Democrats launching congressional investigations into SpaceXAI, META and Apple
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Every time I come away thinking that the investigators themselves have not spend much (or any) time understanding the basics of these businesses.
And so they resort to what they know: speeches/lectures to let their constituents hear and see them on the record standing for anything.
Personally, I'm more worried about his vampiric practices (https://newrepublic.com/article/135706/peter-thiel-vampire). I'm certainly not going to invite him into my house.
https://www.courthousenews.com/investors-tell-10th-circuit-p...
They sold more than $2.2bil in fraudulent stock.
That's the stuff we're allowed to talk about on HN. Ofc we're made fun of if we bring up any ethical concerns. Palantir's Maven is the system the US used to determine targets (using Claude as the integrated LLM), including the target that led to a double tap strike on a girls elementary school. Their CEO is strongly pushing AI weapons in warfare and mass surveillance. He's put out multiple cringe "manifestos". They also provided AI targeting tools to support the genocide in Gaza. And ofc they're critical to ICE's operations. They've centralized phone numbers, addresses, health data, social media data, etc all used to target immigrants and activists that oppose them.
I know it invites backlash on HN to give a shit about stuff like that but I'll continue to repeat it as much as I can. Fuck surveillance, fuck fascism, fuck the boot.
Forgive my ignorance, but how do you make these links?
javascript:void(open('http://archive.ph/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location)))If they make good faith efforts to solve these ( not partisan pork filled non-starter efforts ) I will be deeply grateful.
The Republicans had a chance and failed to even act. If the Democrats do the same I’ll be deeply disappointed.
> Donald, if you’re watching, we’ll put your name on it. You get to be the American president who finally guaranteed health care for every single American.
That could work. The entire Iran saga and all its fallout happened because Trump wanted to beat Obama's JCPOA. That effort went up in flames, along with prices and the US reputation. The narcissistic injury still burns bright in his conscience. And now Democrats can hand him a W, a legitimate one-up of Obama that requires no bluster or lies.
I'd still only give it a 30% chance of happening, but that's up from 0% a few weeks ago.
Congress has to start working for the people it represents again, so I really hope the Democrats start pushing lots of legislation that addresses the real needs of the people. Even if every bill gets vetoed, make sure Trump and the Republicans around him own the lack of progress in a very visible way to ensure 2028 is an easy-mode Democratic win.
But... they also have to undo the damage to the rule of law that has been supercharged by the Trump administration.
Letting bygones be bygones and trying to move back to the old status quo without addressing actual wrongdoing is how you end up with Trump getting reelected even after January 6th.
If you spend years (correctly) telling people the current cronyism and open corruption is destroying our democracy, you have to act like it really was when you regain power and that means investigating and punishing those who took advantage of it, where just and applicable.
So the investigation into Nancy Pelosi's fortuitous stock trades is starting next week?
Against this backdrop, it takes some truly extraordinary selective attention to be scandalized by the Pelosis managing to beat QQQ by one percentage point last time I checked.
The disparity is so large it's dishonest to "both sides" this one. Because with orders of magnitude to separate the severity, it really isn't both sides.
I'd support it.
By the same token, if Bill Clinton gets damaged by a full release of the Epstein files? Good. Fuck 'em then. I'm not a team booster. Investigate likely wrongdoing and punish the guilty, regardless of their politics.
Though of course... Nancy Pelosi isn't remotely the only one who likely benefited from insider knowledge, there are long lists of people from both parties who are in the same boat. Pelosi just gets elevated as a figurehead here because of her high profile (and despite not being a big Pelosi fan myself I still think, if we're being honest, at least a smidge of misogyny)
We should also just ban trading for all elected officials during their terms in office.
Wait, SBF is already in jail.
If Todd Blanche weren't busy pursuing Trump's political enemies with frivolous lawsuits, maybe he could have gotten around to this.
https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Ro%20...
Not "where it will score political points" or "where we really want to get that guy". Where just and applicable.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/11/05/what-de...
No, you don't. In fact that's exactly the wrong approach because it recognizes them as institutions.
Tax them. Reduce money in politics. Investigate them if they did something wrong.
