> And this is the best country in the world, with the best system of government, because private citizens can voice their disagreement with such actions, including by refusal to participate.
On the off chance other Americans were unaware of this: Other countries are democracies too (and many are better functioning)
how cooked do you have to be to synthesize that sentence without universal healthcare and an enormous chunk of the population living paycheck to paycheck
Some would say having a choice of which healthcare to pay for, the ability to choose a provider, the right to not pay for healthcare (maybe you value an extra holiday more than being able to go to a GP) is a good thing.
I'm from the UK, everyone I've met in the NHS has good intentions but the system itself means the standard of care is very poor. I have no option to go elsewhere with my £'s if a receptionist is extremely rude to me or a doctor won't listen.
Not to say the US system is perfect, just that adding even more government intervention (and associated plunder) by making healthcare universal, is perhaps not the answer.
It's easy, in this discussion, to get into the weeds and be distracted by details (like lots of people have by your "no option to go elsewhere with my £'s" remark).
If you want free at the point of healthcare, clearly you are better off in the UK than in the USA. If you want to pay for better care (like, well off middle class, not millions) then you're still better off in the UK than in the USA because we don't have perverse incentives for healthcare insurance, so the cost is lower even when you include the price of NHS services you aren't using. And if you're paying literal millions for healthcare then you ought to be paying for others' healthcare even if you aren't using it in principle.
Does it make logical sense that public healthcare should work better? That's irrelevant because, empirically, it does.
>Not to say the US system is perfect, just that adding even more government intervention (and associated plunder)
Uh huh. Because companies that have the explicit purpose of making as much money as possible don't "plunder". Why do you think it is that the US spends more public money per capita than many other countries and yet still has worse healthcare outcomes?
You're the richest country in the world (Andorra isn't real, don't @ me). And if you want universal healthcare, come and experience the joy of the NHS. I have to actually live with it.
Don't you have private healthcare in the UK too, if you aren't satisfied with the NHS?
IMO universal healthcare is awesome as the final safety-net that provides critical care, no matter your financial or employment situation. Yet it doesn't need be the only option. If businesses or people with money want to pay more to get care faster from private sector, that's okay too. It's how the system works here in Finland.
Ditto Australia, hybrid public / private healthcare ...
* private is good for better rooms, more scenic views, personalised spa like service and near immediate access to non life essential procedures
* public keeps the majority of people alive and triages procedures, you can get overnight heart stent surgery for free if required, might have to wait a few months for non critical knee surgery.
Private healthcare exists in the interstices of the NHS. The gorilla in the room squishes everything else into the corners.
Safety nets would be great, but a net that arrives several days after you have already fallen to the ground is not very helpful. That is what rationing-by-queueing does. Maybe Finland is great - I believe you! Britain's system is not.
Some Americans think the "democracy" vs "republic" distinction is extremely important, and that "democracy" means something like "tyranny of the majority", hence why it is good that America is not a _democracy_, but a _republic_ or a _democratic republic_.
Some other Americans (there is some overlap) also think that the US is so large and diverse that essentially its States are their own countries and the US is more like its own continent, and talking about the American _nation_ or even _country_ is meaningless. It is a union of States (though it is rare that someone argues that the US is not a country).
Isn't this some extreme distortion of semantics though? Going by the majority usage of those words, "democracy" and "republic" mean different but not incompatible things and the claim that America isn't a country is just baffling.
Yeah, republic doesn't really mean much these days (in the common definition and applied to contemporary countries).
North Korea is officially a republic, but it's closer to a hereditary, absolutist monarchy in practice. The UK is officially a constitutional monarchy, but in practice not all that much would change, if they demoted the royal family.
Yeah that's a terrible note to start on -- this is just someone hoping for a pat on the head from the fascists. Not even they would truly believe something so absurd!
That whole intro is whack, really;
There are many things that I or Anthropic or most of you would look at as mass domestic surveillance, that are legal, and it is DoW’s position that it’s their job and duty to do everything legal to protect our country, including those things.
"It's not their fault that they're evil, they're doing things that have yet to be explicitly forbidden by statute!" would be bad enough for a typical executive agency, but to say that about the US Department of Defense in March 2026 is just... brazen.
