Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the empirical fact that lobbying is cheap is at odds with your apparent assumptions about the value companies gain from lobbying. Does that fact make you rethink your notion of what lobbying actually entails?

Lobbying is cheap because it’s just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers. It’s helping them identify where the pre-existing political fault lines are and arming them with ammo for fights that will play out according to existing ideological positions. “K Street lobbyists” don’t even bill at the rates you see for corporate lawyers. $3 million per six months is what a company like Anthropic might burn in a single B2B lawsuit.

View on HN

> just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers

And how does one get the access to do that?

You can just call them up or email them and schedule a meeting.

If it's just making powerpoint presentations why do AI companies whose whole raison d'etre is that they can make these powerpoints in seconds for pennies spend millions on lobbying instead? Lobbying is cheap because it identifies the relatively small number of leverage points it takes to send society down one track instead of another and targets the spending there. Buy the right guy dinner and you get what you want just the same as if you'd spent billions on ads to convince millions of people to vote for the guy who's gonna do what you want.

> If it's just making powerpoint presentations why do AI companies whose whole raison d'etre is that they can make these powerpoints in seconds for pennies spend millions on lobbying instead?

Because you need meat puppets to identify what arguments are going to be compelling to which politicians, and go into an office and spoon feed it to the staffers.

> Lobbying is cheap because it identifies the relatively small number of leverage points it takes to send society down one track instead of another and targets the spending there. Buy the right guy dinner and you get what you want just the same as if you'd spent billions on ads to convince millions of people to vote for the guy who's gonna do what you want.

If that were true, then the price of doing that would get bid up. It's extremely rare that you have an issue where there's not people with deep pockets on both sides of the issue.

> Lobbying is cheap because it’s just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers.

No. It is not. For starters, ask anybody who works at a DC restaurant or sporting venue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com