There's no need to do any of things you mention considering that both parties are owned by the same people and are essentially two faces of the same party in practice. Also - almost all the powers that be - including courts and Congress are already for sale/at the service of big tech.
Putting on my tin-foil, devils-advocate hat... AKA I don't necessarily believe this but I also have no counter-argument:
Mostly performative. When it's decided that something actually needs to pass, then you'll get some sacrificial lambs that vote across the aisle. Typically they'll be close to retirement or from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote.
It's not performative when people are losing health insurance and other people are at risk of starving. I agree with holding out on the government shutdown to try to prevent Americans losing healthcare. But when Republicans are absolutely fine with poor people starving so that they can take away people's healthcare, with a bonus that they get to shut down the government and say "see, government doesn't work", it becomes clear that letting the government shut down (especially food program shutdowns) continue is going to hurt more people than the government shutdown is going to help. So, when you say "performative" it sounds like you support the "both sides are the same" meme, but the ideologies are vastly different - one side is fine with people starving indefinitely, and the other actually doesn't want that.
I would think at least some of this should be obvious, but I guess not?
I mean at some point arguments like this become more akin to Russell's Teapot. If you're making an almost unfalsifiable claim, then the burden of proof is on you to prove it and not others to disprove it.
From a political standpoint, the statement "from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote" is a weird way to put it, since if you framed it in a positive light it would sound more similar to "the state population falls on both sides of the issue and thus either vote could make sense from their legislator depending on exigent circumstances and other factors" or any number of other explanations depending on the vote and populations.
That's funny, because the president (Republican) just signed an executive order forbidding states from enacting their own AI regulations. Meanwhile, California's governor (Democrat) is trying to regulate AI.
Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.
Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.
It's really not surprising. AWS is definitely absolutely now in the category of "too big to fail". And the fact that there's an entire AWS region for US government classified stuff just underscores that.
Becoming TBTF has a very corrosive effect on organizations.
Except it's not. HN users aren't representative and all trackers show no discernable uplift of Firefox usage since manifest v3. There also exists chromium based browsers with continued v2 support.
> and all trackers show no discernable uplift of Firefox usage since manifest v3.
The browser that goes out of its way to protect user privacy against trackers doesn't show up in trackers. This is neither surprising nor particularly damning.
It's still easy to feel like the dumbest person in the room at Amazon... until you cut through the bullshit and realize everyone else in the room is a complete impostor skilled in maximalization, social engineering, politics, and nothing else.
Amazon went from an innovative tech company with an efficient culture where builders could build and ship great products, and where promotions where based on merit, to a completely toxic bureaucratuc hellhole, where all decision making has been hijacked by sociopathic parasites who have learned to game the system for their own benefit.
- most leadership, including technical, is now filled with compete imposters who have very little understanding of tech or market.
- product and strategy decisions are not based on data anymore. Any 'data' is now extremely cherry-picked
- it's standard practice to just completely hide/exclude any negative indicators/metrics.
- promotions are no longer merit-based. They are based exclusively on your ability to social engineer your managers/leadership, and your ability to manufacture metrics that sound good (to imposters who can't rationally inspect/critique them)
- there is zero real innovation happening at Amazon now
- good engineers are leaving in droves and being replaced by 3rd party external consultants
Meh, when I worked at AWS a few years ago, I found to average L7 to be more of a political animal than a very knowledgeable engineer. Many interactions with various L7s where they didn't understand how their own services or common software like browsers worked.
The exact value of all 401k isn't really known, but the average account value is estimated at ~135k, if (let's say) 200 million Americans have a 401k, that comes out to 27 trillion.
In that chart, the 18T of IRA has portion in private equity, and the 15T of pension (defined benefit) has a portion in private equity. The 13T defined contribution plans (of which the vast majority is 401k) can't be placed in private equity right now.
Yeah, but I don't think anybody is expecting every single American to take out 100% of their savings from the stock market and put them in private equity.
It's not, but IRA plus 401k is about equal to GDP, yes (and if you add approximately equivalent defined contribution plans like 403b, tsp, etc, then it's more than GDP)
He wansn't any kind of visionary. He didn't invent or design a single thing. He was a ruthless manager and marketer, abusing people and taking credit for their work.
Sometimes half the battle of making a product is to get the right people in the right room at the right time.
He managed to do that quite frequently. How much credit to give him for it is something I'm not quite sure of myself, but you really can't argue with the results.
