gmd63

QED folks

I saw the videos and know what I saw, which is not what you describe. Regardless of your personal illusions, you're defending the unconstitutional anti-dissident movement that executed them without trial. Flagrantly anti-American.

> vigilante groups who interfere with arrests, hurt officers and encourage people to endanger themselves in the name of supporting illegal immigration

Is that how you'd characterize Alex Pretti and Renee Good?

My impression from your comment is that you have a heavy bias against facts that dispel your political illusions.

If you read the article which is pretty factual, you'll understand that these programs involve undercover agents investigating American citizens some of whom are simply involved in networks that warn their communities about ICE, which is unconstitutionally detaining and deporting American citizens.

> Several of the Minnesota 15 case agents are from out of state and appear in court records for the prosecutions of anti-ICE activists in other cities. This includes Los Angeles–based HSI agents Robert Kurtz III, who specializes in financial fraud, and Ryan Ribner, who allegedly assaulted SEIU California president David Huerta at a June 2025 protest of an ICE enforcement operation, arrested him, and then claimed the then 58-year-old Huerta attacked federal law enforcement. (Huerta’s charges were dropped in July after videos contradicting Ribner’s account surfaced.)

A dude who lied about a protestor being violent to justify assaulting him, then arresting him. And you're defending the domestic surveillance program thats trying to quash civil dissidents to the most wildly corrupt admin in American history. Insane shit.

Insane algorithm burying this highly commented and voted submission on the second page, far behind posts that have fewer comments and votes that are 3x as old.

I don't think you understand Elon at all. The dude paid others to play Diablo characters for him so he could claim to be a good Diablo player, which isn't even a seriously competitive game. He has a deep obsession with his image and the stock prices of his companies. He wouldn't have tweeted the famous "funding secured" tweet that got him in trouble with the SEC if he didn't care about Tesla's stock price.

Whether they were rewarded by actual merit isn't yet known. Their recent wealth is present-dated imaginary future gains paid by speculators. If by "merit", you mean the ability to perform skillfully to serve the whims of people with a lot of money, then yes.

Who is spending the kind of money that makes regular NVIDIA employees millionaires? You have to consider how those people attained it. And at the scale of NVIDIA's growing value downstream of a rapid investment in AI infrastructure, you can trace a good amount of it to Elon Musk, who has interfered illegally in an election to purchase favor with a party that ended several serious investigations into his companies. Now, the government is using Elon's AI which trails in several benchmarks. Elon's storied history of gaming systems to keep his companies alive only begins there.

Capitalism is fine so long as capital is allocated on merit. It isn't, because we don't have capitalism, we have corporate socialism.

Yes. So we should stop enriching people who do that.

It's not inequality. It's who we've chosen to reward. Adversarial people have eaten a lot of the world and that's because we let them.

People love inequality when it's a celebrity they adore living large. Someone who hasn't scammed them and has demonstrably improved their life and the lives of others in a tangible way. The deeper the con, like Trump and Elon, the more damage to trust.

> So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it.

That's not implied by engagement. It's possible to use the advantage AI gives you in a competitive landscape while still fearing the future it will bring.

Babying bad leaders who don't take responsibility for their actions is a good way to scare away good employees.

If you can use mountainous capital to sell at a loss in order to distort the market, yes, that's not a "Free Market", as in, the vaguely understood competitive marketplace armchair economists idealize.

True freedom in the market means the freedom to capitulate your wealth to snake oil salesman and schemers who operate on generational timeframes until economic power consolidates and renders your society into de-facto tyranny. Before any sort of regulations existed, we were all trading shiny rocks with ultimate freedom, and that somehow has produced a bunch of economic situations in the modern day that a ton of people don't like.

What's more interesting to me is freedom from the need to have investigative journalists doing deep dives into potentially fraudulent, thieving, or scheming companies behind every purchase, and to know that what I'm granting market success to is exactly what my money or time is going towards - I'm not buying something at a loss that funds some other deliberately obfuscated project that's made opaque from my perspective of the market transaction.

The proverbial "market wisdom" doesn't emerge out of markets with extreme information asymmetry.

No, the point is to implement laws that foster holistic growth, not gamesmanship that ends in terminal illness.

I wouldn't call it brilliant. It's like cancer cells celebrating how fast they're growing.

Not sure why this is downvoted. Objectively true. Less than 50% of the popular vote, and that's just voting Americans.

Most Americans didn't vote for Trump.

Wonder how the founders/board/investors of the bad incentives factory would manage their site after a massive crowdfunding campaign bet that they'd all still be alive in 2027.

When ambitious competitors who can't accept loss or normalcy enter into a field that's saturated with skilled rule-abiding players, they'll cheat.