Is there anything interesting in there? I skimmed and it seems like reporting on Twitter posts, and news about the 2 leading LLM providers that have been extensively covered on HN.
I found this an incredibly well written and interesting read. A bit of a strange format… is it an article or a newsletter or something else? It is extremely long. I don’t really care though. Because I loved the combination of quotes, insights and links. Thanks.
It's AI narrated, but at this point if I heard Zvi's actual voice I think I would be confused. It's really well done, and uses different voices for each new person being quoted. It also has really good narrated image descriptions.
Zvi's articles are literally exhaustively long,l - before I was able to listen to them I got tired trying to read the whole thing. Now it's my favorite way to keep up with AI.
Breathless thought snippets with an all-in fueled propaganda introduction. Let me see if I can do it, too:
"I am 100 years old and my young wife's lover has discovered Claude Code. I am allowed to sit in the cuck seat whenever he pleases my wife. But what really energizes me is to watch him code: He is sitting in the programmer's cuck seat watching Claude Code work and I am sitting in the meta cuck seat watching him watch Claude. It keeps me awake at night. This isn't just evolution;;;it's revolution!"
The "current one" is Department of Defense. They are illegally branding it otherwise without congressional approval, but that doesn't mean we should welcome it.
More fundamentally, it's hard to convey just how much better a government that wages wars but ostensibly says that they're bad is than a government that gleefully does so. I'll take a flawed democracy that partakes in immoral operations over an openly-imperialist autocracy any day of the week -- as should we all!
It’s fine that a secondary consequence is them showing their foolish hand; I’ll give you that, but this not normal and should not just be absorbed as though it’s normal and that’s just what we call it now
Trump isn't doing anything out of the ordinary for an American president, so I would say it is indeed quite normal. If by "not normal" you mean "not acceptable" then I agree, but that doesn't change that "Department of War" is more correct than "Department of Defense"
> Trump isn't doing anything out of the ordinary for an American president
I'm sorry, but I think both parties would actually agree on the fact that Trump is doing a lot of "out of the ordinary" for an American president.
No other president after WWII has reduced federal workforce by >8% (DOGE), and then rehired a bunch. No other US president ordered the capturing a head of state (Venezuela) and framed it as a law enforcement action. No president has ignored congress or the constitution like Trump has (tariffs, ICE, Greenland).
He uses executive orders a lot more than previous presidents: ~209 per year in his 2nd term. The next highest are Truman (113/year), Carter (80/year) and Kennedy (75/year).
I find it amusing that Trump ran with the promise of "no new wars", and then immediately tries to change the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by a hollow promise from Trump at this point.
As an outsider, the extent and depth of the contradictions are really fascinating, OTOH repeated to the point that nothing surprises anyone anymore.
I keep thinking what's the psychology behind this that makes it work and if they are mostly in on the act or if they really rely on many "useful idiots" like their political opponents keep suggesting.
The discussion around useful idiots became concerning for me as I'm learning to respect people even in the most "don't look up"-like situations, trying to understand their individual motives without judging them. The main problem in political discussions, I figured, is the fact that we have 2-3 groups we try to fit people into.
Unfortunately, useful idiot is a valid phenomena but much of what we observe in the US is disempowerment. The congress people believe that they don't have power outside the president's benevolence and hence does not assert their constitutional powers. The constitutional court is either partisan or outright corrupt and does not work as a corrective. The execution branch are ready to serve the president and not their assigned duties or the law. Many ordinary voters do not feel personal responsibility for acting, but prefer to rely on whoever promises them emotional validation instead of forming and empowering their communities. This is not a single thing, this is a combination of effects that influence and amplify each other.
I find it amusing that Franco ran with the promise of "justice for those with clean hands," and then immediately enacted the Law of Political Responsibilities to institutionalize the summary execution of tens of thousands of his political opponents.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by a hollow promise from Franco at this point.
>I find it amusing that Franco ran with the promise of "justice for those with clean hands," and then immediately enacted the Law of Political Responsibilities to institutionalize the summary execution of tens of thousands of his political opponents.
Ah, but who's "they"? Names of departments are determined by Congress, and Congress has not renamed the DoD. The executive branch does not normally determine the names of its own departments. If you imagine the American government to be a single coherent entity, one might say "they have full naming rights", but it isn't, and in this case, the part doing the rename isn't the part that properly has the power to do so!
