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I've been working on an essay since last week that lays out my own personal take on things: We're (the US) are done. We're cooked. We have destroyed critical i

I've been working on an essay since last week that lays out my own personal take on things: We're (the US) are done. We're cooked. We have destroyed critical institutions and burned through all remaining international goodwill we had in less than a hundred days. No amount of judicial reversals can undo the harm done. It would take years of concentrated, uninterruptible effort to mend that damage, and that's assuming we start today. This is just one more sign of things to come as the world (finally? belatedly? regrettably?) reorients into a multi-pole system again, and migrate away from American Hegemony. The ball has already started rolling abroad in terms of divesting away from US Clouds, and that'll just keep snowballing as time goes on; after all, once orgs realize how easy it is to leave AWS or Azure for something more local, they'll also reconsider the value of Oracle/Salesforce/IBM/Dell/etc. It's going to be a painful decade ahead of the USA. The real winners will be the governments and companies abroad who seize upon this opportunity to grab US talent and help them immigrate to safer countries, especially LGBTQ+ and minority groups who are already being victimized (similar to how the US benefited from immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany in/before WW2).

bovermyer 2y ago
Are you planning on posting that essay online when it's done?
- stego-tech 2y ago
  Yeah, but my writing style on personal projects comes in fits. I'm 2100 words in and only just got to the section on immediately visible effects of these policies, like the EU scouting domestic cloud capacity; this will be added to said section, obviously, along with other travel or commercial data I can get my hands on. The CTA portion is pretty straightforward though, and worth sharing now: stop trying to revive a rotting corpse (America), and start figuring out what we can build to replace it that addresses its flaws and harms. Now's the time to do the big, hard work like equal rights, universal healthcare, eliminating monopolies, fixing taxation, limiting scope of government structures, reforming the MIC, streamlining immigration, protecting workers, etc, because the America of old is dead. Grab the Constitution, hold a Congress of representatives put forward by like-minded states, and rebuild. It's what the Founding Fathers intended, after all, when their grand experiment finally ran its course. It wasn't the final deliverable, just version 1.0 - so now let's sit down and write version 2.0, a modern Constitution for a modern people.
tossandthrow 2y ago
The US is not there yet. But if there is no reversal within the next couple of years, then it will kick in. And that is hard.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  I live my life constantly preparing for the worst case scenario; it's what serves me well in my career in IT (if the building isn't on fire from a nuclear strike with zombies at the gates, it's a good day!), but it does mean I'm always interpreting smoke on the horizon as a wildfire and calling it in - even though it's often just campers roasting marshmallows. I say this so my words and position have more context for readers like yourself, in that I'm preparing for things that aren't likely to happen, but you're grateful someone prepared for it when they do. So when I say we're done, it's because I genuinely see so much smoke on the horizon that I know there's a wildfire there. Companies and governments don't start openly talking about changing vendors or building out infrastructure for funsies - they do it after they've made the decision internally to NOPE out elsewhere. The amount of harm and damage done already simply cannot be overstated, because we're only seeing the damage they haven't hidden. While everyone focuses on one Signal chat a journalist was invited into, people like me are worrying about how many more have already disappeared forever, and how widespread its use internally is for avoiding records and accountability laws. The snowballs have already started down the hill, and it takes years to stop them. By the time we get into a position to stop these, they'll already have grown into avalanches of knock-on effects and repercussions - nevermind the hundreds of other snowballs having been sent downhill since we started responding to this initial volley. Institutions take decades to build, and minutes to destroy; it's why they're entrusted with so much power, after all. All of this is to say that I really think people need to stop thinking we have time to reverse or stop these harms, and accept the harms have already happened, so what do we do now?
  - jemmyw 2y ago
    I would agree. Republicans and then Americans voted for T a second time, after Jan 6. They knew what he stood for. So this change is baked in. The US is abandoning the world order they set and maintained since WWII. Looking back, I think this started well before Trump anyway, probably with Obama. The promise is that Americans will be better off, and it's not a terribly hard sell: why should you pay to defend the world, why shouldn't you take more when you're the strongest. I doubt it'll work out that way, the problems that have been building up for so long are the result of inequality, corporatism and internal social factors. Maybe your snowballs were rolling long before you noticed.
decimalenough 2y ago
> orgs realize how easy it is to leave AWS or Azure for something more local Have you ever tried to migrate anything non-trivial on one cloud to another? Vendor lock-in is very real. Over in my part of the world, I'm in year three of moving one (1) app off AWS and we'll be lucky if we finish this year. The app isn't even that complicated, but it was built entirely on AWS-only tech (Lambda, DynamoDB, etc) and migrating clients (esp. authentication) to the new backend without downtime or breaking legacy clients is very tricky.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  > Have you ever tried to migrate anything non-trivial on one cloud to another? Vendor lock-in is very real. Yep! It's very real if you use vendor-exclusive tooling, and it's why I was the perpetual wet blanket in meetings where leaders would push for said tooling over, say, Terraform or Kubernetes. Still, it's easier than you think for most LOB applications out there. It's really just the in-house custom stuff or products that will take longer to move, but make no mistake - the smart players have already started said moves elsewhere in some form. Maybe it's tasking the architects with identifying gaps between cloud vendors, or adding new sprint backlog items to remove proprietary dependencies on AWS/Azure/GCP over the coming FY, or tasking Engineering with a POC for a major application component "just to weigh our options". It's in motion.
