throwaway5752

The US is doing much, much worse. This is no compliment to China. The US

* murdered a political leader the were negotiating with in Iran after using the military to kidnap the leader of Venezuela.

* is credibly threatening military allies in Greenland, countries with which it has mutual protection treaties and is credibly threatening, without casus belli, to militarily invade another weaker neighbor, Cuba.

* spent months threatening to invade Canada. This wasn't trolling, it is forgotten with their strategy of constant chaos, but they really tried and Canada has made alliances with other countries as a result

* is actively murdering thousands of people in Haiti via a Republican allied private military contractor

* is actively subverting domestic elections

* is building and filling concentration camps with people who have committed no other crime than illegal residency, without due process, and giving them substandard care, leading to many deaths in custody.

* has masked secret police detaining people without due process and deporting them to foreign prison camps, frequently in violation of judicial orders

* has masked secret police arresting citizen because of their nationality and because they are not carrying "their papers"

* is using the power of government to force mergers and ownership changes of corporations to political allies

* is using the power of the government to hide an embarrassing a criminal conspiracy involving leadership in the country, in violation of the US Constitution, since it was ordered by Congress.

* has completely disregarded conflict of interest laws which the leader of the country is using to enrich himself and his family at completely unprecedented levels in US history.

I could go on, but China is a more ethical superpower by a lot of measures and that is a very painful conclusion to state.

This is not even touching on the subject of competency.

The internationally accepted US hegemony and the privileged role of the US dollar was the result of almost a century of goodwill. It is now gone, and then some. The next two decades will not be pleasant for regular Americans who have grown accustomed to, and frankly taken for granted, the level of privilege they had.

edit: and speak of the devil, and competency: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/what-happens-w... just made it to the top of the front page. Even with everything I wrote above, I had neglected to include that the US lies about embarrassing economic data now due to political intererence.

edit 2: this didn't even make the front page and would have been the biggest scandal in modern American history: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-deal-fee-trump-administratio... "Trump Administration Set to Receive $10 Billion Fee for Brokering TikTok Deal"

Conspiracy theories aren't very productive. But the one thing that continues to bother me is how there is no great explanation for why TSLA is still worth much. It's a shrinking car company that is failing to execute at FSD and says it's going to make humanoid robots instead of cars.

There is no good reason TSLA should be valued any more than 10% of its current valuation, and even that would be rich. There is a fine argument it should be worth 3-4% of what it currently is.

It is almost like there's a connection between PayPal, Elon Musks fortunes, and crypto.

I still wonder who Satoshi really was. I wonder how Microstrategy remains solvent.

I agree. For whatever reason, whether it is a change in community sentiment or something else, I get downvotes talking about this. I can't think of a more useless thing to care about. Even if I cared, I couldn't think of a better way to spend accrued social capital.

The hold that scumbags - influencers, political operatives, narcissists with Messiah complexes - have taken over young men, particularly those inclined to go into the software field, is alarming.

Various former founding members of PayPal, leaders of the companies they've founded subsequently, member of A16Z and some opportunists and hangers on to these wealthier individuals who are beneath the dignity of mentioning separately - they have lost their moral and ethical moorings in the course of accumulating massive wealth and they are corrupting others in doing it.

Even modest startup incubators are be obsequious to the wealth and power of these people in the field and decided that money is more important than morality. Or at the very least there is no pretense of it now.

Of course it is Erik Prince's company.

to clarify: Erik Prince founded Blackwater, of the Nisour Square Massacre infamy in the GW Bush administration. He is deeply tied to Republican politics, mercenary work, and particularly the Trump administration. He is IPOing an autonomous lethal drone company, Swarmer, and his other company, Vectrus, is behind the events of this article.

They aren't specious, though. There's ample public record evidence. You can't rebut them because they are part of the historical record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joV-9FFoA3Q is the "Sigg Heil" video. Anyone can see with their own eyes.

