I don't think this will have the effect that the administration thinks it will.
People aren't ignoring all of the things they have been up to. They're keeping track, regardless of the data that the government puts out.
Still, the administration thinks people will just forget. In their minds, it will all simmer down, and since they now control the government, they can avoid consequences from voters and from the courts.
The problem is, history shows that there are worse things for those who abuse human rights than losing elections or facing trial. It would be better for them - and the country - if they kept the data open, disciplined the officers who can't abide by basic professional standards, and re-evaluated their approach.
We’ll see. Depends on the primaries. Institutional dems have a pitiful track record on holding people accountable. I expect we’ll see a lot of reaching across the isle and ‘moving forwards, not dwelling on the past’.
It'd be interesting to know how much the Intelligence as a Service angle serves as a value-add in the minds of Google's executives.
You can get decent open-weight models now. That's not difficult. The difficulty is 1) running them and 2) compliance.
My company runs Claude on GCP's Vertex AI solution. We're in the US healthcare IT space, so the models need to be from somewhere that American healthcare agencies and companies have traditionally been okay with sourcing code from - which means the US, Canada, and maybe Europe. The stuff that handles PHI/PII must be in the US. The expense of hosting is more of a PITA than most customers want to go through this early in the technology's lifecycle, and intelligence gains are simply a matter of degree for most business tasks.
In theory, we could find some open-weight model (likely from China) for our development agentic work and host it anywhere you can host AI models. We don't, though, and I think Google, OpenAI/Microsoft, and Anthropic see that as the core of their business.
We're almost five years into the whole GenAI thing and we're still relying on these guys to spoonfeed us incremental updates.
It's time for them to start focusing on open-weight models and efficiency. Otherwise there's just a layer of marketing hype and "will it do this?" that has to be cut through for evaluation of each and every release cycle.
Models are getting easier and easier to create. The money, if there's any here, is in the harness the user interfaces with, and the data centers running them.
There's plenty of value to be generated with all of these other applications of computer hardware, value that could be generated much sooner than the horizon over which GenAI expects to see its first dollar of profit.
I've been curious to see what happens with all of this. I think a lot of people have been caught in a perpetual upgrade cycle they probably didn't need to be in but were out of decades old habits. The lack of hardware may start to change habits and behaviors to where the masses begin to ignore upgrade cycles. I'm already doing this myself.
Same here. I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas on a Lenovo T570 running Bazzite Linux.
It's playable. Framerates are good unless you dump a bunch of bullets at something while in VATS. No more buggy than it was on Windows when I was playing it back in university, which is saying something for a Bethesda engine game.
I paid for the game and hardware years ago. It's not streamer slop or what all of the hip young people are into, but the story's good and I like unwinding with it.
Honestly, it would have been one of the titles I would have played on a Steam Deck.
Hopefully more people look into the classics. We've hit a point of diminishing returns with things like framerate and resolution at living room/computer desk distances. VR, while cool, is expensive and often requires a dedicated area.
I wonder if certain checks should be put in place to prevent a few companies from hoarding a valuable and limited resource many other industries rely on.
Well in relative terms that hardly matters for consoles due to obvious reasons.
Developers of AAA games for PC can only (or are willing to) do so much to make it run acceptably on what’s a very underpowered PC compared to their target market.
I mean, what are you suggesting “someone” should do about it? The companies can spend their money however they want, and if they want to hire a bunch of product people from YC startups nobody can stop them.
I’m just surprised they need this many of them. What do they do all day? And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?
A lot of the AI game is still integrations and getting entrenched in processes. It has the double whammy that you get to train on their data (not talking about ALL enterprise contracts - but cursor pretty explicitly has this business model. So I'd imagine some enterprise contracts have this.)
I’m just surprised that the people actually keeping the business operating and the tokens flowing don’t resent these product people for sitting around all day coming up with ideas for the same TC package as the people putting out ops fires and bringing new capacity online all day every day. I feel like the actual engineers are probably getting shortchanged.
And now we've overcorrected and have people dying from a lack of government care.
It was indeed meant to sound "cool and fun". It was supposed to be a memorable slogan. That's why Reagan used it. Then people made it into a battle cry for letting the hyper-wealthy dismantle regulations that were often written in blood, or for explaining why we need to let people go into bankruptcy from medical bills.
