Posted by guilamu 5 hours ago
And they are the majority. Thats what Sam Altman understands
I'm sure the Crypto AI Czar (David Sacks) being a major Anthropic hater didn't hurt either
Or that Kushner put a billion in OpenAI recently
EDIT: wow they got in at a huge discount too and OpenAI bought stake in Thrive...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/thrive-capital-bought-shares-in...
I don't know, Anthropic is providing 10K open source developers with $200 subscriptions to their bot, for up to 6 months. 200 * 10000 * 6 = $12 Million total. That's even cheaper, I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from all this.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6tqvzt?start=872&mute=fal...
"I'm sorry, you... You think I'm a prostitute?"
looks at offered cash
"A $40 prostitute?"
Sir Winston Churchill supposedly asked Lady Astor whether she would sleep with him for five million pounds. She said she supposed she would. Then he asked whether she would sleep with him for only five pounds. She answered,"What do you think I am?" His response was, "We've already established that; we're merely haggling over price."- Marcus Felson, Crime and Everyday Life, Second Edition, 1998
We love to pretend humans have unflinching morals but they don't
I think that’s a fallacy, too.
To be clear, I'm not making any claims about whether this is a large proportion or not, because I have absolutely no idea (and I have doubts this would even be possible to calculate with even a remote degree of confidence purely via philosophical discussion). If anything, some sort of study that provides evidence that this number is lower than expected would be a strong argument against typical "tough on crime" policies that are often popular with people who express concern about human nature in this regard.
In my view we have some unflinching morals, some more flexible ones, and some you don't adhere to at all, and which is which tends to differ between people.
I personally don't believe in non-religious ontological good because of this aspect of human nature.
There are people that wouldn't do it no matter the amount. Not for billions. Not for a trillion. And that's why no matter how rich the other party, there are people to whom they simply aren't rich enough.
"No" is the most powerful word in the dictionary. And when some people say no, they really mean no. And no amount of money can change that.
And most filthy, corrupt, bribed politicians and corrupt public servants out there know that fully well: they feel filthy and miserable because they know there are people out there with moral and ethics.
Additionally, there are people who honestly really don't give a fuck about money (it's not my case): so they'll say no not because of particularly high moral or high ethics, they'll say no just because they enjoy their simple life.
Honestly it's a sign of low moral and low ethics to believe that anyone can be bought out and that it's just about the amount.
Like, this is opex
Everyone knew that a lot of politicians have been for sale, but I didn't realize how cheaply they were for sale. Musk able to buy his way into being in charge of an idiotic department with basically no regulation while still being allowed to CEO like five companies, and he did it for like $100 million. That's a lot of money, more than I'll ever be worth, but it's way less than I would think it would cost to buy the presidency, in charge of billions (and maybe trillions?) of dollars of sales and contracting.
Decades of believing we are blessed with some sort of perpetual exceptionalism has made the American people not only susceptible to corruption but actively unknowingly promote it. Propaganda has convinced them to invite it into their house and let it know where all your money is and your bank account information.
I'd love to hear if Anthropic actually would accept this deal, if offered.
This HST quote seems severely outdated by now. They have already been caught, committed all the sins of stupidity and some more. All of it to the clapping mob of people who yearn for some kind of social revenge.
And it’s happening everywhere these last years.
Who could possibly know we have so many wife beaters?
There are a lot of conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones, and the amusing thing to me is that there is a conspiracy of elites who are exerting large amounts of unelected control of the government, and who are actively working to keep you down to enrich themselves, and it's not even a secret.
We call these people "billionaires", and at this point they don't even bother hiding it. Trump had a streamlined bribery system with his stupid cryptocurrency and being in charge of a publicly traded company while in office, Musk bought his way in so he could be in charge of a new department and start defunding any organization that has ever tried to investigate him, and there are hundreds of examples.
Instead morons like Alex Jones will go on the radio and blame lizards or something, and then his listeners will take that and then start blaming Jews or Mexicans, while cheering on the actual conspiracy that's making their lives terrible.
They can steal as long as they are our thieves.
To get through to these people you have to validate their deep fears. Not just say - shut up, you are stupid, vote for me.
Everyone says this kind of stuff, but honestly I don't think I agree. Everyone says that you have to be nice to these people to attract them, but that doesn't seem to have been the case for people like Trump or any of the other demagogues that have popped up in the last decade or so.
These people are decidedly huge assholes. Trump is the most easily offended person I have ever seen, and whenever anyone ever goes against him he will go on his stupid Twitter clone and give a diatribe about how they're not true Americans and they're radical left and they're traitors and a bunch of other bullshit.
People like John McCain and Mitt Romney tried to meet people where they are and negotiate, and both of them failed to win the presidency. Trump went on stage, rambled a bunch of incoherent nonsense about how Mexico not sending their best or trying to brag about having a giant cock and he's been elected twice now.
