Fox is publically funded. 66% of FOX TV revenue is from cable "must carry" channel fees even if you never watch 1 second of it. Last I bothered to check (three years ago) If you have cable TV you're paying on average $35 to Fox per year in "Must Carry" fees.
Military bases pay for FOX. So do VA hospitals and VA-VASH housing contracts require FOX be included. Don't remember if it's Dish or Direct-TV that will stop delivery of FOX programming, but again, the fee still is applied.
ESPN is another example of that, though they do it by refusing any service at all if the cable operator doesn't pay for 100% of all their subscribers, used or not.

Well, I'll have to admit, I didn't have "learning that someone on Slashdot believes that the Cold War was a myth" on my bingo card for today.

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

Yep, all the biggest from the dotcom era were companies that provided the proverbial pickaxes and shovels, and we *mostly* see that here too (Apple largely being unrelated, Google actually a bit, but not wholly in the game of actually training models, mostly the big players are mostly providing hardware or infrastructure to all these.

The big cautionary tales that everyone remembers like pets.com and webvan had silly high valuations, but no where near the heights attained by Intel, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft of the time. It was just so many of those dotcoms sourcing from the vendors propping up their valuations, but the vendors remained viable businesses just as they were before.

Even OpenAI, the most hyped of the hyped purely AI plays is still relatively dwarfed by Meta. OpenAI would be an example of something more akin to the intrinsically dot-com startup. So OpenAI has probably done more for the market valuation of nVidia and Microsoft than themselves.

Nice, the Zenmuse L3 is $18k, the DJI Matrice 400 drone to carry it $11k. So it won't be long before surveyors and the like will be selling its services.

"The chances of someone being born with excellent skills is equal everywhere"

This is a nice rhetorical assertion, and one I'd like to agree with, but it's (unfortunately, for both the skilled and those in less advanced areas) provably false.

Skill directly correlates to IQ at a population level. The IQ of European-native peoples, Chinese, Japanese, and Jewish peoples is in the 100-105 range average. Africa, India, and the Middle East (to a lesser degree)? Not true at all. A full SD or more different. You've got a huge problem with inbreeding throughout India and the Middle East, for instance. This means that your average person is not going to have the same chance of being "born with excellent skills".

Of course, this is also not without discounting things like upbringing and environment, and it undoubtedly has some play in the matter.

As for this policy, it has absolutely nothing to do with letting the best and brightest immigrate. It's clearly reactionary due to unfettered refugees and other unskilled immigrants who can't speak the language, don't want to speak the language, and bring obscene levels of crime to what would otherwise be an idyllic socialist utopia.

In what ways do you find it superior?

For me, Grok has been pretty consistent at making some pretty wild code recommendations and not following specifications.

It's not like Gemini, which will get stuck implementing things and then get into a histrionic panic loop, but it's not nearly as good as gpt5.1 in implementing correct, complete code per specification.

Rats, as an architect I was hoping it might be useful to the general construction industry, but not at 3m accuracy.

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.

What on Earth are you talking about? Nobody is trying to make other countries poor and dangerous. People come to the US from these countries because even jobs that are tough and underpaid by US standards are vastly better than what is available at home. Creating a formal system just eliminates the worst aspects of it: the lawlessness, the sneaking across the border in often dangerous conditions (swimming across rivers, traveling through deserts), "coyotes" smuggling people in terrible conditions, and so forth. The current US system is the dumbest way you could possibly handle it: people wanting to work, US employers wanting them, the US economy benefitting from it... but still making it illegal, chaotic, dangerous, and unregulated for those involved.

Of course pre-pandemic, it was around $1200/ounce, and it's been just insane since the pandemic set in until now...

True, still not at the peak, but speaking of adjusting for inflation...

Cisco from 1998 to 2001 had a crazy anomalous valuation that was the biggest of the big examples of the dot-com bubble run amok. That behemoth of a company had an inflation-adjusted market cap of about a trillion dollars. Microsoft was in same ballpark, with Oracle and Intel a bit less, but still big examples of the dotcom bubble.

This time around, Google is 3.8 trillion, Meta is $1.6 trillion, Microsoft is $3.6 trillion, Amazon is $2.5 trillion, nVidia is $4.4 trililon, Apple is $4.1 Trillion....

This bubble is just massively bigger than the dotcom bubble, with just one of the big players this time being valued even adjusting for inflation more than all the big players of the dotcom era put together, and there being a fair number more of them this time. It dwarfs the 2007 bubble in these top few players alone. When this pops, it's going to be mind numbingly severe fall..

Yeah, this is one area where LLM can certainly make one side more successful. A screw up means either the attack fails, which no worse than not trying or messing up the target system, which may not be the ideal outcome, but it's not like the attacker really cared that much about the target system...

You think the companies are deliberately keeping their models from being professional grade because of some sense of social responsibility?

That is hilarious. They are pushing as hard as they can and hyping it up even more than it is capable of performing. Any shortcomings on their part is not by lack of trying or somehow holding back.