We have a real problem with people in government buying into the idea that it's basically a private company set up for the benefit of one man in particular.

Lots of companies are led by people who think that GenAI should increase productivity and are going to make damn sure that it is. There's no room to figure out things like "etiquette" for how to pass along AI-generated content to coworkers.

Why? Well, as Cory Doctorow said at the talk I attended earlier this week, they do this for the same reason a dog licks his balls: because they can and no one will stop them.

The market thinks this company is worth over a trillion dollars. Remember that.

Weird. I thought it was the fact that you have a cohort of people who are grossly overpaid to represent people who do none of the work yet expect an ever-increasing amount of value created by the work to be shifted to them every 90 days, no matter what, forever.

> We may have to trade the personal fulfillment in these jobs for the broader affordable access to these services.

Then you'll run into two problems:

1) no one will want to do necessary jobs without increased compensation, which is at the root of your analysis of "Baumol's Cost Disease"

2) at least in the US, you'll have a bunch of increasingly miserable people living in a society that gives them less and less to lose while increasing the availability of things that allow them to take out their frustrations upon themselves (substances) or others (weapons)

As far as being led by a nakedly corrupt thundering moron, you're absolutely correct. He's every one of those things.

The issue is that in dealings with other powers, it doesn't seem the rest of the world exercises the same standards.

European powers gladly inked the deal for Nordstream 2 after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. There wasn't much soul-searching when it came to sending athletes and fans to both the Sochi Olympic Games and the 2018 World Cup, both of which occurred after the invasion/annexation of Crimea and after the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine. Russians are still able to get visas to the Schengen Area to this day despite the invasion of the Donbas and numerous acts of sabotage on EU soil by Russian agents.

A number of countries are currently hollowing out their industrial bases by buying up Chinese EVs. This is despite the Uighur genocide in western China, numerous acts of hacking, and continued threats to take over Taiwan by military force, which seems to be a more realistic threat in the next five years.

When you keep doing those sorts of things - things which have fundamental impacts on the world order and on your domestic economies - making Trump the hill you die on just seems stupid.

If line doesn't go up, some Ivy League business school grad who has holdings in MS might make slightly less money and have to cut back on the nose candy budget while summering in the south of France this year.

And that's just inexcusable.

> This is a bad CEO.

There is one and only one measure of whether a CEO is good or bad:

Does the CEO keep the majority of shareholders happy?

Since they are more often than not kept happy with money, if the AI makes the CEO ask the question above and the result is a larger return on the shareholders' investment, then that is a good CEO.

When your domain of knowledge considers Jack Welch to be a genius, there is no floor.

Yes and no.

There's always been an undercurrent of contempt for the US, particularly from Europe. Even during the Clinton and Obama years. There's no satisfying that.

Also, many of the same ills that caused fascism the first time are starting to re-emerge. You can see this in the rise of AfD.

The US actually has enough weight as an economy to have some bargaining power at trade negotiations. Now, whether the negotiator is working in good faith or not is another matter, but if the US suddenly stopped doing business with an individual country, it would likely cause the other side at least some problems.

The UK does not have the weight the US does, and sanctioned itself from all of its largest trading partners in one stroke. If it wants back into the EU (which would likely be the smart thing to do), serious concessions will have to be made. Like, "How much do you really like the pound sterling?" concessions.

Also, Reform's gaining steam, so those concessions are unlikely to be given.

Perhaps after a few high-profile cases, IPOs won't be structured to give absolute control to one person.

That, or you make the ousting of the execs in charge the settlement instead of massive monetary damages.

"If we can just keep consuming massive amounts of capital, at some point, we'll turn a profit. Maybe even a big one."

It's not 2019 anymore, but this mindset acts like it still is.

SpaceX, along with its wanna-IPO classmates OpenAI and Anthropic, are going public because there's basically no more private investor money left and there's no political will (outside of whatever the hell is going on in Donald Trump's head) to lower interest rates to what they were in the golden age of blitzscaling.

They have to ask the public for more money. They just don't have enough humility to do it on decent terms, as evidenced by the IPO deals they're floating.

If this fails to produce what you're talking about - which is likely given things like "speed of radio transmissions", "thermal conductivity in a vacuum" and other things governed by those pesky laws of physics - the game's over.

If you haven't wiped out their corporate savings and sent the stock price tumbling, you haven't really done anything to get the needed recompense and to discourage the behavior in the future. Right now, many companies are effectively sole proprietorships or partnerships with window dressing made to look like there's real accountability. If it becomes impossible to oust the CEO, you're not a shareholder, you're a bagholder.

This is just sole proprietorship with window dressing.

Facebook was originally about people you were acquainted with in real life. You had a pre-existing reason to engage with them. That engagement wasn't as lucrative as SV investors wanted, but it was there.

Twitter never had that premise, or lost it very early on. You screamed into the ether, and people either responded or they didn't. One way to increase the chance of receiving a response is to say outrageous things. Once people figured that out and how to put ads adjacent to the outrageous thing, there was at least some pressure on Facebook (later Meta) to do the same thing, because we're here to make money, not friends.

And really, there are elements of that in old media, too. Their business model was to have captivating programming on TV and radio that would keep you tuned in to see what was happening in the next part of the show after the ad break. Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, every 24-hour news channel, etc. were all very good at this, coarsening of the discourse be damned.

Regardless of who owns it, if you introduce a motive to constantly and eternally increase the value of a media company, you will see a move towards slop content at some point if you have a long enough timeline. It's inevitable.

But the kind of person I'm describing doesn't care about the long-term, or really, anything beyond the current fiscal reporting period.

If there really were some sort of AI that were to be able to drive a humanoid robot to do the same tasks as well or better than a human, and we saw mass adoption, it'd take longer than a fiscal quarter to see the full macroeconomic impact, but the layoffs? You can write those down right then and there.