No, the President does not have “full naming rights” over entities defined and named in statute law. The President is bound to faithfully execute that law, but to change it (even if that change is merely to the name of a department or title of an officer specified within it) requires a bill to that effect to be passed by a majority of each house of Congress, which the President may then sign into law, effecting the change.
Because they used millions of dollars of American citizens’ tax revenue to make a meaningless edgelord gesture, amongst a myriad of other reasons why it’s a bizarre and childish thing to do. Stopping there because this isn’t Reddit
It’s not meaningless; it’s a way for them to immediately prove that the person speaking has been intimidated enough by them to acquiesce to this absurdity. If they don’t, they can be punished just for refusing. If they do, they’re already back on their heels proving their willingness to cave on anything else.
> why. unlike with the gulf of mexico, in this case they have full naming rights.
They actually don't. The official name is still the Department of Defense and only Congress can approve a real name change.
The Trump Executive Order just gives the department permission to use the Department of War name without actually changing the name of the department from the Department of Defense.
That said, despite being anti-Trump I'm fine with calling it the Department of War, it seems a lot more honest.
> And this is the best country in the world, with the best system of government, because private citizens can voice their disagreement with such actions, including by refusal to participate.
On the off chance other Americans were unaware of this: Other countries are democracies too (and many are better functioning)
That quote was indeed off-putting to read.
> because private citizens can voice their disagreement
I'm not sure that's true anymore in the US. At least not without fearing repercussions.
how cooked do you have to be to synthesize that sentence without universal healthcare and an enormous chunk of the population living paycheck to paycheck
Some would say having a choice of which healthcare to pay for, the ability to choose a provider, the right to not pay for healthcare (maybe you value an extra holiday more than being able to go to a GP) is a good thing.
I'm from the UK, everyone I've met in the NHS has good intentions but the system itself means the standard of care is very poor. I have no option to go elsewhere with my £'s if a receptionist is extremely rude to me or a doctor won't listen.
Not to say the US system is perfect, just that adding even more government intervention (and associated plunder) by making healthcare universal, is perhaps not the answer.
"I have no option to go elsewhere with my £'s if a receptionist is extremely rude to me or a doctor won't listen."
In the UK, private healthcare is very much an option if you have the £.
The £'s I give to the NHS I cannot instead take to other healthcare providers.
That’s not inherent of universal healthcare at all. In Austria, you can go to a different doctor if you wish.
It's easy, in this discussion, to get into the weeds and be distracted by details (like lots of people have by your "no option to go elsewhere with my £'s" remark).
If you want free at the point of healthcare, clearly you are better off in the UK than in the USA. If you want to pay for better care (like, well off middle class, not millions) then you're still better off in the UK than in the USA because we don't have perverse incentives for healthcare insurance, so the cost is lower even when you include the price of NHS services you aren't using. And if you're paying literal millions for healthcare then you ought to be paying for others' healthcare even if you aren't using it in principle.
Does it make logical sense that public healthcare should work better? That's irrelevant because, empirically, it does.
>Not to say the US system is perfect, just that adding even more government intervention (and associated plunder)
Uh huh. Because companies that have the explicit purpose of making as much money as possible don't "plunder". Why do you think it is that the US spends more public money per capita than many other countries and yet still has worse healthcare outcomes?
> I'm from the UK [..] I have no option to go elsewhere with my £'s
One of these is an obvious, outright lie. I wonder which.
They are both true. The £'s I give to the NHS I cannot instead take to other healthcare providers.
You're the richest country in the world (Andorra isn't real, don't @ me). And if you want universal healthcare, come and experience the joy of the NHS. I have to actually live with it.
Don't you have private healthcare in the UK too, if you aren't satisfied with the NHS?
IMO universal healthcare is awesome as the final safety-net that provides critical care, no matter your financial or employment situation. Yet it doesn't need be the only option. If businesses or people with money want to pay more to get care faster from private sector, that's okay too. It's how the system works here in Finland.
Ditto Australia, hybrid public / private healthcare ...
