> Having seized the vessel, the navy said it could not be towed back to shore due to poor weather and its fragile construction, and it later sank in the open sea.
We don't know if the Trump admin is killing American citizens in these. They don't know who they are killing either. Maybe the first step to pointing a weapon is knowing who you are pointing it at.
Not even the "war" on drugs or "war" on terror? Semantic games aside, the precedent for the president engaging in military action without congress declaring war was broken decades before Trump.
I love me a good Tu Quoque defense. Keep em coming! I can't remember if we supported him cuz he wasn't the war candidate or we supported him cuz he was or if it even matters and we just make up bullshit excuses for what suits us at the time with whatever is convenient for the given argument...
Everyone talks about stopping drugs entering the border but no one talks about dismantling the extremely efficient logistic network that makes those drugs available in every corner of each major city.
I guess it’s easier to blow up random boats in the pacific than prosecuting corrupt officials but is it effective?
I would say it's as American as it gets, and in this case justified as well. Do you not know America's history..? Even recent one? Obama ordered drone strikes in foreign countries as well.
It's probably very expensive patrolling waters 1000 nautical miles from your shores.
What incentive does Portuguese authorities have to do this, especially considering the cocaine would've likely just been shipped off to buyers in other parts of the EU and not affect Portugal as much
That's like saying "thousands of miles from California" when something is a few miles from Hawaii.
The article kind of buries it but it was intercepted near the Azores, which are Portuguese territory and policed accordingly. They weren't patrolling in the middle of nowhere.
Also they probably got spotted by drone or something before the surface vessels got sent in to check it out.
> Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?
I never understood these sorts of statements. I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.
Adjusted for inflation, wouldn't Alexander the Great's plundering of Persia, which at the time comprised 40% of the world's population, be the greatest theft in human history, using your logic?
> I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.
It was always theft. Having been done in the past does not make them less theft. The reason East India Company is shown as example for such things is that it is the first human organization that did those on an industrial scale and genocidally.
It was already starving Indians by forcing them to plant opium instead of food crops to sell to the Chinese to kill them for money (20 million/year estimated dead from opium) in the late 18th century. And when the Chinese finally tried to stop it, Opium wars happened. The justification shown for that war was 'Free trade'. The justifications still havent changed, neither the practices. This should tell you why East India Company is specifically evil, because it is the first large scale application of the evil you see today and it invented a lot of its methods.
What are the economics of stealing historical jewelry?
Their size is probably big enough that any collector could distinguish them from any random jewels.
Who is there to sell to? The best bet is to store it away then let your great grandkids sell it to some Asian billionaire in the future when Europe and Europol no longer have any power and influence.
Sadly the article alludes to the probable destiny of these pieces: being broken down for melt value. The big stones will get recut to hide where they came from. If the thieves are “smart” it’s likely these will never be seen again in their current form. It just so happens that the Crown Jewels pack a lot of gold and precious stones into a convenient and easy-to-steal package. That the historical and cultural value of these far outweighs the material value is of zero concern to thieves looking to make a quick buck.
If the thieves were only after the melt value then there are easier things to steal. It seems more likely that these particular items were "stolen to order" for a specific private collector.
That's dumb, but it's the best case scenario that everyone should hope for. If they really are only after street resale of the bare metals and stones, those artifacts are already gone as I write this.
Depending on what exactly is this you can find someone to refinish the stones and melt and precious metals. Possibly the stones are not recognizable anyways when taken off. Other than that I assume there is an underground market for these sorts of goods. These thieves seem sophisticated enough to have access to someone who will take this.
> Recovery may prove difficult. “It’s unlikely these jewels will ever be seen again,” said Tobias Kormind, managing director of 77 Diamonds. “Professional crews often break down and re-cut large, recognizable stones to evade detection, effectively erasing their provenance.”
If your net worth is counted in billions and have hundreds of real estate to hide a collection in.... that might be a caprice within your reach. Looking at WWII, already children will be free to sell the jewelry on auction.
Pretty sure there is an underground market for billionaires. I don't doubt they have their private collections that only others in the fold get to view. Bragging rights for the rich and famous?
But also, once a thing is stolen, the market for forgeries of said object explodes. I also may have seen too many mysteries on television though.
NATO lost its credibility when they didn't back Turkey after a Russian fighter jet violated Turkish airspace and was subsequently shot down.
Or when they pulled out of Afghanistan and the world saw 20 years of occupation unravel within a couple weeks.
Or when they went ahead and destroyed multiple countries without much thought.
At this point, NATO is just a bully with a big stick, whacking people then scurrying back across the pond. As well as a marketplace to force allies to buy and get locked in to the American arms industry.
NATO did back Turkey, I don't know why its widespread narrative in Turkey but NATO provided both political support and air defence support. You can check the news from that time.
Do you think that Russia didn't do anything to Turkey because they were afraid of Turkey? Turkey is a powerful country with strong and high quality military but no one is going to defeat Russia without a logistical and military support to match theirs. Ukraine is doing amazing but its thanks to the NATO.
The Europeans invented the car and Ford mass produced it.
Yet, we see Ford as extremely innovative and revolutionary. I think we can draw lots of parallels between a 19th and early 20th century industrializing US and current China.
All articles published by the Economist are reviewed by its editorial team.
Also, the Economist publishes all articles anonymously so the individual author isn't known. As far as I know, they do this so we take all articles and opinions as the perspective of the Economist publication itself.
