbid it, most Americans have also indicated they wouldn't elect anybody who admitted to atheism...
> no women have ever been elected to this role although the rules don't forbid it
The same is true of the role of Leader of the UK Labour Party–but I wonder how many people would suggest that the UK Labour Party has an "unwritten rule" that its leader must be male?
So they think the UK's main centre-left party has an "unwritten rule" against female leaders, when its main centre-right party very obviously doesn't (having a female leader right now, its fourth, and having just last month marked the fiftieth anniversary of its first election of a female leader). How do they explain that? I mean, what about the UK Labour Party's ideology leads it to having an "unwritten rule" against female leadership at its highest level, while the ideology of the UK Conservative Party leads them to embrace such leadership repeatedly?
It's a party about working men not actually a "centre-left party". Hence its decision to humiliate and probably in some cases kill people in order to "encourage work". It looks centre-left on a simplistic axis where the Protestant Work Ethic is assumed as some sort of necessary background rather than an increasingly weird religious belief.
The US does have this problem to a greater extent - don't get me wrong - but the UK doesn't really have a party which is open to the idea that maybe the objectionable thing isn't the use of the words Arbeit Macht Frei over those German camps, the problem is that they're not true.
If you look at Change 5 and 6, they seem to do the same image processing based landing control. This doesn't seem to be a cost cutting measure, since the image processing is computationally much more complex than using a radar altimeter.
Is no one in Europe not skeptical of the increase in defense spending? Things have costs, that money is having to come from somewhere.
Is increasing traditional military spending the way to go in the 21st century? If the decision is left to military leaders,they might spend massive amounts of money preparing to fight yesterday's war.
If you set aside alarmist positions, it may very well possible that Russia has no interests in military conflict with rest of Europe beyond Ukraine.
In that case what is the best thing Europeans could do?
There is danger and risk in military over spending at this juncture, and Europe needs to be level headed about it.
We have opened for €800 billions in investments through the EU.
So, no.
Calling anything "alarmist positions" now is just uninformed; Putin has said Russia wants the USSR territory back, their entire industry is now turned to produce weapons, their schools are "Putin-Jugend", they are currently invested in the first "great war" since WW2.
And the US isn't just getting out of Europe - they have gone full turncoat.
This is an unmitigated disaster for both US (citizens) and EU, and the EU is trying to manage what they can.
If they succeed in Ukraine then they are free to re-arm. Meanwhile Trump has made it clear that article 5 is worthless, so the Baltics are there for the taking. As much as I'd like to say they can rely on the rest of NATO, I'm really unsure if the UK or France would be willing to sacrifice London or Paris for Tallinn or Vilnius.
I think the parent poster has a point. It's a good idea to pause for a moment and think about this critically: Why would Putin attack the EU? Just because he can? What's the gain?
> destabilisation operations
This might actually start to become more of a self-inflicted wound. The uprise of right-wing parties is already happening in the EU. Mostly voted for by people with less education and less wealth. If we spend more money on defense and less on social security, right-wing parties might get even more traction, which causes further destabilization.
> sabotage
Yes and it sucks. There's actually not much you can do about it, because of how international waters are treated legally. But you think rearming the EU will prevent sabotage in the future? I have my doubts.
The current narrative seems to be "Ukraine is almost an EU member state and if we do not defend Ukraine, the EU will be next". Another view of the situation could be: "Ukraine is a special case and Putin would be very dumb to invade the EU".
The gain is more resources to plunder. You're thinking of Putin from a western democratic mindset as an accountable leader who has to at least pretend to serve the interests of his country. It was also dumb to invade Ukraine if you think in terms of Russian interests. Leaders do lots of dumb things which are incredibly damaging for their country and often are driven purely by self-interest, especially dictators.
Re-arming is unfortunately the only answer to naked aggression from dictators and the US cannot be trusted any more as an ally. Putin has clearly stated his aims - to reconstitute the USSR (and if possible enlarge it) and to defeat the west.
It sounds like you're not keeping up on things. We know where the money is coming from. It's headline news daily in the financial press. What are you talking about? And yes, of course we need to defend ourselves.
Europe has benefited a lot from not having to pour tons of money into defense spending. Europeans will be hurting if their countries suddenly have to shift finances for this.
I think it’s much easier to just hunker down and appease the United States for four years and hope the next administrations are more merciful.