* private is good for better rooms, more scenic views, personalised spa like service and near immediate access to non life essential procedures
* public keeps the majority of people alive and triages procedures, you can get overnight heart stent surgery for free if required, might have to wait a few months for non critical knee surgery.
Private healthcare exists in the interstices of the NHS. The gorilla in the room squishes everything else into the corners.
Safety nets would be great, but a net that arrives several days after you have already fallen to the ground is not very helpful. That is what rationing-by-queueing does. Maybe Finland is great - I believe you! Britain's system is not.
This kind of patriotism is embarrassing, I don’t think I have ever seen it displayed by others than US citizens.
Well, North Koreans and Iranians say it, but they have a gun to their heads.
UK and Germany
America's not a democracy, hell it's not even a country.
???
Some Americans think the "democracy" vs "republic" distinction is extremely important, and that "democracy" means something like "tyranny of the majority", hence why it is good that America is not a _democracy_, but a _republic_ or a _democratic republic_.
Some other Americans (there is some overlap) also think that the US is so large and diverse that essentially its States are their own countries and the US is more like its own continent, and talking about the American _nation_ or even _country_ is meaningless. It is a union of States (though it is rare that someone argues that the US is not a country).
Isn't this some extreme distortion of semantics though? Going by the majority usage of those words, "democracy" and "republic" mean different but not incompatible things and the claim that America isn't a country is just baffling.
Yeah, republic doesn't really mean much these days (in the common definition and applied to contemporary countries).
North Korea is officially a republic, but it's closer to a hereditary, absolutist monarchy in practice. The UK is officially a constitutional monarchy, but in practice not all that much would change, if they demoted the royal family.
I think they're making a USA vs America (continent) distinction.
Yeah that's a terrible note to start on -- this is just someone hoping for a pat on the head from the fascists. Not even they would truly believe something so absurd!
That whole intro is whack, really;
"It's not their fault that they're evil, they're doing things that have yet to be explicitly forbidden by statute!" would be bad enough for a typical executive agency, but to say that about the US Department of Defense in March 2026 is just... brazen.Is there anything interesting in there? I skimmed and it seems like reporting on Twitter posts, and news about the 2 leading LLM providers that have been extensively covered on HN.
I found this an incredibly well written and interesting read. A bit of a strange format… is it an article or a newsletter or something else? It is extremely long. I don’t really care though. Because I loved the combination of quotes, insights and links. Thanks.
Lately my favorite podcast to listen to has been the audio version of Zvi's blog: https://dwatvpodcast.substack.com/p/claude-code-claude-cowor... .
It's AI narrated, but at this point if I heard Zvi's actual voice I think I would be confused. It's really well done, and uses different voices for each new person being quoted. It also has really good narrated image descriptions.
Zvi's articles are literally exhaustively long,l - before I was able to listen to them I got tired trying to read the whole thing. Now it's my favorite way to keep up with AI.
Breathless thought snippets with an all-in fueled propaganda introduction. Let me see if I can do it, too:
"I am 100 years old and my young wife's lover has discovered Claude Code. I am allowed to sit in the cuck seat whenever he pleases my wife. But what really energizes me is to watch him code: He is sitting in the programmer's cuck seat watching Claude Code work and I am sitting in the meta cuck seat watching him watch Claude. It keeps me awake at night. This isn't just evolution;;;it's revolution!"
(See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777 for the marketing inspiration)
Can we stop normalizing the bizarre and childish rename of the us defense department?
Nah. The current one is in fact more accurate.
Genuinely surprised they didn't try to get away with department of peace.
The "current one" is Department of Defense. They are illegally branding it otherwise without congressional approval, but that doesn't mean we should welcome it.
More fundamentally, it's hard to convey just how much better a government that wages wars but ostensibly says that they're bad is than a government that gleefully does so. I'll take a flawed democracy that partakes in immoral operations over an openly-imperialist autocracy any day of the week -- as should we all!
I think its rather apt.
I welcome the de-1984-ification of governmental functions.
Its clear that Trump wants to be at war, with their interventions, so, why not?
