Plenty of people near him have a spine. They just aren’t your friends

Regardless, it should be fairly obvious that giving a company you hate money will not cause them to fail faster.

I’ll concede that trying to soak Altman for $14k/mo when he’s already hemorrhaging billions is a bit like pissing in the river.

I might ask what you plan to do with the $14k in tokens you’re burning. If you’ve got a material use case for them, and Altman wants to sell you $20 for a nickel, go wild.

But half the joke of AI is that you’re burning tokens to do nothing. That’s why businesses recoil as soon as they’re asked to justify at-cost AI spend.

I’m amazed it isn’t more.

Despite the popular fantasy, the rich and powerful are not stupid.

Uh… famously untrue. Mental illness has plagued monarchs, pharaohs, and caesers for millennia. That’s long before you get to all the quirked up white boys and trad rad girl bosses currently running things.

You don’t know more about a company or market from passively consuming headlines than the leadership of that company.

Okay, but you can review their balance sheets and their primary lines of credit. Case in point, Sam Altman is heavily reliant on three big financial partners - Softbank, Oracle, and NVIDIA. Two of these are - themselves - hemorrhaging money thanks to large capital outlays that have failed to produce substantive returns.

There are finance journalists who get out ahead of this and report their own analysis. And you can find that in a thousand different private journals, substacks, and podcasts. But you can also go do the grunt work yourself if you’re ambitious.

OpenAI’s financials have been disclosed already (although the official SEC filing is still upcoming). So… just read them if you doubt what you’re reading in the news. But it’s not some kind of secret that the business is operating at a loss, with a fixation on debt-fueled growth. The argument is over future projected revenue, which isn’t something business leadership can be any more certain of than a passive media consumer.

I definitely get the knee-jerk impulse to announce “business professionals know more about business than internet idiots”. Because, sure. True. But the idea that business professionals don’t routinely make bad decisions has some pretty historic well-established counterpoints.

“The business people know more” line is akin to saying “This used car dealer must know more about the vehicles on his lot than I do, so I can trust him”.

you do not need special skills to apply for the job

That’s definitely the textbook economic definition.

But the colloquial definition is that you don’t need special skills to do the job. Employees are interchangeable outside some minimal qualifications (rudimentary intellect, marginal physicality, gender).

And therefore you should be able to fully staff your organization paying the lowest prevailing wage rate, so long as some number of unemployed people exist. Anyone can be fired and replaced at any time with near-zero friction.

And if you couldn’t pay for the pizza, they’d have sex with you

The answer is simple.

The government shouldn’t be telling us what time it is. We should leave that to the private sector. And you should be required to pay for a subscription to know what time it is.

Was going to say. They already passed this, and then the Senate dragged it’s feet

Yeah, sure, okay.

But also this is all mythology from the Bronze Age. So talking about Goliath’s kit feels a bit like discussing the potency of hydra venom or the height of the World Tree.

I’m guessing religion.

Religion is the excuse, not the cause. There’s a fair number of religious institutions which are queer friendly or at least queer-indifferent. You gravitate towards the religious group that echoes your own biases. Those biases aren’t imbued by some supernatural force. They’re the result of material incentives and social divides that demagogues exploit when they fashion a religious doctrine.

I wish I knew how to get people to care

So much of the anti-LGBTQ hysteria comes from people who are in immediate proximity to friends and loved ones coming out of the closet. And while the natural response to this occurrence is to show love and support, we have a deluge of misinformation that’s designed to poison people into believing the most insane bullshit.

Which is to say, people do care. But they tend to get their heads scrambled with reactionary media. And the end result is that, after hearing for decades “if you’re gay then you’ve become the victims of sexual assault and you’re going to do drugs and you’ll get horrible diseases that will kill you”, they respond with abject horror at the slightest hint of queerness. Same if you see a sibling or a child or (god fucking forbid) a parent or spouse show signs of it.

The end result of this firehose of induced anxiety, combined with the economic pressures of poverty and the social pressures of fascist religious institutions, is incoherent panic.

Why do you care if someone likes dick?

Because then they’ll make you like dick and liking dick will kill you and damn your soul in a lake of fire for eternity.

survey

Computer, zoom in, decode, and enhance.

have sex with

Republicans will claim that giraffes aren’t gay and then shoot them anyway.

Real David and Goliath moment.

The most prominent leader of the movement, former radio presenter Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma

We need to shut down radios. No more sending broadcast messages, until we can figure out what’s going on.

the Reason Is More Alarming Than Ever

militarnyi.com

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many of you have guns and there’s much more violence and insanity in general

Every third article in the UK is about “Knife Crime!!!” The French and German news networks make it sound like Paris and Berlin are active war zones. FFS, even the Swedes are insisting half the country is living out the plot of Taken.

Like, I’m sure the US is marginally less safe than Europe. But I suspect that has more to do with Europe just being on-average five years older than the US. By and large, both continents are extremely safe. Violence - particularly street violence - is extraordinarily rare. And the areas where it does crop up tend to be between people who know each other and having some kind of deep interpersonal dysfunction (abusive spouses / parents, school kids fighting one another over some accumulated grudge, sports hooligans brawling with their rivals).

What we have, in practice, is a handful of highly glamorized violent events (school shootings, most notably) that get international news coverage. FFS, we spend more time covering shootings in the US than we do covering our active military campaigns abroad.