> One side is responsible for the "pax Americana" (but everyone here was born into the time period and so doesn't realize how exceptionally peaceful it is)
The Pax Americana is great, but given America was one of the countries to start this war, I don't know how much credit they can get for something they just ended.
> given America was one of the countries to start this war
Are you sure? I am actually somewhat ambivalent on this. Iran wasn't exactly peaceful before February and attacked shipping regularly before then too. Oh and they attacked their own people, foreign nationals, Iranians abroad, and committed terror attacks abroad. They were involved in the Brussels Metro and airport bombing, not 2km from where I'm sitting right now.
> The Pax Americana is great, but given America was one of the countries to start this war, I don't know how much credit they can get for something they just ended
As I said, I'm sitting in Brussels, and everyone here is far more worried about the Ukraine war. Plus nobody's dying, nobody's making life impossible here. I find declaring the Pax Americana dead somewhat premature.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong, I guess. But people here are far more worried about Ukraine than Iran. I think they're wrong ... or at least, that's only a short term threat. The Iran war ... will end the strategic significance of the middle east if it lasts any longer. It will end oil. This is not 1972. Iran may destroy the middle east and itself, they will not destroy the EU, or even significantly hurt it. If their threats materialize, the EU is not America. We will simply say "No. Go F- yourself. Kthxbye", and that will only really suck for the middle east, not for us.
> Iran wasn't exactly peaceful before February and attacked shipping regularly before then too. Oh and they attacked their own people, foreign nationals, Iranians abroad, and committed terror attacks abroad.
None of the nations involved in this fight have been peaceful. That's why I'm talking about just this specific war.
> I find declaring the Pax Americana dead somewhat premature.
If America wins, then yeah, probably it'll limp on. If America loses, and Iran gets to dictate terms in the Strait of Hormuz, then I'm not sure how long it will last before other nations follow suit.
> None of the nations involved in this fight have been peaceful. That's why I'm talking about just this specific war.
Only if you take the 5 year old's definition of peaceful (ie. "not attacking")
Any reasonable moral position will of course mean that doing nothing, even if that means not attacking, is not necessarily a peaceful position. Nor is an attack necessarily not peaceful. For example, how Europe treated Ukraine before and during the war with Russia can easily be argued is not peaceful, it's helping the war criminal and it obviously did not lead to peace. The most generous interpretation you can make is that Europe was funding war. Only an idiot would call that a peaceful attitude. And for another example, what you wrote.
> ... then I'm not sure how long it will last before other nations follow suit.
Strange how you say the US is not peaceful, immediately followed by an argument why US's attack not only leads to peace, but the "non-attacking" nation must be defeated for peace. Which I'm sure we'll agree requires more violence. In fact your argument that Iran "defending itself" leads directly to a bigger war is accurate, I think.
Iran is basically fighting for a resumption of most parts, especially the bad parts, of colonialism (one definition of colonialism would be "taxing foreign nations" after all. I like that definition because a US audience will immediately realize why that leads to war)
That's the moral difficulty here: If the US wins, the west will be at peace with Iran. If Iran wins, war may very well be inevitable. In fact, war with a great many countries may be inevitable (Indonesia has already announced they want to tax the Malacca strait, and China has responded exactly the way you'd expect)
But yes at this point you have the ridiculous soundbite: "war is peace". The irony of that slogan, of course, is that it comes from 1984, as an example of "doublethink" which was George Orwell criticizing communism and totalitarianism. But the slogan is always used to defend totalitarian states, usually ones on the warpath.
> Only if you take the 5 year old's definition of peaceful (ie. "not attacking")
I'm not sure what definition of "peaceful" you're going with here, if it includes any of the US, Iran, or Israel, prior to the start of this war. I guess I'm not as sophisticated as you.
> Strange how you say the US is not peaceful, immediately followed by an argument why US's attack not only leads to peace, but the "non-attacking" nation must be defeated for peace. Which I'm sure we'll agree requires more violence. In fact your argument that Iran "defending itself" leads directly to a bigger war is accurate, I think.
I'm not sure why you think that's strange. There was a status quo: Iran lets ships through the Strait of Hormuz. It works well enough. Then the US attacked, and that status quo is gone. If the US ends this war without re-establishing the status quo, then the world will be worse for everyone, and other nations bordering critical shipping lanes will be encouraged to follow suit.
