If you have to rely on government to defend your big business against smaller competitors, then your business model sucks.
Of course, in this very-late stage of capitalism, the primary model for large companies is lobbying government to pass anti-competitive legislature and to get free money.
This is commonplace. There’s a reason that the kids call their youth pastor the freak of the week, because the previous one just got booted for being too creepy and the new one is likely no less.
I have a hypothesis about it, as youth pastors are supposed to council teens while also selling them Jesus (and devotion to this specific church). Counciling really needs to be unconditionally in good faith. Selling them something falls right in to the chasm of serving two masters, and once the pastor is betraying his flock to push the church agenda, it becomes too tempting to also push a personal agenda. And teens struggling with personal problems (and often family or society problems) can be super grateful and easily manipulable when you actually help them.
This is one of the reasons teachers are supposed to be trained, credentialed and professional. Part of that training is being aware of the social dynamics that can be mistaken for romance on egalitarian terms, and it’s so not. And then, teachers still occasionally wreck their careers by getting involved with their favored students.
Youth pastors are not trained in this at all, so that even ones who didn’t go in intending to be a predator will sometimes yield to temptation.
And tech guys tasked with creating social media for children are not appropriately trained either, and in fact no-one is even thinking of it.
So far every use of algorithmic policing that has been reported has shown only to exacerbate the conditions caused by systemic bigotry.
Even in Canada, I have to assume the system is working as designed – the racism is deliberate – until proven otherwise.
No disrespect intended for Mr. Jordan.
Paywall free: Thank you, MSN
Yes. Twenty-five cameras is not a movement. It’s a handful of pissed off vandals, maybe trying to start a movement.
This guy discovered that Flock cameras are terribly easy to hack, which might be harder to trace.
Blacks typically vote mostly for Democrats while whites typically vote for Republicans. So black neighborhoods are commonly not getting representation.
Mississippi is about as Jim Crow as it can possibly be, so it doesn’t surprise me if white supremacist elected officials are pushed into office via gerrymandering, voter suppression and election tampering.
One does not simply walk into Mordor.
Tribalism makes people really stupid.
The problem is the top is captured and has been for a very long time. The difference now is it’s mask-off and has lost the capacity to pretend to be public serving.
As the history of labor has shown us, it is very hard to organize bottom-up without leadership getting compromised or killed.
The valuation of the stock is based on Musk doing what he’s always done, which is making seemingly impossible promises sometime in the future.
You know what he promised by 2025? A fleet of driverless Tesla taxis. xAI producing the first AGI. A human being on Mars planting a flag.
You know what the evaluation of SpaceX is based on? The promise of a Mars colony with one million human inhabitants, and space-based data centers. It’s going to be decades before it’s worth the IPO, if ever.
In the meantime SpaceX is in debt 20 billion, and is bleeding money. It lost $4.94 billion in 2025.
So it looks to me like a private equity project. Like Toys 'R Us or Radio Shack or Claire’s. Remember those?
And Nasdaq-100 is fast-tracking SpaceX into its portfolio after 15 days. Soon, pension funds and 401(k)s are going to feature SpaceX stocks. So when it does implode, a lot of worker-class folk are going to eat the loss.
You know who I bet will not be eating the loss? Trillionaire Elon Musk.
One episode of How Money Works (this one, I think) talks about how the AI and tech companies would simultaneously insist that Chinese AI was a national security problem (and therefore we should deregulate AI research) while simultaneously arguing they should be allowed to sell their chips to China.
That was before Chinese models made some serious gains and is catching up to the capability of Anthropic.
So the AI sector here in the States has been duplicitous about its status.
Also in recent news (like here), OpenAI is seeking to borrow $1.5 trillion while only expecting to make $20 billion in profits.
Also prices have risen on AI tokens, to the point they exceed the salaries of the workers AI was allegedly going to replace.
I think the US AI sector promised too much and has been trying to catch up by feeding more and more resources to the development process. I remember some sci-fi stories / hypotheticals about self-replicating AI being asked a super-difficult question and in an effort to get smart enough to answer it, the AI system ate the earth. We’re doing exactly that, except with humans involved, who can’t seem to help themselves.