The greatest timeline for Europe in its history? Post WW2 to now.
The greatest timeline for Latin America overall? Post WW2 to now.
The greatest timeline for Oceania overall? Post WW2 to now.
The greatest timeline for India? Post WW2 to now.
The greatest timeline for the rest of Asia overall? Post WW2 to now.
Coming up on 80 years. Here's a short list, please tell me which prior ~80 year period in history these nations had it better overall for their people.
Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Poland, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Greece, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria. Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan. Australia, New Zealand, Canada. China, Japan, Indonesia, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand. Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama. Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain.
Just most of the world population in that little list.
Even Russia - the people of Russia have far higher standards of living at the median today than they have at any other point in their history. It's not even remotely close.
'But but but the world isn't perfect.' No kidding.
You have a gigantic confounder of general progress, much of it technological.
Just recently I made a post here in some thread to point out that even wein backwards East Germany made huge gains - my grandfather, born early 20th century, lived much, much better even by the end of the GDR compared to when he was born in the Weimar Republic.
Especially food became a non-issue in the modern world, productivity increases were gigantic. The Haber-Bosch process, very important at the start of that development, was not a US invention, nor contingent on anything US related.
It would be hard to disentangle US influence, but one can assume even if the US had not become so dominant, much of those developments would still have taken place, lifting up much of the entire world.
Right, because counterfactuals aren’t provable. It doesn’t seem to stop people from confidently stating that American hegemony was worse than the alternatives.
We know it worked well, that the entire world seems to be better off now than before ww2.
We know that west Germany did far better than east Germany. We know Japan did far better than the Asian states under the USSR’s influence. We know that things went pretty damned well overall for the whole NATOsphere after ww2.
We know WW3 didn’t happen.
We don’t know how it would have gone if it were another country “in charge” or how it would have gone if nobody was “in charge” to the degree the US was.
So just saying “Pax Americana was a pox on the world” is such an utterly asinine statement I don’t even know how to begin to address it, other than to file it under “trolls gonna troll.”
Correlation is not causation. At the same time, the industrial and technological revolutions happened, which are the main drivers of the "greatest timeline".
The greatest era of prosperity expansion and peace in world history courtesy of pax Americana. The best decades - measurably - for humanity overall have taken place since the US assumed that role post WW2.
Depends on where you were during those decades. If you're in one of the unlucky countries that didn't do what the US wanted you likely suffered enormously.
Part of it is ideas and ideals. America represents ideas of liberty, liberalism, democracy, and individualism. The USSR/Russia and China represent the exact opposite.
America has failed to live up to those ideals (slavery, plunder, toppling democratically elected leaders to install military dictatorships, unnecessary wars with mass civilian casualties) on multiple occasions, but if you at least look at things on paper, America is selling a better product. And with the (now gutted) aid we provided to the world, and the economic boons of American consumer demand helping to speed up industrialization of poorer countries, benefits weren't just lofty principles.
One nice thing about American ideals is that, domestically, Americans who respect them can fight for them and fight for their preservation and expansion. There exists a noble thing to fight for which can in fact be fought for, and that thing encompasses the principle of not ever permitting people in other countries to suffer so that the United States may gain. Good luck doing any of that in Russia or China in 2025, and likely also in 2050.
“ Part of it is ideas and ideals. America represents ideas of liberty, liberalism, democracy, and individualism. The USSR/Russia and China represent the exact opposite.”
This is just pure John Birch society propaganda and at no point has the US actually ever attempted in any real way to realize this
This just seems pretty wrong. Obviously there were also lots of bad things the Americans did, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t attempting to realize those ideals. The US was quite influential in ending colonialism by Britain and France across much of the world after WWII for example. The US also helped to set up west Germany and Japan as liberal democracies after the war (they certainly weren’t before or during it, and Britain and France were not so fond of helping Germany recover), as well as helping German reunification (again opposed by France and Britain) and post-Soviet states with their recovery (sure, in all these cases the thing that was good for realizing these values was also good in the long run for the US (especially its Cold War political goals) and the affected countries but I don’t think that’s a very good argument that the US doesn’t care about these values).
I think there’s a lot of nuance here, and you have not expressed nuanced or detailed opinions in this thread, so I’m a bit curious about what your actual claims are, but I’m also not particularly interested in debating them.
> The US was quite influential in ending colonialism by Britain and France across much of the world after WWII for example.
The colonized people were a lot more influential there, though the US did exert some force in that direction (as well as plenty in the other direction) depending on its perception of the value of the particular colonial arrangement on its own geopolitical interests.
America has often stomped on the ideas it claims to fight for but to say it has never attempted to realize it is very silly and itself just reflexive anti-America propaganda. Look at FDR's words and actions during and after WWII, look at Eisenhower, look at Carter, look at JFK, imagine a future trajectory where Al Gore won that election.
America has sometimes done the exact opposite of helping other countries become healthy democracies - but they also very obviously have sometimes in fact helped other countries become healthy democracies. America's staunch pro-liberty pro-democracy stance is a big part of why the immediate aftermath of WWII led to Europe becoming a mostly democratic, stable quasi-union.
I am saying it's a gray area but that at least on paper America says nice words. You're just saying it's all bad.
Anything the US does that is beneficial is 1. Incidental to th goal 2. Will eventually benefit them US interest if only because it’s used as further propaganda
Which isn't at all accurate. Venture capital specifically exists to fund first, in the pursuit of success later - and the US has been by a dramatic margin the leader in doing that for the past ~60-70 years.
China has this process at the city state level. They can leverage their pegged currency to keep their citizen’s purchasing power lower than it should be to fund anything.
