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It is also the consensus position for a lot of bad reasons though.

There is an assumption that belief in, or even reasonable agnosticism towards, any other theory can only be motivated by racism.

There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it, because they want to believe we are all more similar than we are different, etc.

Multiregional hypotheses are perfectly plausible. We have very limited information one way or another. Out of Africa may be more likely but it is far from certain.


Just to be clear about what the term multiregionalism means, it's an argument that there's anatomical continuity between archaic hominin populations around afroeurasia and modern human populations. That is, anatomical modernity didn't evolve once in Africa, but multiple times all over the world in populations that are still extant today. A multiregional hypothesis might say that modern Chinese people evolved from archaic populations in Asia.

This is completely and unequivocally rejected by the genetic evidence. The evidence is so absolutely overwhelming that even fucking Wolpoff came around and now says:

    It is broadly agreed that all recent/living human populations ultimately descend from Africans.
Now, if you mean something completely different to the commonly understood definition of multiregionalism, I'm willing to hear it.


There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it

But, also, There are many people that [do not] believe OOA because they [do not] want to believe it.

That's why we look at genetic evidence, to eliminate nonsense. That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.

If it makes you feels better, think of it this way:

we don't believe OOA because the evidence says we're related to blacks. We believe it because the evidence says we're pretty much hairless apes. (And a lot of us aren't even hairless!)

There, feel better about it now?


theres actually almost zero clarity around the common ancestor between apes and humans, and a lot of speculation that the common ancestor lived 6-8 million years ago.


> That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.

No. Non-African humans have genetic lineages that do not occur anywhere in Africa.

This doesn't mean OOA is necessarily false, but does makes it much less likely.

Also, lumping in primates is a red herring. The resolution of our gene clade knowledge doesn't go that far back. Dreaming about some hypothetical ape ancestor is a vibe, not a science.


In what sense are domestic car manufacturers "important"? They're inefficient if they're being outcompeted by China.


You can't rely on Chinese companies to make the tanks and rockets you intend aiming at China.

Car manufacturers serve many purposes. Aside from keeping the UAW membership onside, they are a strategic buttress for an emerging future war risk.

Australia maintained subsidies to Ford and GM for onshore production precisely because of this. And they stopped when a strategic realignment made successive governments decide the risk didn't justify the expense. A decision they may now be regretting.


War with China.. ya'll are nuts. The American zeitgeist is completely poisoned and insane. Listening to this stuff from the outside is kind of horrifying. War with a nuclear armed country ends with a nuclear winter for the whole planet. There is no preparing for war with China unless you want everyone dead (which I'm starting to suspect a lot of people are okay with)

This seems so anachronistic.... When was the last war where tanks were important..?

Car are made using components from all around the world... How would you even make a tank in a Tesla factory?


In The 2022 Invasion of Russia into the Ukraine Tanks played an important role in the offensive and the counter-offensive especially around Kyiv, Mariupol, Severodonetsk, and Avdiivka


Are they still a factor? I thought they quickly were put out of the picture once drone warfare was ironed out. Haven't heard of tanks in Ukraine for the past couple of years


This is from last month: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/09/08/world/europe/...

It describes how tanks were modified to protect, first, against attacks from the top, and then, from drone attacks from all sides.

They claim “But they remain important, especially for trying to take and hold territory. With their heavy firepower, they will continue to have a role in attacking, defending and supporting the foot soldiers of the infantry.”


super interesting! thanks


Well, the last war where tanks and other old weapons were important is going on in Ukraine, for example. And I'm pretty sure you could build quite a few death machine components with what's available in Tesla factories as well (certainly not a full tank though, but you could probably not do that in an ICE car factory either).

FWIW, I agree with your general sentiment, though.

Also, I'm pretty sure that the car industry as it is now would fight retooling their factories tooth and nail, move production to other countries and do anything else they can to be able to continue making as much profit as they can.


> certainly not a full tank though

I wonder how much you couldn't though. Obviously you'd need to retool the whole thing, and the cannon is a bit more complicated than simply a metal cylinder, but just how much more complicated? The reloading system is probably the most complex after of the jet turbine that powers those things.

My other question is, with gigacasting, how much better could a Tesla factory build an M1 Abrams compared to a traditional automakers?