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/27/nx-s1-5276084/elon-musk-germa... is where Musk says, "Frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their parents, their great-grandparents." - referring the Holocaust, just 80 years ago, in which 13 million people were systematically rounded up, placed in concentration campls, and mass murdered by the government, including 6 million Jewish people.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/16/elon-musk... "You have said the actual truth"

Regarding Twitter / X, after he took over:

According to data provided by the research company Memetica to The New York Times, in the past month, Elon Musk's platform featured 46,000 posts with the hashtag #HitlerWasRight, compared to an average of less than 5,000 posts per month in previous months (an increase of 820%). Posts with the hashtags #DeathtotheJews or #DeathtoJews appeared 51,000 times in the last month, marking a surge of 2,450%.

This is the guy claiming to try to make a trustworthy foundational model. There are deeper reasons for Grok's market share problems than the founding team or coding capability. You can't talk about this event and ignore it. He's trying to take Space X public and it's only going to get worse. His personal brand is dragging down his companies, as far as I can tell Tesla has lost 25-50% of their EV market share in Europe in the past 2 years? The problem is not just BYD.

This ignores his publicly acknowledged drug use that has led to tension with his boards of directors https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e...

I don't know. Elon Musk personally founded xAI and these were his hand selected cofounders.

The grandparent comment is from someone that has been on this site almost since the beginning. Far longer than you. They might have insights about the community that you do not.

Musk

* gave a Nazi Sigg Heil salute (twice) at a political even, on video. Famously.

* has consistently supported a German political party that re-uses Nazi slogans, minimizes or outright denies the Holocaust, minimizes the criminality of the SS

* frequently and consistently upvotes posts on X echoing white supremacist and Nazi ideology on his social media site

* owns the most popular site for neo-Nazis

To say "is not backed up by any kind of connection to reality" is actually verifiably false. I can't say anything about the other words, but there is evidence for miles that he is sympathetic to Nazi ideology.

And this is directly relevant here. It can't be ignored when you are talking about his business, or you have an elephant in the room. His personal flaws and meglomaniacal executive style are a package deal.

That's not really enough, is it? I didn't say we shouldn't have proof of identity.

First, do we not have proof of identity? How often should we have proof of idenity? How many cases of fraud are there per year? How large is the problem?

Second, who should issue a different proof of identity? How much should it cost? Should the requirements be left to states or the federal government?

Third, who would administer this system. Would it be public or private, or left to states? What criminal and civil law should exist for misusing this law for witholding the right to vote on this basis? Would you trust a non-Republican leadership if DHS still was the agency verifying identity documents and storing soft-copies of them?

What you want isn't unreasonable, but you leave out so many details that your reasonable statement can be misused for ill intent and denying people their right to vote.

A fair follow up question for me to you might be "how do you feel about the additional requirements for married women to get reissued vital documents when they have changed their birth name to their husband's last name in the SAVE act?" When concerns like these aren't addressed in massive changes to voting laws, it makes lots of people uncomfortable that the changes aren't made in good faith.

As the article notes, the Swiss do both. The normal system is a paper ballot based system. This was for secure e-voting for those unable to use paper ballots.

The separate question, of why people are obsessed with it - implicitly in the United States - is a separate question.

sonofhans - to reply to your follow up here, I mostly agree with you. But I would soften it to say it is a tool that can be used for good or bad ends, and I felt the Swiss were using it more towards good ends. But I agreed that the ability to misuse it is intrinsic.

My dire warning is in fact secondary to the climate changes, which are much worse and are already causing regional famines and human migration in the Levant and East African.

People do not appreciate how fragile modern life that we've become accustomed to can be. A few famines, a few supply chain breakdowns, the wrong conflict escalations - together at the wrong time could effectively end homo sapiens as an advanced intelligent species. Our big break was easily accessibly surface hydrocarbons, which we have mostly burned through. That enabled advanced materials science, electrical engineering, metallurgy that all build upon each other. As the species has gotten larger, it allowed greater specialization. If we have a massive drawdown in population as the result of a self-inflicted climate crisis, there is a nontrivial possibility we we never recover to current levels of advancement.

"CO2 levels are likely to be lower by the end of the century"

This is not well supported by any evidence that I'm aware of.

These are scientific papers, they couch things in conservative wording. The fact that these papers exist ought to alarm you, and CO2 levels.

Atmosphere CO2 concentration is accelerating, and enter areas of uncontrolled feedback loops

CO2 levels are detectably weakening human bone and making you more anxious at current levels: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11869-026-01918-5 (look at the CO2 level over time image for a sense of perspective)

CO2 levels are increasing your risk of diabetes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...?

