Peter Thiel is almost wholly responsible for JD Vance being in the White House

What can be done to curtail it? Ban corporate donations to political parties and PACs. Limit personal contributions. Implement campaign spending limits so parties can't spend hundreds of millions on an election if they somehow manage to get that much money.

Other nations (e.g. Canada) do this. It's not perfect. Money is always looking for a way, and politicians are always looking for the kind of power that money buys. It's an eternal game of whack-a-mole, but it's a game worth playing.

American politicians aren't going to propose this. Americans need to demand it.

To what extent does waging war contribute to increasing the safety of Americans? Every war the United States has started since WWII against another country has not been a defensive war, but an invasion by the U.S. itself. The United States has enjoyed global military dominance for decades. It has also become clear that even the world’s best military is no match for a large-scale psychological operation.

A few rounds of this and eventually both sides have worked themselves into a frenzy to motivate buying excessive amounts of weapons, and then finally something trivial makes someone important "that's it, that was the thing we got the guns for" and a few billion dollars in weapons go up in smoke along with some hundreds of human lives (if everything goes well).

Also, there's nothing unusual about the big guy thinking they don't have to learn lessons from others and so ignore their experience.

The Iranians have explicitly tweeted:

"For years, we've been awaiting the Americans' entry into the designated points, and for over two decades, we've been training with the asymmetric warfare strategy for this very moment. Now, we have just one message for the American soldiers: Come closer."

Also the war games from a quarter century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

For example, the UK defense review that was published during the Ukraine War (in which the UK is closely supporting Ukraine) focused on traditional defense approaches (tanks, big boats, that sort of thing) and mostly ignored the need to upskill quickly in building, iterating, and deploying disposable cheap drones.

Or, more generally, there are people who voted for the current US administration who are upset that the things that were promised in Project 2025 have actually been implemented and have now affected them personally and negatively.

I think the defense contractors disagree with this. I often wondered how these shiny super high tech, crazy expensive US weapons would do in an all out war. They are good at bullying countries with not limited military capacity (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya come to mind) but probably won’t do well against an enemy that can build huge numbers of drones.

In what way do you feel Thiel is "behind" SpaceX?

In the grand scheme of things: humans are doing the granding, the scheming, and the things. Earth has a tiny bit of something to do with that.

It wasn’t bankrolled with billions for the good of society.

Being naive is fun, but being realistic about the species we are is better. And it seems we can leverage that to land on the moon. So it’s working as intended.

This is a model most countries are working on now - from China to France to Russia to Ukraine to India to South Korea to ...

Also, for all of HN's moaning, this has bipartisan support in both parties. Based on my network, NatSec and Defense Policy roles haven't seen significant turnover irrespective of admin and those of us in the space are aligned with America irrespective of who's in the White House.

It's the same way how at SF Climate Week right now where plenty of founders in the space are taking conversations with VCs irrespective of political opinions. Climate and GreenTech is dual use, and even a couple European trade commissions have been working on introducing their startups here and helping them expand IP and R&D headcount IN the US. Clearly the overlap between pissy HNer and people doing s#it doesn't overlap as much anymore.

Absolutely insane.