Lots of Americans don't get it yet but what we're living through is the end of what was sometimes called the "post-war international order" that began in 1945. America's allies in western Europe have been deliberately alienated and our electorate has shown itself to be too volatile, unpredictable, and frankly dumb to elect a trustworthy government.
Intelligence-sharing from countries once, and still sort of nominally, our allies has been curtailed because no one can trust that information shared with us won't make its way to other countries that do not wish them well. That trust will take decades to rebuild if in fact it can be, and by that time, the world will be a very different place.
The current administration is in the grip of religious fanatics with delusional, apocalyptic views of the world, as is much of the political party they come from. Nobody sensible trusts people like that, nor should they. It will take a generation to remove these people from political power, and it's far from clear that a majority of the electorate even wants to.
Meanwhile, the US is gutting the science and education infrastructure that was rightly the envy of the world and making itself hostile to immigrants from nearly the entire world, when being a draw to the best and brightest served it so well for so long. Again, damage being done in a matter of years will take decades to recover from.
It's not time to pack it in but it is time to recognize that America does not now and will in all likelihood never again hold the place in the world it did from 1945 to 2017. The America that most adults alive now grew up in is gone and the one their children and grandchildren will inhabit will likely be much diminished.
Didn't have to happen but that's where we are and we brought it on ourselves.
The U.S. is currently in a similar position to the U.K. in the Suez in 1956 and is sprinting into the position the U.S.S.R. was in Afghanistan in 1979. Americans watching network TV news or reading the New York Times, however, would be hard pressed to distinguish it from Iraq in 2003.
I fully agree, it's super obvious and even wanted by a huge share of the US population by voting for "America first".
I hope that the EU manages to fill the power vacuum. They are already forming new economic bonds super fast and starting new defense initiatives. It will need a real EU military though. Also a new mode to operate is needed, the pure consensus based mode doesn't work that well.
This is a pretty interesting idea and seems to be well-executed. Type looks good. I can't possibly justify the cost for my personal use but sort of wish I could. This must have been an enormous amount of work. Congratulations on what looks like a job very well done.
"Use of the document structuring conventions... allows PostScript language programs to communicate their document structure and printing requirements to document managers in a way that does not affect the PostScript language page description"
The idea being that those document managers did not themselves have to be PostScript interpreters in order to do useful things with PostScript documents given to them. Much simpler.
For example, a page imposition program, which extracts pages from a document and places them effectively on a much larger sheet, arranged in the way they need to be for printing 8- or 16- or 32-up on a commercial printing press, can operate strictly on the basis of the DSC comments.
To it, each page of PostScript is essentially an opaque blob that it does not need to interpret or understand in the least. It is just a chunk of text between %%BeginPage and %%EndPage comments.
This is tremendously useful. A smaller scale of two-up printing is explicitly mentioned as an example on p. 9 of the spec.
If NHL players don't already have gold-standard health and dental insurance, then the NHLPA needs much, much better lawyers. Doubt that's an issue though, or that this guy needs any help getting his teeth fixed. This is just a meaningless marketing stunt and should not have been reported as "news."
> Amazon has shipped what I genuinely believe to be the single most complicated unified user experience in human history
OK, I shop at Amazon, am a Prime member, all that stuff, but their web site is horrible. Just pathetic.
I appreciate that they are huge and sell a pretty much incomprehensible number of things, and that what it takes behind the scenes to make it all happen is hugely complex and very impressive on its own terms, but still: the web site is horrible.
> "FreeBSD ships as a complete, coherent OS" is belied by this kind of nonsense. No, it's not. Or, sure, it is, but in exactly the same way that Debian or whatever is.
Ehhh... not exactly. With nothing but the smallest FreeBSD installer image, you can, if you include just one optional package, have a system that is capable of entirely recompiling itself.
You might say "who cares?" and that's fine. But it is "complete" in a sense that no linux system I know of is. I admit that I don't know what it would take to install from, say, almalinux-10.0-x86_64-minimal.iso, and end up with a system capable of recompiling itself, but I expect it would be a whole lot more work than that. Could be wrong.
> I think that enough time has passed that we can critique poor old Kant
No, no, no! Here on Hacker News, it is apparently forbidden to criticize the dead because "they can't defend themselves." It's seen as somewhere between "cowardly" and "uncouth."
This policy seems to mainly apply, for some weird reason I suspect I would prefer not to know about, to the recently-departed Dilbert guy. But I'm sure his fans would stick up for Kant also!
Intelligence-sharing from countries once, and still sort of nominally, our allies has been curtailed because no one can trust that information shared with us won't make its way to other countries that do not wish them well. That trust will take decades to rebuild if in fact it can be, and by that time, the world will be a very different place.
The current administration is in the grip of religious fanatics with delusional, apocalyptic views of the world, as is much of the political party they come from. Nobody sensible trusts people like that, nor should they. It will take a generation to remove these people from political power, and it's far from clear that a majority of the electorate even wants to.
Meanwhile, the US is gutting the science and education infrastructure that was rightly the envy of the world and making itself hostile to immigrants from nearly the entire world, when being a draw to the best and brightest served it so well for so long. Again, damage being done in a matter of years will take decades to recover from.
It's not time to pack it in but it is time to recognize that America does not now and will in all likelihood never again hold the place in the world it did from 1945 to 2017. The America that most adults alive now grew up in is gone and the one their children and grandchildren will inhabit will likely be much diminished.
Didn't have to happen but that's where we are and we brought it on ourselves.
reply