I'm not as current as I used to be with my military trivia (I blame getting older and getting to know more refugees, veterans and families who lost people in wars) but I'll have a go:

A tank weighs like 60 tons or so. The engine and transmission alone are heavier and bulkier than whole cars, so basically none of the infrastructure you have available in many car factories is dimensioned correctly. Modern armor is composite and includes stuff like ceramic components which you would not have the machines, processes and knowledge for. "Gigacasting" sounds impressive but it's "just" aluminium injection molding that can do relatively big and integrated parts and you can't just fill in some steel-composite armor material mix in the hopper and have a fully formed Abrams fall out the other end of the machine. Things like barrels are forged (I think), which you again would not have the right infrastructure for. And so on and so forth.

My guess would be: It would be more sensible to apply division of labor and - for example - have many of the car factories spit out CNC and cast parts that fit into their usual production envelope and are then integrated into other/bigger systems at your friendly neighborhood US armory (Krauss-Maffei or wherever, more likely), specalized stuff like aircraft parts from their Gigapresses, have them do electrical work for other systems, produce lighter (support-)vehicles, use their skills and infrastructure in quick mass production for things you really need a lot of (shells, basic supplies for your war-torn population's needs, and so on), have their prototyping labs work on more cutting-edge/improvised stuff like the Drones we see in Ukraine and Russia. I'm sure there are plenty more good (terrible) ideas to be had.


oh man, that's great. Thank you! I'm not in manufacturing so I love learning new things.


Best way to find yourself in war is not prepare for one. As shown time and again. Also, persuading your enemies not to prepare for war is a part of the war effort.

> so anachronistic

tell that to ruzzia


> As shown time and again

what a load of warmongering bs.. I literally can't think of a single example. Korea, Vietnam, France, Britain, Japan, Germany every country involved in a war in the past ~100 years had prepared for it. Maybe maybe Iraq under Saddam Hussein didn't properly prepare? Though they were highly militarized. On the contrary, the more you prepare and get people frothing at the mouth the more likely it's gunna happen.

Thank god none had been between two nuclear powers so far

> tell that to ruzzia

They had a bunch of tanks and seemingly lost huge amounts of them. They seem to be a prime example of tanks not working in the modern context


>> They seem to be a prime example of tanks not working in the modern context

Without proper strategy nothing works. Size of the russian army was too small for the task to fight and occupy such a huge county as Ukraine.

Also russians had bunch of old tanks, almost all of them made in USSR.


So what do you propose we do when China attacks? Capitulate?!


Why "when"?


Military build-up. Xi's own bellicose declarations towards Taiwan. Closeness to and participation into other dictator's military endeavors.


Maybe not tanks, but certainly drones, no? We need some sort of manufacturing. If not for war itself, as a deterrent? Plus there will still be troops no matter what, so certainly we'll still need to make APCs.

"Car are made using components from all around the world..." That's part of the problem. Building more here may bring some of the components closer, at least to friendlier countries.


"The American zeitgeist is completely poisoned and insane. "

The average Chinese person is very gung ho about invading Taiwan


They're not even winning the war on Portland.


Since there’s no good reason to do any of that, we should absolutely lose that capability since to use it is to abuse it


> Since there’s no good reason to do any of that

It's 2025. We're still asking what happens when one group has lots of guns, tanks, fighter jets and missiles, and the other doesn't? Also, there is a difference between stockpiling arms and maintaining the ability to produce them if necessary.


Deterrence is a very good reason, and the reason we’ve had peace in the western world for as long as we have.


Integrated markets and commerce is why we have had peace in the western world. The very things the current American head honcho is tearing apart.

We have had very little peace in the rest of the world in the meantime between the colonial wars, the various proxy wars of the Cold War, then the numerous stupid adventures of the modern America and now Russia wanting to be an empire again.


I don’t think integrated markets were the cause. There was plenty of integration between Ukraine and Russia in the oil and gas infrastructure for example.

(Nuclear) deterrence is why we’ve only had proxy wars instead of direct wars


If the "outcompeting" is possible because of Chinese government subsidies, then it's important to protect local industry from unfair competition.

It's similar to the logic behind anti-trust actions against monopolists. If the playing field isn't level, then the USA government steps in to level it.

(Whether BYD is subsidised or not is another question, but the above is the logic of protecting local industry.)


> If the playing field isn't level, then the USA government steps in to level it.

