NATO lost its credibility when they didn't back Turkey after a Russian fighter jet violated Turkish airspace and was subsequently shot down.
Or when they pulled out of Afghanistan and the world saw 20 years of occupation unravel within a couple weeks.
Or when they went ahead and destroyed multiple countries without much thought.
At this point, NATO is just a bully with a big stick, whacking people then scurrying back across the pond. As well as a marketplace to force allies to buy and get locked in to the American arms industry.
NATO did back Turkey, I don't know why its widespread narrative in Turkey but NATO provided both political support and air defence support. You can check the news from that time.
Do you think that Russia didn't do anything to Turkey because they were afraid of Turkey? Turkey is a powerful country with strong and high quality military but no one is going to defeat Russia without a logistical and military support to match theirs. Ukraine is doing amazing but its thanks to the NATO.
The Europeans invented the car and Ford mass produced it.
Yet, we see Ford as extremely innovative and revolutionary. I think we can draw lots of parallels between a 19th and early 20th century industrializing US and current China.
All articles published by the Economist are reviewed by its editorial team.
Also, the Economist publishes all articles anonymously so the individual author isn't known. As far as I know, they do this so we take all articles and opinions as the perspective of the Economist publication itself.
Even if articles are reviewed by their editors (which I assume is true of all serious publications) they are probably reviewing for some level of quality and relevance rather than cross-article consistency. If there are interesting arguments for and against a thing it’s worth hearing both imo.
I’m pretty sure the “what if” in that article was meant in earnest. That article was playing out a scenario, in a nod to the ai maximalists. I don’t think it was making any sort of prediction or actually agreeing with those maximalists.
It was the central article of the issue, the one that dictated the headline and image on the cover for the week, and came with a small coterie of other articles discussing the repercussions of such an AI.
If it was disagreeing with AI maximalists, it was primarily in terms of the timeline, not in terms of the outcomes or inevitability of the scenario.
This doesn't seem right to me. From the article I believe you are referencing ("What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?"):
> If investors thought all this was likely, asset prices would already be shifting accordingly. Yet, despite the sky-high valuations of tech firms, markets are very far from pricing in explosive growth. “Markets are not forecasting it with high probability,” says Basil Halperin of Stanford, one of Mr Chow’s co-authors. A draft paper released on July 15th by Isaiah Andrews and Maryam Farboodi of mit finds that bond yields have on average declined around the release of new ai models by the likes of Openai and DeepSeek, rather than rising.
It absolutely (beyond being clearly titled "what if") presented real counterarguments to its core premise.
There are plenty of other scenarios that they have explored since then, including the totally contrary "What if the AI stock market blows up?" article.
This is pretty typical for them IME. They definitely have a bias, but they do try to explore multiple sides of the same idea in earnest.
I think any improvements to productivity AI brings will also create uncertainty and disruption to employment, and maybe the latter is greater than the former, and investors see that.
re: Why are The Economist’s writers anonymous?, Frqy3 had a good take on this back in 2017:
> From an economic viewpoint, this also means that the brand value of the articles remains with the masthead rather than the individual authors. This commodifies the authors and makes then more fungible.
> Being The Economist, I am sure they are aware of this.
Quite a cynical perspective. The Economist’s writers have been anonymous since the magazine’s founding in 1843. In the 19th century, anonymity was normal in publications like this. Signing one’s name to articles was seen as pretentious.
Most Youtube viewers watch on mobile or smart TVs, so adblockers aren't an issue there.
I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching. I doubt their crackdown on adblock users would affect view counts that much, but I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence and a few Google searches
> I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching.
This is not a safe assumption. Personally, I've stopped using YouTube entirely for entertainment; the level of annoyance dealing with it vs the value I get out of it is just not worth it any more. I'm doing other things with my time now instead of watching YouTube. Some of that is watching video on other platforms, and some of that is spending time on other hobbies instead.
Yeah, UBO and Sponsor Block are still working for me but if they stop I’ll be gone. I haven’t browsed Reddit since I switched to iOS and lost access to RedReader.
