The first key feature of the Panopticon is that the guards can observe the inmate at all times and he can't hide.
The second key feature is that the inmate can't observe the guards. He can't know who they are and can't even know if they're paying attention to him or not.
Yes, an here in lies the hypocrisy of our times where tech titans can have their information removed from public data sources (anyone remember the guy tracking Musk's plane?) while amassing staggering quantities of data about everyone else. Then have the gall to call for a "compromise" on their collection and selling of this data and our privacy.
Working a McJob to make some CEO and their investors rich is not a virtue. The Protestant work ethic really is a toxic ideology that can't die soon enough. It's the very basis of exploitation.
When you choose to not work as an able-bodied person you're really insisting that your community should be forced to give you resources while you contribute nothing.
Any collectivist commune would kick you out for this.
It's also interesting you use the McJob angle, because when you consider the price of a Big Mac, labor is by far the largest contributor of cost, not profit.
A Big Mac's cost is 30% labor, 25% ingredients and only 5% net profit. The remainder is operating costs. Seems like a pretty good deal for the people making the Big Mac, they're getting 6x more than the franchisee gets.
Good. Over the past few years, VCs have proven that they’re warmongering psychopaths. Hopefully China puts every last one of the Palantir/Flock/Anduril class out of business.
Not that I'm anti-China, but their companies would have no qualms selling surveillance tech to your local gov too if they could. I'm sure Palantir, Flock, and other US companies would sell to China too if they could.
This is true, but there is another foreign country that can send people to your door. What's to stop China from eventually buying that type of influence over our govt officials?
If our govt officials are willing to betray their citizens for money to China, what’s the point of preferring to give them power over us instead of giving it to China?
Given the nations that have actually bought influence over our government officials, China would be an upgrade. I doubt the president needs another decked out 747 though.
There are no entities on earth I trust less than US corporations and the US government (well, Israel but you’d have to literally be suicidal to willing use Israeli tech). I’ll happily give China my data. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve proven themselves to be a force for good, or at least neutral.
As a US citizen I have domicile over the data and a legal system that has some claws. We tend to enforce and celebrate IP whereas China openly scoffs at its premise.
Frankly I don’t trust any of them. Certainly not Anthropic after they refused to delete my Cowork session. Certainly not OpenAI with their duplicity. I’m a Google workspace subscriber so I use Gemini, but only with logging disabled and for throwaway searches.
I will go at the pace that hardware I control lets me. That happens to be pretty damn slow ATM… waiting for 45 minutes for my 4090 to pp 30k tokens wasn’t much fun the other day, but it got the job done. If speed were a priority I’d propose be renting time on vast.ai or something.
So do many other CEOs and it’s near impossible to sift through overly optimistic statements and not. Agree he truly pushes the envelope but also we all see the numbers and are not forced to invest in the company.
Yes, I think Musk has proven the stock market is a scam. If it wasn’t, the SEC would have thrown him in prison years ago for his regular violations of law in Tesla earnings calls.
Just so we're clear: You think that the only company selling EVs in the USA for a net profit is a scam?
What do you call Rivian, Lucid, Fisker, Bolinger, Lordstown, Slate, and Aptera?
Slate has been conspicuously silent about orders since the day after launch. Lucid is on the brink of bankruptcy. Fisker has gone bankrupt... twice. Lordstown no longer exists (with assets purchased for pennies on the dollar by their former CEO). Aptera has reorganized more times than I can count, and has been planning to release their product any day now for over 10 years!
Rivian actually lost a lawsuit this year for misleading investors about the potential profitability of their product leading up to IPO. An IPO which raised more money in one fell swoop than all the external funding Tesla had in their entire existence. By your own metric, is Rivian not a bigger scam than Tesla?
By the way, a bad fact for Rivian in that case was that they sexually harassed a female exec, who turned around and revealed (in her own lawsuit against them, just weeks before IPO) that the expected ASP of the R1 would be less than the production cost. Oops.
And, somehow, Tesla is the problem. Yea, that makes sense.
Definitely not and I think those types of opinions erode any rational discussion. It’s part of the problem with these discussions. There are extreme views that take a position that is not defendable but follow the hive mind for whatever side they are on.
I like to think in shades of gray and I am somewhere in the middle. Tesla? Amazing product, crazy valuation. SpaceX, some of the underlying products are indeed very valuable but the valuation is again out of this world, no pun intended. The market can stay irrational a lot longer than I can stay solvent. Would never take a short against Elon but I also would never invest into his businesses.
You’re moving the goal post in your argument. First it’s being good at raising money is a scam. Now you are pointing out his incredibly foolish claims. No disagreement, it’s an absurd statement. I don’t know if it classifies as fraud.
The term scam is definitely inflammatory, but I think the sentiment is fair considering the unprecedented and extreme overvaluation and the unrealistic justification for it. It's even worse when you consider Elon's consistent track record of over-promising and under-delivering. Taken together with Elon's role in gutting regulations and coordinating to change listing rules, it's totally fair to characterize what's going on as intentional dishonesty for profit - i.e. a scam.
1. Israel is not an ally, Israel is not in NATO. Most US citizens do not support Israel and want to completely disentangle the US from Israel. Israel has attacked the US on many occasions going so far as to steal nuclear secrets (Jonathan Pollard).
2. The text makes it very clear that this is a merger. A sibling comment posted the exact copy, read it for yourself.
Where in the text do you see anything about a "merger"? Bilateral agreements to develop technology are common between countries. That is nothing resembling a merger. There is no discussion of joint command structure, joint budgeting, etc.
I speak as a US citizen, not as an Epstein blackmailed politician. Israel is our enemy. To requote the text:
> "... responsible for synchronizing cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation, by-- (1) identifying jointly developed or Israeli-origin technologies with operational utility for potential integration into United States systems and programs of record; (2) ensuring collaborative research initiatives involving government, private sector, and academic institutions in the United States and Israel, is done in a manner that protects sensitive technology and information and the national security interests of the United States and Israel;"
There's nothing wrong with websites choosing to comply with particular privacy standards. This should be voluntary and used as a trust signal. A website that promises to follow certain standards should be legally accountable if it breaks that promise, but it should not be mandatory to make such promises.
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