Thanks, tech industry! A generational disruption in all forms of science and the destruction of the crown jewels of America’s last century, but at least now you get to be ruled by a violent senile pedophile and his deranged crackhead enablers.
You could swap "tech" for "big media" and just play the same blame game for Reagan's and Bush Jr's elections.
> the crown jewels of America’s last century
Including Nasa in this pure idealization of the past. Nasa had many flaws that enabled a catastrophic Shuttle program and then the slow loss of US go-to-LEO capability.
There's probably more to expect of US investment in space without incompetent or contradictory military and political oversight than the current nasa zombie programs.
And it's unclear that Nasa can ever be without that oversight.
Do you remember when a President of the United States was impeached for an affair with an adult intern?
Do you remember when a Republican presidential nominee defended his opponent from a racist question at a Republican Rally, calling him a "decent family man?"
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Then, can you think of a time when a POTUS committed a pump a security he was selling, only to dump it immediately after his inauguration, and it it was barely talked about at at all?
I wasn't alive but I read about how people made fun of Carter for being a peanut farmer.
So much for Americans believing in hard work and salt of the earth! Now they have a NYC property developer.
To understand America do not listen to what they say but watch what they do...
You may not realize this because the vast majority of people don’t realize it, but there are far deeper things going on with both those situations, i.e., how Reagan became what he did and why Carter was so attacked and for so long. It takes immense understanding of history and geopolitical matters beyond what the system’s education system can impart, which makes it challenging to understand things properly.
Think of it like trying to understand the true origins and nature of the Soviet Union while being in the Soviet Union. Only a few people will even be able to achieve such an understanding and only under immense pressures and significant dangers even without speaking out, just alone for having sought out the truth. You cannot understand the Matrix while being plugged into it.
You can keep your abusive language to yourself. It does not work on me. Either you have intention behind your lies or you are simply naive. Either way you are projecting, you can move along. You are dismissed.
You know there are people on HN who come from or live outside the US, right? Instead of ruminating on how incredibly hard it is for mere mortals to understand the historical forces in play, you could just make your attempt at articulating what you think the key drivers were. Granted, a HN comment only allows for so much depth and references to books or academic papers involve work to generate and read, but as it is you've advanced no thesis whatsoever.
>> Do you remember when a President of the United States was impeached for an affair with an adult intern?
You know, you could at least try to get your facts straight. Clinton was not impeached for his consensual affair with Lewinsky. He was impeached for lying about it under oath.
edit: providing corrections now gets posts flagged huh?
Kind of funny that you specifically pointed out the "lying under oath" part. Becaause you know, the initial argument's current POTUS lied under oath, several times, about way more dangerous things.
And he fired the people that did their job at the FBI to investigate him. Out of pure retaliation.
The shuttle program wasnt what NASA wanted to do, it was the military that pushed for that.
It's ironic that you'd blame them for the thing they didnt want to do.
If theyd kept their budget and autonomy after the moon landing it looked like they wouldve been building reusable rockets like the ones elon is building now, except in like, 1980.
It's ironic that you didn't read a comment before answering.
> it's unclear that Nasa can ever be without that (military and political) oversight
By design, Nasa is probably doomed to get interference.
> If theyd kept their budget and autonomy after the moon landing it looked like they wouldve been building reusable rockets
Pure fantasy. Nasa's interest for reusable vehicles led them to the Shuttle. Even without all the design changes, it would have been a dud.
Due to its nature, Nasa can't freely explore and commit to a design like SpaceX does/did. It draws a concept and freezes it after contractor review, only to find after an already massive investment if it works. Then there's public accountability instead of executive risk taking.
I'd bet the proper way to have protected Nasa would have been to keep it focused on key scientific missions with limited financial exposure. Mars rovers are a perfect case, or most James Webb.
Using Nasa to go back to the Moon or reach Mars was doomed to fail (sort of like it failed post Apollo).
>Nasa's interest for reusable vehicles led them to the Shuttle
The shuttle was a result of budget cuts they had no control over, military pressure they had no control over AND an interest in reusable spacecraft. The latter wasnt the problem.
The way I see it you are either blaming the organization for something it had no control over or are making an incoherent point in order to disparage the organization. Perhaps you could illuminate a 3rd interpretation of your comment.
Probably the creation of techno-fascist state, or at least the desire to have one as outlined by Thiel and co. The excessive deference that all tech companies have had towards elected leaders instead of striving for independence under the law, and now they strive to co-opt government to achieve their goals.
The relentless disintermediation of, well, everything in society is powered by big tech. No middle class can exist anymore in the neoliberal turbocapitalist system that's trying to grow into place everywhere; there is just the little human puttering about, and a bunch of extremely rich oligarchs and tech bros taking their money.
Technology made all of this possible. From amazon (destruction of local shops) to uber (not saying the old system was good, but who needs transit concentrated into the hands of a few) to google (monopolizing and stifling search and adtech). And who knows what role large scale manipulation by stochastic propaganda parrots will play.
It feels like malpractice to leave Andreessen off the list, if only because he's such a good example of how losery and pathetic the tech moguls really are.
Imagine becoming wealthy and powerful in an age of abundance off of NCSA Mosaic and throwing it all away because you feel threatened by black people and think that government funded research is now bad. That's the level of "advanced thought" in these guys' group chats.
So Thiel and Musk have nothing to do with Trump getting elected.
Or Social networks as an easy way of spreading misinformation.
New to the club AI that delivers convincing sound, photo and video „proofs“ for any fake news they want including elaborated texts fitting to their target audience
Even if you limit yourself to billionaires, I don't see how you can possibly blame Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang, and Tim Cook for the current administration's decisions to cut funding to science and basic research (among other bad decisions). The worst thing you can say about them is that some of them, after the election, essentially paid bribes to the protection racket that is the current administration. It would be more noble if they refused, but it's also sort of blaming the victim and either way had no impact on these decisions
If the richest and most powerful people in the world who stand to gain the most from a self-coup are the victims... you and I have a very different definition of "victim".
As some promiment commentator wrote (and I'll rephrase terribly), imagine if there was no Russian election meddling, then we wouldn't have those racists and "deplorables"!
> How does the US influence elections in Russia/China?
Are you claiming the CIA doesn't exist? Are you claiming there was never any stay behind organisation? Are you claiming the entire continent of south america doesn't see USA intervention every time they vote wrong?
I also don't like dictatorships, and USA propped dictators aren't any better than russian ones.
You're being disingenuous. There will be some bad actors in any large organization. That doesn't make stay-behind organizations in general a bad idea. Sometimes younger people today fail to realize that Communism once represented an existential threat to human civilization.
If your ideology is "it's ok to kill any amount of people to avoid someone I don't like to be democratically elected somewhere in the world" I don't think we will ever agree.
1. They don't just kill people you don't like, they kill randos with bombs
2. People you don't like don't deserve mass murder anyway
3. Killing communists is what nazis do. In fact they're so good at killing they killed much more people than any communist ever did. If your morals align with the nazi party, you're probably a nazi and you should REALLY REALLY REALLY do some serious thinking.
There you go again, lying and trying to put words in my mouth. Opposing communism does not equate to supporting Nazism (or any other "ism"). Nazis and communists are roughly equivalent from a moral perspective in that they both represent existential threats to humanity, and both groups should be eliminated.
Just a wild guess: The connection is uncontrolled growth, where companies evolve from a normal business to a perpetual "increasing shareholder value" grift (think the Apples, Googles, Microsofts, Metas, (Space)Xs out there...). It happened when tech incorporated "the user" as a product (as opposed to tech working to actually solve problems and elevate the status quo).
Are the use of the word fuck and the aggressiveness separate aspects?
And no, I do not know exactly why. In what universe is SpaceX a company that mostly just cares about "increasing shareholder value" and not literally pushing the boundaries of the human endeavor?
“… at least now you get to be ruled by a violent senile pedophile and his deranged crackhead enablers.”
Which one? *blank stare*
America has a deeply rooted problem with a parasitic and evil, lying, conniving, devious ruling class and their treasonous, accomplice enablers… to clarify what may be dismissed by some because you call them “crackheads”.
I am quite convinced that this is at least one of the "benefits" of things like the sexual liberation movement and even the push to breach national norms against pornography; you don't even have to be embarrassed or step down, let alone be prosecuted for perversion, degeneracy, sexual abuse, etc. if you are a ruling class perverse person that is bored with normal things and therefore seek ever increasingly perverse, degenerate, transgressive, and abusive things. You are also easily controlled and manipulated once you have crossed the line and are compromised by indulging in perversions.
What do you do when/if you have everything else, you have done everything else, and normal things everyone else does bore you and you essentially have unlimited money/resources; you do things that most people cannot even imagine anyone would think of doing, let alone do them. It is why certain elements of our society have worked so hard to corrupt society in all kinds of ways, including through desensitization through all kinds of media and even things like essentially taking capital punishment off the table, even for the ver people who it is most effective for, deliberate, intentional "white collar" criminals like the very kinds that do perverse things. You can't pardon perverts and con artists and traitors if they are dead.
Start perusing https://news.ycombinator.com/active as your hn frontpage and make note of a very obvious flagging bias there. Vouch and upvote the information that is getting hidden while not breaking the guidelines. Hulk Hogan's death being front page news while MechaHitler getting flagged tells you everything you need to know about this site.
How come is it the tech industry to blame? Trump’s election result is because of the decades of de-industrialization and undereducated people left out of the growth during this time. I don’t see why tech industry would be the first to blame.
FWIW, this is the brainworm faction that fought the techbro faction and got them kicked out of the throne room. Think Russell Vought and the OMB, not Elon. Elon registered his disapproval of the huge science cuts in the President’s budget request. The nominated techbro NASA administrator was cancelled because he wasn’t anti-science enough.
> ruled by a violent senile pedophile and his deranged crackhead enablers
Which one?
If you want to blame anyone, try the financial sector and financialization of everything. They fed the conflagration and created perfect condition for Trump-like figure to rise.
I work for one of the largest financial companies. It's not us or the sector. There's a whole shadow sector behind the scenes doing this stuff run by billionaire funded think tanks who manipulated tech markets and leverage political and social manipulation through their connections. It's the world we live in but we didn't create it.
Shit education leads to pliable humans leads to social manipulation leads to desired outcomes from marketing efforts.
The workers did, the people with money welcomed him with open arms hoping for less regulation and big contracts. Look in the row behind trump during his inauguration if you need proof.
Somehow, they did not welcomed previous democratic president. And somehow, I doubt they would welcome Harris the same way. Like common, they were eager and happy to kiss the ring and support him.
> Somehow, they did not welcomed previous democratic president
They did, but such information is not brought up due to political bias here. For example, how many people here know that Uber donated $1 million(the max amount possible) to Biden's inauguration? Google, Amazon and Microsoft donated too.
Check the people on the inauguration itself. The actual public celebrating from leaders went toward Trump. Plus multiple prominent tech leaders are behind the project 2025 itself and really pushing Trump politics. Oh, and Musk was right there on the stage and even in government.
Google and Microsoft and Uber were paying both parties, that part is right.
Most tech billionaires didn't endorse anyone because the election was close and they wanted to avoid scrutiny by either party. A few high profile tech billionaires endorsed Donald Trump
