I think way too many engineers underestimate the ability of tech-savvy non-engineers to use AI to build quite sophisticated applications today.

Would these scale to millions of users? Are they totally secure? Surely no. But if we're being honest, most freelancers and agencies haven't been producing highly-scalable, highly-secure work product either.

So much of what you'd previously pay a "real" freelance developer or web "agency" to build is no less "garbage" than what engineers would call the average vibe-coded web app.

Claude in particular is today really surprisingly good at taking examples and a layperson's description of a website and building something that looks good and is functional.

For obvious reasons, I think many developers/engineers don't want to accept this. They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough. But the honest will acknowledge that spaghetti code and crap pre-dated AI.

It's not just about the numbers themselves, it's about what they signal in terms of priorities.

Is it really so strange to question whether a country with $40 trillion in debt that spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its war machine - more than 2x the amount spent by the second-largest military spender in the world - has its priorities straight?

The saddest thing about healthcare in America is that it's working exactly as designed. The high costs are a feature, not a bug. And large numbers of the people who are an emergency room visit away from a financial crisis cheer the products of a military-industrial complex that has produced enough firepower to destroy the planet thousands of times over.

Oman is known as the "Switzerland of the Mideast" and has served as a trusted mediator in the region for a long time. Ostensibly, the Omanis have advised the US about the perils of attacking Iran, which is why no president before the current one was stupid enough to do it.

The US is the second largest foreign investor in Oman, and Oman is one of just 14 countries the US has a Free Trade Agreement with. US citizens can own a business in Oman 100% without a local partner.

This is a bad faith rebuttal that intentionally tries to distort the comparison.

Here's the salient point you're trying to ignore: many other countries have lower healthcare costs and better health outcomes because they've prioritized investing in healthcare systems that work better for their citizens.

Government budgets are not unlimited and when your country spends nearly $1 trillion/year on the military (more than double the second-biggest spender) on top of a debt pile rapidly approaching $40 trillion, it's reasonable to question whether the people running the show have their priorities straight.

As Martin Luther King Jr. recognized a long time ago, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

To which I'd add a point about socioeconomic death. Of course, that doesn't resonate with people who measure the country's economic situation by stock prices.

> It seems at least as likely to do with the incredibly high salaries we pay doctors.

Doctor wages account for about 8% of healthcare spend in the US, so even if doctors worked for free, you wouldn't even come close to parity with other countries in terms of healthcare costs.

Don't you think something is wrong when the cost of an emergency room visit in much of the country exceeds individuals' median liquid savings?

> And the fact that we use like 50% more healthcare services than a typical single-payer society.

This simply isn't true. Per Kaiser Family Foundation: "The U.S.’s higher spending on providers is driven more by higher prices than higher utilization of care. Patients in the U.S. have shorter average hospital stays and fewer physician visits per capita, while many hospital procedures have been shown to have higher prices in the U.S. "

One can acknowledge the necessity of having a military while at the same time questioning the magnitude of defense spending.

It's quite common in modern society that people use things they don't particularly like, for a variety of reasons. One is that the society is being structured so that it's difficult to avoid its most toxic parts.

As it relates to AI, it certainly doesn't help that everyone is being told they need to learn AI or risk being eliminated by it.

The problem isn't that these people are simply inarticulate and incapable of expressing their views in ways that appeal to people. It's that their views are unappealing (if not downright objectionable) to most people.

You stated:

> Iran's leadership changed post-1979...

The pre-1979 leadership was the Shah, who was effectively a Western-backed dictator. You conveniently ignore this fact. Why don't you want to acknowledge it?

Your statement, "Iran's leadership changed post-1979...", also conveniently glosses over the fact that there was a revolution that overthrew this Western-backed dictatorship. The leadership just didn't passively change.

> My argument is simple: 60%+ of Iranians want regime change. 69% want the government to stop funding foreign proxy wars. The regime has a 12% approval rating. Iranians want something else. I cited polling data showing what Iranians want themselves. You can read the links I provided. The policies of the current regime are deeply unpopular.

I would point out that polling reliably in Iran is, for obvious reasons, very difficult but even if we accept for argument's sake the notion that the majority of Iranians want something other than the current regime, which seems entirely logical, that doesn't actually tell us what they want to replace it with.

Your own source (GAMAAN) has stated:

"The demand for a democratic government is widespread among Iranians, though at the same time, a notable portion of society shows an inclination toward individual authoritarianism. No political or civil figure currently enjoys majority support in society. Each political cluster represents only a portion (between 5% to 35%) of the population, and no single opposition force is capable of representing the full diversity present within the country."

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202508212335

The implication of this is that Iranians don't hold a singular view of what a replacement to the Islamic Republic should look like. There is no guarantee that whatever comes next would be significantly "better" and many reasons to believe that if the Islamic Republic falls under certain circumstances, it could lead to a very precarious situation for Iranians, the region and the world.