Hypercompetitive fields will always surface cheaters given enough time. Then regulations pile on to fight the cheating, which makes it harder for honest people to do the good work.

We do not punish cheaters like these as much as we should.

To put it into context, 40 billion dollars is about 22,000 average lifetime earnings of a man in the US.

Xi Jinping has disciplined millions of officials as part of his anti-corruption campaign. That cannot be some corrupt way to silence dissidents while being popular with an allegedly corruption-omniscient citizenry.

I'm interested to hear your informed thoughts on why corruption charges still exist in China if everyone there knows how corruption is happening.

Access to corruption is never widely understood and accessible to every person, otherwise it would be written into law and stated plainly for everyone to see. Corruption is a form of economic eugenics that breeds fraudsters and cheaters who can buy into the in-group via know-how, money or aesthetics while slowing the growth of a law abiding populace that competes honestly on merit but doesn't fit the unwritten rules of admission. Any participation in that system is a spiraling force that makes the world worse, and it's always a choice.

In the US we're being led by a career fraudster who was a Wharton grad only because he had a family friend who was an admissions officer, and according to his sister, he paid someone to take his SATs for him. We have not been serious about the massive consequences of white collar fraud and corruption and we are now beginning to understand the butterfly effects.

This is just the citizenry paying double tariffs. First, we bought the higher priced goods. Now, the companies are trying to take our tariff payments again, this time from the government, to "make up" for the tariff money that we had already paid them in the first place.

What should happen is that $X of the budget should be put into escrow for the next administration to use after these criminals make their way out.

Because we don't want people whose profession is maximally exploiting perverse incentive structures to flourish. A society that grants outsized rewards to bad faith citizens is bad for everyone. The more influence those cheaters have over the economy the worse off we all are.

You should not be able to get rich to the tune of a 600% daily return just because you're insider trading. That doesn't incentivize sharing your information with the market. On the contrary that incentivizes delaying communicating your secret information until the last second to maximize the return on your unexpected information.

I'm interested to hear why you think that better pay wouldn't help the issue. Being comfortable with your living situation and feeling like you're respected in excess of your boss's federal or state legal obligations plays a big role in having the wherewithal to put serious effort into whatever you're doing day to day, and it helps to mitigate the divide between the richest and the poorest among us / bad jokes or insults that originate out of fear of being poor.

> Such institutions can't compete in the marketplace we've set up, because it's cheaper to offer shitty service and low product quality, to keep employees expendable, low skill, low paid cogs, and to reward CEOs and management willing to screw over their fellow employees at every opportunity to ensure the number goes up.

The federal minimum wage has been the same since 2009, but In-N-Out is an example of a company that chooses to avoid blaming the worker or the market or the regulatory environment for all of their business difficulties. They choose to pay well over the California minimum wage, and I don't find it coincidental that I've had better experiences with employees there vs some other fast food locations. Costco has made similar choices with how they treat their employees and they're doing great. No regulation needed, just better leadership.

The CEOs that blame "inevitable" market forces on why they have to treat employees poorly while refusing to look inward will ironically lose out in the market. And at a larger scale, probably the countries too.

I'm saying if the populace wants taxes to fund open source and votes for it, and maintainers just stop working on open source otherwise that's also the free market. Doing stuff for free and then complaining about when it benefits greedy folks in an outsized way is a negotiation tactic with the public that people are allowed to do.

Yep. The reason employees don't care about their work is that caring for their work is not valued. Box checkers and opportunists proliferate as loyal craftsmen get screwed over repeatedly.

> You could take the Kansai airport baggage handler team and drop them into any airline in the world, and they'd perform to the same high standard. Take any halfass United Airline baggage team and drop them at Kansai and they'd be breaking guitars, killing dogs, and all the other usual shenanigans just like back at home, and they wouldn't give a flying rat's behind about how their employer respects them or not. They're there for paychecks. Respect doesn't even enter into consideration.

The hypothetical of dropping one baggage team into another airport might be true in an immediate timeframe but it doesn't address the core issue - each team was formed in a completely different society, one values celebrity and quick-buck scamming, one values planting trees that cast shade long after you're dead. Pretending like the influential people who steer the most economic activity aren't to blame at all for that difference in culture is insane, especially when we have a felon president who has been pardoning many high profile fraudsters.

Also requires a culture of respect for the people who are handling baggage - an important thing lacking in parts of society in the US, where working fast food is used as a pejorative.

We have a bunch of socially minded people providing free value in the form of open source that enjoy the gift they are giving to others. When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations - who employ people to search for exploits, without fixing them, to suck up as much wealth as possible - I'm not surprised they would want to take a step back and ask for a share of that.

And that's totally fine under the same market mechanics you're recommending. If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them.