I think Jonathan Coulton made a song about Elon Musk's venture on this area

Was the cop in a backwards baseball cap carrying a skateboard and asking "fellow youths" where to get drinks?

And in terms of the median they're not wrong...

The problem is the government folks assume they are the exception to the rule

Against the federal government, where every agent and federal employee has qualified immunity for any actions without extremely, ridiculously specific, established precedent at scotus level? For civil damages only, because there is no right of private prosecution in federal law as ruled by scotus back in the 80s? Damages paid by the federal government which prints the money, years if not decades after the case crawls the appeals all the way to scotus?

Good luck collecting damages against the federal government, but the frontline agent has zero reasons to care - their chain of command has zero reasons to care, they are immune from accountability. Legally literally, career wise practically - they are too insignificant to be worth throwing under the bus even if things go sideways at that level.

The problem is not about legal recourse - the problem is how incentives and deterrents translate to day to day actions on the ground

The escathon of the techbros is slightly less concerning than the escathon of millenialist religious groups actively working to bring closer the End of Times.

You know, the literal source of that expression - not the metaphorical sense its used in politics since Buckley.

I'm not saying this startup is that type of death cult - rather training an AI based on a technology prone to hallucinations on the Book of Revelations... is a remarkably stupid "fit function" unless thats the output you want.

There is a hell of a difference in context - cops are not federal agents. if a citizen brings a civil rights case against a police department they do this in a federal court - the prosecutor does not work for the same people that may be held responsible for the damage. Thats how you get consent decrees, leadership changes, etc.

Those cases can be career ending for police leadership, and career making for the prosecutors - you can figure out the incentives and deterrents that flow down to the chain.

ICE are federal agents - they are not DOJ but work closely enough, and follow the directives of the same executive branch. Unless the agencies have both disparate policies and a lot of independence (not the case today), a zealous prosecution will be damaging and embarrassing for the executive branch in general.

No prosecutor is going to touch that without clear support from the top. Agency leadership is not going to worry about that risk if they're getting the go ahead from the top of the branch. No individual agent will see the risk of "crossing the line" ending his career, or their boss and their bosses' boss.

For a lot of people those deterrents had gone too far, enforcement had their hands tied, etc. so they don't see this as a bad thing. But we have seen what happens in towns and cities when you give local police "bonuses" and incentives for aggressive enforcement without checks.

How does the investor find the products that are viable, but not "seen" or getting traction with customers?

The general idea is not new, that's basically "cigar butt" investing strategy. But the point of tech startups is they are high risk / reward enterprises, which have not proven their worth or accumulated hard assets to justify more debt or valuation on liquidation. They don't struggle long waiting for a turnkey investor. Persistence is not seen as innovation and its cheaper to close shop and launch a new venture.

Because if you are drinking the AI koolair at alss training Roko's Basilisk on escathological scripture has to be on the top 10 stupid business plans of a very stupid business cyle

The last century is littered with examples of nations with "truly self sufficient" economic policies and explicitly anti/deglobalization - they used to call it anti-imperialism but it was the same goals, same tools. Many were successful on those goals - drastically reducing imports, moving industry production into the country, etc. None succeed in keeping a competitive economy or sustaining (much less improving) quality of life.

To be fair, the old social-democrat experiments did not try the "lets change the tariff every week" approach. Usually they defined a plan and policies stable enough for that local manufacturer to plan, build or upgrade the white-chocolate industry to supply the local demand. The scarcity and empty shelves came at the end of the five-year plan failure, not at the beginning.

Factories do not have to be the main source of employment today - like agriculture did not have to be the main source of employment after the 19th century.

I'll take the "embrace open source" more seriously when they release Surfshark (which they also own) so someone can fix their memory leaks and random "lets show an eternal floating toolbar window... sometimes" bugs.

Congressional staffers alarmed at the impact of AI on congressional staff asks ChatGPT to do their research and extrapolates impact on staff reduction to the general population. Yep, checks out.

No one really knows the skills accenture consultants will need to prove added value on the age of AI. Or if there is any value to add when the LLMMs commoditize the market of generated pabulum.

So they're not really wrong...

There is an inertia to these things - not as many people have planned vacations to Afghanistan as NY or whichever Disneyland.

There is also a ton of business travel in the US, which necessarily translates in direct and indirect tourism spending. That takes an even longer time to migrate if the country is not peripheral to your industry.

If tourism had still been slightly declining or flat since the pandemic this would be bad news. If you account for growth trends it is dire news.

There are only three ways to fund a government: extracting cash from foreign nations (war / tributes), extorting taxes from citizens (income / tariffs / VAT) and debt engineering (monetary / fiscal policies and platinum coins for some reason)

Modern societies are reluctant to pay the cost of blood and threatened violence to reliably extract money from foreign nations.

Democracies are reluctant to pay the political cost of reminding their citizens they are being extorted for taxes.

So elected governments tend to fall back on the monetary games, which conveniently depends only on credibility and sleight of hands and while its subtle enough has little political cost

Unfortunately by the time being subtle is not enough, the political class may not know how to use any other tool. And if you burn all credibility with shenanigans you lose the legitimacy to any of the three toolsets.