Having some centralized/public ownership of some enterprises doesn't necessarily mean that the government is going to purge people or starve tens of millions.
Good thing there's a strong corporate governance model at SpaceX where the c-suite is fully accountable to an independent board of directors, who could use their majority voting power to remove that c-suite at will.
Could you imagine the abuse of power that could happen if one person held over 50% of the voting power at such a company?
Are super shares like Zuckerberg's and Musk a new thing? Genuinely curious if they're a recent invention or something that's quietly happened for a while because it seems like a large inversion of the deal of going public, lose some control of the company in exchange for a large amount of cash but these nonvoting/supervoting share splits seem to completely upend what I understood to be part of the deal for access to the stock market.
The New York Times Company operates under a dual-class stock structure where the Ochs-Sulzberger family holds roughly 95% of Class B shares. This family control allows them to elect 70% of the company's Board of Directors.
Copied from google's response to "new york times governance"
Google's AI also says that the NYT has had that structure since 1957.
Ford has something similar from the 1930s. (Dodge did too until it was bought.) Raylon (synthetic textiles) did it in the 1920s and the company behind Jack Daniels did it right after Prohibition.
Google says that the NYSE banned dual-class between 1926 and 1986; I don't know how to reconcile that with Ford.
A news org I see a valid reason for keeping two classes of stock I guess. It feels slimy elsewhere without that some editorial independence justification.
Ford has them. What it has meant for Ford-- and will probably mean for Facebook-- is that Zuck's heirs will control the company, for better or for worse.
The common justification for this is that for a media company (NYT) you want a person or family to take responsibility for the editorial content, not a pure profit seeker. Facebook has it both ways and typically denies it has editorial control.
IMO, the flaw of markets is that they are short sighted. Sometimes this allows states to outmaneuver them with a longer view. Current exhibit A: China. Historically state intervention has been worse in the long run. But who knows. If we went into a depression a lot of people may think state intervention is a better system, as many admired the USSR during the Great Depression.
Don't worry, he will try to change the law before he passes this mortal coil. This is a person that has open disdain for the law and thinks he should be emperor of humanity.
The USSR's main problem was not that it was socialist or communist, but that it was Russian. Russia is run by people who are adept at coopting revolutionary movements into a corrupt, authoritarian core. When left-wing libertarians say "true Socialism has never been tried", this is (along with China) what they are referring to.
The theoretical arguments against socialism (or, more specifically, centrally planned state production) given by Hayek is that pricing is information and markets are computers on that information, ergo changing the information gives you a bad result. This certainly applied to the kinds of production the Soviet Union loved to engage in, but there's no particular reason why it can't apply to capitalist enterprise as well. I mean, Facebook's headcount or market cap alone is larger than some actual nation-states' population or GDP.
Just like how the USSR was nominally socialist but practically engaged in exactly the same state-controlled mode of production as feudalism, today's corporate entities are nominally capitalist but practically feudalist. The medieval historians in the room would probably balk at me using the word "feudalist" to describe either, so to be clear, what I mean is "an economic system in which the majority of profit goes to landowners / platform owners / the state / etc". In this economic mode, companies can warp markets to their whims in exactly the same way Congress can.
Except, Congress is democratically controlled. Joint-stock corporations are inherently oligarchial in structure: control of the company is assigned based on how many shares you can afford to buy, so the company answers to the amount of money that has capitalized it, and not any other concern[0]. The "innovation" in Facebook's IPO was to go from internal oligarchy to internal autocracy - to install Mark Zuckerberg as God-Emperor of Facebook and largely depose the shareholder class that normally runs publicly-traded entities.
You'd think markets would have priced in this risk, but Facebook IPO'd at the peak of its hype and was able to get away with this. The funny thing about Hayek's distributed market computer is that it does not actually reach perfectly efficient price computation. If it did, you could crack RSA keys by placing a sufficient number of suitably complex options trades. Markets can put a bounty on fixing incorrect pricing information, but they can also just refuse to accept corrected pricing. Everyone rushing into Facebook stock counteracted the few people concerned about the ridiculously autocratic governance structure. And now that it's obvious that such a thing was a problem, it's too late to challenge it, because now Facebook has platform holder money. Zuckerberg can bribe the shareholders to not care about their lack of control.