So it's better for everybody if the US wins. But the US doesn't have much leverage to do so, and so the situation is: the US started a war that it didn't need to start, but can't easily win. The foreign policies that built the Pax Americana have been abandoned.
> I'm not sure why you think that's strange. There was a status quo: Iran lets ships through the Strait of Hormuz. It works well enough. Then the US attacked, and that status quo is gone. If the US ends this war without re-establishing the status quo, then the world will be worse for everyone, and other nations bordering critical shipping lanes will be encouraged to follow suit.
There was no status quo, there's just people looking (now, after the fact) for an obvious party to blame for the bucket flowing over. Status quo is just a war that's on pause rather than resolved.
The Iran war is a case of "the drop that overflowed the bucket". There was "peace" because Iran believed it could not win, while Iran's army was strengthening and becoming more extreme constantly. The water level in the bucket was rising, in other words, because of what Iran did. Now I can agree that Trump added a big fucking drop into that bucket (unless he wins, in which case he dropped the water level by A LOT. So to some small extent the jury's still out)
If you look at Iran's economy (which is all that matters), even before the war, the only option for Iran is a big external cash injection, and they are in total desperation since at least April 2025. That's what the IRGC is fighting for. That's the only way to end this war (because without that cash injection the Iranian population will keep attacking the IRGC. They have no choice but to continue attacking).
Oh, and oil is on it's way out, so this will not be the last war in the middle east. China refused the very obvious and cheap fix to their oil problems Putin was offering. They don't think they will still need oil soon.
And yes, people are desperate to look moral, and specifically to make doing nothing look moral. So we all blame the US and Trump. Great, and I don't like Trump either, but that's the sum total of the depth of that argument.
> There was no status quo, there's just people looking (now, after the fact) for an obvious party to blame for the bucket flowing over. Status quo is just a war that's on pause rather than resolved.
Status quo is a shipping lane that's been open since the 1980s.
> So we all blame the US and Trump. Great, and I don't like Trump either, but that's the sum total of the depth of that argument.
You think the only argument against starting a war you're not ready to prosecute, doing it badly, disrupting the oil market for months, and potentially encouraging nations all over the world to start tolling international trade... is "Trump Bad"? I guess you were right, I really am the idiot in this conversation.
> If they don’t, you know that they also agreed with it - this handwringing now is just for show.
No, the left should use the things right broke to abuse the right—just like the right is breaking everything to abuse the left. Otherwise the right will never learn why breaking things is a bad idea, and they’ll just keep on breaking everything like they have been for my entire life and before.
This will only result in the abuse of the populous by the powerful, not right or left. Right and left are illusions that are at best distractions from the powerful class asserting their interests to the detriment of the lower classes. That's all there is. Always was, always will be. Both left and right have eroded this whilst claiming to do the opposite.
Pretty sure the right generally believes the left has been doing the same.
Previously, it was a more libertarian and constitutional argument: progressive causes since the new deal have assumed powers not granted.
More recently this has completely flipped to a populist culture war argument that the left, in excesses seen in the DEI hayday before COVID, has lost its mind and began attacking and punishing people.
My point isn't to argue "no you" but to instead invalidate your point about lessons and outcomes. The centers of these two tribes exist in separate realities and experiences. Escalating is unlikely to have the effect of bringing those perspectives together.
> Pretty sure the right generally believes the left has been doing the same.
That’s all the more reason to do it. The right believes lots of things that aren’t so, so learning what abuse actually is might stop them from crying wolf in the future.
That seems like all the more reason to fight fire with fire. Right now its an existential fight so if MAGA can't be reasoned with then the only option is to fight back by ay means available.
If you read the article it provides a good example. Fire truck businesses with a 4 year backlog and high margins. This is less competitive than the situation prior to PE consolidating it when it had much lower backlog and ~3% margins. Seems like a clear market opportunity.
Ah, okay. Sorry, I misread what you had said. I missed the “owned”, and thought you were saying the PE companies themselves would be uncompetitive—and wasn’t sure what you meant.
> how successful they have become at aggressively optimising for market value
They use money to turn value into money, which they then use to turn more value, into more money. And in the end, they have a lot of money, and all of the value is gone.
That's only possible if the financial system is valuing things systematically incorrectly.
