I have a Sony Bravia that I've never connected to the internet, only to an Apple TV and a Steam Deck. It makes a noise when you turn it on or off, and sometimes it makes that noise all by itself while turned off. Makes me feel like it turns itself on to try and collect audio data periodically. But! I think since the TV itself is never going to have direct internet access, I'm not that worried about it sending my data.
The one good thing about the current system is that shitheads like musk can spend half-a-billion to buy elections, but the people still have the final say.
Interestingly the current "lets stop corporations from spending money on elections" that's popular in several states - wouldn't directly touch Musk because he can just spend the money directly.
I don't think "Oooh. Scary muslims!" works any less well if it's required to say "Elon Musk" rather than "American Apple Pie Goodness PAC" or whatever.
It might make a difference for smaller donors, especially if they're more sensitive about their personal PR.
Many countries cap donations by private individuals (capped to 1,000 in Ireland, for instance, for both private individuals and companies). Like, this is a fixable problem.
It's fixable if you have significant Supreme Court reform. I doubt the numbers are there to actually land that reform. Say you get 52 Democrats in the Senate, which is a tall order, and you write some reforms that could actually work, forced retirements, that sort of thing, immediately you'll find that two or three of them suddenly think such reforms need to be "bipartisan" and alas the Republicans who've fixed things don't seem interested in coming along. How about that.
Or, I suppose, you could fix it by abolishing America's Written Constitution so that its legislature can just write legislation for this. I think that would go down like cold sick - Americans love their Written Constitution.
It's not limited to textbooks or academic publications, or based on any context whatsoever, but an ngram search actually suggests there's a much larger musk stain on recent published literature than I'd ever thought possible:
I wasn't trying to imply that, simply noting that there was a surprising amount of literary chatter about Musk, at high levels compared to commonly cited physicists. It's not the most useful comparison.
It could easily be people writing fanfic about him (ugh) or criticising the pants off him, and may not be related at all. But I'd guess a lot of this was field-adjacent to at least his business interests.
If you have a lot of money and you've managed to stay out of prison, people are generally ready to believe good things about you and want to be in your good graces. If you pay people to continually say good things about you and manage your media appearances for you, there will generally be a lot of impact to that. You're just telling people what they're primed to believe. A lot of people will fluff up your image for free just because they're hoping for patronage.
Musk has a BA in physics that was awarded a couple years after he says he says he completed his studies. Unlike CPSC, leaving a physics program early robs you of some pretty crucial stuff. You generally don't see a lot of rockstar physicists leaving university early to join startups. Despite Musk posing as a rocket scientist, engineering guru, etc., there's no evidence he's one of the scientific or engineering minds behind Tesla or SpaceX's work. He's just a money guy.
The general rule for money guys is that the closer you are to the money, the more of it you can get. This is why CEO's are paid outrageous sums. Musk is the closest guy to the money at his companies, and his one true gift seems to be "getting close" to politicians in order to get the public's money, which Tesla and SpaceX have received gob-smacking amounts of.
If you want a laugh, go look up the episode of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History addendum where he brought Musk on. Carlin typically interviews authors of history books, so why Musk? Why indeed! During this episode, it comes out that Musk used to have models of WWII planes but clearly knows absolutely nothing about history. Despite this, he makes every effort to sound like he does. This is the sort of exposure $$$ gets you but, sometimes, you miss the mark.
I guess some people still like to troll? Or are so dumb they’ve obviously never even cracked a physic text? I’m hoping it’s just old fashioned trolling.
No, this much money in politics is still very dangerous.
A major reason it isn't working for now is because Donald Trump is, in addition to being a corrupt autocrat, incredibly incompetent. We shouldn't have to rely on that next time.
EV sales are not a great metric to judge musk sentiments, consider the Tesla drivers who put various bumper stickers on
Tesla is the only EV company in the US making a good product. People also like the techieness. Foreign manufactures like Hyundai (what I drive, preferred less tech and real buttons) have tariffs and such applied to them. BYD would wreck them all if allowed.
>Tesla is the only EV company in the US making a good product. People also like the techieness.
Well yes. Those were things in EU too. But those didn't override the fact that he tried to control their elections. The US has some people who swore off Tesla in similar protest, but the overall sentiment didn't seem to impact their bottom line.
I personally want to hold out and see if/when the US gives up on tariffing progress. But I have driven a 2008 car for almost 10 years and can't overlook the scenario of needing to replace it one day.
And I'm interested in an FEV for my next car. Tesla is completely out of the question, but I really haven't been impressed with most other offerings when I could peer over the border and see what BYD, Xiaomi, and others are doing. Maybe I compromise short term then trade in when the time comes?
I don't know the specifics of Brazil's system, but at least in the US gerrymandering has nothing to do with the Presidency or Senate, only the House. It's also not without risk. Gerrymandering is bad, but it doesn't change the totals of votes; it attempts to reapportion "excess" votes yielding a large win margin in one area to give winning, but necessarily smaller, margins in more areas. Amongst other challenges though that smaller margin means if there is a wave then a gerrymander can turn into a "dummymander" where previously safe districts get flipped.
