There is a reason for that. And it is most likely that they are rapidly freeing up Capital so they can try their hand at AI bullshit along with everybody else.

You don't just cut 20% of your staff like it's nothing. Companies are firing employees left and right to free up capital. This is actually by design it's what high interest rates are designed to do.

If inflation was under control a lot of these layoffs wouldn't be happening because companies would just borrow at low interest rates.

So I was using telling Trump kind of broadly. What they would actually be doing is calling the senators they own and telling them to sit down with Trump and explain that if he doesn't back the fuck down he's going to lose his War Powers. And if he keeps up at it they will have the senators they own impeach him and remove him from office after the midterms.

Remember the Trump isn't actually in charge the billionaires are. So if this is happening it's because the billionaires want it to.

I'm sure that the various other AI companies will respect the copyrights involved and not steal all the useful information and ideas and algorithms. If it's one group of people who are always very respectful of copyright it's AI companies.

The trouble is the only place to dump it that much money involved is into your 401k. So it's only a matter of time.

There will be an initial gold rush by Insiders. And then the regulations will quietly be altered. Just in time to let them screw us all over and make out with all our money.

Did you get paid to post that? If not then you should be.

We stopped and forcing antitrust law in the '80s. If you try to make a serious go at competing with any major company then they will come in and if you are extremely lucky off of the buy you out but these days they just come in and copy your product and do it cheaper by leveraging other businesses they own and run you out of business.

As a employee you're also fucked because we also stopped and forcing labor protection laws. So companies can collude to lower wages while getting tax breaks for offshoring your job.

The game is rigged against you. But that's a really hard thing for people to accept.

Is so good for the billionaires that they don't care that America is rapidly getting shut out of the rest of the world because we are a national security risk...

Ordinarily what would be happening right now is billionaires would be telling Trump to knock it the fuck off with the crazy foreign policy because of the risk of us companies being frozen out of European markets. But nope. Everybody is just full steam ahead on the Trump train.

It's another example of how every single system designed to protect you has broken down.

Of bad stock into your 401k. The YouTuber Patrick Boyle has a detailed video on the subject.

Basically SpaceX is going to be valued at 1.5 trillion. However it is impossible for it to reach that valuation in the real world.

SpaceX already has all the launch customers that can possibly get even under the best case scenario. And in unfavorable administration would almost certainly start looking for alternatives because Elon meddled in a war.

So the only possible growth sector for SpaceX is launching its own satellites, specifically the ones for internet.

But that's a dead end too because there aren't enough customers who can afford high-speed internet and also do not have access to some form of landline based internet like cable or DSL

the only other growth sector would be AI bullshit but Elon has lost most of his engineers to other companies. SpaceX got this huge boost because Elon had a mystique and he was talking about going to Mars so a shitload of rocket engineers took lower pay than they could get in any other job and work longer hours to work for spacex. That isn't happening with elon's AI companies. So he can't compete and the stuff he's building is barely better than what you could build yourself and run off your own GPU.

Everybody knows this, at least everybody who is investing that kind of money, so in order to get the kind of money he wants he's doing a weird stock scheme that limits access to the stock in order to drive up the price. Basically a few insiders will get all the profit and it's going to leave a huge amount of worthless stock that needs to be sent somewhere.

Normally it would be dumped into public pensions but those have been maxed out with bad stock already. So we are 401K is going to get hammered.

This is just the largest of many scams that are going to loot your retirement and there's basically nothing you can do about it except vote for pro-consumer politicians who want to regulate Wall Street but that's going to be annoying people like Elizabeth Warren and AOC and Bernie Sanders and frankly people don't like them... And in politics likeability is basically everything now.

What I'm saying is that if you are retiring or even if you're just retired you're a fucked. You have money and somebody wants it and they're going to get it

In this case it would be easy enough to calculate how much anything would be off and then use the existing data.

Remember we're not talking about science here we're talking about public policy. So yeah the scientists can go ahead and redo all the experiments just to confirm the numbers and that's something scientists will want to do.

But we're not going to find all of a sudden that micro plastics are good for you. Neither are we going to find that they are in such low quantities that they aren't harmful. At best this is going to slightly skew the results.

