And those 100 trillion neurons are powered by pizza.

It’s almost like there are different classes of people with different rules and expectations for each class.

Military should not depend on the imported (non-domestic) stuff. Supply chains must be 100% domeatic for the military.

Those are military requiremets.

This move is an overreach into the civilian/private sphere, so nakedly designed not for security, but for privileging the already morbidly overpriviledged domestic billionaires.

Also, with the rabid billionaires in control anyone can become an adversary overnight. Trump, with the presidential cabinet filled to the brim with billionaires and bootlickers, made Mexico, Canada, Denmark, and even the whole of the EU into adversaries, when they weren’t before. The word “adversary” is meaningless these days.

The consequence is that they waste money and time. Which actually matters for businesses strapped for money or time. But most of the megacorps are swimming in money and in time. They waste those all the time even without the AI because the upper management accepts kickbacks to contract with the worst (but also the bribiest) contractors. And mid management, and everyone else, put their own personal interests ahead of the company’s. Now that the AI hype is here, they have a new tool to waste time and money with, but nothing has fundamentally changed. Big business is a lumbering inefficient bureaucracy by its nature.

You mean malicious compliance works for the mid management too? I believe it.

.ua is a Ukrainian domain. Ukraine is at war with Russia. They have strong incentives to present information a certain way, not to say they have incentives to straight up lie when it helps their cause.

I’m not picking on Ukraine here. This is what every geopolitical actor does, as far as I know. I mean power lies, period, but when the various powers are at war, the lies go tgrough the roof.

That said, they can also tell the truth too, but only if the truth HELPS their cause.

Unions became a thing in the USA after the fallout from the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Sadly most West Virginians don’t know their own history and are rabid boot lickers.

My point is, before unions, if you had a problem with your boss, you would just shoot the boss. That was too much for the cappies, and they allowed unionism as a pressure release valve to avoid themselves getting shot. Now if people are unhappy they can hold signs in 100 degree weather and make noise. Much better than getting shot.

Can’t trust the billionaires.

It would be naive to think private corporations don’t hire shadow PR companies to generate social traffic.

It’s not just the state actors. Private entities are in on the game too.

I think you deserve the same thing.

It means any dollar works the same as any other. That’s how I would put it.

Here’s a dictionary:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fungible

So if Kagi takes a bunch of dollars in and makes a claim that THIS particular dollar funds the AI project, but THAT particular dollar does not fund it, that claim about the specificity of the individual dollars is on its face bullshit.

Don’t forget that money is fungible.

I don’t want to convince people that the good they do in the world is ineffectual. That is counter to my interests.

There is no poimt in waiting or hoping for a catalyst or even talking about it, since no one seems to know what this catalyst is, all it does is shift the initiative outward, makes people stall, makes people limp and faithless in their actions, wastes emotional energies, etc. I don’t see any positive effects.

Of course people need to organize. But how the fuck will anyone organize when even the prophets do not believe!

Inference is a thing.

Not government.

Only 3 (a minority) are unauthorized police installations. Police in the example in the article are going rogue likely with some tacit support.

What’s left?

Someone with time, money, utility trucks, experience in mounting cameras, someone with networking resources and experience to store and analyze data.

Who is that? This immediately excludes 99.99% of the population. We can infer, assuming the article is not fake news, it’s almost certainly a corporate entity or an estate of a very high net worth individual or family.

We can ask who has the motive and the capability not just to install many flagrantly illegal cameras but also to collect, analyze and use the information?

Mounting unaccountable cameras on public utility poles is an act of war. It’s not a foreign entity, because that would start a big stink if it were. That means almost cedtainly these are our local energy and labor extractors: corporates and/or billionaires (or otherwise very high net worth actors).

Insane.

People who lead by example while standing on business ten toes down and NOT self-deprecating?

Humility hurts more than helps in many situations, like here in this one. “I do all that but I humbly believe it’s pointless, it makes no difference.” That’s not the energy that gets things done or is appealing to watch or to join.

It’s like fining Epstein $100.

$500 million dollar fine.

All C level execs caned for 100 strokes publicly. Top investors guillotined in public.

That’s how you make this stop.

Or the scale of the fine can be expressed as a percentage of the assets and revenues, to make the fines genuinely dreadful.

Never mind right sizing the fines. I keep operating from the assumption that we are dealing with largely reasonable people who have a bad take and are correctable.

Make guillotines great again.

No new taxea, no fines, no jails, straight to the public square guillotine with this level of malfeasance.

Some notes.

Unionizing is great when you must work in a business with highly concentrated ownership. Unions, when they are democratic, counterbalance the concentrated ownership of your workplace.

An undemocratic union can be a tool for worker management as opposed to worker empowerment.

However, workers should aspire to own their workplaces. That’s what worker coops are for.

In a worker coop workers are the owners and the boss of themselves. That goes far beyond what even the best union can achieve for worker empowerment.

Also workers competing for scraps has been a thing forever now. AI simply pours gasoline on that fire. It’s bad, really bad, but not new.

The main problem is landlessness or assetlessness. When you own nothing, you will accept any conditions to survive. Owning nothing sets your leverage to 0. Even if you have skills, if you can’t say ‘no’ you cannot negotiate. To be able to say ‘no’ reliably and reasonably you need either personal assets, or incredibly useful and resourseful commons, which are assets in which you have an unshakeable share.

We should do away with the landless/assetless condition as a matter of principle. That means wealth accumulations must have a ceiling.