They are not slowly increasing, they are hockey sticking. The worst case is coming to pass. People are addicted to optimism here. It is unfounded - there is one action and it is to reduce CO2 emissions drastically at the expense of economic growth or we will destroy the world as we know it.

It cannot be overstated how dire the situation is.

The only outcome is advanced human civilization will go extinct, with the carrying capacity of the world to support enough humans to specialize. Maybe that's the AI rush and drive to distract everyone with divisive presidents and pointless wars.

Does this model autonomously kill people without human approval or perform domestic surveillance of US citizens?

The US never atoned for Henry Ford, Charle Lindberg, and other Nazi loving capitalists.

They attempted a coup on FDR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

It has been mostly whitewashed in favor of "the greatest generation" and the WW2 hero narrative.

Restricting foreign scientists here is yet another way we are paying for this whitewashing and romanticizing of US exceptionalism today.

It did in Germany.

The administration has done nothing but be loudly and proudly racist and ant-science.

It mades all the sense in the world. It is terrible, but it makes sense.

They have brought incalculable shame and future suffering on the US.

Sam Altman has a well deserved reputation which he reinforced whenever he's given the opportunity to do so.

Help me understand the relatively regulatory frameworks around each activity.

Prediction markets exist to bypass gambling restrictions and monetize insider trading. It isn't a problem, it is their raison d'etre.

You are correct. Maybe this is just a very dumb move Paramount and those funding this acquisition.

Now they can control millennial and younger minds by controlling what CNN broadcasts.

Trust is what we've always had for dealing with this. It is an incredible force multiplier for intellectual capacity.

We've just forgotten it. This doesn't require a technical solution, it just requires operating in a trustworthy manner and only extending your web of trust in your platforms to trustworthy entities.

Price matching across vendors does not matter if you trust one vendor. You can just go with "order from Costco" and avoid a complicated technical problem.

So much of what we are doing now is rediscovering trust, integrity, and ethics. Think about Meta and the challenges they would have to being a foundational model provider in light of that analysis, for example.

I think I agree with you in general, just not in this specific case. There is nothing that changed this year with respect to food.

And this administration rolled back existing standards to improve school lunch nutrition and their nutrition policy changes have not been science based, so they demonstrably don't care about the issue.

It isn't "so deadly", it's just unhealthy, and it's made worse by culture and business encouraging excessive consumption and serving sizes.

Ultraprocessed foods aren't great, but it's yet another manufactured crisis to serve as a distraction from the Epstein files scandal and coverup, like the attack Iran will be next Thursday. What a horrible time.

That is a bad idea. Hydrocarbon polymers like PEX, ferrous alloys, and concrete would be much more practical.

"causal way" is the key part.

I did list facts. And I agree with your causal analysis. I simply disagree with your interpretation of the degree to which the contributing factors we responsible. This is not my words as someone on the internet, this is the NTSB report's contributing factors.

If a shipping company immediately changed policy to force drivers to work 18 hours a day and 7 days a week, then it would be a pretty poor analysis to chalk all the resulting accidents up to driver error. Driver error would be the actual cause, the negligent policy change would be a proximate cause.

I respect your expertise in the area as a pilot but I will stand by what I have said. And I respectfully have said all I have to say on the matter.

It was a system in a critical state and the freeze and well telegraphed upcoming layoffs led to a controller covering two roles and work done by supporting staff. This pushed the system over the edge.

Then they tried to baselessly blame DEI, then they tried to shift blame to the controller.

The collision was January 29. On Jan 20, a hiring freeze was hastily rolled out including the FAA. They were in the process of laying off staff, which was finalized in February with 400 probationary staff. These were largely rolled back that year after the impact to the civil aviation system, including substantially contributing to the deaths of these 67 people. The NIST report was produced under pressure. I stand by what I wrote. They threw an overloaded system into chaos with little care for the consequences and this was one of the results.

DOGE was working hand in hand with then new administration the entire time.

"need many years to become stable again"

People are selfish. "Life will be much harder, and the problem will never be fixable within the rest of your life or your childrens' lives"