Many people here are talking about how more powerful people are also corrupt and are getting away with it. All corruption is bad. This soldier put the life of everyone on the mission in danger by doing this.
This is true, just like "all lives matter" is true, and it misses the point in the exact same way.
Those people you are replying to are not saying that this soldier should get away with his corruption because more powerful people are getting away with theirs. They are saying that those who abuse greater power are doing greater harm, and that their corruption should be punished with greater urgency.
On top of the harm the powerful people inflict directly through their corrupt actions, there's a secondary effect on the society at large. Unlike trickle-down economics, trickle-down corruption is a real thing. People see those in power get away with corruption and say "Why should I do the right thing?"
Of course, the usual answer from those in power ends up being "because we have the power to punish you and you don't have the power to punish us". And that's how you end up with the arrest and prosecution of a US soldier on the same 5 counts that the top politicians and their cronies are getting away with on a daily basis, aided by the president himself.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Legitimizing small time corruption because bigger corruption exists just legitimizes corrupt behavior in general. It should be offensive no matter who does it.
We can't penalize the 400B corruption. If we could, I would completely agree with OP's point. It's just that it's not a matter of choice.
It's not that we "don't choose to"... We obviously want to, but we can't, because there is an inherent principal-agent problem that exists with high-level corruption.
Again, it's like saying "let's not take the time to charge someone with manslaughter, because there are people out there who have committed war crimes that have killed tens of thousands of people." We all want to bring the war-criminals to justices, but we can't, so it's moot.
We should spend our resources on law enforcement where we can. Otherwise it's a race to the bottom, because with justice, perfect quickly becomes the enemy of good.
I have to ask: did you read what I wrote before you replied to me? I know the question might come across as an attack, but it's not. I'm genuinely curious about what process lead to your comment being a reply to mine, when mine explicitly states the following:
> Those people you are replying to are not saying that this soldier should get away with his corruption because more powerful people are getting away with theirs. They are saying that those who abuse greater power are doing greater harm, and that their corruption should be punished with greater urgency.
I did read it. Your point is effectively irrelevant. It means the same thing. Creating an "urgency chain" is effectively the same thing as justifying behavior.
It's like saying "we shouldn't worry about enforcing traffic laws because we need to use our resources to bring war criminals to justice" when the reason where not bringing war criminals to justice isn't for lack of concern, it's just that we have no coercive power.
Caring about prioritizing things where we do not have coercive power is pointless.
> It's like saying "we shouldn't worry about enforcing traffic laws because we need to use our resources to bring war criminals to justice"
It most definitely isn't. At no point did anyone in this discussion say "we shouldn't worry about small time corruption". In fact, I explicitly said the opposite. And then I highlighted it after you essentially accused me of doing so, as you're doing again.
> Creating an "urgency chain" is effectively the same thing as justifying behavior.
No, it's not. No one is "creating" an "urgency chain". Justice isn't binary. Things can be more or less just, they're not either perfectly just or completely unjust with nothing in between. Similarly, different people have different levels of impact. That's the definition of power in this context: the level of impact your actions have. No one is "creating" these concepts out of thin air.
What is happening here is that people are complaining about injustice and other people -- like you and the person I initially replied to -- are trying to delegitimize those complaints by stating that "all corruption is bad".
Let me repeat this, in case it got lost despite earlier repetitions: yes, we all know that "all corruption is bad". Just like we all know that "all lives matter", but pointing out that banality only got popular after the "black lives matter" slogan surfaced in response to a systemic injustice against African Americans.
You're doing the same kind of thing here.
> Caring about prioritizing things where we do not have coercive power is pointless.
On the contrary. If you always give up on caring because you don't have coercive power, you will never rectify injustices caused by imbalance of coercive power.
They didn't make the bet until after the raid - but before the announcement. Surely they endangered people, perhaps more and different people than simply those on the mission
Can you provide a reference? From a Reuters article:
> prosecutors said Van Dyke bet more than $33,000 on Polymarket between December 27, 2025, and January 2, 2026, that Maduro would soon be out of office and that U.S. forces would soon enter Venezuela
Incentivizes him to take on more risk to ensure mission success.
