Sure, monopolies are great for the C-suite, but they turn out to be really bad for the end users and customers, the real losers when there is no competition.
Get in loser, we're going for a monopoly! It's all fun and games until you're locked in and enshitification sets in. I would sooner go without than get fooled again.
Please say something intelligent about a link when you drop it. No one can tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
I did watch the video of him and I can confirm (so no one else wastes their time) he does not address why monopolies are great for everyone other than the CEO. But he does go into depth about why women should not wear Hillary Clinton style pantsuits when pitching ideas to him. Noted.
I am not sure if the video is the same as the article, but there is no way I am going to pay a penny to hear what Theil has to say. Honestly, after I heard him rambling about the anti-christ crap he spews I would pay for him to stop talking.
Monetary incentives are the foundations of Capitalism. There are only two ways that ethics might get in the way of their profits.
The first is government regulation. We saw lots of deregulation of oversight over the ten years before the 2008 financial crisis. None of the ethically compromised C-suite folks went to jail for their behavior because it was suddenly not a crime. Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations. This is what we get when the government is comprised of or controlled by capitalists. It's called fascism.
The second is public boycott or revolt. Could the new Target CEO be the result of the recent boycott? Same with Starbucks? Has anyone actually bought a Tesla in the past year? The big tech folks are bending over backwards to hide the fact that they have no real AI business model, making it a gigantic bubble that is about to burst. There is a national frenzy that no one is reporting on people ditching their subscriptions. We are going to see affordability get worse very quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens as more and more people start tightening their purse strings, whether by choice or necessity.
> Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations.
Indeed. Let us quote the Dune books (since they're trending, and for good reason!):
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.-Law and Governance (The Spacing Guild)"
And if you would let me indulge one more:
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class: whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
-Politics as Repeat Phenomenon (Bene Gesserit Training Manual)"
For a lot of us, work is not our life. Turns out that most people really want a paid vacation. Smart Capitalists know that it's easier to extract value from workers with higher morale.
If you would rather trade your paid vacation for an extra week of pay, I am sure you and your boss can work it out. Companies pay out unused vacation all the time. Just don't ruin it for the rest of us!
Based on the data sources and the methodology, it looks about as accurate as you could get. They link to their methodology and technical documentation from that site. Even if some resourceful young people you know can get by on less, in general people should not have to live in abject poverty while working a full time job -- I would consider that to be a "Dying Wage".
Looks like the Moltbook stunt really backfired. CyberInsider reports that OpenClaw is distributing tons of MacOS malware. This is not good publicity for them.
We can see that the two-party democracy in the United States has been one of the primary power tools of the 1%. They buy politicians from both parties and then sit back and laugh on their yachts while everyone else goes red in the face, outraged, arguing, and distracted. We are indeed the suckers yet again, but maybe, just maybe this time will be different?
So your argument to the valid narrative of gross unfairness and people being above the law is to look the other way because you are afraid of being called a "socialist"? Holding criminals accountable for bad and reckless behavior is not socialism by any definition of the word.
It's not my solution, I'm not in charge of the SEC! I'm broadly supportive of anti-inequality measures against the financial industry. It's just that if you say that the peanut gallery will call it socialist.
I would however like people to be a bit more specific about what they think the crime was, who specifically committed what, and whether it was actually illegal at the time. It's a word people love to throw around. It's not actually illegal to make poor business decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_Quinn for example, while his misconduct cost the collapse of AIB, the thing he was actually jailed for was failing to comply with court orders.
Anger also comes from many retirees whose retirement savings tanked. Everyday people lost a lot of money, many their homes, and no one bailed them out. It appears to many that those responsible were above the law. It's the same reason people are furious about the Epstein Files, where the only person in jail for what happened is a woman. We see our neighbors dragged out of their houses or cars without a warrant because they don't look "white" and may have committed the misdemeanor of not having proper documentation. And yet, not a single CEO was held accountable for far worse crimes committed -- in fact, they kept their bonuses! These people recklessly inflicted a huge amount of pain on the public, through lost investments, millions of people losing their homes, most young people not being able to buy homes, and creating an even greater divide between the 1% and the rest of us. It is truly weird to read comments that seem to defend them.
The key hurdle for AI to leap is establishing trust with users. No one trusts the big players (for good reason) and it is causing serious anxiety among the investors. It seems Claude acknowledges this and is looking to make trust a critical part of their marketing messaging by saying no ads or product placement. The problem is that serving ads is only one facet of trust. There are trust issues around privacy, intellectual property, transparency, training data, security, accuracy, and simply "being evil" that Claude's marketing doesn't acknowledge or address. Trust, on the scale they need, is going to be very hard for any of them to establish, if not impossible.
That still doesn't mean much unless you're doing your own training or getting the weights from a trusted source, and neither of those mean much without knowing something about the data being trained on.
If someone is trying to influence your results, running the inference on your own infrastructure prevents some attack vectors but not some of the more plausible and worrying ones.
I don't think people are concerned about the models' math being biased/tainted (people know of it but that largely doesn't factor into the "security concerns" that people cite.) Typically, it's about how do we know that our data is not going to be seen by a 3rd party. That's what I'm speaking to. Running on your own infra, you can guarantee there are no phone-homes.
What do you mean? Google is roughly the most trusted organization in the world by revealed preference. The 800(?) million ChatGPT users – I have a hard time reading that as a trust problem.
Usage metrics don't reveal preference in all cases. The fact these companies are sketchy/untrustworthy is practically a meme, including among non-tech people. Their services are widely relied upon, but they enjoy very little subjective good will
Get in loser, we're going for a monopoly! It's all fun and games until you're locked in and enshitification sets in. I would sooner go without than get fooled again.
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