Either way, it's beyond obvious in 2026 that SWAT teams are no longer necessary and are far, far more trouble than they're worth. Abolish them today.

What we need is peaceful, sober deprecation of this institution, and in particular, decommissioning of the nuclear arsenal. And there's no good reason that can't start today.

I've been thinking about this question for a couple of days.

I think that, for the purposes of your analysis - that "the US has been going backward for years", it's important to make two observations:

a) This sentiment is precisely what has fueled Trumpism in the first place. If we just change which things we long for in the good old days, but keep the same timeline pessimism about what we've lost and why, it seems to me that we're likely to cycle around the fear/greed/predation we see, objection to which enjoys consensus (albeit with tribal labels perhaps). I don't have a strong sense of whether the US has been going backward, because I'm not sure it's possible for it to have (or to have had) a particular discrete direction in the first place. I don't long for what we've lost.

b) Let's look at POTUS approval. Of the single simple (perhaps oversimple, I don't know) metrics we might use to assess the narrative that "Americans fundamentally don't give a shit", it's a pretty good one. At some future point, the US government will wash away into history as they all eventually do, and the POTUS approval rating will be (and likely will already have been approximately) zero. The historic lows we're seeing in this area now are, to me, cause for enormous optimism. We have more and more inroads toward consensus regarding the illegitimacy of this institution. We are finding ourselves in agreement that the power vested in this office is invested poorly.

None of this is to deny that I'm nonplussed about the status quo. The murder of over a hundred children with a single tomahawk missile is probably the most horrific of any crime committed by an American in my lifetime, and it's not at all obvious how even to stand in the service of justice in its regard.

But what I do see, and what I do observe that everyone around me seems to see, is that we are accelerating toward novelty, leaving the lifeboats that brought us from the great ships of the industry and agriculture to these shores, and figuring out who we are.

In the past six months or so, I have begun to feel, for the first time since our fiddler Kuba Hejhal - one of the best on earth IMO, and I know some HNers had the privilege to see him on stage and perhaps have their lives changed in some small way for it - left this world by his own hand, that I can write and play optimistically about the evolution I see.

So I can't say that I have a single answer that can satisfy your critique, let alone convert your position to mine, but I thank you for noticing my sentiment, and I hope that we are all open to our minds changing as the records and shows and codebases flow.

1) Sure, good things do emerge from less good things. That's how improvement happens. That's why we have thumbs thumbs today, even though none of our ancestors in the neoproterozoic era did.

2) On longer time scales (say, measuring from about 5,000 years ago to 5,000 years hence), I'm not sure we can say that DARPAnet was the most important evolutionary milestone in the emergence of the internet. It has been long and steady with several exciting jumps, where DARPAnet is just one.

I'm also wary of being steered too much by the physical models (from vacuum tubes to GPU data centers) and not enough by the founding notions and ideas and songs and treatises.

To me, The Two Sisters -=> Salt Creek -=> Terrapin Station -=> A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace -=> archive.org is a more dispositive lineage than the circuity, especially with regard to the potential for peace that exists in this domain.

Isn't this _the entire point_ of the internet? To evolve beyond states and boundaries and warfare as a way of making decisions about resource allocation?

It strikes me as very short-sighted to decline to act as a generation on this matter. Humans today (or lets say, in these next few centuries) _are_ special; we have arrived at an evolutionary milestone with the birth of a new organism that does seem capable of lasting peace.

Feel free to peruse my profile and websites to get a sense of my contributions and career trajectory over the past few decades, in software and in bluegrass music, if you for whatever reason seriously think that's germane to the discussion.

But this program appears to just treat war like it's some perfectly normal thing, rather than the most undesirable aspect of humanity which we're hoping to finally bring to an end so can we enjoy an age of peace amidst the internet.

This page literally presents war as if it's a profit vector rather than a societal ill - something that antiwar activists have been claiming is the actual impetus for most conflicts in the world, only to be called conspiracy theorists in response.

It's just totally nauseating.

So while, in the abstract, preventing people from being killed by drone swarms is a great idea, it's tainted from the get-go if the solution is just to make more money by having bigger killing machines, rather than preventing people from wanting/needing to drone swarm other people from the outset.

> Department of War Directory – This year the students had access to a Department of War Directory – essentially a phonebook of ~5,700 names of “Who buys in the Dept of War?” The directory includes a tutorial on how the DoW buys and the various acquisition and funding processes and programs that exist for startups. It provides details on how to sell to the DoW and where the Program Acquistion Officers (PAEs) fit into that process.

Literally teaching people how to make money selling misery and violence. No mention of how the tech involved can be used to constrain states, stop wars, establish justice, identify war crimes and restore victims, nothing. I thought we were beyond this in 2026.

...don't like the sound of that.

Why oh why are we insisting on dragging these violent legacy states into the AI age? Let alone using them as a trust vector for when to (and not to) remove safeguards?

This seems like a way to get somebody nuked.

I have an 11yo. I know a ton of parents. And I don't know a single person - not one - who thinks this is a good idea. And I've asked.

Obviously this is just an anecdote and not a substitute for data. But... is there data on sentiment? I don't think it's actual parents who are pushing for this.

Contextually, I think it's a very reasonable (and commonly held, in the academic world) take that the EOs have also gotten far more legislative and legal. This is partly (but only partly) owing to administrative deference delegated by congress.

It's also somewhat specific to technological innovations, which some EOs have sought to occupy the field on before the lumbering process of congress can respond. And it's not limited to published EOs either, but many executive actions, especially in the White House OLC. This was very obvious during the W. Bush administration as regards the (Lotus Domino) email system in place at that time (which was the topic of my thesis, so it kinda serves as a temporal landmark in my consideration of this issue, but I do genuinely think it was a new frontier in executive overreach and obfuscation of interests in terms of how the White House has approached its interactions with the internet).

But it seems like, by and large, even the faster models are now aimed at longer-running agentic flows and not sub-1s autocomplete. Or am I wrong about that?

How does that make it better for the current administration to do it?

Plenty of innovations are regulated (ie, its regularity maintained) without the state.

Do we really imagine that intervention by the imperial hegemon is likely to lead to regulation, rather than capture and weaponization?

* police/prison/statist notions of justice * auto industry / auto-first infra * both pro- and anti-israel * pro-IP / copyright industrial complex

There are a bunch more. Maybe it's a shift in actual human sentiment, but without evidence, I don't think it makes sense for that to be the first presumption.

Fortunately, we're gonna get this here web-o-trust thing going in the next 10 years or so and not have to doubt who the humans are anymore. Riiight?

It's palpable in the comment sections of many corporate news outlets, as well as on reddit.

Unless there's evidence that this pattern of comments is from real biological humans, I see no reason to presume that it is.

The commenters' status as people (I presume here you mean biological humans) seems unlikely to me.

To qualify even for the 'far end of reasonable', you'd have to divert the plane. Returning to origin, especially when the origin is not one of the 10 closest airports and is in a much more densely packed urban area (with a much more harrowing approach) than any of those 10 renders this entire incident totally unserious.

There are real actual safety concerns to address in aviation. This doesn't make the top 1,000 list. It's wasted effort in a world where economy of opportunity is significant.