This reminds of something that has been bugging me on mobile.
I click a video by accident. It begins to play the ad before the video. I have to watch the add before I can go back to looking for what I wanted to watch. eugh
> Most Youtube viewers watch on mobile or smart TVs, so adblockers aren't an issue there.
I continue to find it amazing just How Big the impact of "advertising" is in the brain of a median HN commenter vs. the attention paid (almost none) to it by citizens at large.
Like, that Liberty Mutual Duck is just weird to most folks, but to us it's somehow the greatest assault on our freedom imaginable?
It's not an assault on freedom. But I think we'll learn over time that pervasive advertising does weird things to our brains. Consider that "advertising" is just a euphemism for "psychological manipulation to get you to want to buy something". I don't want to be psychologically manipulated! For any reason! It feels like a violation.
It’s because making the choice of not being served ads is increasingly a technical challenge/hobby undertaking. Nerds like challenges. Other people are unaware it’s even a choice they have.
You're right, but it's not because it's a challenge that we like, it's not like this is something enjoyable. Nerds do it through gritted teeth, it's annoying to bypass all of that. They just know it's a possibility and care about it enough to pursue it. Most people don't know and don't care.
Most people have lived with ads their whole lives, so the slow increase over decades barely registers. Many HN readers have spent the last 15–20 years avoiding them almost entirely with ad blockers, streaming, and piracy. Coming back to ad-saturated spaces feels jarring - like stepping out of a smoke-free world and into the 1960s, where everyone’s lighting up indoors.
It’s an emu, not a duck. I hate that I’m forced to waste my time to see that and that it occupies space in my brain.
I’m also annoyed because this is a bit of a rug pull by youtube. The videos I watch of some obscure mechanical repair on a motor uploaded 15 years ago aren’t being monetized and they do not cost youtube enough to justify the multiple ads at the start and another in the middle that I have to sit through now to see it.
Youtube is going through major enshitification and is destroying the experience of consuming the largest video library in the world.
It was a riff on the AFLAC duck from a few decades back, a similarly hated campaign that played everywhere and that we all survived just fine.
Maybe the humor was bad. But the point stands: advertising has been with us since the dawn of "media" and no one cares outside our oddball bubble. People sat through ads on their sitcoms in the 70's and they sit through the annoying insurance birds, and... who cares?
It's only here that people somehow believe that contra all evidence, somehow advertising on the internet is a unique affront to all that is holy. When... it's just ads!
Do we have a democracy though? If so many politicians are bought by special interests, does our system of governance allow for any path for self-correction?
> That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
I don't believe any of the stats coming out of China. I think it is best to approach data coming out of adversarial countries with lots of paranoia.
There are only disadvantages for the US to skew stats and data since much of the global economy depends on it. Whereas it’s advantageous for China to skew stats and data for the time being as it rises to be a peer adversary militarily and economically.
As of a few months ago, the US has demonstrably proven that they are willing to lie about stats and data because the president throws a hissy fit at reality, so, no, they absolutely shouldn't.
I don't know if that is necessarily the case. I'm from eastern Turkey and my DNA results showed mostly Iranian and Armenian ethnicity. I'd assume, a place that was constantly trampled would have a little more variety, especially considering the last time the Persian or Armenian empires controlled the city I'm from (Malatya) was thousands of years ago.
It's valuable real estate but not so easy to conquer. Probably because of the mountains. When the Arab's were on a role, they couldn't get too far into Turkey, same with Tamerlane, as well as many other invaders throughout history.
My father, a Turk, has a couple of close Armenian friends from Arapkir, a county of Malatya, from his childhood right after WWII. Going back 30-40 years before that period, Armenians were the majority ethnic population in many counties of eastern Turkish cities. Not sure about Persians, but having an Armenian connection in a big chunk of your DNA if you're from the area shouldn't be that surprising.
Fun fact. Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, has Malatya and Arabkir districts.