When someone bets 32k that a political opponent of the US is going to be kidnapped I think its fair to say some will assume it was placed by an insider.
What exactly would that look like from the position of an individual low rank unit? What would $32k of risk look like on a foreign battle field? I'm struggling to understand this prerogative.
What would be far larger source of risk is if they bet _against_ the operation and then personally sabotaged it. That's far more understandable but it's not what happened here.
It apparently and sadly needs to be said on Hacker News, I'm not defending him, and he should be punished, but I genuinely can't apprehend the risk assessment logic here.
Easy to think of a scenario where he should stand down but instead continues with the mission, risking the lives of his team mates, or maybe civilians.
He was incentivized to win the bet. The military does not want people to have outside loyalties because that creates problems any time they’re not perfectly aligned – for example, if they had orders to minimize team or civilian casualties you don’t want this guy starting a messy firefight because he’s thinking the target is getting away and willing to risk someone else’s lives for half a million dollars.
You also have to think about leaning information: if people do this, bodyguards around the world are going to monitor betting markets looking for unexplained changes. The military doesn’t like anything which can leak timing information since that increases the risk of a mission failing.
All corruption is bad. Selective enforcement of the law is worse. It increases corruption by giving a strong incentive to win favors from powerful people.
Both are true. No sympathy for this guy if he’s guilty as charged.
But also don’t forget that this guy’s trades are a drop in the ocean compared to the rest of the likely insider trading that’s visible in the Polymarket logs. (Eg on timing of Iran attacks, Trump tariff announcements, etc)
It's a short step from the Congress people taking advantage of foreknowledge, vs them MAKING self advantageous opportunities. And it's not guaranteed their "making" is in the public interest.
The sentiment is not that this man shouldn't be prosecuted it is that the blatant double standard and growing endemic societal cancer that is corruption is being allowed to blossom while leaders target scape goats for the same behavior. What this administration is trying to signal with going after this guy is that the problem is not with them, it's someone else, that they're on the up and up. It is why scapegoating is an effective tactic
it's a blatant double standard if you have evidence of people "doing it and getting away with it", but you don't, you just suspect it. and it's scapegoating if blame is centered on a person or group to explain away the totality of a widespread (or made up) problem, and that is also not happening here, instead "a person did something" and got arrested.
I don’t understand the point of denying reality when it unfolds in front of you. Plenty of evidence for these things. Denial of obvious truth is an American epidemic and cultural export
The point is that none of the congressional cases would end in a conviction. So unless you want to suspend rule of law theres not really much we can do without some hard evidence.
Unfortunately enforcing any laws on congressmen is very difficult.
In all decent democracies elected politicians have immunity or similar safeguards, since the separation of powers (as theorized by Montesquieu in the middle of illuminism) which represents the foundation of democracy demands that both the legislative and executive power be separated from the judicial one.
“Making the politicians pay for their crimes” is often just a populist argument, while there are ways to incriminate them, expecting that they can be prosecuted like us normal citizens is not compatible with democracy.
You may not like what I said but I said it. Go read the original works by Montesquieu, he understood it first.
I would argue the opposite, that having members of government who CANNOT be prosecuted like normal citizens is not compatible with democracy. I would think arguments to the contrary would have to assume other impediments to a properly functioning justice system, such as politically motivated prosecutions, widespread selective enforcement, etc.
Exactly. And the same is true of the judicial system btw, who must stay separate from other powers, meaning that it also has to police itself, which can create its own issues.
These are just the (little) costs of democracy. If you aren’t ready to pay them, you haven’t really considered the alternatives.
You said SHOULD. Yes, I absolutely agree that politicians (and I very intentionally do not call any names) should be criminally punished most harshly for abusing their position for personal enrichment or for some other egoistical goals. On the other hand, these are the people we, as totality of all voters, chose for their function. The main punishment for a politician in democracy should be the threat of losing next elections, not criminal prosecution. And of course, per definition, in every democracy every politician has a majority of citizens, who considers him stupid and in the hysterical environment of the current political life (hysterical for many more or less good reasons) such politician is not only opponent, but an enemy if not a traitor. There is an unfortunate tendency to convert this adversarial feeling into full blown hate and accusations of criminal misconduct.