> I did not advocate for a Western-backed dictatorship. The false choice you're presenting (Islamic republic vs Western puppet state) isn't the one Iranians are making. Iranians are not asking for a Western-backed dictatorship. Iranians are saying "stop spending our money blowing up the Middle East and end this pointless forever war with Israel". Iranians want a different foreign policy.

The problem is that you haven't articulated a specific, realistic vision for what would come next. I might be wrong but the just of your comments seems to suggest that you believe the US and Israeli war against Iran will led to something good when there's scant evidence of that.

Ironically, on the other side of the equation, a majority of Americans have been asking their government for more than two decades to stop spending their money blowing up the Middle East.

The US (and Israel) launched this war against Iran and it's deeply unpopular with the majority of Americans.

If you think it's "utterly insane" for Iran to spend 2-3% of its GDP (tens of billions of dollars a year) on its military spending, surely you must think it's "utterly insane" that the US spends a similar percentage of its much, much larger GDP (amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars a year) on its military every year. Us military spending is more than double China's, and China is the country with the next highest level of military spending in the world. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are homeless, and millions more struggle to afford basic necessities like healthcare and housing.

> You also accused me of not caring about Iranians, while also defending a regime that 88% of Iranians disapprove of. That's a strange way to show you care about Iranians.

It's completely disingenuous to suggest that anything in my comment defended the Iranian regime. I don't know if you care about Iranians or not, but if you do, you surely would be very concerned that the person claiming he wants to liberate them has threatened to destroy "every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran" (a war crime) and end their "whole civilization" (genocide).

You want the Iranian government to build infrastructure, invest in its people and build the economy. That sounds good. But I fail to see how the US and Israel destroying Iran's infrastructure, killing innocent civilians and suffocating the Iranian economy is going to lead to that.

The US and Israel had no legal basis to launch an attack on Iran.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. You can't be for the rule of law only when it's convenient for you and expect the rest of the world to be for the rule of law when it's not convenient for them.

You mean the de facto dictatorship that was installed by an MI6 and CIA-instigated coup in 1953 and widely unpopular because, among other things, it used secret police to brutally suppress political dissent?

It can if you have an adjustable rate mortgage. But that's not all. Lots of people leverage their equity for cash (HELOCs, etc.) to remodel, take a vacation, buy more junk, etc. So your house can easily become a financial boondoggle.

And your mortgage isn't the only cost. There's maintenance and repairs, property-related taxes (which can go up), healthcare, food, gas, automobiles, the price of basic necessities, a meal out, etc.

Tons of people are living in homes that have increased substantially in value, making them "rich", but they're still under financial pressure if not outright struggling because the prices of everything else they want and need in life have increased faster than their wages.

And then what happens when the company you work for reports record profits and...lays you off into a market where tens of thousands of people who do what you do have also been laid off?

The problem with the modern American economy is that the path to "success" for the average worker gets narrower and narrower. You can "win" in one or two areas and still lose in the end. Very easily. Happens to tons of people.

AI might have a financial component (malinvestment that needs to be corrected) but from my own first-hand observations, I can't deny that AI is reducing the value of many jobs that people would like to believe are "high skill" and therefore "high value". I've personally seen dev teams shrink by 50% while productivity remains the same because all of the devs are using AI to knock out tasks. A lot of software engineering isn't as complex and immune to AI as software engineers would like to believe.

American companies are already incentivized by the market to maximize profit by cutting labor wherever possible and I don't think anyone should be under the illusion that managers aren't aware of the fact that many employees are already using AI to do their work.

Times are changing. HNers tend to be among the more fortunate in American society but even today, a STEM degree doesn't guarantee anyone a cushy, high-paying tech job.

> ...but it’s silly to try to turn this into a class warfare thing.

You can ignore the class warfare but the class warfare isn't ignoring you/your country.

He wasn't a "little guy" but apparently his only mistake was not being high enough.

Impressive in what way?

> ...and he's probably still a ways off from his peak earning potential.

That's an assumption, but even if it's probably true, to what end? The issue most working Americans face is that the cost of living rises faster than their wages.

> Then he might have a bit more income for discretional spending.

So...earn more so that you can spend more. This, in a nutshell, is the insanity of America's consumer culture.

> In short - yeah it's a grind, but it sounds like he's making responsible decisions and hopefully they will start to pay dividends in another 5-10 years.

Young people who are fortunate enough to be in a position to make "responsible decisions" should obviously do so (within reason) but this "grind for the future" mindset is also part of the insanity of American culture.

There are places in this world where people in their 20s can enjoy their youth without having to worry that doing so could doom them to financial distress for the rest of their lives.

It also served as a useful way for Trump to throw Vance under the bus. If the negotiations were serious and in good faith, I think you would have seen Rubio there. Instead, you had Rubio sitting ringside at a UFC fight while the talks collapsed.