Even if articles are reviewed by their editors (which I assume is true of all serious publications) they are probably reviewing for some level of quality and relevance rather than cross-article consistency. If there are interesting arguments for and against a thing it’s worth hearing both imo.
I’m pretty sure the “what if” in that article was meant in earnest. That article was playing out a scenario, in a nod to the ai maximalists. I don’t think it was making any sort of prediction or actually agreeing with those maximalists.
It was the central article of the issue, the one that dictated the headline and image on the cover for the week, and came with a small coterie of other articles discussing the repercussions of such an AI.
If it was disagreeing with AI maximalists, it was primarily in terms of the timeline, not in terms of the outcomes or inevitability of the scenario.
This doesn't seem right to me. From the article I believe you are referencing ("What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?"):
> If investors thought all this was likely, asset prices would already be shifting accordingly. Yet, despite the sky-high valuations of tech firms, markets are very far from pricing in explosive growth. “Markets are not forecasting it with high probability,” says Basil Halperin of Stanford, one of Mr Chow’s co-authors. A draft paper released on July 15th by Isaiah Andrews and Maryam Farboodi of mit finds that bond yields have on average declined around the release of new ai models by the likes of Openai and DeepSeek, rather than rising.
It absolutely (beyond being clearly titled "what if") presented real counterarguments to its core premise.
There are plenty of other scenarios that they have explored since then, including the totally contrary "What if the AI stock market blows up?" article.
This is pretty typical for them IME. They definitely have a bias, but they do try to explore multiple sides of the same idea in earnest.
I think any improvements to productivity AI brings will also create uncertainty and disruption to employment, and maybe the latter is greater than the former, and investors see that.
re: Why are The Economist’s writers anonymous?, Frqy3 had a good take on this back in 2017:
> From an economic viewpoint, this also means that the brand value of the articles remains with the masthead rather than the individual authors. This commodifies the authors and makes then more fungible.
> Being The Economist, I am sure they are aware of this.
Quite a cynical perspective. The Economist’s writers have been anonymous since the magazine’s founding in 1843. In the 19th century, anonymity was normal in publications like this. Signing one’s name to articles was seen as pretentious.
Most Youtube viewers watch on mobile or smart TVs, so adblockers aren't an issue there.
I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching. I doubt their crackdown on adblock users would affect view counts that much, but I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence and a few Google searches
> I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching.
This is not a safe assumption. Personally, I've stopped using YouTube entirely for entertainment; the level of annoyance dealing with it vs the value I get out of it is just not worth it any more. I'm doing other things with my time now instead of watching YouTube. Some of that is watching video on other platforms, and some of that is spending time on other hobbies instead.
Yeah, UBO and Sponsor Block are still working for me but if they stop I’ll be gone. I haven’t browsed Reddit since I switched to iOS and lost access to RedReader.
This reminds of something that has been bugging me on mobile.
I click a video by accident. It begins to play the ad before the video. I have to watch the add before I can go back to looking for what I wanted to watch. eugh
> Most Youtube viewers watch on mobile or smart TVs, so adblockers aren't an issue there.
I continue to find it amazing just How Big the impact of "advertising" is in the brain of a median HN commenter vs. the attention paid (almost none) to it by citizens at large.
Like, that Liberty Mutual Duck is just weird to most folks, but to us it's somehow the greatest assault on our freedom imaginable?
It's not an assault on freedom. But I think we'll learn over time that pervasive advertising does weird things to our brains. Consider that "advertising" is just a euphemism for "psychological manipulation to get you to want to buy something". I don't want to be psychologically manipulated! For any reason! It feels like a violation.
It’s because making the choice of not being served ads is increasingly a technical challenge/hobby undertaking. Nerds like challenges. Other people are unaware it’s even a choice they have.
You're right, but it's not because it's a challenge that we like, it's not like this is something enjoyable. Nerds do it through gritted teeth, it's annoying to bypass all of that. They just know it's a possibility and care about it enough to pursue it. Most people don't know and don't care.
Most people have lived with ads their whole lives, so the slow increase over decades barely registers. Many HN readers have spent the last 15–20 years avoiding them almost entirely with ad blockers, streaming, and piracy. Coming back to ad-saturated spaces feels jarring - like stepping out of a smoke-free world and into the 1960s, where everyone’s lighting up indoors.
It’s an emu, not a duck. I hate that I’m forced to waste my time to see that and that it occupies space in my brain.
I’m also annoyed because this is a bit of a rug pull by youtube. The videos I watch of some obscure mechanical repair on a motor uploaded 15 years ago aren’t being monetized and they do not cost youtube enough to justify the multiple ads at the start and another in the middle that I have to sit through now to see it.
Youtube is going through major enshitification and is destroying the experience of consuming the largest video library in the world.
It was a riff on the AFLAC duck from a few decades back, a similarly hated campaign that played everywhere and that we all survived just fine.
Maybe the humor was bad. But the point stands: advertising has been with us since the dawn of "media" and no one cares outside our oddball bubble. People sat through ads on their sitcoms in the 70's and they sit through the annoying insurance birds, and... who cares?
It's only here that people somehow believe that contra all evidence, somehow advertising on the internet is a unique affront to all that is holy. When... it's just ads!
Maybe I'm wrong, but, I think Hezb0-lla-h is pretty much the "government", especially in southern Lebanon
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