But this isn't like radiometric dating where there are are all sorts of caveats because of how that science works. At the end of the day you've still got a brain full of plastic it's just potentially slightly less plastic.

But as usual just like when cigarettes were discovered to be killing people the plastic industry is going to hammer us with stories about this and slow down and the attempt at reform for at least another 50 years. And just like the cigarette industry, assuming our civilization survives what's happening right now that is, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back at this time and say what the fuck was wrong with those people?

About losing those lawsuits. They can absorb the fines and work around them. After a little bit of finagling the dollar amounts involved will not be terribly large. But on the other hand, and they have called this out in their sec filings, this basically makes it borderline impossible for any competitor to go up against them. In the long run it's probably going to save them money because traditionally the way they survive is by buying up whichever competitor of theirs the kids under 15 flocked to in order to find a place their parents didn't hang out

It's like how Microsoft lost their antitrust trial and the "punishment" was to give away millions of dollars of software to schools which they had been trying to get to take their software for 20 years...

I don't know what the opposite of a pyrrhic victory but I believe we've found it.

You will find that every single one of those age gate laws was written by a lobbying firm tied to Facebook.

There is no question that the age restriction laws are coming from facebook. Also Planitir. They are also behind some of the funding for lobbying for the laws. They use what's called template laws where they write a legal template that can be sent across the country to form the basis of laws that pass everywhere.

No we don't exactly know why. But it doesn't take a lot to figure out. It doesn't really drastically improve their tracking but what it does do is let them know that you are real. That's why we know it's about detecting AI slop.

First being in AI programmer is like having a limitless supply of Junior programmers doing their very very first gig and you are their manager.

Second what ends up happening is if the AI doesn't work you're doubling up your work because your boss tells you the AI must be working so you must be more productive. And if the AI does work it's just doing the grunt work and now instead of having a little bit of grunt work throughout the day to rest your mind in between the hard stuff you're expected to be full on 24/7 banging out the most difficult aspects of code one after another.

Basically it either doesn't work and now you have double the workload without any new tools to manage that workload or it does work and now your boss expects you to crank out super code 24/7. Either way your job just got a whole lot harder and a whole lot more miserable.

It's mandatory for them because there is so much AI slop now it's starting to infect their data sets. Facebook doesn't give a shit about the quality of their advertising because no matter how many bots there are people keep buying the ads. But the advertising is only about 1/3 of their revenue 2/3 of it is selling data to brokers and law enforcement.

There is so much AI slop and it is so sophisticated it's becoming difficult to keep it out of their data sets and that's gradually making the data sets useless.

So they are going to force complete tracking under the guise of think of the children so that they and they alone know who is a bot and who isn't. As an added bonus is also means that they can effectively and easily figure out who is a person and use their data to train llms.

AI slop is basically an existential threat to these companies because at the end of the day they do need to know who is and isn't a real user and they need to be able to do that quickly and effectively. So mandatory age verification is the way to go.

Your privacy is completely irrelevant. And frankly I think it's irrelevant to most people here. Everyone will talk about how important privacy and internet and anonymity is but when it comes time to vote a dozen other issues come first often pretty stupid ones.

So Mark Zuckerberg can go around buying up laws and there really isn't anything we can do about it because voters prioritize other things.

Taxes made them successful. We used to have super high taxes for the wealthy and corporations. This created a use it or lose it mentality among businesses because they couldn't just pocket all the money themselves because it would be taxed up the wazoo at a certain point. There were ways around taxes even back then but they weren't nearly as effective as they are now where you have billionaires paying an effective tax rate of 0%

Also stock BuyBacks used to be illegal. Stock BuyBacks mean that companies don't invest anymore they hold on to their cash so that they can do BuyBacks and pump the stock during downturn. This is exactly why stock BuyBacks were illegal for so long.

I don't think folks realize how much of a role public policy plays in their daily lives or the myriad of knock-on effects from those kind of policies. There's an idea of a chesterton's fence, which is a fence that you don't pull down unless you know damn well why it was put up. High taxes and Wall Street regulation were a classic chesterton's fence.

GitHub apparently has dropped below 90% uptime and it's very likely because they are using AI slop to write important code and it doesn't work.

It's a huge problem but there isn't really a solution.