Heavy on number 3. Everyone tap dancing with glee over how badly this is going to blow up in the Republicans faces is seriously underestimating the degree to which this is going to be a government absolutely built from the ground up on corruption, bribery and extortion. I can’t help but think that in a few years the US is not going to look an awful lot like Russia.

And the reality is that, by the standards of billionaires, these people will all be very, very easily bought.

I genuinely don’t know how they plan to make a parody of InfoWars that will not be indistinguishable from the original thing.

Very excited for this. I played the demo and it was perfect; exactly what a remake of this game should be. I really hope they’ll do the sequel as well.

You’re missing the fact that a flatscreen TV will still often represent - as a portion of someone’s wealth - a far greater cost than a private jet would to a billionaire. Consider that most low income people are getting their cell phones on payment plans, whereas a multimillionaire can afford to buy a Lamborghini Gellardo out of pocket. On top of that, high end purchases like cars, yachts, houses, fine art, etc, often retain a lot of their resale value, turning them into investments in many cases, often reselling for more than their purchase price. So yes, I absolutely did account for the tax exemptions on “essentials”, and even when you factor those your sales tax only model still ends up being less onerous the more wealthy someone is.

I also want to call out the unspoken implication that is often present with these theories - not accusing you of doing this, but it needs to be said - that items like phones, computers and TVs are extraneous luxuries that no poor person should ever own, as if enjoying a fulfilling life or engaging in relaxation are things that only the wealthy should be allowed to have access to.

No

An investment contract exists if there is an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.”

And just to be absolutely clear, many cryptocurrencies do not qualify as investments, and the government agrees. However there are numerous other regulations that the crypto industry apparently cannot handle, such as “Know Your Client” laws, which all financial institutions have to abide by, and which exist to prevent money laundering (Binance’s internal emails revealed that they knew perfectly well that their clients were using their service to facilitate crime, and they were perfectly happy with that).

These are not bad faith regulations. They exist for good reasons, and there is absolute no good reason why the crypto industry shouldn’t also be subject to them. If these are currencies they should be regulated like currencies. If they are investments they should be regulated like investments.

That’s not what’s happening here. Microsoft management are well aware that AI isn’t making them any money, but the company made a multi billion dollar bet on the idea that it would, and now they have to convince shareholders that they didn’t epicly fuck up. Shoving AI into stuff like notepad is basically about artificially inflating “consumer uptake” numbers that they can then show to credulous investors to suggest that any day now this whole thing is going to explode into an absolute tidal wave of growth, so you’d better buy more stock right now, better not miss out.

There wasn’t a need to “define a new regulatory framework that actually fits” because, funnily enough, the existing regulatory framework already fits. It turns out, inventing new words doesn’t actually change the fundamental nature of the thing you’re describing. Refusing to call something an “investment” doesn’t change the fact that you’re selling an investment, refusing to call something a “security” doesn’t prevent it from being a security if it meets the definition.

Edit: Sorry, let me address that ridiculous point about Coinbase “asking for clarity” directly. Yes, Coinbase repeatedly “asked for clarity” in the same manner as a dude in a girl’s DMs repeatedly asking for nudes while being told in the bluntest of terms to fuck off. They were given perfectly clear answers, they just didn’t like them, so they kept claiming, with zero fucking basis, that these will laid out rules that every financial institution has been following for decades were somehow “unclear” to them. It was a conversation not unlike a Sovereign Citizen trying to get out of a speeding ticket by claiming that they don’t understand where the officer’s authority comes from. The law is prefectly clear. If you don’t understand the law, you hire a lawyer who does. That’s a cost of doing business. Sticking “smart” in front the of the word “contract” doesn’t suddenly invent a whole new field of law. I can’t suddenly get away with murder because I call it “crypto murder”. The law is based on what you do, not what you call it.

Lower income people spend - as a proportion of their income - far more of their income than higher income people. This makes the “nothing but sales taxes” approach much more regressive than it initially seems, despite often being touted by economists as a progressive approach to taxation.

Coiners: “We want to be taken seriously and treated as legitimate businesses!”

Biden Government: “OK. We’ll treat you as legitimate businesses in your respective fields and expect you to comply with the same regulations everyone else has to.”

Coiners: “Oh shit wait no this sucks, our whole business model only works because of crime, quick everyone vote for a fascist conman!”

I’m a big fan of the maxim that how people talk about furries tells you a LOT about how deep their progressive ideals actually run.