roncesvalles 2y ago
Ehh. Consider, for example, all the terrible things that China does and yet the world continues to do business with them. TFA's situation (tourism to the US) is probably the area that will be hit the most. Outside of that, business is mostly based on economics not politics.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  I don't get why people think business and politics aren't two sides of the same triangle, or that economics is some holy force that is guaranteed to produce ideal outcomes 100% of the time. Companies do business with China because it was cheap, and now because they must. China could quintuple prices overnight, and nobody (outside the EU, and even then only in part) could do anything about it. Everyone else dismantled domestic supply chains for manufacturing, resource extraction and refinement, and assembly. They lack the educated and diverse workforces needed for modern labor, opting instead for a wide chasm between office workers and everyone else with little to no in between. The only reason China doesn't do this is because it'd be politically disadvantageous, which is the side of the game they're playing right now (hence the military buildup, provocation of the USA and neighboring countries, and an expansionist foreign policy). India and SEA are years away from being comparable in capacity and scale to China, and that assumes no geopolitical instability in the region that disrupts their own progress. Economics is as fungible as business and politics are at the end of the day, because they're all on the same triangle. Entities align to different parts of that triangle, sure, but there is no "sweet spot" that guarantees a given outcome, nor is there some magic force that will "fix" the balance of the triangle. Economics, politics, and businesses aren't equivalent to some "moral arc of the universe" argument - they're just points of a shape that everyone and every action must fall between, with varying outcomes.
anal_reactor 2y ago
> We're (the US) are done. We're cooked. I think I've written this comment a few times already, but it'll never stop being relevant: The curse of growing up in a rich country during prosperity is that every single issue is the most serious problem your country has faced in your entire lifetime. Chill out. It's going to be fine. You're still going to be a high-income country with good standard of life, even if it falls a little. And even if you're right and the US as we know it is done, it's not because of one orange man with an attitude. It's because of bigger forces. The US became so strong because it used right the once-in-a-millenium opportunity where its engineers would run circles around other countries. When US was sending men to the Moon, China was recovering from an unfortunate incident of having forgotten how to grow rice. That's how big the gap was. Circumstances for such a situation to arise appear extremely rarely, and during "normal times" country's wealth is pretty much tied to its population size. With China and India being together seven times as populous as the US, it's just not possible for the US to maintain its hegemony no matter whether you vote Republican, Democrat, or draw a penis on your ballot, unless the US happens to be lucky enough to again stumble upon some revolutionary discovery comparable to the invention of computers, and have it impossible to produce in rival countries. Spoiler alert: seems like AI is the next big thing, and even if the US still has the lead, China is already technologically closer than Soviets were during their peak.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  > The curse of growing up in a rich country during prosperity is that every single issue is the most serious problem your country has faced in your entire lifetime. Oh, no, it's not just me saying this. Friends who grew up in dirt poor countries with totalitarian regimes and fled to the USA, are now openly wondering if they should've gone to the EU instead given the sudden about-face. Peers who lived through democratic collapses into authoritarianism are screaming that "this is how it ends, not how it begins". I'm hardly the only one saying this. > And even if you're right and the US as we know it is done, it's not because of one orange man with an attitude. Never said it was? Like, their actions certainly acted as a strong wakeup call to the rest of the world that we are done, that the era of American Hegemony is over, but it's also a long time coming. My personal argument is that this has been in motion since midway through Carter's administration, and has been its own snowball of policy decisions and dismantling of institutions for short-term gains, seizing acquired capital from profitable enterprise rather than reinvesting it into future growth. > The US became so strong because it used right the once-in-a-millenium opportunity where its engineers would run circles around other countries. Yeah, nah, that's a side-effect of good institutions but not a root cause of prosperity. We used to have the best engineers, manufacturers, refineries, and extraction companies in the world, until we kept the Corporate HQs and outsource everything elsewhere. We sacrificed long-term growth for short-term gains, and that's something that causes harm regardless of population density or growth. Your argument kinda goes all over the place to try overplay how important the US' highly-educated domestic workforce was to its successes, and downplay the harms to the underlying systems caused by a rejection of long-term strategic planning in favor of wealth pumps and short-term thinking. I don't quite know how to respond to that without picking it apart line-by-line, and that time would be better served finishing my dang essay.
rsynnott 2y ago
> We're (the US) are done. We're cooked. We have destroyed critical institutions and burned through all remaining international goodwill we had in less than a hundred days. No amount of judicial reversals can undo the harm done. I mean, as you mention, see Germany. Took them a while, though.

