they didn’t inherit their immense wealth

Except even that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. A big component of the market cap of any Fortune 100 company stems from equity and debt held by the generationally wealthy, typically through family funds managed by private equity groups. Amazon and Tesla aren’t worth $1T without the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Adelsons and the Waltons bidding up asset prices. Microsoft doesn’t exist today without Bill Gates’s mom sitting on the IBM board of directors and handing her son the contracts for their 1980s OS. Hell, Berkshire Hathaway is owned by the sons of a Congressman and a federal judge, respectively.

What’s more, the biggest source of market capital is inevitably government contracts. You can’t tell me that Michael Dell is “independently wealthy” when the bulk of his fortune came via the Texas public school system buying all his company’s computers. Particularly when the governors, legislators, and board members making these decisions are (a) big shareholders of the Dell corporation and (b) legacy scions of wealthy Texas families.

Be less lazy

“Damn this sucks, I’m doing the thing”

“Hey you lazy stupid fuck, go back in time and do it sooner”

Why is the Internet like this?

Always worth keeping in mind that these fuckers are selling snake oil to one another under the guise of national security.

This technology is dangerous not because it works as advertised but because it creates a vacuum of responsibility for when the very manual killing starts

Israel’s Lavender AI is a great example of this in action. It doesn’t work in any meaningful way. All it does is label casualties in a bombing run as “terrorists” after the fact.

It can say it can, when asked by an investor. And really, what else matters?

If the AI cannot run the business then we must conclude that the business does not produce anything of real value.

Nothing to do but downsize and move on.

Microsoft is in the process of downsizing to the tune of 3% of its global workforce and rising.

Could be they really are unironically cruising towards a CEO overseeing a bunch of spam bot email accounts they’re treating as headcount.

Nothing however breaks because of AI

The trajectory is the same, but AI put more gas in the tank in a machine that one might have assumed had reached its limits a decade ago when outsourcing had played itself out.

What NYT and other legacy media is mostly worried about is that with AI psyops and fake news is becoming more and more democratized instead of an expensive top-down ordeal and for making harder for anybody to trust anything anymore, a trust that they relied on to control the narrative.

I think you’ve got it a bit backwards. The NYT operates as a paper of record in large part because it emits a signal that echoes through downstream media. And that stems from the general trust the paper has cultivated (undeserved trust, but welcome to the dictatorship of the bourgeois, folks).

The implementation of AI as a system of record is replacing the NYT as a trustworthy source, in part because the NYT has finally degraded its own credibility. And in part because why would I go fight with a bunch of paywalls and pop-ups and ad banners on the NYT when I can (seemingly) get the same information from a nice clean OpenAI / Gemini / Deepseek prompt.

The expense of setting up a system of record is still enormous. The catch is that the AI companies have more money to propagandize their own reputation. Meanwhile, the NYT and the WaPo and the cable news channels have been suffocating in comparative obscurity when they weren’t outright touting AI venues as alternatives to themselves.

News isn’t being democratized. Its as horded as ever. These older outlets have simply become vectors to send people to the new and far more efficient Consent Manufacturing Machines.

while it does stop a lot, missles and rockets still get through to Israel.

It stops some rockets initially. But the math of missile defense has always been needing two or more countermeasures for every incoming projectile. Consequently, its only useful against small or infrequent salvos. As soon as you get into a war with a modern industrial war-time economy (say, for instance, Iran) you can’t keep up with the number of inbound projectiles.

Once Israeli missile defenses run dry, there’s nothing left standing between them and the next strike.

I’m sure US citizens will also be glad to know that they have donated $2,600,000,000 of their tax dollars specifically towards just the Iron Dome project in Israel between 2011 and 2022.

It would be antisemitic not to be glad.

More or less risky and inefficient than the Iron Dome?

Asking for an Israeli guy currently hiding in a bunker.

I mean, this is the same guy who said we’d be living on Mars in 2025.

However you want to phrase it, they’re very different problems with different solutions.

“Someone picked the lock on my door and got into my house” is meaningfully distinct from “Someone stole my keys”.

You can keep your nasty chips

You can argue it’s a classic ID-10T error in your workflow.

But nobody has discovered a security vulnerability within the system architecture. This is the system operating as designed, abet with the wrong person standing in front of the terminal.

I don’t know how we got from exploding pagers to space lasers.

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Proximity to the equator and high elevation make for ideal launch sites. Then eastward facing, because you want to run counter to the earth’s spin as you launch and be out over open water if something fucks up. One reason why Kenya, Brazil, and Indonesia were floated as a high efficiency international spaceports decades ago, when efficiency was considered more important than inflating a billionaire’s ego.

I mean… its a big deal if you’re anywhere near the launchpad. Or, in or around South Padre Island.

Also can’t help but notice that Starbase, Texas is practically hugging the US/Mexico border. Almost as though Abbott didn’t want this shit landing in his own backyard when it failed.

Heavy Lift drones can carry upwards of 55 lbs. And there’s no reason you’re limited to one.

We’ve been busting through constitutional amendments with abandon. I don’t think you could point to one that this administration would honor or respect.