You are ignoring the main post when you attribute the lack of confidence to lack of sustainable revenue streams. We are talking about China, the country that 5 years ago turned the private tutoring industry nonprofit on an overnight decision. Tomorrow, the CCP could seize your highly valued frontier shares by nationalizing a frontier lab. They could ban your highly valued Chinese GPU foundry from exporting to the lucrative foreign market. The visionary CEO that's getting you to invest in his firm at 250 P/E could be disappeared tomorrow because he's been too mouthy on social media recently.

This is a highly visible industry that's drawing political attention. The lack of long-term confidence comes from dealing with an authoritarian communist government with a track record of coming down on capitalists like an elephant in a glass store, not because anyone is afraid that "copyright issues" will be a concern in China.

I think this is a bad investment because Western AI companies are too focused on censorship and politics rather than delivering a good product. It's not clear how the surplus value of AI will be distributed, maybe most will go to Nvidia, maybe to integrators, maybe to consumers; frontier labs seem one of the weaker bets to me with how overleveraged they are and how well China is competing with them. I think this will end up like the airline business where the most romantic part of the business (the owner/operators of the planes) is a perpetual money loser even as others get value.

HOWEVER, I am put off by the duality of anticapitalism on display every time we talk about the stock market. On one side, the rich get richer - its an unfair machine and we must tax them to hell and prevent their wealth accumulation. On the other side, stocks are a scam - an IPO is a way to create the final bagholder before the bubble pops, a way to trade fantasy money for real money. a scheme to plunder 401ks. I wish the two sides would duke it out:

* Should we make it legal to sell shares to retail on a 1-day-old company registration and a dream, so they can participate in Anthropic's growth from day one instead of after the company is valued at $2T? Or is it total funny money scam to sell shares at $1M when all you have is two guys in a garage and a powerpoint slide?

* Should we make it illegal to sell shares to retail at all? Or do we need a way to participate in the same instruments that allow the rich to get richer after all?

There was once a practical joke that went like - a young programmer sells 0.0001% of his company to his parents for $1. He announces the fundraising round and the media lauds him a millionaire, because if $1 / 0.0001% = $1MM.

This is the confusion you're running into. Yes, the company is selling shares on a $2T valuation, but nobody is putting trillions of dollars in; only a small portion of the shares will change hands.

It's also the confusion that the wealth tax people run into all the time. A startup founder who is a "millionaire" because his company was valued at $5M when he raised $1 from his dad or $20k from an angel does not actually have $5M to play with; he has $20k (likely already turned into AWS credits) plus shares theoretically worth $4.98M but only if he finds an investor (big if).

I have no idea what you're on about.

Whites have a lot of guilt but I don't think you'll convince them to willingly accept the same fate as the Native Americans.

The point of a union is to be able to prevent that. Capture an industry and work together to vote yourself a good wage, ban qualified non-union entrants, prevent automation. Look at the ILWU for a sterling example of how a small set of Americans have managed to wrest control of an economical choke point for themselves; it's a great gig if you can get it. Hell, Uber's main innovation was in opening up the taxi industry. It's time to make it closed again.

> "Between A from B"? What grammatical construct is that? Not an English one....

You have a talent for distracting yourself with trivialities. Who cares about the principle of free speech when we have the mighty Strafgesetzbuch to guide us? And who cares about any type of speech when we can talk grammar? Marvelous.

I don't think I ever said anything about yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, but quoting sophistry used to falsely prosecute antiwar protesters is exactly the kind of bullshit I'd expect from your ilk. I bet if the court told you to catch escaped slaves, you'd get to it right away as your highest moral duty. How could anyone have any other morals than the ones listed in the StGB?

Yes, I could tell that you struggle to distinguish between "the goal of free speech" from "the laws regarding speech". For most people the content of the StGB is not as important as the principles it encodes or fails to encode. But there are many people like you who latch onto the legal text as their moral bible.

Some people really struggle to distinguish between "the goal of free speech" from "the laws regarding speech".

