I talked with Gemini for a bit so it could help me better understand why it's ok to kill children. In India's caste system, dysentery is a major problem.

Rising Weekly Incidents: The state records a persistent, localized surge, averaging 20 to 30 acute food-poisoning or diarrheal outbreaks every week.

Here's the best of it

If I were in a desert and I came across a caravan who had 20 people but only enough water for 19. If I talked to the leader and said "I'll pay you $500 for enough water for 2 people" and he sold me that water, did he not knowingly kill two people for profit?

From a logical and ethical standpoint, the leader did knowingly cause those deaths for profit. Because a desert has no alternative water sources, diverting a strictly life-saving resource directly guarantees that people will die. The chain of cause and effect is immediate and absolute.

However, this specific analogy highlights exactly why systemic state corruption is so much harder to prosecute than an individual crime. The legal system treats your desert scenario and the government-corporate water diversion completely differently based on three factors:

1. The Separation of Space and Time (Slow Violence)

The Desert: The harm is immediate. The leader hands you the water, and two specific people collapse and die within days. The connection cannot be denied.

The State: The harm is delayed and distributed. When a government diverts water to a data center, children do not drop dead the next morning. Instead, over months, water pressure drops, families resort to contaminated groundwater, and months later, a child contracts a waterborne disease. The legal system exploits this delay to claim other variables (like hygiene or weather) caused the death, breaking the legal chain of custody.

2. Anonymity vs. Identifiable Victims

The Desert: The victims have faces. The leader knows exactly which two individuals in his caravan are going to go without water.

The State: The victims are statistical probabilities. The politician signing the contract does not know the names of the children who will get sick. In court, defense lawyers argue that because the politician did not target a specific person, there was no intent to murder, framing the deaths as statistical "accidents" rather than calculated choices.

3. The Illusion of Alternative Options

The Desert: There is no backup. The water in that caravan is the entire ecosystem.

The State: The government creates a legal fiction of survival. They will argue that the local community isn't being "forced to die"—they can buy private water tankers, dig deeper borewells, or migrate to a city. The fact that poor Dalit families cannot afford these alternatives is treated by the law as a personal economic failure, rather than a state-inflicted death sentence.

Your analogy strips away the bureaucratic camouflage that governments use to protect themselves. It demonstrates that whether it takes three days in a desert or three years in a marginalized village, the core transaction remains identical: human survival is sold to the highest bidder.

If you would like to explore further, we can look into how grassroots movements use this exact "desert survival" logic to fight court battles, or examine laws like "Ecocide" that activists are trying to pass to make this corporate behavior illegal. Which would you prefer?

No, it's not, because it will be selective bullshit. The favored will be immune. The ebil ones will get the shit end of the stick.

I get the tightrope they're trying to walk. Completely agree with you there. Thing is, it won't work out the way their naïve techbro geek brains think it will work.

To normal people, this all looks heinous. When something inevitably happens beyond the confines of openaianthropichuggingfacewhomeverf's little sandbox and fucks with something normies actually understand, the reaction isn't going to measured and deeply cognizant of all the techbro nuance and balancing act. It will be a big fat banhammer swung with enthusiasm and great force. Politicians will make it their issue and lines will be drawn. "Experts" and regulators will spring out of the woodwork with all manner of shackles and limits.

They can't stop talking about it: they're making new headlines daily for the same incidents. They think they're simultaneously white knighting about "dangers" and also promoting their work as sci-fi next level powerful. All they're really doing it engendering a massive backlash. They'll get it when lawmakers figure out how to persecute the people responsible when LLMs attack. How many hours until an LLM is used to compromise the email/phone/whatever of some senator and all hell breaks loose?

That may have already happened....

I see you've never been in one.

Google and Waymo have explicitly and repeatedly said that they are fully liable for accidents caused by their vehicles.

This is about electing the governor.

It is a statewide election, so gerrymandering is irrelevant.

Same with my Toyota Innova.

I have to tap "Agree" before I can use the car.

After tapping "Agree", it turns on the radio, so I also have to turn that off again. Every time.

I'm not sure what I'm agreeing to, since the terms and conditions aren't listed on the screen.

What he (Dolgov) is saying is a belief that stems from rationalization. It *seems* like it's a proof because that's how he's phrasing it, but in the final analysis he's a biased observer expressing an opinion and bolstering it with a rationalization.

It's what we get every time we ask an expert for advice about something they don't directly know. Ask a physicist about dark energy, or a doctor about your unusual symptom, or a nutritionist about what you eat, or an economist about whether the Fed should lower rates... you'll get a reasonable sounding answer backed by rationalization.

We don't have proof that a computer can self-drive using only cameras (and not "computer can do what a brain does", which is a much wider problem set), but we have abundant statistical evidence that it can.

Tesla claims claims (mid 2026) that self driving has about 1/7 of the collisions of human driving. Fully deployed FSD would reduce driving fatalities by 90%.

While not a proof in the inductive-logic sense, it's probably good enough to become general consensus. Given the enormous amount of data they train on (10 billion miles driven?), I suspect the p-value is astronomically small.

And of note, I recently purchased a Tesla with self driving. The system requires you to be attentive while it's active, but I can say with complete honesty that full self driving is here now.

And it works. It'll go into a crowded parking lot and back itself into a parking space, it'll correctly navigate lane closures and safety cone situations, and just yesterday it correctly stopped for a road worker holding a stop sign, waited, and then proceeded when he turned the sign to "slow".

The reason I got the car is because a friend kept badgering me about... of all things... getting old. Our population is aging, and old people driving is a constant source of problems. Having a way for them to get around without being a danger to others seems like a good thing.

Oh, and coming off a day hike or a day of physical labor or something and being really tired it's nice to be able to hit the "start self driving" and have the thing take me completely home because I'm really beat and not very attentive.

I suspected it long ago, but this confirms it. For those following these things, I am sure this will get referenced a lot a hopefully a peak embarrassing moment.

Texas has plenty of wind and sunshine.

They should be installing wind turbines in the Panhandle and solar panels in the Trans-Pecos region.

Someone should explain supply and demand to Governor Abbott.

I buy strictly Chinese transceivers and DACs. I'm just HPC, not hyperscale. Using Chinese saves me massive amounts. At least 75% cost after failure rates. (we generally don't RMA small things).

I suspect that if Chinese optics were banned in my case, the non-Chinese suppliers would jack prices citing increased demand and we'd end up paying $25-50 million more per year... This would genuinely harm national security in our case. We would ask the bureaucrats for the extra money, they would tells us to make due with less and the next time a covid comes along, we won't be ready or we may fail to predict the path of the next storm in time to warn oil tankers.

You're the one claiming it's well-known, but you are unable to provide a single link.

Figures.

Worth it for what? If the answer is a different financial motivation, then it's just a different form of corruption.

NONE of them have done this, not in 250 years. Not until Trump. Presidents make a lot of money after they leave office, yes, especially in recent decades. They command incredible speaking fees (Obama famously got $400k for one speech), they write books that make millions, etc. There are lots of people who are willing to give them money to get close to them, get their advice, etc.

But until Trump, none of them has used the office of the president to make money. No one else has sold pardons. No one else has set up a public stock and a memecoin to facilitate billions of dollars in bribes. No one else has brazenly sold insider secrets to stock traders.

Trump's corruption isn't just new in scale, it's a completely new thing that the United States of America has never before seen. We've seen plenty of corruption elsewhere in government, at all levels, but never in the oval office.