Maybe... but probably not. Having to divert investments from one part of the economy to another is not that much a big problem: Russia has been doing the same and they have an economy of war that works more or less (some say they are on the brink of collapse and yet, they are still there). So, Europe can totally rely way less on the US, they just have to change their priorities, and they'll adapt just as Russia has adapted. Thinking they cannot is really presumptuous, or even comptemptuous (and a lot of people have made the same mistake with Russia by the way). And yet, at the moment, the US think that way, not believing in soft power any more, but only in pure pressure or even blackmail. If history teaches one thing, it is that you always create your own ennemies (Versailles treaty comes to mind).
That is not what is happening. Listen to Ursula. She’s telling you what is happening. Eu countries are being “allowed” to go into debt without triggering eu debt procedures. It won’t be reinvestment. It will be dilution of currency though debt. Something all too familiar to Americans.
Correct. Interestingly enough, it will massively increase the supply of euro bonds, and probably pull in a bunch of cash that goes to US treasuries now.
If there's enough pan European bonds (which there won't be) then the reserve currency status of the dollar could be threatened.
But still it is only grand speeches we are getting from Europe.
And is any one in Europe not skeptical of any increase in defense spending? Things have costs, that money is having to come from somewhere.
Is increasing traditional military spending the way to go in the 21st century? If the decision is left to military leaders,they might spend massive amounts of money preparing to fight yesterday's war.
If you set aside alarmist positions, it may very well possible that Russia has no interests in military conflict with rest of Europe beyond Ukraine. In that case what is the best thing Europeans could do?
But in general, there is lot of fear mongering and fatalism in European leadership. Secondarily, the concept that history can repeat itself is very dubious, the circumstances and events are far too complex for such a simple interpretation.
They are producing MC-21 without engines waiting for the PD-14 to be ready. We will see in a couple of months if the engine's problems have been solved.
I hope that changes soon. America is marching towards becoming kings of the world or completely isolated until this admin goes out to pasture. I hope nobody wants to go back to kings.
Perhaps one reason is that US thought that the globalized free trade world system will always benefit it more than other nations. However in the last few years China grew big, and figured out how to make that system work in a manner advantageous to them. So US is under-cutting that system, or in other words changing the rules of the game so that China can't make progress easily.
Fundamental question is will US be ever able to come to terms with a world in which US is not the dominant world power?
Practically if you look at the British or Russians, it doesn't seem to make much difference to the lives of ordinary people, the losing of 'world power' status.
> Fundamental question is will US be ever able to come to terms with a world in which US is not the dominant world power?
I think one missing key aspect is: will the US be ever able to come to terms with _an authoritarian_ power being the dominant world power?
There was a lot of optimism around China (much like there is today with Japan) in the 2000's and early 2010's, but their continued lean towards authoritarianism and regional aggression (Taiwan, South China Sea, Philippines, etc) has definitely soured that view.
When you can't beat an authoritarian power while remaining democratic and peacefully supporting other nations in your region, the obvious next step is to discard those constraints.
In history class I was taught in the 60s and 70s the US preferred and encouraged China to develop itself, partly (or mainly I guess depending on your view) as a foil to the Soviet Union, partly because of internal humanistic values and belief that prosperity is good for people.
From a 50+ year historical standpoint it seems even more than philosophy that the two should get along.
Not confident in my understanding though, isn't there more to current politics than recent events and the last 30 years? Wondering if and suspecting there's something with more predictive value than online headlines and pundits.
Demographics clearly -- TFR types of analysis seem compelling, although that's on a longer time frame than current tensions.
Desktop OS's typically don't protect one application's data from another, or the system's data from an application. At least not out of the box without configuring some kind of sandboxing solution.
The user-based permissions model is an outdated dinosaur from a time when we could trust the applications we run on our systems to act on our behalf. Applications now act on the developer's behalf, often against the user. An application "running as me" should not have access to every resource (file or peripheral) on the device that I have access to. That's a huge blast radius.
Operating Systems really need to start treating developers as adversarial from a security/permissions point of view.
Macs have started prompting for confirmation when software requests access to some directories. It’s better than nothing, but the OS doesn’t really have any kind of tutorial explaining how the permissions work and which directories are covered.
HN tells personal stories all the time. I think they just wanted to tell a little joke about how suspicious the word "PlayDate" sounds out of context. I don't think it's so egregious to warrant the 3rd degree.
If anything, the overscrutinizing on an innocent story feels more reddit-esque to me.
I found it cute. I'm sorry some people are so cynical.
I put it as simple as this: what is the maximum harm I have for believing this story vs just chucking and moving on? I see zero risk so trying to join this odd callout fake culture is more disruptive than leaving it be.