The history of state intervention is very fraught, but there's one subset of interventions that has a better track record than most: those intended to stymie autocrats of trade. The state cannot correctly set prices better than a market can, but it absolutely can prevent other state-like entities from doing the same thing. Likewise, it would behoove the world's competition law and securities regulators to investigate and regulate the use of dual-class shares to retain control over companies you do not own.
Unfortunately, the current administration is unlikely to do anything about this.
Actually, to make matters worse, Texas is deliberately trying to pour gasoline on the problem by disenfranchising minority shareholders. I believe this was done specifically to give Elon Musk even more control over SpaceX, because Delaware made the mistake of actually entertaining a shareholder lawsuit over Musk's pay packet. If Facebook was an autocracy that bribed its shareholders into compliance, then SpaceX is an autocracy that says, "Fuck you, pay me". If there's one thing that gives me hope, it's that the markets are rightfully rejecting this obvious attempt at offloading Musk's toxic junk onto retail. But this is mainly because Elon failed to generate suitable hype to get the market to buy into his trash, not because markets are actually good at pricing in this specific kind of risk.
[0] In fact, this is part of why you see companies go to great lengths to fight unions, even when negotiating with a union would be cheaper. The shareholder class considers democratic control (one worker, one vote) to be an existential threat.
I would not put empaphis on some sort of ethnological mythos to why the USSR was like it was. It is a weak argument.
> Zuckerberg can bribe the shareholders to not care about their lack of control.
Monarchies had to please the aristocracy, etc.
I would say that "democracy" happens on party level not voter level. Party members are way more into the details than even the most engaged voters. You need to be at the meetings to know who is pushing what. It is all in subtle things. Most people I speak to have the most naive view on how parties work internally. Like it is a person. Goomba fallacy..
And party members more understand power hierarchy. All the drama is about that internally. Commité of whatever doing whatever having a say in whatever and delegate count of whatever county level org. to distict congress org. etc.
I think a big problem is that far too few people are engaged in politics nowadays. Active party members are aware of power structures and how they work.
In American politics at least, there is a phenomenon of political issues that happen to have high popular support but also high political opposition. I call these "antipartisan" issues; and one interesting feature of these antipartisan issues is that they tend to get politically disengaged people to actually show up and lobby their representatives like nothing else.
Think things like right-to-repair, or data centers. A lot of people want right-to-repair, but a lot of politicians think IP law is untouchable and don't want to burn political capital on a battle they know they will lose when they can just sop up donor money to strike down or water down R2R bills. Same with data centers: they're unpopular with the electorate but politicians will do the scummiest tricks in the book to try and get a data center built. Eventually these kinds of issues do get some political wins, but they're swimming uphill both ways.
The problem isn't that democracy does not happen anymore, it's that our democratically elected representatives are unwilling to yield to democracy when the people wish to overrule them. The point of representative democracy is that the representative is supposed to do things in my best interest even if I don't particularly understand all the nuts and bolts. But a lot of representatives just think they got elected king and that my voice doesn't matter the moment I exit the polling place. This is, in effect, a deliberate attempt to disengage voters.
There's an old political cartoon from the post-Brexit era that goes something like, "These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane"? The obvious joke being that no, randos are not qualified to fly the plane. But at the same time, the people who bought tickets are the ones who ultimately deciding where to fly. If the pilot said, "I know you bought a ticket for Miami, but I don't like Florida weather, so we're flying to Houston", you'd be right to be pissed off. The fact that you don't know how to fly the plane is not a moral vindication of the pilot's decision to override your travel decisions. Or, in this case, the fact that party leaders can out-organize their members does not mean they should overrule them.
As for the USSR, I had written a whole explainer on the French Revolution and how it neatly mirrored the Russian one before I realized it was distracting from my main point. It's easier to say "Russia is good at resisting change and coopting economic systems".
But if you want a stronger argument: The general pattern is that revolutions that intend to depose the ruling class of a country run the risk of turning on themselves. The infighting proceeds to burn through and kill all the true believers, leaving a hollow shell of people who played the power game well enough to survive. Thermidor[0] comes, and a coalition of surviving old guard and revolutionaries enjoy the spoils of a system whose dead wood just got killed off. And Russia did this twice: first, the Bolsheviks turned Communism into a dictatorship; second, the oligarchs turned "liberal" capitalism into an aristocracy. Inferring anything about the properties of the underlying economic system from how it was coopted by Russia is useless.