>funny business
This is actually pretty dang hard in anything but a total sham, and even then is at least obvious it happened. Some timy fiddling at the margins may be possible to sneak through, and yeah some elections that might make the difference. But that can't counter any serious victory. The more common technique seems to be trying to suppress the vote. But as well as also not being trivial it also too risks backfiring by motivating people much harder. There is a lot of human psychology around "loss", people often absolutely hate things being taken from them even if they were complacent about having them.
Brazilian here. President wins by popular vote. Period.
Must win by 50% plus 1 of all valid votes on Round 1. If not, 1st and 2nd most voted go for Round 2 a few weeks later. Then, 50%+1 again of all valid votes.
Gerrymandering can give you control of state level offices that then let you affect federal elections by say closing voting locations where you think mostly the opposition will vote or kicking people with ethnic names of voting lists at the last minute.
So there's not a direct effect on Presidential elections but there's a second order effect.
Gerrymandering is the most benign of the tricks, and both sides play that trick. What's more concerning is we don't really have a true paper record of the votes. So many of these swing states have machines that produce digital only voting records. So how do we even know that the vote is accurate? Even if there was a paper record, most states don't even bother re-checking unless it's very close. After 2016, a lot of activism across the country has forced states to switch to a paper + digital record, which allows quick tallies, but then also paper backup and opens the door to two way verification. Unfortunately, this is not enough. There needs to be validation done after the election to confirm. But again, the worst part is that the states that really matter have been the ones least incentivized to actually switch over. So who knows? While its conspiracy thinking that Trump didn't actually win in 2024, do we really know for sure?
Everything else you mentioned also matters. I can't tell you the amount of times that the state of Georgia, suddenly out of the blue, invalidated a lot of registered voters. And if people don't check, like my friend in a minority town outside of Atlanta, they won't realize until election day. Red states are more likely to play this trick. Your conclusion is something I disagree with, though. Voters have lost so much over the last decade, and they don't fight back until it really starts to affect them personally. I think the surge that we might see this election is only due to economics. If the economics were good, it's not out of the question that Trump would be doing fairly decent this election cycle. This is why Iran is playing things very well to try to enact maximum economic pain in the days before the election. But it's all about economics, and that shows you that people truly don't really care.
Gerrymandering doesn’t change the fact that the voters decide the results. Most electoral systems already give unequal weight to different votes based on district sizes etc., so gerrymandering is only a change of degree and intention, not of how democracy fundamentally works.
> Gerrymandering doesn’t change the fact that the voters decide the results.
Well it does change which voters decide the results. A lot of electoral systems seek to constantly redress imbalance by having impartial bodies redraw district lines as populations shift. It is a shame the US does not. Gerrymandering is fundamentally undemocratic.
Looking at today's headlines on Washington Post, I'm asking myself if it's always been a pro-war, pro-trump, right-wing rag, or if it's only since Bezos bought it?
Only since Bezos. I used to actually pay for WaPo pre-bezos. It was fine for a while and then he started clearly messing with editorial decisions and I bailed. It's now a garbage source.
I think China publishing this stuff is more about prestige. The US has had export controls that make it illegal to sell Nvidia chips, and other AI hardware to China, and this is China saying "yeah, whatever". Also, it weakens western tech companies' position in AI, and pushes CCP bias perniciously. Building your product/company on top of a text-generation model that favours the CCP position on everything is just peak propaganda.
Sometimes I’m not sure who is more unhinged: the total AI kool aid drinkers who think this will make us all into immortal demigods (or take over the world as it goes “foom”), or the AI doomers and haters who exaggerate everything potentially negative about it and react to it the way a 1980s Christian fundamentalist reacted to rock music.
It’s a new fundamental innovation in math and CS that allows large scale lossy compression of natural language another data formats in a way that is semantically queryable and cross-referenceable. It also manifests some form of emergent intelligence, likely evidence of the long posited link between intelligence and data compression.
The tech is awesome. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen in over a decade. The industry is kind of shitty, which is not unusual. The discourse around it is almost universally insane, crazy people arguing with crazy people.
Oh and get off the AI eco bullshit train. Look up the energy cost of AI queries vs driving or running a home air conditioning system. Feel bad about using AI? Skip that DoorDash order. You probably just saved the energy of 1-2 days of heavy Claude Code use.
To steelman the haters, I think their view is that the industry is so uniquely shitty that it's unconscionable to help the industry at all by using the tech, which is a product of that industry.
We've had frontier models widely available for general use for 5-6 years now. Despite the promises, we haven't revolutionized anything; not society, not government, not engineering, not the environment. The only thing we've done is revolutionize the pockets of AI purveyors, suppliers and charlatans. We haven't cured disease, ended hunger, or achieved time travel. Sure, the tech is cool. But it's cool at 1b, 8b, and 30b parameters at a size that fits on consumer hardware. Hyperscale AI that's built for no purpose in particular, at any social/environmental cost, is everything that's wrong with society. That's not Christian fundamentalism or doomerism, that's recognizing the sickness at the core of the tech industry. We let the tech-billionaires delete their ESG pledges, and abandoned the fight against climate change so we can generate celebrity porn.
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