It’s fine that a secondary consequence is them showing their foolish hand; I’ll give you that, but this not normal and should not just be absorbed as though it’s normal and that’s just what we call it now
Trump isn't doing anything out of the ordinary for an American president, so I would say it is indeed quite normal. If by "not normal" you mean "not acceptable" then I agree, but that doesn't change that "Department of War" is more correct than "Department of Defense"
> Trump isn't doing anything out of the ordinary for an American president
I'm sorry, but I think both parties would actually agree on the fact that Trump is doing a lot of "out of the ordinary" for an American president.
No other president after WWII has reduced federal workforce by >8% (DOGE), and then rehired a bunch. No other US president ordered the capturing a head of state (Venezuela) and framed it as a law enforcement action. No president has ignored congress or the constitution like Trump has (tariffs, ICE, Greenland).
He uses executive orders a lot more than previous presidents: ~209 per year in his 2nd term. The next highest are Truman (113/year), Carter (80/year) and Kennedy (75/year).
I think it's pretty clear I was referring to the topic at hand, which is regards to military action and the Department of Defense/War naming.
I find it amusing that Trump ran with the promise of "no new wars", and then immediately tries to change the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by a hollow promise from Trump at this point.
As an outsider, the extent and depth of the contradictions are really fascinating, OTOH repeated to the point that nothing surprises anyone anymore.
I keep thinking what's the psychology behind this that makes it work and if they are mostly in on the act or if they really rely on many "useful idiots" like their political opponents keep suggesting.
The discussion around useful idiots became concerning for me as I'm learning to respect people even in the most "don't look up"-like situations, trying to understand their individual motives without judging them. The main problem in political discussions, I figured, is the fact that we have 2-3 groups we try to fit people into.
Wow, I made that digress quickly :)
Unfortunately, useful idiot is a valid phenomena but much of what we observe in the US is disempowerment. The congress people believe that they don't have power outside the president's benevolence and hence does not assert their constitutional powers. The constitutional court is either partisan or outright corrupt and does not work as a corrective. The execution branch are ready to serve the president and not their assigned duties or the law. Many ordinary voters do not feel personal responsibility for acting, but prefer to rely on whoever promises them emotional validation instead of forming and empowering their communities. This is not a single thing, this is a combination of effects that influence and amplify each other.
I find it amusing that Franco ran with the promise of "justice for those with clean hands," and then immediately enacted the Law of Political Responsibilities to institutionalize the summary execution of tens of thousands of his political opponents.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by a hollow promise from Franco at this point.
>I find it amusing that Franco ran with the promise of "justice for those with clean hands," and then immediately enacted the Law of Political Responsibilities to institutionalize the summary execution of tens of thousands of his political opponents.
Maybe they didn't have clean hands?
That's what they always say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Political_Responsibilit...
[flagged]
Ah, but who's "they"? Names of departments are determined by Congress, and Congress has not renamed the DoD. The executive branch does not normally determine the names of its own departments. If you imagine the American government to be a single coherent entity, one might say "they have full naming rights", but it isn't, and in this case, the part doing the rename isn't the part that properly has the power to do so!
No, the President does not have “full naming rights” over entities defined and named in statute law. The President is bound to faithfully execute that law, but to change it (even if that change is merely to the name of a department or title of an officer specified within it) requires a bill to that effect to be passed by a majority of each house of Congress, which the President may then sign into law, effecting the change.
Because they used millions of dollars of American citizens’ tax revenue to make a meaningless edgelord gesture, amongst a myriad of other reasons why it’s a bizarre and childish thing to do. Stopping there because this isn’t Reddit
It’s not meaningless; it’s a way for them to immediately prove that the person speaking has been intimidated enough by them to acquiesce to this absurdity. If they don’t, they can be punished just for refusing. If they do, they’re already back on their heels proving their willingness to cave on anything else.
no they don't. "department of war" is a "secondary title" of the DoD.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
only congress can change the name.
What are naming rights? China call the sea in the south, well…, South China sea. The same one is called East Sea in Vietnam. Both is official name.
> why. unlike with the gulf of mexico, in this case they have full naming rights.
They actually don't. The official name is still the Department of Defense and only Congress can approve a real name change.
The Trump Executive Order just gives the department permission to use the Department of War name without actually changing the name of the department from the Department of Defense.
That said, despite being anti-Trump I'm fine with calling it the Department of War, it seems a lot more honest.
His naming of the Bored of Peace was also foot forward and eerily prescient.