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It’s free as a loss leader. The trick is to upsell later. Unfortunately for OpenAI there are plenty of competitors with fungible products, so it might be hard to pull a classic monopoly rug-pull.

Their CEO is a loon for one thing. But also the concept of spying is generally unsavory. Nobody wants to be tracked. Palantir has proven that they have no ethical framework for who they work with. Essentially they fill a mercenary role in modern society. Nobody really trusts mercenaries, for obvious reasons.

And?

None of the reasons you’ve given apply to everybody. They do apply to illegal migrants, protestors, and violent criminals though - and others that also cause similar societal problems and disruption. Once again HN - like so many other online meeting spaces - takes for granted that the libertarian and extreme ‘human and civil rights’ tech bro ethos is invariably shared by everybody else. It is not.


Such a sad worldview. Unfortunately thinking like that is self-fulfilling. By building weapons you encourage everyone else to build weapons, and everyone is poorer in the end.

Some silly aspect of human nature I guess. I notice it's worse in men on average.


What's your suggested alternative? This is exactly kind of shallow virtue signalling I was pointing at. While you make dismissive remarks like this, your government or USA does the dirty work required to keep stability.

Capitalism is designed to have a lot of free riders. Anyone with sufficient capital not to work is free-riding by design (if they choose not to work).

Not if the tax system is well designed

Hey now, the Trump admin will get offended if you downplay their incompetence!

We let capitalism run too far. Need to swing hard towards socialism or the whole thing will collapse

Americans often confuse socialsim for handing out money freely and letting people commit crimes without going to jail, both the left and right, so its this wierd catch 22 going on or something

I live in Spain and that’s what socialism means basically. At least here.

> and letting people commit crimes without going to jail

Looking at the administration, the feudal internet lords and other megacorps, the US is deeply socialist then.


But, see, there is a fundamental difference.

We prefer to let capital (and its representatives) commit the juiciest crimes...


> and letting people commit crimes without going to jail

So US is the most socialist country by far. Both rich and poor commit crimes without going to jail


"handing out money freely and letting people commit crimes without going to jail"

Sounds pretty much like Trump and the modern GOP


The actual problem is how do we give people things that are way more expensive than those people will ever be able to cover themselves?

The answer is to make someone else pay for it. But man, have you ever gone to dinner with your large tech salary and been advised you have a moral obligation to cover 80% of the table's bill, and then be demonized for scrutinizing what people ordered?

Socialism is great when you can get yourself to believe that the government is a bottomless money pit fed by evil people with infinite money harvested from captive forced labor.

Capitalism is great when you can get yourself to believe that the lives of people who cannot carry (or did not carry) their weight don't matter.


I think you’re a magnitude or two off in the current state of wealth inequality. It’s more like people are asking you with a 400k/yr salary to pitch in to buy candy bars and you’re upset someone picked out a king size for fifty cents more.

Socialist policies would be decidedly less popular if people knew that most of the money to fund them would come from middle and upper middle class earners.

While those people as individuals have nowhere near "billionaire" money, they as a contingent have the most wealth.

While the "1% have more money than the bottom 50%" is true, they have less than half the money of the 70%-95%. America's cash cow is in the suburbs, not the Hamptons. Kinda forbidden knowledge to know that.


As pointed out by Rosa Luxemburg, the choices are socialism or barbarism. In the US, barbarism seems to be a far more likely outcome.

More than likely, it's daily reality.

Insane binary choice fallacy. The choices are more akin to centralised control or free-ish markets. We see from experience how centralised control has completely butchered healthcare, both in the US and also my country of Canada. It's time to drop the insane authoritarian control and let people freely chose their own destiny, so to speak.

Wikipedia is excellent.

Very good news. Capitalism is going off the rails and needs to be heavily reigned in.

Agreed, I hope they can have some strong enforcement teeth with GIANT fines.

Their CEO is a crazy person who seemingly wants to tear down democracy

[flagged]


Thiel is pro-dictatorship as near as one can tell. Karp probably isn’t sane enough to evaluate

The jury disagrees with you.

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