bovermyer 2y ago

Are you planning on posting that essay online when it's done?

stego-tech 2y ago
Yeah, but my writing style on personal projects comes in fits. I'm 2100 words in and only just got to the section on immediately visible effects of these policies, like the EU scouting domestic cloud capacity; this will be added to said section, obviously, along with other travel or commercial data I can get my hands on. The CTA portion is pretty straightforward though, and worth sharing now: stop trying to revive a rotting corpse (America), and start figuring out what we can build to replace it that addresses its flaws and harms. Now's the time to do the big, hard work like equal rights, universal healthcare, eliminating monopolies, fixing taxation, limiting scope of government structures, reforming the MIC, streamlining immigration, protecting workers, etc, because the America of old is dead. Grab the Constitution, hold a Congress of representatives put forward by like-minded states, and rebuild. It's what the Founding Fathers intended, after all, when their grand experiment finally ran its course. It wasn't the final deliverable, just version 1.0 - so now let's sit down and write version 2.0, a modern Constitution for a modern people.

tossandthrow 2y ago

The US is not there yet. But if there is no reversal within the next couple of years, then it will kick in. And that is hard.

stego-tech 2y ago
I live my life constantly preparing for the worst case scenario; it's what serves me well in my career in IT (if the building isn't on fire from a nuclear strike with zombies at the gates, it's a good day!), but it does mean I'm always interpreting smoke on the horizon as a wildfire and calling it in - even though it's often just campers roasting marshmallows. I say this so my words and position have more context for readers like yourself, in that I'm preparing for things that aren't likely to happen, but you're grateful someone prepared for it when they do. So when I say we're done, it's because I genuinely see so much smoke on the horizon that I know there's a wildfire there. Companies and governments don't start openly talking about changing vendors or building out infrastructure for funsies - they do it after they've made the decision internally to NOPE out elsewhere. The amount of harm and damage done already simply cannot be overstated, because we're only seeing the damage they haven't hidden. While everyone focuses on one Signal chat a journalist was invited into, people like me are worrying about how many more have already disappeared forever, and how widespread its use internally is for avoiding records and accountability laws. The snowballs have already started down the hill, and it takes years to stop them. By the time we get into a position to stop these, they'll already have grown into avalanches of knock-on effects and repercussions - nevermind the hundreds of other snowballs having been sent downhill since we started responding to this initial volley. Institutions take decades to build, and minutes to destroy; it's why they're entrusted with so much power, after all. All of this is to say that I really think people need to stop thinking we have time to reverse or stop these harms, and accept the harms have already happened, so what do we do now?
- jemmyw 2y ago
  I would agree. Republicans and then Americans voted for T a second time, after Jan 6. They knew what he stood for. So this change is baked in. The US is abandoning the world order they set and maintained since WWII. Looking back, I think this started well before Trump anyway, probably with Obama. The promise is that Americans will be better off, and it's not a terribly hard sell: why should you pay to defend the world, why shouldn't you take more when you're the strongest. I doubt it'll work out that way, the problems that have been building up for so long are the result of inequality, corporatism and internal social factors. Maybe your snowballs were rolling long before you noticed.

decimalenough 2y ago

> orgs realize how easy it is to leave AWS or Azure for something more local Have you ever tried to migrate anything non-trivial on one cloud to another? Vendor lock-in is very real. Over in my part of the world, I'm in year three of moving one (1) app off AWS and we'll be lucky if we finish this year. The app isn't even that complicated, but it was built entirely on AWS-only tech (Lambda, DynamoDB, etc) and migrating clients (esp. authentication) to the new backend without downtime or breaking legacy clients is very tricky.

stego-tech 2y ago
> Have you ever tried to migrate anything non-trivial on one cloud to another? Vendor lock-in is very real. Yep! It's very real if you use vendor-exclusive tooling, and it's why I was the perpetual wet blanket in meetings where leaders would push for said tooling over, say, Terraform or Kubernetes. Still, it's easier than you think for most LOB applications out there. It's really just the in-house custom stuff or products that will take longer to move, but make no mistake - the smart players have already started said moves elsewhere in some form. Maybe it's tasking the architects with identifying gaps between cloud vendors, or adding new sprint backlog items to remove proprietary dependencies on AWS/Azure/GCP over the coming FY, or tasking Engineering with a POC for a major application component "just to weigh our options". It's in motion.