There are way too many self proclaimed leftists who either want to or feel compelled to reflexively shit on furries, because they’re the designated punching bags that it’s OK to mock. This, despite the fact that furries aren’t harming anyone.

I don’t get furry kinks. I don’t get spending thousands of dollars on a fursuit. I don’t get the fursona thing. I do know enough to know that for most furries it’s not a kink, furry porn is only consumed by a very small subset of the community, and a lot of self-identified furries probably can’t afford a fursuit.

But most of all, I know they’re not hurting anyone. So who the fuck cares what they do with their time and money, or how they get off, or fucking whatever? It’s none of my god damn business.

I hope every furry is having a good time, and I hope you all get an abundance of head pats.

And I wish that the so-called leftists who keep punching down on them would find someone actually worth shitting on to be mean to instead.

Like Nazis. It’s always good to be mean to Nazis.

Companies release free products to bring people into their ecosystem. If your company is already using Workstation Player, and now they’re looking for a Type 1 hypervisor, it makes sense to seriously consider ESXi. The idea especially is that you get smaller companies hooked on your free products early and then as they grow they buy more of your stuff rather than reconfigure their whole setup. You also get IT enthusiasts and home users to adopt, which gets you name recognition and builds familiarity. Then in the workplace those same users look to your brand as one to trust.

For VMware, the problem is that they recently made a huge volley of deeply anti-consumer moves - basically told all their small customers to fuck off, and told their big customers to prepare to get fucked - and it really did not go the way they’d hoped. Turns out when you’re competing in a space where KVM, Hyper-V and XCP all exist, it’s actually not that difficult for customers to leave. So they did.

This won’t directly help their bottom line but it’s presumably a sacrifice play to salvage their brand somewhat. Turns out when you tell people to fuck off, they tend to do just that.

Yeah, they’ve been reliably putting out solid indie titles for a while. Overcooked, Blasphemous, Yooka Laylee, Hell Let Loose (the best WW2 shooter on the market by far), Moving Out, The Escapists, My Time at Portia and Dredge were all published by them, just to name a few of their recent titles.

Wait, what?

OK, help me understand your reasoning here.

People refuse to vote for Harris, because it would betray their principals to support the Dems when they refuse to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide (which it is).

They do this, despite knowing that this will help Trump win, who will actively encourage Israel’s genocide, as opposed to the current Dem position of trying to (fairly ineffectively) somewhat temper it.

This is very much an example of what Ian is talking about in his video. (Typically) White progressive activists choosing their own principles over what will actually be most beneficial for the people they claim to be advocating for. The Dems are ultimately the better option for Palestinians, small though the difference may be.

But you seem to be arguing that actually the real villain here is some random commenter calling those people out for doing exactly that. And that said commentor is actually the one guilty of choosing principles over effective advocacy.

Do I have that right?

Being compared to Everett True is the greatest compliment I have ever been given, and am honour of which I am in no way worthy.

You know what? Sure, fuck it, why not? I don’t even have a problem with OpenAI getting billions of dollars to do R&D on LLMs. They might actually turn out to have some practical applications, maybe.

My problem is that OpenAI basically stopped doing real R&D the moment ChatGPT became a product, because now all their money goes into their ridiculous backend server costs and putting increasingly silly layers of lipstick on a pig so that they can get one more round of investment funding.

AI is a really important area of technology to study, and I’m all in favour of giving money to the people actually studying it. But that sure as shit ain’t Sam Altman and his band of carnival barkers.

It’s been proven that even small amounts of synthetic data injected into a training set quickly leads to a phenomenon termed “model collapse”, though I prefer the term “Hapsburg AI” (not mine).

Basically, this is the kind of thing you announce you’re doing because it will hopefully get you one more round of investment funding while Sam Altman finishes working out how to fake his death.

Translation: “We told everyone we could turn glorified autocomplete into artificial general intelligence and then they gave us a bunch of money for that, so now we actually have to try to deliver something and we’ve got no idea how.”

Victory? What victory? He’s going to cut off all support and present Ukraine with a choice between handing Russia half of their country now, or all of it in a year’s time. And Putin will say “Good doggy” and pat his head just like he so desperately wants.

Won’t do any good. Legal age of consent in Japan is 13.

He won’t actually, like, listen to them. But he’ll be in the room when they’re happening. Sometimes. If he didn’t decide to play golf instead.