gmd63

Needing to maximize shareholder value is a myth. There is no law that requires you to do that - people like to use the idea as an excuse to do scummy business.

They also allow people to convince those who trust that prediction markets are accurate barometers of likeliness that certain events will be likely with a meager amount of money.

It gives people who aren't aware of the bot accounts / thumb on the scale the perception that insane crackpot delusions are more popular than they are.

There is a reason Musk paid so much for Twitter. If this stuff had no effect he wouldn't have bought it.

Huh, the only time I've seen the government standing up for feds killing white Americans was under Republican leadership over the last few weeks.

As someone who really hates what this unlawful administration is doing, I went to my local progressive club meeting for the first time expecting at least a fraction of what MAGA folks fantasize about - elite schemers developing an actual strategy to fight back.

Instead what I found were a bunch of kind mostly elderly people sharing news that I had read online a week before, and some folks gathering signatures for positions running for office.

You are doing a huge disservice to yourself by staying indoors and making assumptions about stuff that you aren't investigating in person.

It is disappointing to me that people can look at the list of infamous people he has already pardoned, who have paid him, and then expect that he won't continue acting on trend, just because some shallow-book manipulable prediction market, which is primarily a money laundering tool for event fixers, tells us that it's "not likely".

This is like book publishers asking to take a slice of your income due to presenting you with the information you studied to become proficient. Except the book publishers actually helped to create the information that helped you and didn't steal it.

Those takes are informed and level headed. We have a wildly unqualified Secretary of Defense who was appointed only because he advocated in his book "American Crusade" for a crusade against the "American Left". A Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts described us as in the middle of a second American Revolution that will remain bloodless if the left allows it. And he said that before the election.

The DOGE project was a wildly unconstitutional overreach of the executive branch, shutting down or severely crippling agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without the approval of Congress.

Republicans are letting Trump act like a dictator to accomplish things they want outside of the guardrails of our democracy. There are plenty more examples out there if you choose to pay attention.

Do you know how ridiculous you sound defending Trump for bringing back a person from a foreign prison that he sent there without due process? Only because he got caught?

The guy operates in bad faith constantly. It's why a huge chunk of his prior administration recommended against voting for him. It's his only edge in life aside from his ability to hypnotize idiots, and it's only an edge because weak willed or complicit people let him get away with it.

The old skeuomorphic Apple icons were so easily distinguishable and yet still identifiable as Apple, a tough act to balance today amid competing design languages in oceans of competing apps. I thought they were great.

That pen and ink icon had a classic feel to it. It made me think about the time and effort demanded by handwriting that I was bypassing by opening that app. That kind of visual poetry is lost in these flat designs, where communicating membership in a brand's ecosystem seems to beat out other priorities.

The fuss about AI is interesting to me in music. The most popular and commercially successful artists are already basically using "AI" by having teams of people produce their ideas for them, if they're not outright buying a hit from someone like Max Martin. If you watch Timbaland's Masterclass, he is essentially squeaking noises into a mic which his underlings toil away with and produce into beats.

If you don't like the AI workflow, humans are already offering that workflow to the richest and most successful among us. The new tech is kind of leveling the playing field in that sense. When you think about how AI is applied in other fields, it's basically on the way to giving everyone CEO powers, allowing them to delegate vague directives into action. Whether there's room for 8 billion CEOs on earth remains to be seen.

I personally think barriers to entry in certain industries are features, so we aren't drowned in a sea of careless whims and can more easily find products made with love, dedication, and well articulated intent.

People switched from BlackBerry to iPhone for far more than just iPhones being "shiny and new." Visual voicemail, Safari, touchscreen, etc. The recent UI redesign effort is not remotely comparable to the investment and strategy that went into distinguishing the iPhone from the rest of the cell phone market.

We're discussing this on one of the most bare and plain sites on the popular internet. Folks who are attracted to value don't care if stuff isn't redesigned if it works well. It's a bad sign if executives at Apple feel the need to invest in cheap dopamine hacks for the sake of novelty farming.

A company that stagnates or even shrinks to a healthy size can be more valuable to society, and the stock market in the long term, than one that mutilates itself in chase of unnecessary growth.

If it's coming down from the C suite, that just makes it worse. That's cheap marketing tricks winning priority over lasting intent. It's not just the design folks trying to justify their job at that point, it's the executives surrendering to the "stock must go up during my quarters at all costs" mentality.

Yep. Also an issue: the high profit industries are abused by pump and dump scammers like Vivek Ramaswamy who had his doctor mother run a phase 2 clinical trial on a struggling Alzheimer's drug he bought from GlaxoSmithKline before he cashed out and it inevitably failed phase 3 trials.

We're moving in the opposite direction of ensuring that capital is allocated productively in said industries by destroying regulations and agencies like the CFPB, FTC, SEC, and by giving platforms and political power to the cheaters and fraudsters who have infested the Republican party.