A downside is that their consumption economy is low, all their geo neighbors view them as a threat (reducing exports long term), and this contributes to high unemployment as productivity increases.
VC still requires startups to find themselves and prove something first. China basically has a program to do X and anyone can sign up to be a part of that program. All are funded and the winners emerge. I’m broadly generalizing that process but that’s not how VC approaches it.
So instead of "Come pitch us your varied and unique ideas and convince us how our investment will 1000x the returns" it's more like "we need this capability in this industry. Here is a pool of money for you to start figuring it out. We'll focus on the more successful companies over time until they can stand on their own and compete internationally."
I can't imagine why China is so dominant in so many areas when they explicitly plan and invest in capabilities they want to have instead of just relying on the market to "naturally" provide these capabilities or constantly relying on the same handful of inept and corrupt companies to deliver on national needs.
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
He was as democratically elected as the system at the time allowed and spent basically his entire political career on increasing the power of the majlis and getting rid of colonial interests.
The UK spent a lot of resources conspiring against this project, which ultimately failed, to a large extent because he did not have a solution to the blockade that followed nationalisation of the oil production. Perhaps he also did not expect as many members of the majlis to join the foreign conspiracy as did when the blockade got inconvenient.
It's also not like democratisation followed under the shah, rather the opposite, like the establishment of rather nasty security services and a nuclear program that the later revolutionaries inherited.
Right up until he was about to lose an election, then he suspended counting votes and tried to dissolve the Majlis in alliance with the communist party.
Not sure what you mean. In the -52 election he stopped the vote counting when enough of the majlis was filled that it could legally do work, and then tried to form a government which the shah blocked. This is what led to the proposal that the majlis give him six months of emergency powers.
I don’t have the book I’m looking for handy but the consensus opinion of historians of Iran is that it was an illegitimate move, as explained by Ervand Abrahamian in “ Evolving Iran: An Introduction to Politics and Problems in the Islamic Republic”.
Tellingly his first act after seating a half empty Majlis was to have them grant him emergency powers that allowed him to dictate laws. This is not a democratic system.
The whole reason for the use of "pay their fair share" while never actually defining what the fair share is supposed to be. It's solely about hit & run propaganda. Avoiding discussing actual numbers is a requirement to the politics.
What I'm seeing Ad infinitum on HN in every thread on agentic development: yeah but it really doesn't work perfectly today.
None of these people can apparently see beyond the tip of their nose. It doesn't matter if it takes a year, or three years, or five years, or ten years. Nothing can stop what's about to happen. If it takes ten years, so what, it's all going to get smashed and turned upside down. These agents will get a lot better over just the next three years. Ten years? Ha.
It's the personal interest bias that's tilting the time fog, it's desperation / wilful blindness. Millions of highly paid people with their livelihoods being disrupted rapidly, in full denial about what the world looks like just a few years out, so they shift the time thought markers to months or a year - which reveals just how fast this is all moving.
You aren't wrong, but you’re underestimating the inertia of $10M+/year B2B distributors. There are thousands of these in traditional sectors (pipe manufacturing, HVAC, etc.) that rely on hyper-localized logistics and century-old workflows.
Buyer pressure will eventually force process updates, but it is a slow burn. The bottleneck is rarely the tech or the partner, it's the internal culture. The software moves fast, but the people deeply integrated into physical infrastructure move 10x slower than you'd expect.
Internal culture changes on budget cycles, and right now, most companies are being pushed by investors to adopt AI. Have your sales team ask about AI budgeting vs. SaaS budgeting. I think you'll find that AI budget is available and conventional SaaS/IT budget isn't. Most managers are looking for a way to "adopt ai" so I think we're in a unique time.
> people deeply integrated into physical infrastructure move 10x slower than you'd expect.
My experience is yes, to move everyone. To do a pilot and prove the value? That's doable quickly, and if the pilot succeeds, the rest is fast.
I don't think you can guarantee it will get better. I'm sure it will improve from here but by how much? Have the exponential gains topped out? Maybe it's a slow slog over many years that isn't that disruptive. Has there been any technology that hasn't hit some kind of wall?
The broad concern that some people have is misplaced (China doesn't care about the average American home). The narrow concern is extremely plausible: that China would happily use it to target dissidents for example, or people that have fled China for various reasons. We've seen how aggressive they are over time in targeting those people, including physical kidnappings in the US and elsewhere.
The acquisition of iRobot should be immediately blocked on national security concerns. China would have no problem doing the same if the situations were reversed.
99% of humans are mimics, they contribute essentially zero original thought across 75 years. Mimicry is more often an ideal optimization of nature (of which an LLM is part) rather than a flaw. Most of what you'll ever want an LLM to do is to be a highly effective parrot, not an original thinker. Origination as a process is extraordinarily expensive and wasteful (see: entrepreneurial failure rates).
How often do you need original thought from an LLM versus parrot thought? The extreme majority of all use cases globally will only ever need a parrot.
The greatest timeline for Latin America overall? Post WW2 to now.
The greatest timeline for Oceania overall? Post WW2 to now.
The greatest timeline for India? Post WW2 to now.
The greatest timeline for the rest of Asia overall? Post WW2 to now.
Coming up on 80 years. Here's a short list, please tell me which prior ~80 year period in history these nations had it better overall for their people.
Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Poland, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Greece, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria. Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan. Australia, New Zealand, Canada. China, Japan, Indonesia, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand. Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama. Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain.
Just most of the world population in that little list.
Even Russia - the people of Russia have far higher standards of living at the median today than they have at any other point in their history. It's not even remotely close.
'But but but the world isn't perfect.' No kidding.
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