It's because the economy sucks ass and we're all struggling more to get less. Countries only want somebody who's basically guaranteed to bring something to the table and not somebody perceived to be a drag on an already struggling economy.
What it means (IMHO), if things don't get better, is more unpredictable politics. The Old Guard is already seen as having gotten us into this mess, and people will be more likely to try something new. We've seen a more authoritarian turn on both the right and the left. The ship could still right itself, but a lot of our problems are feeding back into each other and we may be seeing the beginnings of a phase transition, to borrow a metaphor from complexity theory.
Doesn't it mostly stem from demographics? Developed countries are experiencing lower natural population growth so some have tried to make that up with immigration. Our economy and centralized fiscal policies generally assume a growing population. Without that, there's little that can be done. Automation can be used to increase productivity but that also faces a backlash from people worried about their jobs. People will blame the problems on politicians but the problem is beyond them.
i'm tempted to say "all politics is downstream from economics", but really economics an politics is quite intertwined; its not surprise things are spiraling...
This actually happened in 1965. De Gaulle, the president of France at the time, sent the French Navy over to America and took their reserve gold back home. This prompted other countries to do the same and by 1971 America had switched from a gold standard to a fiat currency.
You're leaving out some really interesting context there. After the Great Depression the economic equilibrium the world settled into, with the Bretton Woods treaty, is that participating countries, which was most of the non-Soviet aligned world, would agree to base their currency's value on the USD.
That'd obviously give the US an immense amount of power, so in exchange the US would agree to make the USD convertible to gold at a fixed rate by other countries (as opposed to e.g. individuals). So the whole point here is that if the US tried to print a whole bunch of money to exploit our 'exorbitant privilege', countries would be able to take their now devaluing USD and exchange into a gold at a stable rate and make a whole bunch of money. So it was intended to be a self correcting system.
The problem is that the US did print a whole bunch of money anyhow, and when France and other countries said 'hey we'd like to convert our USD to gold' we just said 'nah' and defaulted on our obligations, bringing Bretton Woods to an end in 1971. That signaled the beginning of the modern completely fiat economic system, and led to some wild quotes from the time. For instance the Secretary of the Treasury under Nixon (who was president in 71) has a great quote of, 'The dollar is our currency, but your problem.'
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It's critical to understand this history to understand what's happening today with countries increasingly seeking to replace the dollar. Many want something akin to Bretton Woods 2.0, but without any country being given a win button. And that's not so easy to devise!
The alternative that was the ICU with an international reserve would punish surplus nations and help deficit nations. A Bretton Woods 2.0 thus would be advantageous to the US while neutralizing much of the advantageous the EU and China have as export based economies.
> Many want something akin to Bretton Woods 2.0, but without any country being given a win button. And that's not so easy to devise!
The hard part is getting countries to agree on one system. Coming up with a good one is easy. You can either do EU style governance where countries vote on policy or go hands off and anchor everything to crypto.
> hard part is getting countries to agree on one system
To put it bluntly, America ended WWII with a global nuclear monopoly and then only industrial base on the planet that hadn't been bombed into smithereens. That put it in a unique position to set the terms of the peace. The only party that came out with any comparable leverage was the USSR on account of its massive army and willingness to maintain a wartime economy that would have been untenable in the democracies of the West. (Absent the USSR, it's again unlikely Bretton-Woods would have emerged–the Soviet threat created an incentive to coöperate.)
More than that, the end of WWII saw American complete its then priority of decolonization. That meant there were lots of newly created countries, not quite peacefully but not at the level of violence that usually accompanies new-country formation (with obvious exceptions, e.g. Partition and Israel/Palestine), that could be wooed with riches and ideology.
Notably the USD was also rapidly losing its global share (and it had already fell under 50%) until the collapse of the USSR. Then the newly formed nations, looking to the West, rapidly dollarized, and the USD influence began growing rapidly reaching above 70% in the early 2000s when it once again began to decline to where it's at today in the mid 50% range.
Only fools like the management of Apple, Microsoft, and Google would lend money to the United States government. Government bonds have fallen 80% relative to gold in the past few years.
> Government bonds have fallen 80% relative to gold in the past few years.
I think most people would suggest the converse..... that gold prices have doubled over the last three years compared to virtually any stable western currency.
They are also very difficult, and very expensive, to maintain as they age. There is a small hydro damn near where I live that predates WWII and the county/state cannot find anyone who wants to take it over because of the expense in repairing it. This is in part due to seismic retrofitting which needs to happen, but also a variety of other factors, including being built basically on silt, having a public road on top which people need to get to their homes, and simply updating the aged equipment which has been on its last leg for a while.
What's more, the dam installation changed the local water table level, and residential wells drilled since the 1940's only had to go down so far. If the dam is removed, all these wells will dry up, and the state is beginning to make it difficult to drill new wells, and they certainly don't want to shell out to install plumbing to unincorporated communities which don't vote for the majority party anyway.
Another dam nearby held a massive amount of water for one of the bigger cities in the state. This is on the west coast, and if we get the Big One, it'll flood a populated area with hundreds of thousands of people. So they've had to draw down on the water levels and it's basically useless now, but deconstructing the dam would probably be a project requiring federal money, and since it's an earthen dam in a seismic zone there isn't really any retrofitting that you can do to fix it.
Basically, dams will give you some cheap electric and a water supply for a while but after 50-70 years they're a huge liability.
Honestly I'm a little surprised the FAA doesn't have more to say about this. They are somewhat notorious for exercising authority for its own sake, and do not appreciate other people or government agencies stepping on their turf.
Slight aside, I remember reading a post here on HN; the poster said they created an astronav system for use with webcams and published the code on github, only to receive on knock on their door a little while later from somebody who explained that this code in fact violated ITAR restrictions and they needed to remove it.
So… while that’s true of most astronav systems to date (particularly the ones meant to be used during daytime, and especially with reference stars potentially near the horizon), I’m not sure that’s really a hard requirement.
If you restrict the domain to nighttime or exoatmospheric, a high-resolution wide-angle camera paired with an offline astrometry database has the makings of a strapdown astronav.
Widening the domain again, the natural motion of the vehicle is probably enough, when combined with inertial sensors to aid pixel-shift image stabilization, to achieve the same kind of processing gain as the older systems got with shutter-synchronous detection.
Would that hold up in court if the person were willing to challenge it? That seems a clear cut violation of that person's speech, but I guess anything for "national security".
US secrecy laws hold up in court. Just ask any contractor who accidentally brought home a classified document or three (and their name doesn't rhyme with Bonald Bump).
Yeah they talk up privacy but trust is a big component of that. Where's the source? I distrust Google...but I also distrust a company I've never heard of with mobile device data in 2026. It's basically keys to the kingdom now.
I like croc but you can get magic wormhole clients for platforms that your SO uses through the usual distribution channels without having to resort to "weird" installation methods like Obtanium or Fdroid.
What it means (IMHO), if things don't get better, is more unpredictable politics. The Old Guard is already seen as having gotten us into this mess, and people will be more likely to try something new. We've seen a more authoritarian turn on both the right and the left. The ship could still right itself, but a lot of our problems are feeding back into each other and we may be seeing the beginnings of a phase transition, to borrow a metaphor from complexity theory.
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