Mainly I wanted to suggest that the folks you're diagnosing might have valid reason to complain. I could have done it more tactfully, but that's what came out.

Your post reads to me as a complaint that people who complain too much have a problem.

I don't think I misinterpreted the condescension you dished out by blanket labeling a trend of mostly valid critique as psychological compulsion and performative misanthropy.

You've convinced me, I'm going to stop complaining about corporate slop and the connection between big tech / VCs and the awful political situation in the most advanced country in the world. I will try to glaze Liquid Glass from here on out, say some nice things about the richest man on earth who kept quiet about the fact that he pays people to grind video games for him, and make sure to give David Sacks and Jason Calacanis the benefit of the doubt next time they are whining like babies online for a Silicon Valley Bank bailout.

I think the OP website is pretty cool by the way.

In a free and unregulated market, you will see cronyism by the wealthiest players who have captured it. The payoff of capture is enormous and therefore investors have incentive to offer up capital to accelerate the capture. Tyrants emerge from anarchy. A corrupt MAGA administration bought by private money is the product of a poorly regulated market.

Money is power. High concentrations of money controlled by few people serve the whims of those people, who use that power to influence politics, in 2024 through one of the most dishonest campaign trails and propaganda operations in my living memory of American politics. I'm surprised you don't see the connection.

Democracy is not the problem, it's a deliberately misinformed populace shaped by undeserved money that's the core issue. Folks who pollute the information in the market or the political field steer the market away from a symmetrical information equilibrium -- they are huge drains on human potential. Trump did both and evaded trial for sedition because of how much he cheated in business and engaged the law in bad faith, and due to favors he promised to others like Elon and Ellison who had more money. Before he was a "democratically elected tyrant" he was a regular free market one.

Money is power.

Trump's and the Republican party's whole shtick is deregulation. The financial tumors in the economy love it when the white blood cells look the other way. That's why folks like Ellison and Elon bought this election. These are the types of orders they are happy to comply with for favorable treatment.

If you don't regulate, you're just opening the door for the free market to birth a tyrant or cabal that makes up their own power structures.

Larry Ellison is using his bags to purchase lies and silence.

No economy can be in true equilibrium when the consumers send profits to be spent in unforeseen and unrelated ways like this. Every purchase carries potentially immense future costs that are almost completely opaque.

Free market maximalists need to confront this fact before praying at the altar of complete deregulation, and every consumer should pay more attention to who they are buying from.

The greatest challenge facing humanity is building a culture where we are liberated to cooperate toward the greatest goals without fear of another selfish individual or group taking advantage to our detriment.

Yes, the mathematicians will tell you it's "inevitable" that people will cheat and "enshittify". But if you take statistical samplings of the universe from an outsider's perspective, you would think it would be impossible for life to exist. Our whole existence is built on disregard for the inevitable.

Reducing humanity to a bunch of game-theory optimizing automatons will be a sure-fire way to fail The Great Filter, as nobody can possibly understand and mathematically articulate the larger games at stake that we haven't even discovered.

The folks who succeed most in business are the type who have an intuition for what's best. They're not some automaton reading too far into and amplifying the imperfect and shallow signals of "demand" in a marketplace.

I'm not excusing elected officials. I would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE. I'm just pointing out that the Trump admin deliberately lied about its connection to Project 2025, which made DOGE's connection unclear to people who consume Fox News etc.

People are downing my comment for suggesting that many people who don't take the internet straight into their veins every day might have had a hard time connecting the dots between DOGE and Project 2025.

No, it wasn't clear. I know several Trump voters who either didn't know Project 2025 existed or believed the lies that it was a liberal hoax.

To anyone paying an ounce of attention, yeah it might have been clear.

That was not the clear purpose of DOGE. The Trump campaign deliberately distanced itself from Project 2025. If they had been honest about their intent to enact Project 2025 to voters, they would have lost.

Shame. Only the wealthiest scammers should be able to manipulate these numbers via businesses that generate GDP like phone farms or buying the entire social media platform.

Why stop there? Whichever shareholders flood the datacenter with the most electrical signals get the most profits.

The sad irony is that blockchain will do more to promote dictatorship as a superior form of government around the world than any other technology.

Blockchain's primary usefulness has been to evade regulations, and due to the rapidly changing nature of the technology, representative democracies with legitimate legal institutions have lagged behind when it comes to regulating it.

The country that wins (prevents fraudsters and scammers who exploit crypto) will be a dictatorship solely because a dictatorship is the only form of government fast enough to either rein in lawless cryptofinance, or exploit it maximally.

When enough actual value creating people who bought in to the libertarian crypto fantasy finally realize that they're slaving away to make ends meet in an economy that enshrines meme coin shills and folks who use crypto to evade the law, it will have been too late.