When you criticize the Dear Leader and he legally brings you to the People's Revolutionary Court, which follows all protocol to the letter before having you shot for lese majeste, nothing illegal has taken place. Still, the people might object to this state of affairs and seek to improve it.

I do not know where you lost the ability to distinguish between "legal" and "right". But this non-sequitur where someone complains about impingement on free speech (the principle) and gets a response like "akshually Germans are not entitled to free speech" is disturbingly common.

Allegedly the Roman Republic was founded when Sextus Tarquinius exercised his kingly right to sleep with other men's wives. I suppose if you were in Brutus' shoes, you would explain to the foolish men of Rome how procedure was followed and that's all that matters.

People's impulse has always been to restrict speech and to win by suppressing dissent. The 1st Amendment is an exception and has plenty of detractors, even among the terminally online who are beneficiaries of unfettered communication (remember "freeze peach"?)..

Web hosts today feel no shame about arbitrary moderation, shadow bans, if not disabling comments outright. The same journalists who somehow see themselves as the protectors of democracy have no issue writing for venues with public commenting disabled. It comes from the same sentiment - the citizen is a dumb and dangerous animal who should be controlled (still gets to vote tho..but we could think about fixes for that later). You cannot let dumb and dangerous animals post on the sites of venerable protectors of democracy such as the NYT! That would endanger civic life!

This impulse is omnipresent and not restricted to journalistic venues. What does OpenAI think of first when they talk about safety? Its not the killbots; their harnesses were initially motivated to prevent dumb and dangerous animals from asking about meth recipes or pictures of naked women. The citizen cannot be trusted with open AI, he has to be protected from himself. The citizen cannot be trusted with anything. Except voting, apparently. For now.

In practice it isn't enough to have a reason for revenge. Communism has proven remarkably resilient, and even the people of North Korea, despite having ample reason to exact revenge, have not been able to kill Kim (or his Cuban counterparts). Most people in history did not live in free countries, and even today, only a small set of countries have democracies (as flawed as ours are). This is why it's important for the populace to be armed and to zealously protect its rights - "renewed reasons for revenge" alone will only serve as seasoning for your stay in the labor camp.

Each nonprofit one day reorients from fulfilling the mission to enriching employees and management. What's unique about OpenAI is how quickly and publicly Altman could make the transition.

This is a common defense of HFT favoritism, but I don't see it happening in the real market. What you see in the market is exactly what you'd expect to see in any market - highly traded assets trade on narrow spreads, illiquid assets trade on very wide spreads. VOO has a 1 cent spread because a billion dollars of VOO are traded every day. On the other hand, despite all the sweetheart deals that HFTs benefit from, VOO260417C00720000 has a 100% spread - the kindly HFTs who can easily automatically quote both sides are nowhere to be found. The argument is that these people get discounts on their trading costs and mechanical advantages in how they do their trading because they also have a duty to provide narrow spreads, but those narrow spreads are nowhere to be found (except in places where you obviously don't need HFT for narrow spreads, like goddamn S&P).

> HFT's save money [..] ensuring the pricing is more fair

HFT is about being on the other side of everyone's trades and collecting money on the spread. Since you want to trade everything, this limits how much you can know about the things you trade. Arbitrage and price correction do not require colocated servers and trading fee exemptions and they should not be conflated with HFT. If you do HFT it is synergistic to also have a robust model for what the prices should be, but in many ways HFT is the polar opposite strategy of the trading involved in price discovery.

Are those other people in the room with you right now?

By the way, today I got Hunterbrook Media's yearly recap, which begins like this:

```
In 2025, Hunterbrook Media published dozens of investigations, driving impact across healthcare, housing, and the environment. (See below!)

No ads or clickbait. No exclusive paywalls.
[..]

But really, our business model is simpler than that.

We get paid to be right, to be rigorous. Because if the reporting is wrong, the investment or the lawsuit fails. And the reverse is also true. Markets and courts, while severely flawed, are still fairly good at getting to the truth — eventually.
```

The "skin in the game" principle is widely applicable.