> I'm from eastern Turkey and my DNA results showed mostly Iranian and Armenian ethnicity. I'd assume, a place that was constantly trampled would have a little more variety
Historically, being "conquered/trampled" didn't mean genetic displacement or even mixing. Especially if an established and stable population already existed there. It just meant the masses had a new master. The mongols conquered china but china is still chinese. The arabs conquered iran but iran's still iranian. The brits conquered india but india is still indian.
> especially considering the last time the Persian or Armenian empires controlled the city I'm from (Malatya) was thousands of years ago.
But turks don't speak persian or armenian. They speak turkish. They don't use armenian script but used arabic alphabet previously and now the latin alphabet. Turks aren't christian or zoroastrian or buddhist, but are muslim.
A predominantly genetic iranian/armenian population that speaks turkish, is muslim and uses the latin alphabet. That's pretty diverse.
> Yes, I know GDP is a flawed measure, but as long as its flaws are consistent over the years it is useful for scaling.
I don't think they can be considered consistent over the years. 20% of our GDP is healthcare and that's only going to grow as the population ages. I don't know what percent of the GDP is financial services but that'll probably also grow until we get something akin to 2008 again.
Including healthcare and financial services in GDP figures feels out of place and unproductive but I'm not an economist so I don't know what I'm talking about.
Then you have the services sector which makes you reconsider what the point of calculating a country's GDP is to begin with?
> Including healthcare and financial services in GDP figures feels out of place and unproductive
You reminded me of something: a nurse in San Diego sleeping through her entire shift is more productive than half a dozen nurses in many third world countries working hard, because the way economists measure productivity is the $/hour output. People doing nothing in America are much more productive than people doing a lot in most of the world because that is how we define productivity, and how the term is discussed in articles and papers.
Doesn't matter, the same articles and papers will bring up that US enjoys higher productivity due to better technologies, etc, but since all of that makes it very hard to be really measured, it's always a mixture of some heterogeneous ideas together.
> Doesn't matter, the same articles and papers will bring up that US enjoys higher productivity due to better technologies, etc, but since all of that makes it very hard to be really measured, it's always a mixture of some heterogeneous ideas together.
It's actually worse than that, because in lots of EU/western countries health is provided by states which gets booked against GDP at cost. In the US, because it's more private it gets booked higher because of the margins. It's actually responsible for a bunch of the US's "productivity" growth since the financial crisis.
In practice third world countries are very unproductive, and it's immediately visible to the naked eye. Many shops and restaurants have half a dozen people (or more!) taking the order and handling the check, there are entire extended families manning market stalls that barely sell anything, cabbies just hang out all day waiting for a ride, etc. You might be theoretically right, but I think that's not actually how it works out in reality.
I have made a very specific example, you extrapolated some other data from it.
If you want a clearer comparison take Japan and tell me their average driver, nurse, teacher, policeman, factory worker, carpenter, painter, car mechanic, shop assistant, barista, bank clerk, etc does "less" or "less efficiently" than his american counter part.
Because there is a huge difference in measured productivity between them.
There might be, at times, some added productivity in US due to having more capital at disposal to adopt some technology, there might be some other benefits from being more risk prone in US? Sure. But that amounts for smallish differences and sure not for the immense gap measured by economic measures, which, at the end of the day, as explained with the initial sleeping nurse example is still $/hour.
It reminds me of the early days of the russian invasion when everyone was mocking russia for having the same gdp as spain. As it turns out having a small gdp doesn't mean much as long aas you have industries and resources.
France includes illegal drug traffic and illegal prostitution in its gdp too
Most countries include criminal enterprises when determining economic statistics. It's important, because economic crises can begin in shadow industries.
Having small GDP per capita means people are poor. Having poor people is even better to the war. Russia is economically weak, but can continue this war for 5 years or even more, paying immense price for it, sacrificing their feature.
Or when they pulled out of Afghanistan and the world saw 20 years of occupation unravel within a couple weeks.
Or when they went ahead and destroyed multiple countries without much thought.
At this point, NATO is just a bully with a big stick, whacking people then scurrying back across the pond. As well as a marketplace to force allies to buy and get locked in to the American arms industry.
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