Note that I'm using the term oligarch precisely. Not just rich people. Rich people holding direct political power. You don't control that without empowering it, you remove the direct political power.
This is controlling them.
It's really not. Putin controls his oligarchs. Denmark doesn't have oligarchs. (It does have nobility and billionaires.)
And for US it's too late, it already has oligarchs.
Who is Putin’s peer in Russia? An oligarchy is a small group of peers.
> This is controlling them.
I think it's meant to remove them from that class.
Controlling: telling them what to do, implementing policy through their power.
Eliminating: removing their power until they're not oligarchs.
That's how you control them, yes. I don't understand what you are disagreeing with?
But on the other hand I'm really surprised by the lack of foresight and intention displayed by big tech oligarchs and to be honest I'm troubled by it. Like there's a lot of seemingly unforced errors from these guys and I'm not sure why.
For instance Sam Altman didn't have that stupid thing that he recently said about the allocation of RAM and Elon Musk doesn't have to say the stupid stuff that he says all the time in social media, so what makes them say these things? These are small things, admittedly, but they are also kind of big things, or hint at big things, you know?
Is it simply a lack of immediate negative consequences for their actions that slowly reshapes their brain into not being able to foresee negative consequences in general?
Or is there some deeper plan there? It doesn't seem like it. And if that's the case, that there is no deeper plan, how are the organizations that these people command able to continue functioning, are the CEOs really so unnecessary that the people around them just smile, nod, tell them what they want to hear and work around whatever damage they cause when they spout off some hare-brained ideas? Like who is running the show here?
The reason is simple: arrogance and being out-of-touch.
This is bizarre. ICE is an (enforcement) arm of the government. So the government is investigating Apple for hosting tracking apps used by the government?
The app... I don't at all understand what the role of the app is, so I really can't comment on that aspect of the situation.
A short spell in prison for Cook and any other executive who played a part in the decision to pay for improper influence, and a several hundred billion dollar fine for Apple Inc would almost certainly have a salutary effect.
Musk and Zuckerberg's outfits are less likely to be redeemable and so would be better dealt with by being broken up, nationalised, or simply shut down.
[^0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/30/dona...
Both sides are wrong on this, giving or accepting.
But more than that - giving bribes is fucking over people who cannot afford to give bribes so they are treated unfairly.
So not only it's a crime - it's also morally evil.
... Wait, what? You prosecute _both_.
> Working with law enforcement is... uh, not a crime, definitionally.
The "just following orders" defence is, fairly, notoriously, weak. "Just following requests" is presumably even weaker. If you assist law enforcement in doing something illegal, you shouldn't assume that you're magically in the clear.
Good luck with that Mr. Jordan. The House minority leader doesn't have the power to issue congressional summons, and there is a 0% chance that the Democrats will allow him to take any committee assignment that would put him in such a position (and even his own party didn't trust him enough to put him in charge of anything important after it was revealed that as a coach at OSU he knew about the sexual abuse of minors and student athletes for decades and did nothing about it).
You had every chance to fix this yourself. In Trump's first term, in between terms, and again in his second term. But it appears you are incapable of self-imposed accountability. Now it's our turn to enforce the law.
Will you have the consistency to say it's good on both sides? Will you support deporting Ilhan Omar, for example? I highly doubt it. You're just another partisan, and we all live in Brazil now where an election means locking up your opponents.
No treatment of him by Democrats will be seen as remotely fair (and be honest, it won't be remotely fair), and only makes us progressively into more of a shithole country.
Not to mention, half of the lawfare that's being proposed is against Elon, who is abrasive but legally a far cry from Trump. It's just lawfare.
Edit: and it's too bad to see I was right about you!
No, you're not being honest. The consistent failing of Democratic attempts to enforce the law is having too limp a wrist. Being too meticulous, forming too much bipartisan consensus, giving too much opportunity for "delay until it goes away." All the way from Jerome Powell through the Epstein investigation to the Jan 6 prosecution.
If that changes -- and to be clear, I hope it does -- it will be a dramatic departure from trend.
You live in a dream world.