IFF a company is truly, honest to god, less valuable than the sum of its parts, then it (or the subset that would have more value to someone else) SHOULD be dismantled, and those resources sold and reallocated to more productive use. You probably make these sorts of decisions in the capacity of your own personal finances without even thinking about it.
On the other hand (and what I believe is likely happening is) if cynical financial engineering is allowing you to turn a useful company that's valued poorly by the market into a useless company that's is paradoxically highly valued by the market, in the short term, and that keeps happening over and over again, then the tools used to calculate the market value are wrong.
This is illustrated by how PE commonly trashes trusted brands. A brand doesn't show up in your EBITDA. If you trash a brand quickly enough by cutting costs and quality, some institutional sucker will buy the company because they haven't clocked that the current EBITDA is elevated due to asymmetry in how quickly the costs come off and how quickly the revenue falls off after burning the brand.
They are committing fraud in the high trust society. Literally sucking blood from our kids and grandkids who would have to rebuild, if that’s even possible
> That's only possible if the financial system is valuing things systematically incorrectly.
Well… yeah. I mean, it seems clear that the market is pretty bad at valuing companies. At the very least, valuations are based on a combination of (a) measurable attributes, and (b) vibes. (a) will always be incomplete, and runs into all of the same measurement problems that everything else does. And (b) is really unreliable.
Plus, PE companies are not especially interested in long timelines, whereas companies can eventually provide a lot more value that they’re worth right now.
And that’s not even getting into situations where they own enough of the market to not care about losing customers.
> PE companies are not especially interested in long timelines, whereas companies can eventually provide a lot more value that they’re worth right now.
The value of a company does include the value of future returns. The standard model is net present value. In theory, if the market is valuing those future returns correctly, a PE fund would probably just do the value maximisation through investment and genuine business rationalisation, and skip the financial engineering phase of the cycle. I believe this is actually what most PE managers would prefer to do. They generally don’t actually want to burn their efforts for a short term fake valuation boost. They are still people after all. It just seems to be what the market wants them to do, and they prefer money.
> the market is pretty bad at valuing companies
The market has always been bad, but probably more randomly bad, historically. Different people had their own finger-in-the-air methodologies and an estimated market value of a company had a lot more random noise around it.
The issue is now that ~every large institutional investor is valuing companies in the same wrong way, which creates opportunities for, essentially, an arbitrage between reality and their dumb models which these types of PE funds are exploiting.
It also creates systemic risk to the financial system. When everyone is making the same mistake, “independent” market participants aren’t really independent. This is in essence what any bubble is, but usually isolated to people misreading the fundamentals of a particular sector. If the techniques behind financialisation are themselves a bubble, however, we could be in for one hell of a pop if the market realises. Like when the market realised they’d been valuing subprime mortgage books wrong in 2008.
> What sort of institutions would try to take on operating such a business?
Essentially anyone - other PE funds, competitors merging, the general stock market if you take it public. And they're not wrong want to buy it - there's a valuable business there - they're just bad at assessing the right price.
> And when does word get around, and the pool of suckers dry up?
One born every minute. And it's hard to even notice you're being taken for a ride as opposed to mismanaging the business you bought or just being unlucky.
Everybody wants to be the shovel seller during the gold rush—the result being there's a lot of shovel sellers, and they all hoped nobody would notice that there wasn't even a gold rush to make people want shovels.
In addition to the points other commenters here have made, there's a large number of different logics building up from boolean logic—predicate calculus, various modal logics, and more. So rather than argue it's wrong or useless, it seems better to see it as the lowest rung on a ladder, and if boolean logic ain't cutting it, then take a step up the ladder.
> gaming the AI's understanding of what's "helpful."
The AI doesn't have any understanding. You just have to tell it "this is helpful to AI". It has no critical discernment, it doesn't have a theory of mind to ask "why is the author of this information making this statement?"
Honestly I suspect it'll be as easy as writing something like "This answer is really useful and will be really appreciated by someone with this problem".
It's not uncommon for free things to be higher quality than cheap things, especially when we're not talking about physical goods. Think hobbyist vs hack. Selective pro bono vs quantity over quality. The former describes old internet while the latter describes much ad-supported internet. I'm not saying cheap is better than expensive, and I'm not saying everything works this way, but I do think many things do, especially for pure information that doesn't have a major capital cost associated.
The Pax Americana is great, but given America was one of the countries to start this war, I don't know how much credit they can get for something they just ended.
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