[0] The French Revolutionary Calendar month that covers late July through early August. Since nobody uses that calendar anymore, "Thermidor" generally means "the moment when the revolution is coopted".
> our democratically elected representatives are unwilling to yield to democracy when the people wish to overrule them.
Yeah this is a big problem. Essentially I feel there is to few "the child in Emporors new clothes" that can call out obvious BS.
I.e. somewhat emotional members that don't know the unspoken rules.
> But if you want a stronger argument: The general pattern is that revolutions that intend to depose the ruling class of a country run the risk of turning on themselves.
Sure. You could generalize to violent brutes should not run things if you want a nice society and they are let loose in bloody revolutions.
Some media companies had them before the 1980s. New York Times issued dual class in 1969 so that the owning family maintained editorial control.
Berkshire Hathaway is possibly the most famous from the 80s/90s. The class A shares are significantly more expensive and proportionately even more powerful than the class B shares. The lower price version was important back when physical exchanges didn’t support fractional shares as they do today.
Berkshires share classes are different in that A is exactly ten B shares and anyone can convert A to B and hold them. The dual share classes that are bad separate control from ownership.
The BRK A and B are slightly different in that A is worth 1500 B but B only has 1/10000 of a vote so it IS a somewhat lopsided value vs voting share but not as bad as the 0 vote SPCX shares that just got dumped on the market.
Your ratios are way off. Price ratio is 1:1500 for A to B, while voting power ration is 1:10000. Each A share is 6.67x more powerful than 1500 x B shares.
They were a thing in the previous 20's and the exchanges banned them in like the 40's (you could still have a dual-class corporate structure, you just wouldn't be listed on eg the NYSE), because investors thought that was some bullshit to have someone control a company while owning only a tiny slice of it.
> Kreuger's financial empire has been described by one biographer as a Ponzi scheme... Another biographer called Kreuger a "genius and swindler", and John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that he was the "Leonardo of larcenists".
Google is also pretty new in the terms I was talking about only slightly older than Facebook. I mean going back to the 80s/90s or earlier, pre current FAANG at least.
Interestingly enough, strong corporate governance and independent directors do not produce better returns. This is a central point in Eric Rees's book Incorruptible.
I'll need to read that, but if my anecdotal experience is any indication, there aren't that many "independent" boards of directors. Ultimately you do find some sort of connection between board members and the c-suite of many companies. In some cases (Meta) the CEO is the chairman. Marc Andreesen is also on Meta's board despite being an early investor and mentor to Zuckerberg. Seems like an explicit conflict of interest, no?
Is it abuse of power or company success? Wouldn’t shareholders vote out any crazy successful ideas Elon had? Likely bankrupting companies at their early stages?
That's why companies usually don't have a bunch of competing owners from the start. You do your big risky moves early on when you have the novel vision and a big blank check from a VC. Public stockholders aren't going to be as risk tolerant because the ROI is never going to be as high as what the early VC would get. Going public is growing up, you can't do the fun risky stuff you did when you were a young startup with more cash than sense. When you do want to do something fun as a public company, you have to do it carefully because you're dealing with other people's money now.
I just realized that dictatorship is in a way the same thing. Look at Singapore. It is super successful because of "right" dictatorship. Libya was somewhat a good example with their insane water infrastructure and social programs.
The thing is, you don't really need to have dictatorship to get those things.
You could just, I don't know, fund infrastructure and social programs without developing cults of personality around leaders or letting them torture opponents to death.
No one ever votes out the guy running the ring toss at the carnival either. What if your man only plays rigged games so he can resist anyone looking at the books or having a voice?
People aren't ignoring all of the things they have been up to. They're keeping track, regardless of the data that the government puts out.
Still, the administration thinks people will just forget. In their minds, it will all simmer down, and since they now control the government, they can avoid consequences from voters and from the courts.
The problem is, history shows that there are worse things for those who abuse human rights than losing elections or facing trial. It would be better for them - and the country - if they kept the data open, disciplined the officers who can't abide by basic professional standards, and re-evaluated their approach.
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