Man, you've been on a streak of these purely vitriolic posts. Maybe take a break from the internet for a bit? These posts read like someone who needs help.
Thank you, this was my first thought as well. He essentially leaked classified mission info for the purpose of scoring some cash on it. Insider trading in congress is a big problem too, but there are some real differences here.
I get migraines and didn't have any problem. Bring unable to focus is more of a symptom or early warning rather than a trigger, at least for me. I'm not sure what the trigger is, maybe being dehydrated or something I ate.
I used to think heat/exercise was my only trigger. Then I got ahold of some of some HDR-enabled emojis and immediately started seeing auras everywhere haha. Didn’t take long to get rid of those. I didn’t get one from this article, but it felt like I was about to. So maybe not migraine-triggering but definitely anxiety-triggering :)
Lately when I watch a video on YouTube, every single one of the recommended videos is AI slop. Not sure what the next 5 years holds. It does make me question the argument that bad AI generated content is equivalent to bad human generated content. And they all have hundreds of thousands of views, another mystery.
A dirty secret is the algorithms can't differentiate real users from fake.
The universe of content is so large now, if you don't start with a fake audience you go nowhere. Slop rises to the top, because slopfarms can spend all their money on the farming rather than the content. It's even worse if you look at short form video because it's trivial to clone anything that went viral and alter the message, no real human or attractive 20 year old American required.
If content requires a real human network for transmission, the cost of transmitting slop is your own reputation within your network. A bunch of bots circle jerking each other can't sell concert tickets or much of anything.
The idea that some artist is exceptionally talented and good and they deserve to be famous or sell out concerts is a myth. There are so many exceptionally skilled singers, songwriters, and musicians that are all unknowns. Many who are more talented than (insert famous living or dead pop star here.)
I think this is part of the reason why the AI ruins creativity is overblown. The music-art-talent pyramid always meant a tiny percent at the top walked away with all of the money. Look at the numbers from the last screen actor's guild strike, the majority of actors earn at or below minimum wage. It's a new world, and the old one people believe deserves to continue perpetually existed in but a blink of human civilization.
>A dirty secret is the algorithms can't differentiate real users from fake.
The mainstream platforms exist for the fake users, not for the real ones.
Before they could make "fake users" out of real people (by teaching them to enjoy the taste of mental effluvia); now they've factored out the people (since humans prefer actual nutrients).
With the current moon mission I'm reminded of how whenever someone from NASA is interviewed they like talking about how the billions spent are justified because of the practical results of the research - Velcro, Tang, etc. It always seemed like a stretch, but I have the unpleasant feeling the US is going to lean the true value of being the research leader when it's gone.
I liked the recent Nova episode on neanderthals. They talked about how awful the last ice age was for the neanderthals despite being adapted to cold climates, and how modern humans survived it by staying away until it got warmer.
I recently hit the fold level limit, which is hard coded into Vim at 20. I was disappointed that it's the same in neovim. I tried changing the Vim code and compiling from source but apparently it's not that simple because it still doesn't work (although it does behave differently).
I'm hitting the limit due to a system that uses lists of nested rules or decision trees.
There's nothing stopping a company from creating products based on these, and having them certified, assuming they satisfy the requirements for certification (which if they don't you probably don't want to put it in your house anyway). I'm not familiar with the cern hardware license, but it appears to allow commercialization.
I don't really understand the first episode. The idea as far as I can tell is that it's illegal to use employees who reverse engineered the BIOS to clone the BIOS, but it's legal to hire someone new, who presumably is also going to have to reverse engineer the BIOS in order to clone it.
The idea is that specifications are not copyrightable, but implementations are. So, the first team reverse engineers the work and writes a spec for the second team to work from. That way, you guarantee that the second implementation is free of copyrighted code.
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