If anyone's looking for the ongoing theatre of international diplomacy at a time of heightened tensions, Trump just proposed a 38 year-old novice/campaign operative as the US ambassador to the world's most populous nation.
Given his upbringing and birthplace he seems to have a pretty diverse background. Likely a good candidate for an ambassador role in general. He doesn't seem to have a specific background regarding India, but other than that most criticism seems to be political bias of reporters/editors.
Well if that's the problem, then maybe address that, perhaps by teaching people critical thinking skills?
But teaching people to ask critical questions risks unraveling the fabric of American capitalism ("Hey why is it that the government spends more on healthcare per capita than any other OECD country but with markedly worse outcomes?", "How can we call ourselves the greatest nation on Earth when we are simultaneously the wealthiest nation on the planet and still have such poor health, education and quality of life indicators?"), so we can't have that can we?
> Well if that's the problem, then maybe address that, perhaps by teaching people critical thinking skills?
We should do that, but reforming our education system will take years or decades. And in any event, any solution that requires everyone to learn or do something or act in a particular way is doomed to fail. Humans just don't work like that.
And even with robust critical thinking skills, people are still susceptible to psychological manipulation. That's never going to change.
> But teaching people to ask critical questions risks
How long will it take to do it on a meaningful scale, all while “free-thinkers” (read Chinese and Russian bots) beat the drum of “they’re brainwashing you”?
About five years, for Finland's critical thinking curriculum. (First results, to latest.)
However, that requires an education system that can be easily updated, and widely rolled out, without being shotgunned by anyone who has already lost their critical thinking ability, who may be in a position in government.
Yeah, i'd imagine one cycle of high school oughtta get everyone through at least one class, with the new life experience to have actually used and explored it. Teach it in homeroom where you teach the other mostly bs but sometimes valuable things, make em do 2-3 weeks on it and for gods sake have the curriculum written by experts and NOT BY POLITICIANS. I can't think of anything worse than a "bipartisan effort to design curriculum though congressional committee"
> Apple has always been adamant that the fee is for the service of using the App Store, not the payment processor
So charge developers for the service of using the App Store, perhaps with a per-download cost. To "give away" the service of the App Store only to recuperate your costs (and then some) via payment processing is just daylight robbery.
In the US, highways are almost all free but ”payment” is roughed charged through gasoline taxes. You also pay for sewage service based on how much water you use, not how much sewage you produce, based on the assumption that most of your water goes into the sewer.
Charging customers by some other correlated proxy is not robbery; it’s just practical. Which is exactly why the court had no issues with the arrangement.
The issue isn’t how Apple bills for their services, but rather whether they should be allowed to force every app developer to even consume them, at least to the extent they currently do.
Given that this is the US legal/political system, that question is being fought out in various proxy fights, but by looking at the largely equivalent situation in the EU and the DMA, you can see what’s really at stake here.
My biggest pet peeve and oft-cited example of US puritanism being imposed upon the entire world is the closed captioning system on YouTube that censors out words like s**t, f**k..
I have nothing whatsoever to do with the US, my Google account is based in a jurisdiction where I'm well past the legal age for adults and where hearing such words (and "worse") is quite normal at 14.
And yet I can't get this multinational behemoth to stop nannying me.
Even better, the folks who frequent HN could stop aiding authoritarianism by building the tech, but that would require turning down lucrative RSUs, so I'm not holding my breath.
I totally nuked my career in communications and networking as a result of Internet mass surveillance and the prosecution of Orwellian "thought crimes". It really is a modern day witch hunt. Had to do something else, and am so much happier now that it's gone.
Yes, I was so outraged and shocked from it, what the government was doing, specifically regarding Internet pornography, that I had "moral injury". A condition not dissimilar from PTSD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury
We are living in the 21st Century and we are still behaving, on some level like it's 1692. The year when the Salem witch trials were carried out.
And few people speak up about what's going on. They consider it normal. Because of how the Overton window works. How the frog has boiled so slowly over the decades.
And they'll just infiltrate your open source project, in the name of preventing petty "harassment" of developers. That way they will allow weaknesses in the protocol to arise, due to attrition of the best developers. And there you go, everything has been handed over to intelligence agencies, who can now easily break its security.
> it doesn't matter how great your constitution is if your country is dead.
Why is the longevity of a nation more important than the values it stands for (as laid down in its constitution)? One could argue that it's better to have a great constitution that treats its citizens equally and fairly, even if the nation is short-lived and eventually disintegrates into smaller nations.
The interpersonal equivalent of this would be "It doesn't matter how great your relationship is if your marriage is dead". I'm not sure many would agree with keeping a marriage alive at any cost.
The long-term risk usually isn't disintegrating into smaller nations, it's being conquered by a larger nation. And that's exactly why it matters if your country is dead - you could have the greatest constitution in the world, but if everybody lives under the totalitarian dictatorship next door, it's not doing you much good. Realistic governance needs to be a balance between quality of life for citizens and the continued survival of the state and independence from conquering powers. Arguably many Native American tribes were a lot happier before the white man came, but that doesn't do you much good when you get genocided.
Relatedly, I'm not sure if the GP's Scalia speech actually gets the causality right. I think we could make a good case that the United State's dominance and longevity comes from two oceans, fertile cropland, and advanced technology, and form of governance is a mostly-irrelevant sideshow. You could plop a different government down in North America, and as long as it had adequate incentives for individual innovation, it'd still end up a superpower.
