I don’t know who is right, but this is the greatest nerd fight I’ve seen in years! 😁

Drop that fucker til it’s in the ground.

They’re using a bullshit slight-of-hand to claim they’re not spending government money on it.

They’re planning on using coins seized from criminals. But normally those coins would be sold, and the proceeds from that sale would go to the US Treasury. Instead, they’re going to seize them and just hold onto them.

It’s the same thing. Whether you spend government money to purchase coins and hold them, or you simply hold seize coins, both of these options result in the same increase in the US national debt.

And ultimately it is simply a method of propping up the crypto bubble. They want the US government to be the ultimate “diamond hands” hoarder of crypto. Every time some dark web drug site gets shut down, any coins they hold will be thrown into a government vault, never to be seen again. This effectively removes them from circulation, decreasing the supply, and forcing crypto prices higher. This is taking billions from the Treasury to prop up the crypto market.

I mean, 4x the market cap of Meta, 80x, it makes little difference. The key is the book publishers should end up owning Meta. Again, I wouldn’t expect them to necessarily turn Facebook into some revitalized utopia. But I think at least a bunch of stodgy old book publishers wouldn’t be so overtly cartoonishly fascist at the very least.

Exactly. Of course, I need to make sure the files are appropriate for AI training, so it’s imperative that I review the media in its entirety first.

That’s one of those things that fridge logic really hits hard. Because there are no fixed prices under Earth’s laws. So in exchange for quintillions of dollars of Earth’s music, the aliens could just sell us technology at the same or similar price.

Let’s do some math. Some searching suggests the average size of an e-book is about 3 MB. 82 TB means they pirated about 27 million e-books. At the rate of Russet’s fine, that would come to damages of $2.2 trillion. So not more money than has ever is about 4x Meta’s entire market cap.

I hope the book publishers sue Meta and end up owning Facebook and Instagram. Not that I expect one evil megacorp to inevitably fix all the ills of another. But it would be hard to make Facebook any worse than it currently is.

I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t pirate media. I’m just slowly gathering a collection of AI training data.

It’s almost like the government has already spent decades wringing every last penny of fraud prevention out of the only programs these type of goon wants to cut. Any kind of welfare that benefits regular people has deliberately onerous applications and continual verification. You can cancel these programs entirely, but there’s little actual fraud there to find in Medicaid, food stamps, etc. There’s actually millions of people who would qualify for these programs that aren’t on them due to the difficulties of the application process.

There is plenty of fraud to be found, but it’s all in the contraction, consulting, and acquisition sides of the budget. There’s plenty of fat to be wrung out of military contractors or contractors like SpaceX. Look at the debacle of the pandemic business-aid loans. But this is the type of waste and fraud that Musk and Trump love. It personally benefits them and everyone in the cabinet. They could find fraud here, but they’re not interested in that type of fraud.

Enough doomposting. Fatalism is fatal. Even if you’re right, would you rather go down fighting or wait for the knock on the door to come to you? Here are some tangible things Dem reps can actually do right now, even as a minority party. These are the things voters should be demanding of them, other than just vague calls to “do something”:

1. Grind the Senate to a halt. Not one Dem vote for any confirmation. Filibuster everything. Put holds on everything.
2. Not one Democratic vote for a continuing resolution or debt ceiling increase without major concessions. The federal government is better shut down than run by Trump/Musk.
3. Participate directly in street protests. Sitting reps can participate in these with little risk for arrest or assault by cops, and they have the resources and clout to not be destroyed by being arrested.
4. Purge anyone who dares utter the word “bipartisanship” from the party. Anyone who votes on a single Republican bill should be ineligible for a penny of Dem campaign funds come the next cycle and should lose any committee seats they have.

These are the things we should be demanding of Democratic representatives right now. Give up on the doomerism. If you want to crawl into a hole and die, fine. Go do it and quit bitching.

Oh, and quit trying to relitigate the prior election. Yes, there were errors on both sides of the left. The centrists should have stopped the genocide, and the Palestine supporters should have voted for Kamala anyway. It’s a moot point now. We have bigger problems to worry about, and picking at these old wounds does nothing but divide the left further.

Pardons don’t help you when you’re being removed by the military.

There is a big difference between someone like Trump potentially carrying out a coup and actively carrying out a coup. He is now “an enemy, foreign and domestic.” If members of the military have any intention of upholding their oath, he and his regime need to be removed by force.

Realistically, if they does face justice, it will likely be mob justice. Trump and Musk are setting themselves up to be in an incredibly physically vulnerable position. What do you think is going to happen in the DC metro area after they fire half of the federal government? The vast majority of the DC population will want to literally see their heads on pikes. And the military? They may uphold their oath to the Constitution not by removing Trump by force themselves, but simply by standing aside and letting the mob storm the gates.

The problem with running a blatantly and undeniably unconstitutional regime is that mobs of angry people will have zero moral compulsion about removing you from this world in justice outside the law.

When this is over, Musk is going to end up hanging from the end of a rope. He will be charged, tried, and convicted, and hanged for treason against the republic. What he has done is literally a capital offense. And those kids who’ve helped him enact this coup by hacking government systems? They have signed their own death warrants. They will join him on the gallows after they also are convicted for their treason and acts of terrorism against the nation.

It reminds me one of Asimov’s robots trying to reason a way around the Three Laws.

Replace Tienanmen with discussions of Palestine, and you get the same censorship in US models.

Our governments aren’t as different as they would like to pretend. The media in both countries is controlled by a government-integrated media oligarchy. The US is just a little more gentle with its censorship. China will lock you up for expressing certain views online. The US makes sure all prominent social media sites will either ban you or severely throttle the spread of your posts if you post any political wrongthink.

The US is ultimately just better at hiding its censorship.

I don’t see anything in there that doesn’t also apply to OpenAI and other western companies.

Ask OpenAI’s products to explain the absurdity of conservative Christianity, or any number of bugbears the West accepts censorship over.

Honestly, this all seems like small potatoes. We’re trying to save our species from extinction here. We’re trying to maintain the standard of living that came with the Industrial Revolution without burning out planet to a cinder.

If doing so means our steel industry runs 10% less efficiently, I really don’t give a damn.

Another option is to skip most of the grid storage and just spam solar panels. Rely on batteries only to get you through the night, not to bridge power across seasons. Build enough panels that your country can meet its needs even on a cloudy day in winter. Then you have reasonable power costs in the winter and nearly free electricity the rest of the year.

You could see a lot of energy-intensive industries becoming seasonal. We have a crop growing season, a school season, and sports seasons. Why not an “AI model training” season?