roncesvalles 2y ago

Ehh. Consider, for example, all the terrible things that China does and yet the world continues to do business with them. TFA's situation (tourism to the US) is probably the area that will be hit the most. Outside of that, business is mostly based on economics not politics.

stego-tech 2y ago
I don't get why people think business and politics aren't two sides of the same triangle, or that economics is some holy force that is guaranteed to produce ideal outcomes 100% of the time. Companies do business with China because it was cheap, and now because they must. China could quintuple prices overnight, and nobody (outside the EU, and even then only in part) could do anything about it. Everyone else dismantled domestic supply chains for manufacturing, resource extraction and refinement, and assembly. They lack the educated and diverse workforces needed for modern labor, opting instead for a wide chasm between office workers and everyone else with little to no in between. The only reason China doesn't do this is because it'd be politically disadvantageous, which is the side of the game they're playing right now (hence the military buildup, provocation of the USA and neighboring countries, and an expansionist foreign policy). India and SEA are years away from being comparable in capacity and scale to China, and that assumes no geopolitical instability in the region that disrupts their own progress. Economics is as fungible as business and politics are at the end of the day, because they're all on the same triangle. Entities align to different parts of that triangle, sure, but there is no "sweet spot" that guarantees a given outcome, nor is there some magic force that will "fix" the balance of the triangle. Economics, politics, and businesses aren't equivalent to some "moral arc of the universe" argument - they're just points of a shape that everyone and every action must fall between, with varying outcomes.

anal_reactor 2y ago

> We're (the US) are done. We're cooked. I think I've written this comment a few times already, but it'll never stop being relevant: The curse of growing up in a rich country during prosperity is that every single issue is the most serious problem your country has faced in your entire lifetime. Chill out. It's going to be fine. You're still going to be a high-income country with good standard of life, even if it falls a little. And even if you're right and the US as we know it is done, it's not because of one orange man with an attitude. It's because of bigger forces. The US became so strong because it used right the once-in-a-millenium opportunity where its engineers would run circles around other countries. When US was sending men to the Moon, China was recovering from an unfortunate incident of having forgotten how to grow rice. That's how big the gap was. Circumstances for such a situation to arise appear extremely rarely, and during "normal times" country's wealth is pretty much tied to its population size. With China and India being together seven times as populous as the US, it's just not possible for the US to maintain its hegemony no matter whether you vote Republican, Democrat, or draw a penis on your ballot, unless the US happens to be lucky enough to again stumble upon some revolutionary discovery comparable to the invention of computers, and have it impossible to produce in rival countries. Spoiler alert: seems like AI is the next big thing, and even if the US still has the lead, China is already technologically closer than Soviets were during their peak.

stego-tech 2y ago
> The curse of growing up in a rich country during prosperity is that every single issue is the most serious problem your country has faced in your entire lifetime. Oh, no, it's not just me saying this. Friends who grew up in dirt poor countries with totalitarian regimes and fled to the USA, are now openly wondering if they should've gone to the EU instead given the sudden about-face. Peers who lived through democratic collapses into authoritarianism are screaming that "this is how it ends, not how it begins". I'm hardly the only one saying this. > And even if you're right and the US as we know it is done, it's not because of one orange man with an attitude. Never said it was? Like, their actions certainly acted as a strong wakeup call to the rest of the world that we are done, that the era of American Hegemony is over, but it's also a long time coming. My personal argument is that this has been in motion since midway through Carter's administration, and has been its own snowball of policy decisions and dismantling of institutions for short-term gains, seizing acquired capital from profitable enterprise rather than reinvesting it into future growth. > The US became so strong because it used right the once-in-a-millenium opportunity where its engineers would run circles around other countries. Yeah, nah, that's a side-effect of good institutions but not a root cause of prosperity. We used to have the best engineers, manufacturers, refineries, and extraction companies in the world, until we kept the Corporate HQs and outsource everything elsewhere. We sacrificed long-term growth for short-term gains, and that's something that causes harm regardless of population density or growth. Your argument kinda goes all over the place to try overplay how important the US' highly-educated domestic workforce was to its successes, and downplay the harms to the underlying systems caused by a rejection of long-term strategic planning in favor of wealth pumps and short-term thinking. I don't quite know how to respond to that without picking it apart line-by-line, and that time would be better served finishing my dang essay.

rsynnott 2y ago

> We're (the US) are done. We're cooked. We have destroyed critical institutions and burned through all remaining international goodwill we had in less than a hundred days. No amount of judicial reversals can undo the harm done. I mean, as you mention, see Germany. Took them a while, though.