I took the same path. Work early, work hard. I started out as a mechanic without any qualifications, went to community college and got a job from a teacher as a network eng on his team at a game company. A year later I was promoted to a programming position. But I started at less than half the pay of any new hired programmer. Later on I figured I was getting paid 20% less than average. I didn't rocket through the titles like people with degrees did.
I have not tried leveling up by jumping through companies much. The pace of acquisitions means I'm always getting paid to stay put with retention bonuses and stock. A lot of people who left for more money ended up coming back anyway.

Palantir would be doing/saying whatever is required to be in favor with the current administration. It's not betting entirely on government contracts, just mostly.
I believe Alex Karp is a pro-trump libertarian nutjob, but even if he wasn't they'd be doing the same sort of getting in the administrations pockets as deeply as possible. They'll get so embedded that the next administration can't kick them out.

Revenue management is the thing that makes airlines profitable now, and has been since 1978 when they were deregulated by the Carter administration. At first the term was "yield management" and eventually "revenue management". The application of expert systems and machine learning algorithms are all in the realm of AI. Any big business driven by profits is using "AI" although I don't see how ChatGPT could optimize anything around pricing.

I'm trying to get AI to replace everything tedious. Nope, still too stupid. I don't want to hear anything about "prompt engineering" or "you didn't ask it right"
How often do they have to ask Computer twice on Star Trek?

Computer, how many humans are aboard the ship currently?
Ninety billion, two hundred twenty one million, three-hundred eighty seven thousand, nine hundred and twenty one.
That's impossible and obviously incorrect. Try again and this time tell me how many people are aboard THIS SHIP CURRENTLY.
I made a mistake, sorry. I meant to say Sixty hundred billion...

Also, not aware of or don't care how fat they are.
Not all Americans. Just about the same percentage that own iPhones. No correlation there.

"Trump's vision of making America the crypto capital of the world"
Well, we first have to beat Nigeria and maybe Cambodia for that title. If the US dollar falls flat on George Washington's face, this vision will be made real.

200 million dollars compensation?
He was a student researcher at google from 2020-2022 before becoming a director at Apple.
41 research papers in ML, computer vision, signal processing.
https://www.researchgate.net/p...
Meta figures he can help them crack the AGI barrier so they can replace meat humans with virtual analogs.

It's a little jarring when I get something completely backwards from the start. I've thought this way for years and I don't know why exactly. Obviously I'm not in the oil business.
The word "fair" is subjective, I agree. As is "capital class" because anyone who has money can make capital investments. I'm not talking about the capitalist or capital class in the Marxist sense, but the owners of the bulk of the wealth. The morbidly wealthy.

I don't know what the long term effects of being generally happy and financially secure are. Could be trouble. People might get complacent and stop striving to achieve things.

The UAE's trillions are invested in everything across the globe. If the majority of money-making ventures in the world implode and they haven't shifted to non-imploding investments, then they'll have a big problem. They have all the resources of Blackrock making sure their fund continues growing.

Now if only they could name them appropriately for outside markets. Nobody wants to drive a Zeekr. Maybe Ford can badge-engineer them with something like the Ford Expedition Mach-E or something cool like that. And have XL, XLT, Lariat, Platinum trims.

Anyone who buys a Mercedes is not concerned too much about the cost. They're paying extra for the misplaced prestige. They're paying a lot more in down the road maintenance costs too.
Also the floaty airbag suspensions that have zero body roll, which can be cool if you like that kind of thing.

What's Ford building then? Ford is licensing some battery tech from BYD or some other Chinese entity to build a new battery plant in the US.
Which you know, good for Ford.

The US could potentially use its crude oil exclusively in theory, but it doesn't have the means to do so. If the sulphur content of crude is above 0.5%, it's called sour crude. It's got more hydrogen sulfide that needs to be removed before it can be safely shipped and processed into lighter distillates. Removing hydrogen sulfide adds to processing costs, so for economic reasons it makes more sense to blend light sweet crude with some processed sour crude to get an acceptable crude oil grade for the refineries in the US to make acceptable quality fuels and other distillates. If you're in NW Indiana near Lake Michigan, you can smell the rotten egg smell of hydrogen sulfide being flared off. This is probably due to the oil coming down from Canada and other sources being very very dirty. BP Whiting facility in Indiana was built to process really dirty/sandy/watery/egg smelling oil from hydro-cracking shale fields or tar sands or whatever nasty hydrocarbon sources they're shipping in there. Most of the light sweet crude comes from further afield.
The US Navy keeps global trade flowing, just as the British Navy did when it was a colonial power. Yes, corporations benefit from the public money shoveled into the military budget, and don't pay their fair share of taxes. This is an imbalance in the way things work, as is the income divide between the capital class and the workers. But capitalism will grease the wheels in favor of the capitalists, as long as they're not held to account by law. The capital class has not paid its fair share of taxes since the 1930's if ever.

Microsoft employed foreign engineers and then employed "digital escorts" to keep an eye on them?
I want to see the job posting for that one:
  "Wanted: Cloud Digital Escort. As a Cloud Digital Escort, you will watch over IT workers located in China to prevent them from doing nasty things like send sensitive data to China. Great hours for night owls! Pay: Hourly/min wage/less"

Every time I have to use Excel I remember how bad MS is at building software, but how good they are at roping everyone into using it.