Apologies are free. Did he donate even one or two percent of the surely exorbitant salary he made at Google all those years to any cause countering those negative externalities? (I'm genuinely curious)
Yeah, reviews are useless in Germany as a result. If anyone from Google is reading this, PLEASE add a tag to establishments that remove reviews by legal means!
Sometimes I believe they aren't monetizing me. With Kagi I feel quite confident, for example. It depends how prominently they put 'no monetization/ads' as part of their marketing. Uber doesn't do that, to be fair, and never have done.
The unit economic impact of customer care is just brutal. It's simply unaffordable for many low-frequency, low-value businesses. Particularly when 70-80% of requests are simple questions or things that can be done already in their profile with self-service. High-value SaaS is a different story.
At least the Chinese models are open source, so you don't need to send money to the Chinese government to use them (unlike Grok 4, where you need to send money to Elon Musk)
“Open source” doesn’t mean “independent.” Most of those labs are state-linked and operate under laws that require compliance with party policy.
The CCP plays a long game, they want dependency, not donations. Once enough people adopt their stack, they’ll set the governance norms and compliance rules around it.
It’s not paranoia, it’s policy. Go read their New Generation AI Development Plan, they’ve been explicit about it since 2017.
Words have meaning. He said he does not hate him. That does not mean he likes him. Hate is a very strong emotion. Dislike is a much less stronger emotion. That is not all the same.
(I also don't hate Elon, but I still don't like him or consider doing buisness with him in any way)
USAID was a highly effective and efficient operation. Musk dismembered it, leading to untold misery, death, and the spread of infectious diseases. I think this is reason enough to hate Musk.
Also, keep in mind that what Musk did was a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution, so he simultaneously killed a program which saved lives while he also started the U.S. on the road to authoritarianism.
The race to the highest body count looks like Elon in first, RFK jr. second, and Stephen Miller a distant third but looking like he'll finish strong once the camps are fully operating.
I would argue without Musk and his Twitter/richest man of the world power, Trump would have never been elected in the first place, which would have prevented this and a lot of other bad things. Still, I don't hate him. (Hate is not a condition I think is healthy or constructive or something I should explain myself not feeling it)
An "administration" doesn't add debt - Congress does. Power of the purse strings, no?
I'm not sure what you mean by "this administration". Are you including DJT's first term?
Regardless, here are the numbers per Investopedia:
"Based on total dollar amounts, Joe Biden contributed the most to the national debt, adding $8.5 trillion during his presidency, followed by Donald Trump ($7.8 trillion in his first term) and Barack Obama ($7.7 trillion during his two terms)."
DJT's first term had the excuse of the COVID pandemic. Other than the final year when that was an issue, his spending was reasonable. 0'Biden on the other hand, had no such excuse for his spending binge, which was consistent across his (thankfully few) four years in office.
The "talk of lowering debt" is necessary, since right now we're spending 25% of federal revenue (about $1 trillion) paying the interest on our current massive national debt.
The hope is that a supercharged US economy can raise revenues enough to ease the pain of paying down the national debt that's largely been accumulated since 2000. It must be done to avoid the inevitable consequences.
It is misremembering to frame their actions as recommendations, when they took action themselves, acted first, and asked for permission later. There were infamous public displays of being given carte blanche on the spot after employees told them they didn't have just that. They put metaphorical "heads on pikes" so that they wouldn't have to face questions again outside of court.
Yeah, if it weren't for USAID then the CIA wouldn't have had any cover for smuggling those weapons and would have just given up.
The argument is like saying "criminals used this bank to transfer stolen money so the bank is bad and I'm glad they were shut down." USAID has done far more good than the harm they were exploited to enable.
Not sure if this is intended to be critical or supportive. A lot of Americans supported these types of efforts to oppose the Soviet Union. There’s a Tom Hanks movie about it, for example.
Because they were lied to by American mass media that presented mujahedeen as freedom fighters. When 9/11 happened Americans suddenly found themselves on the receiving end and stopped being supportive of Islamic extremists.
And a vaccination programme was used as a front when searching for Bin Ladin. That doesn’t mean that vaccine programs are bad. Anything can be used as a front
It's not convincing. If those simply numbers (that everyone who is deciding these things has certainly considered) were a compelling argument, then everyone would act accordingly on them. It's not the first time they — all of them — are spending/investing money.
So what do I have to assume? Are they all simultaneously high on drugs and incapable of doing the maths? If that's the argument we want to go with, that's cool (and what do I know, it might turn out to be right) but it's a tall ask.
