I like how in today’s world and especially when it comes to Musk things cannot be as simple as incompetence. It has to be some 4D chess move. Like a reverse Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which might be/maybe/perhaps explained by 4D chess move. It’s like 4chan leaking all over the Internet. And Musk can keep his genius legacy alive.
is it really 4D chess to imagine that a man under investigation by the federal government would desire to benefit from being given express permission to reduce force and efficacy of agencies directly threatening him?
I don't think Musk having bad faith intent shows him to be intelligent, more just greedy and selfish, but I think it's actually more irresponsible to believe that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing
That falls under “dishonest stuff companies do all the time”. Unless there are major political points to be scored by nailing him (which there may be now, don’t get me wrong), this would get a slap on the wrist. The cars do drive themselves, they have for awhile, Tesla never claimed it was perfect, they only claimed it would be perfect in the near future and musk plausibly could have (delusionally) thought this so there is no case (not saying he isn’t dishonest, though, that’s just not how the legal system works).
So I don’t think being looked at for the kind of stuff many companies do all the time explains <checks notes> infiltrating the government and personally disrupting the people investigating him, in public. If he’s worried about a financial hit, souring Tesla’s reputation as he has is obviously not worth it. If he’s worried about prosecution, surely he would be better off being nice to everyone in politics, not pissing anyone off and strongly supporting choice causes off the mainstream radar that happen to be in the interest of politicians.
So if he is doing it on principle, he just needs to be hubristic and reckless and possibly very autistic. If he is doing it to mess with the people investigating him, he needs to be outright stupid.
Hubristic and reckless (and autistic) are much, much more realistic adjectives for Musk than “outright stupid”. I know a lot of people will just assert that he is stupid, but if you yourself are sufficiently intelligent and you listen to the guy talk for a long time, you can at least tell he isn’t stupid. You can tell because he doesn’t do the rhetorical things stupid people need to do in order to mask contradictions or logical holes in what they are saying. They always do it. Even smart people sometimes do it quite a bit, like Steven Pinker for example m. Musk very rarely does it, and when he does it’s so completely obvious you can tell he’s bad at it and didn’t get where he is by being good at it.
It's not 4D chess to hurt the agencies that regulate and investigate you. It's the opposite of 4D chess. There is no secret plan, not conspiracy theory, no clever chess move.
Because majority of the tax payers who might agree with the non-funding of "everyone's project" have another problem. They are also afraid of the unknown "They" and big industries - like Big Pharma. Private institutions research can be easily dismissed as biased. But given that like you they believe even public research is politically motivated - might as well not do any research at all.
Full charge towards third world country standards.
(PS: While I see you asking for proofs from others, you haven't provided any of your own. Do you have proof to show how this is going to fix the deficit and kill the debt?)
I dont think it's a leap too far to suggest that spending less on any line item is a step towards a balanced budget ie eliminating the deficit. And once a deficit is eliminated we can begin to work on the debt. What proof is required when it's very simple maths.
Here's a reference if you need one - "“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”
There’s also good expense and bad expense. You just don’t say employees taking too much money, cut it and all good. You find what is needed and what needs to be cut. Where’s the proof that this doesn’t throw good research along with biased research?
You choosing to debate the last point and not address the issue I pointed about “let private enterprise fund research” tells me enough.
It is pretty much clear that the current WH has decided science has a bias against them and wants to curb it. There is no reason apart from that.
People still bring in bad faith arguments about private companies funding research or replication crisis. Sure these are big issues in current scientific research. There is no denying that.
While there might be an intuitive sense of less public research means money saved, there is no data or research (duh!) showing the impact of reduced public research.
From what we have seen so far this will make things worse - because for one private research is going to biased. It happens today but public research can counter that. Later there will be no defense. Like MAHA report making up BS sources using AI to push its agenda.
The irony in all of this is - the man pushing ivermectin during a pandemic - one of the biggest replication issue if not the big one - is telling others how to do research and people are defending him.
> .. the current WH has decided science has a bias against them and wants to curb it ...
The US spent ~1 trillion dollars on science in 2024, 2025 will be maybe 10% less.
The EU spent ~460 billion dollars on science in 2024 ... and 2025 will be 10 to 20% less.
So the problem I have here is simple. I mostly agree with you. But European governments, despite having more money to spend, spent less on science, and are taking back grants faster than Trump. Per-capita or per-GDP-dollar they spent 3 to 4 times less than the US on science. In absolute terms, they spent less than half the US spent.
EU politicians (and diplomats) are doing worse than Trump on this issue, not better.
This is the part that's always forgotten. Everyone's gleefully saying that this Trump White House is going to finally, after decades, reverse the EU to US brain drain!
