Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | KaiserPro's commentslogin

Why does anyone listen to him about product design/buisness running?

Twitter was a success _despite_ him. the original idea was strong enough to blast through all of the odd/wrong decisions he took. The time it took to make hashtags a thing, the terrible scaling, the huge overhiring, and deliberate duplication of teams, and his inability/reluctance to make any product decision. Sure he's got great connections, but he is a terrible leader of a buisness

Most of his product philosophy is negatively correlated with businesses that need to make a profit to survive.

I know what he'll do, he'll have someone make a bunch of agents to manage all these poor people via chat. he'll boast about how AI native the company is, it'll be chaos.


Hes also liable for the death sentence, 18 U.S.C. § 2441 — War Crimes Act (1996) & 10 U.S.C. § 950t — Military Commissions Act (more relevent)

They won't face any US law. AIUI, they have been getting letters from the DOJ office of legal counsel that say it's legal. This effectively immunizes them (the DOJ can't turn around and charge you with a crime, if they advised you beforehand it was not a crime).

The best shot would be to turn them over to the ICC


> they have been getting letters from the DOJ office of legal counsel that say it's legal. This effectively immunizes them (the DOJ can't turn around and charge you with a crime, if they advised you beforehand it was not a crime).

This is not true.

OLC opinions are just that: opinions. They are non-binding and non-promissory. They are an important factor in any assessments as a norm, but definitely not dispositive and not legally binding.

The only real barrier is the pardon power, but I'm personally fine at this point with totally breaking the seal, trying and jailing every criminal in the administration(++), and consider the pardon power gone for good. Small price to pay.


> This effectively immunizes them (the DOJ can't turn around and charge you with a crime, if they advised you beforehand it was not a crime).

Where is the check or balance on this? The executive branch can apparently just launder itself wholesale of any crimes committed by its members.


> the DOJ can't turn around and charge you with a crime, if they advised you beforehand it was not a crime

this sounds like the kind of rules we, as a society, decided to dispense with, so the DOJ can absolutely turn around.


Alas, the USA isn't signed up to the ICC.

Sure, but, if somehow they fell into ICC custody overseas...

Now wouldn’t that be sweet?

Unless I missed something, Only Hegseth was promising no quarter (ie war crimes)

We should be clear that Hegseth is not an officer in the US military, and this is clearly an illegal order. The fact that he has fired the JAGs who would tell him that is unsurprising, but does not change the facts. Any such killings would expose the individuals to a USMCJ Article 118 charge.

he what? this is on the record?

https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4434...

> Our response? We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.

March 13, 2026


He probably said "no quarter" because it sounds cool and doesn't really know what it means. The most ironic part is how he is an avowed Christian warrior and says "no mercy" when mercy figures pretty prominently in Christianity.

Yes, he said it in front of reporters at a Pentagon briefing.

https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4434...

> Our response? We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.


From 2024:

"In 2024’s The War on Warriors, Hegseth argues at length that US forces should ignore the Geneva conventions and other elements of international law governing the conduct of war."

“'What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us?” he asks. “Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: if you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.'”

He wrote a book in which he openly advocates for war crimes. Maybe, just maybe, it pays to believe him.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/25/pete-hegseth...


For what it's worth, he probably didn't know what he was saying.

(slop has been around longer than LLMs)


It’s the one constant about this administration: you’re always wondering ”is this incompetence by not knowing what they’re saying or incompetence where they know what they’re saying”

What is this worth?

Dark comedy mostly.

> Nuclear power is not dispatchable.

I mean it is, its just slower.

but if you have batteries, then you can divert the power to the batteries to keep them topped up.


While technically possible, given that the vast majority of the cost is capex and not fuel and given that it is already five times the cost of solar and wind when producing at 100% 24/7, setting literal piles of cash on fire might be more economic than using it to dispatch electricity.

If you're using it to charge batteries it's just five times more expensive than equivalent solar or wind.


French nuclear stations are roughly as fast as combined cycle gas (to turn off at least)

The point is, with enough battery, you don't need fast despatch for things like water/gas/nuclear, because the battery does that for you. In the UK the 11gwhr we have (about 1/2-1/3 of one hours consumption) is more than capable to do the balancing.


Thats whats driving the buildout in places like spain.

Solar power is in curltailment most days, so to make money solar operators need to add batteries to take free energy and shift it to the ultra expensive parts of the day.


I mean yeah, but $100 a barrel makes it difficult to argue.

> Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder?

In the UK, houses have energy ratings, which are largely not that useful, but they do allow estimated annual running charge.

The house that I live in we moved in and were spending ~1.7k on gas a year.

We needed to re-render the place, because it has a few missing pieces. we spent the extra £4 to put in 90mm of external wall insulation. We also had to replace the glazing. It was cheaper to get triple glazing (for some reason), however the results of that was that it was 6degrees warmer in winter, and 10 degrees (celcius) cooler in summer. Even with gas prices doubling, we spend about £70 on hotwater and heating.


There's also the simple reality that houses with better energy ratings are worth more when they are sold. If you own a house, it's a good way to lower your bills and increase the value of your house. The only thing you know for sure when you pay hundreds per month for gas is that it goes out of the chimney. Over ten years, that adds up. Most houses you can probably do some sensible things that definitely earn themselves back in that kind of period while also increasing the value of your property. The inconvenience and financing tend to be the big obstacle. Add incentives to the mix and it becomes an easy choice in a lot of places.

> Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.

Thats catagorically wrong on both levels.

Common land was regulated and had a ton of bylaws to make sure that people didn't take the piss. There was lots of work done to improve the soil, (leaving fallow, crop rotation, fertilising, etc etc)

As for anti-slavery, there was a whole multi century effort to fight against surfdom.

The Quakers and other more radical religious types condemned it as unchristian,

The secular types also raged against it, thomas paine is most well known now, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Spence was also a key proponent.


> I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently.

I agree, but this is 100% not the right model. Altman is not the right person to be in control of a media organisation. He shows little willing to understand anything of how the world works currently, let alone something out of his wheel house.


Or, they know exactly what they wield when they take over.

Right, it's simple mathematics. It costs X energy units to raise a human to adulthood, and Y energy units to train a frontier language model. What's so hard about this?

i am gonna miss the ad reads

the segways to the ad reads are always one of their funniest bits


The cost of doing nothing is going to be large.

Apart from the oil, there is the fertiliser that isn't being shipped. That means that august crops are going to be down. Assuming its a good year. prices go up, which means we can expect a wave of overthrown governments (similar to the arab spring) in 12-24 months time.

For the USA that means inflation, along with a credit crunch (probably)


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: