Are sanctions just feel-good vibe policy that Russia, Iran, etc. somehow always manage to get around while politicians signal furiously?

yeah, sure, they all blew up by design. They can barely use billion tax payer dollars to deliver a banana to the Indian ocean, great success.

With budget reconciliation and a dead filibuster, anything is possible. Step 1: chuck Chuck.

What do you expect? "Person X is a spy for country Y" rarely comes with any detail, even when it's blatantly true. Intelligence work is by definition secretive and probabilistic. Nobody's gonna give you a blow-by-blow Ian Fleming novel about an active investigation.

To be clear about what we actually do know about the "spy" label: members of the US Congress (on appropriate committees, etc) apparently received a memo from the US intelligence community that speculated she may have been recruited by the Chinese MSS (Ministry of State Security.) It's not hard to guess how they might have gotten this leverage: on at least two occasions she's run into problems with the CSRC (China Securities Regulatory Commission), which they could have offered to make go away.

That said, sometimes a black-market importer is just in it for the money, and Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) said he found the narrative improbable after being briefed on it. Apparently the FBI is busy sniffing glue (thanks, Kash), the DNI's lackeys think the label is reaching, and the CIA feels she has plausible deniability. What is clear, however, is that China has definitely benefited from her self-interested actions, and she definitely used her romantic proximity to Jensen to achieve that. My understanding is that intelligence agencies often try to groom or coax such "useful" people to steer them into being more efficient/productive/relevant in their activities; so they're assets, even if they're not field agents.

when you're done beating it, please put that dead horse back on the pile with the rest of the Fox News scapegoats (and remember to wash your hands with soap)

I don't mean to alarm you, but there's a good chance this will actually be on the way out. The new cohort of Democrats seized on it and made it a major issue during the midterms. In total, 51 congresscritters signed a letter demanding it, and both Jeffries and Schumer have described it as a priority for the new session.

You'll have to get something new to moan about! Won't that be fun?

To think, an entire genre of low-effort knee-jerk Slashdot comment might become obsolete soon. I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime. Truly, miracles are possible. :')

At least it's not the typical paranoid schizophrenic guy posting the same manifesto on every story.

Trump knew for an entire year about the Jensen/spy situation; Jensen confessed to it, got defensive when asked about China, and there's plenty of photographic documentation that it existed. There's no coincidences here; it's routine for the US President to be get advance notice of something major before it goes public, and the blatant insider trading is just normal behavior for Trump.

No moral failing is so profound, no travesty so great, that it cannot be overlooked if doing so will insulate one's investments from the horrors of mediocrity.

Too true! And you can rely on that. In fact, he will continue to "have been a good boss" until the value of their stock portfolios recovers.

Yep. It's incredibly annoying.

"One $250 million dollar hookerbot, or 250 million one-dollar hookerbots?"

Huang's not an idiot, his security team would be handing out his money, because nVidia's money would be documented. Lord knows Huang can afford it.

The overwhelming majority of his nVidia shares are vested so it doesn't matter. This guy could acquire a $10,000-dollar-a-day cocaine and escort habit and he would still probably end his life richer than he is now.

So... several things to point out here...

First, Elon's politics are not all race-baiting and dog-whistling all the time. That stuff is largely performative. He wants clout and respect above all else, and will essentially do anything in order to get there. Make no mistake, he was publicly advocating for fully-automated luxury communism ("machines work, AI runs politics, everyone lives in paradise") long before anyone else; Neuralink is explicitly about recreating a technology from the Culture series, no matter the cost. This is the same agenda as Altman and Amodei, years before LLMs could drive toward the same issue. Most of what comes out of his mouth is vice signalling, i.e. malicious virtue signalling. There are definitely individual areas in which he inflexibly violates the Left's social covenant, like his approaches to business leadership and labor relations (best described as "penny-pinching miser") but he doesn't brag about those things; they're the result of him being a deeply flawed scumbag, not his politics. His ownership of Twitter is the same thing; he bought the company purely so he could stop people from saying mean things about him on the Internet, and the bile-spewing hive upon it is nothing more than a roost of flying monkeys to him, shaped according to his whims; even under his ownership, it may not always be as it is now.

Second, we tend to give model designers too much credit in the AI ecosystem. The network also includes Palantir and Oracle. It's hard to get much fouler than Thiel, who can't decide whether or not he's the Antichrist and is explicitly pro-monarchy, or Ellison, who has bankrolled his son's attempt to buy up the entirety of the US mainstream media industry and dye it red forever. These companies work together hand in hand, day after day, to accomplish goals like planning ICE raids and bombing schools in Iran. OpenAI and Anthropic stand on a pyramid of other businesses, including SpaceX and NVIDIA. Remove one and their services go offline; their interdependence is not minor, nor is the incredibly byzantine circular financing structure that Jensen Huang forced them all into. They're all essentially in a suicide pact with each other, and every time one of them goes public, more of the economy gets held hostage. When the bubble bursts, either the Fed will have to bail them out, or the entire country will go under. This sort of economic gambit is not exactly anti-capitalist, but it's most certainly in line with modern robber baron small-c conservatism.

Third? Altman is a scuzzy fucking sociopath, and Amodei's actions repeatedly fail to live up to his promises. They talk about the risk of destroying humanity, and the urgency of slowing down, and then immediately flip around and press harder on the gas. Winning the race is more important to them than anything else. For Altman the reward is unquestionably money; when the OpenAI board fired him for lying, he staged a coup and stole the company back, then neutered its non-profit arm. Every other dimension of political discourse is just snakeskin to him, available to shed or don as needed. He does not hesitate to let the Pentagon use his products to murder civilians. Conversely, it's possible Amodei has convinced himself that he's doing the right thing and that people will be grateful to him later, but being left of Altman doesn't mean the Left recognizes him as one of their own. Everything for these two men is justifiable for their ends; they aren't pushing back on the surveillance state, or the gentrification of San Francisco that their companies are driving, or any of a million other serious causes that currently galvanize the Left into making decisions at the voting booth. Money remains king, either as a terminal or instrumental goal, and if they were founded a year ago they might very well never have bothered with toning down sycophancy or trying to eliminate racial and gender bias from their systems. Elon used to act the same way.

In short, they're all horrible, callous people, and they're all using capitalism to win. The color of the car used to get them there does not matter in the slightest.