Then you look at the facts ... and no, it's not. In fact it may accelerate under Trump. What the EU is doing to science funding is worse than what Trump is doing.
I mean, I get it. Trump is worse than Biden. Or, to put it a different way: the US is so far ahead of the EU in science that the major idiotic stumble Trump is turning out to be ... just doesn't matter. But yeah, bring back Biden!
If getting a science grant for X is 5 years of effort in the EU, it's about 2 years of effort in the US. Sure, it used to be 1.8 years and that sucks. But there is still a very large difference and obviously the expected outcome here, if we're being honest, is that the US ... will easily remain far ahead in science to the EU.
A long whataboutism and defending points which were never made.
"What about EU? European governments, despite having more money to spend, spent less on science, and are taking back grants faster than Trump." where have we seen this? Oh yes, the RW who talk about EU "offloading" science to US.
I understand this makes for good TV content where the focus is to shift goalposts to new topic.
I didn't make the points about brain drain or whether US will remain ahead. I only pointed out is that the real reason WH is doing this and those on the right gleefully clapping along. People defend this in bad faith. There is no way to know if this is going to be net positive. Numbers look fine on paper but the cost of say private biased research unchallenged by neutral public research might erase the gain. I am fine if I am proven wrong in 4 years and things remain unchanged.
But yeah, Biden something something and Trump something something.
I work with both enterprise software and in house teams. Each path has its pro and cons. As you put it costly CRM might not be fulfilling its purpose. And the two biggest points in favour of in house are cost and bespoke nature of solution.
Building is only one part. Maintaining and using/running is another.
Onboarding for both technical and functional teams takes longer as the ERP is different from other company.
Feature creep is an issue. After all who can say no to more bespoke features. Maybe roll CRM, Reporting and Analytics into one. Maintenance costs and priorities now become more important.
We have also explored AI agents in this area. People specific tasks are great use cases. Create mock up and wireframes? AI can do well and you still have human in the loop. Enterprise level tasks like say book closing for late company ERP? AI makes lot of mistakes.
Same dumbness applies to people who are supposed to enforce these laws. Enforcement authorities will often tell you to settle privately - “just return the money and ask your victim to rescind the case”. They don’t care for average consumer.
Not to mention everyone and their moms building own streaming service only to lose money, cut down the catalogue, increase prices and find that is still not enough. So now add ads in some paid tiers. With everyone needing that ad revenue and profiling data to "personalize experience" I think it is cleaner to just sail the high seas.
> I will point out that India have the highest number of victims of cyber-fraud
Combined with worst enforcement and investigation efforts to tackle this issue. The default resolution on a cyber crime report is : Fraudster's account is blocked and they are given a choice to plead forgiveness from the accuser. They often return the money in lieu of the complaint being rescinded. Then fraudster is free to con others. Fraudsters know this is a numbers game that is why they hit every morsel they can get a bite.
Worse yet people use the cyber crime provision to take revenge. People can file frivolous cases without proof and ge others account locked. Banks will treat you with disdain and police will tell you to settle privately too.
What about investigations you ask? Very few cases reach that level. Local police file the FIR and they don't even know what is "cyber" in cyber crime. Fraudsters can continue playing the numbers game.
So, yes it is easy to talk about victims when the policies are lacking. And then this high number of victims can be used as a crutch to push insecure apps on everyone's phones. The worst part of it? They will get data and still remain clueless and inept in solving the high number of cyber crimes.
I have been recently experimenting with Antigravity and writing a react app. I too didn't know how to start the server or what is "npm run dev". I consider myself fairly technical so I caught up as I went along.
While using the vibe coding tools it became clear to me that this is not something to be used by folks who are not technically inclined. Because at some point they might need to learn about context, tokens etc.
I mean this guy had a single window, 10k lines of code and just kept burning tokens for simplest, vague prompts. This whole issue might be made possible due to Antigravity free tokens. On Cursor the model might have just stopped and asked to fed with more money to start working again -- and then deleting all the files.
Add to the fact that people are still defending this gross corruption and both siding it. It seems to me that Americans have went from “drain the swap” to “corruption is okay because the other side does it too. My only regret is that I am not part of the government to score some money too.” It is now a race to becoming a low trust, third world government.
This reminds of ads on Amazon Echo and other intelligent devices. I think there was similar hype - not in terms of scale - but on personal data. Many advertisers and their moms were writing skills to tap this market.
It'll be interesting to see how they serve up ads and how it ends up working. Before the initial state is that people will find ways to serve up malware in form of ads and someone might end up writing ublock type stuff to block these ads.
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