More recently though, it kind of seems like if the playing field isn't tipped strongly towards the US, then the US government will step in to tip it their way.


Government subsidies effectively provide protection for a local market and capital.

America has some of the lowest cost of capital and most effective financial markets in human history.

If the Chinese markets are blocked that doesn’t mean the rest of the world is inaccessible.

Another aspect of government subsidies is that they mask incompetence.


Not sure why this is downvoted. The Chinese government has been quite transparent in terms of globally dominating several industries including EV through heavy government support.

It would make no sense to destroy your own industry because it can’t compete with a heavily subsidized foreign industry.


If it is such a successful strategy, why doesn't everybody do it?


It's often not a successful strategy.

If your product sells like made at a subsidized price, but not at the unsubsidized price, it's not a real business.


Subsidise industries?

Everyone does.

China funds it upfront, while the US does it after the spending and calls it a bail-out, or a "government contract"


Yes it says this in the article.


Why is the far right always so racist?


Landlords are an excellent thing, as anyone that cannot afford, or does not want, to simply buy a house could tell you.

Set up is a phrasal verb and omitting the space is incorrect, yes, but only an annoying pedant would point it out.

It recommends Debian and says:

>I make my guides on this site for Debian 11. If you use another OS, just know that your [mileage] may vary in terms of you might need to change some instructions here minorly.

If you were going to complain about bad grammar, that sentence is a much better target, and yet it is still quite easily understandable.


Don't be ridiculous. You don't need to be computer savvy to use electronic banking. Cheques haven't been used in most countries for over a decade and the only actual difference is that you get transferred the money immediately instead of banking a cheque.


Fwiw, two factor authorization requires smartphone savvy. This is mind bending to the wall phone crowd. Not to mention the difficulty with lots of passwords that require new ones every so often. Not everybody grew up or lives digitally - there’s a whole lot of people who “had people do that for them” or didn’t work with computers in their career.


Great, now every operation has 300ms of latency. Kill me


If your ping is that high, you might be doing it wrong. Even Starlink is usually less than half that, usually a lot less. Most Remote Desktop setups I’ve seen are fairly and surprisingly responsive. It’s not quite as nice as a desktop 3 feet away, sure, but that only matters for a few things, and it’s good enough for most work. The tradeoff can be worth it since you can now work from anywhere via laptop and connect to the same machine. No need for multiple setups, most of the machine management is taken care of, upgrades are seamless. For various reasons I haven’t been able to move permanently to a cloud workstation, but TBH I often want to.


Worse when the VPN they also force on you adds 300ms.


All of the big clouds have regions throughout the world so you should be able to find one less than 100ms away fairly easily.

Then realistically in any company you'll need to interact with services and data in one specific location, so maybe it's better to be colocated there instead.


I wonder if everyone on HN has just woken from a 20 year coma.


School shootings are extremely rare. If you want to protect kids you will be much more effective if you work on pedestrian safety, or anything related to driving at all really.


None of what you said is true. The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords was renamed the Supreme Court and moved to a different building (but otherwise essentially unchanged) in 2005 under Tony Blair's Labour government.


No, that's not accurate. The Supreme Court of the UK was established in 2009 so I was off by a year. That would have been under Gordon Brown.


There is a huge difference in the quality of workers in fast food. Some people are slow. They are inefficient. They let things burn, they count change slowly, they are clumsy. They can't multi-task.

It is cognitively simple for you, because you aren't thick. But for people of well-below average intelligence, flipping burgers and doing something else at the time is just not possible.


This is incredibly ignorant. The Church didn't kill anyone for being good at art, and in fact did more for the development of fine art than any other institution in human history.


So if someone was a good pagan artist, the church was cool with that?


Looking at religious art and thinking religion destroyed/hampered art is a hot take honestly.

If anything the opposite argument would be that without relgion art has devolved has more merit than this.


As I understand it, being an artist was a trade. If there were no customers asking for pagan art, there would have been no pagan art.


Customers were not allowed to ask for pagan art, on penalty of death for large portions of the time we are talking about.


Owning art that was too lifelike was also a death sentence.

Anything that detracted from the grandour of the church was evidence of satanism. So, if you got a painting that looks better then what's on display in church, you were gonna get executed eventually.


Yes, hence there being a lot of obviously pagan art at the Vatican.


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