I'm not convinced that being polite to these conservatives is actually the right path forward. I tried being polite to my grandmother when we would discuss these things and instead of reflecting on her believes she's fully fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole and has actively said to me that my wife should be deported.
Listening to QAnon is a desperate attempt to understand the world after every other mainstream figure of authority failed that person.
What I am talking about is not politeness. Politeness is tone management. The McCain/Romney approach. I respect my opponent, let's find common ground, here's my reasonable plan. That is only decorum. But Trump did validate. That's precisely why he won. He just validated the ugliest parts. When he said the system is rigged, that the elites despise you, that your way of life is under siege, millions of people heard the first person in power say what they felt. The content was often vile, the solutions were fraudulent, but the emotional recognition was real. He didn't win by being polite. He won by being the first one to say your rage makes sense.
The mistake is thinking validation means being nice. It doesn't. It means demonstrating that you understand what someone is actually experiencing before you ask them to go somewhere with you. Trump does this instinctively, he just leads people somewhere destructive.
In the end I think to preserve democracy one has to become involved. Standing on the sideline at this point doesn’t cut it.
A lot of things that people call "bribery" is really just ensuring that your preferred candidate gets in office. You couldn't give money directly to the candidate for personal use. Donations went to the campaign of the guy who already agreed with you. The FEC used to take a dim view of outright pay-for-service, even dressed up.
This is new. And now people need to decide how they feel about that. They get one chance to say "no, that's not how we do things." Even if the administration suffers a blow this November, if they hear that this is mostly acceptable to their base, it will be what every politician does from here on.
Having a preferred candidate you give money to is already bribery - whatever the law says. You fund your favorite pony to get the power. They then scratch your back or lend a sympathetic ear.
To the degree great inequality leads to this being decisive in elections, it is a corrupting influence, but the term for it is still not “bribery”.
But when a presidential candidate tells oil companies they should donate because he is going to help them, that’s solid bribery.
When companies pay to “settle” ridiculous accusations, or “donate” to a president’s causes, while their mergers or other business legal issues depend on an openly pay-for-play president’s goodwill, that’s solid bribery.
The country’s policies, discipline, reputation and competence (economic, diplomatic and political) are being sold off for a tiny fraction of what their future adjusted value is worth.
Say, a single donor can contribute a maximum of €6,000 per parliament candidate per election.
Yes, that's a real limit.
And they did so, so they could take bribes with no consequences as long as they take them the right way.
No, it's not inevitable. What you've described is the way a lot of authoritarian states work, such as China. China attracts plenty of capital and external talent, including people from other countries such as Taiwan and the United States. You have be all-in on the CCP's rules, though.
Vietnam operates in a similar way. Untold billions of FDI in the past 20 years from Japan, the U.S. and China. Talk with top executives there, and you'll frequently find close connections or family ties with leaders in Hanoi.
It very clearly is, the present AI instance is far from the only recent case.
> I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.
They evaluate the propensity and ability to profitably engage in open corruption the same as they evaluate other capacities of the company. “Secure” isn't a binary category, and the risk here is much like any other risk.
> When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent.
That is the expected result of increasing perceived risk. yes, probably one of those “slowly and then all at once” things.
Investors just care for the returns. As long as they can identify and bet on the side doing the bribing, they're fine...
2025 was also the first year that the majority of stocks were traded off-market (i.e. hedgie darkpools, no public price discovery).
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Hope ya'll bought your gold before Monday.
#RemindMe2days [gold@5290USD, this post]
Do you have any sources for that?
It’s the best investment - just bribe your way to contracts
To where?
I'm in Europe, I'd like to see it come here. The news I see suggests China's ahead of us in this race, but I don't know if that's for all talent, or if it was just an artefact of a lot of Chinese people in the US on work visas returning home.
Or indeed whether the news about China doing well here was real or hallucinated by an LLM.
Immigration is hard.
I moved to Germany in 2018, and only just this month reached B1 level in the language; and that was a pre-Brexit move so I don't need to care about visa.
The EU has a "blue card" scheme modeled on US green card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union)
If language is your biggest barrier, pick a country whose language you already speak. As this clearly includes English, Ireland if you want specifically EU, and UK if you just want the continent (mainly London, but I spent a long time in Cambridge tech sector).
Germany may still be an option even without being a native speaker (depending on your skills), but with all the difficulty everyone has today with AI messing with job hunting, get the contract before considering a move.
I suggest you do the same -- the reply lists a dozen promising sites.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/if-an-american-citizen-a-tr...
There is a cabal of extremists steering technology contracts in this administration and among their donors. The names are familiar - Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Palmer Luckey, etc. A future administration will need to purge all their companies from our government and investigate them for corruption and treason.