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Trump 47: Billionaire Techbros, Oligarchies, and Unchecked Power (Page 3)
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Apr 2007
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You can lead a horse to academic papers...
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Clinically Insane
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…but you can’t stop him lying.
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Join Date: Aug 2001
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I just noticed that Google Maps has changed Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. Apple Maps has retained the real name (so far, anyway.)
Google Calendar has also removed things like Black History Month, Pride Month, Indigenous Peoples Day, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month.
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Join Date: Jun 2000
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maps on my old desktop still says gulf of mexico, and my ipad appears to still say gulf of mexico... but when you zoom in on it and choose directions it says Gulf of America. Reddit thought a caching issue.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
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Originally Posted by Thorzdad
Google Calendar has also removed things like Black History Month, Pride Month, Indigenous Peoples Day, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month.
Google claims this has been planned for awhile. I’m somewhat inclined to believe them, but the optics are undeniably crummy.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
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In ongoing Bureau of Financial Services shenanigans, key player Thomas Krause coughed up some details under oath. 10 pages.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/re...36609.33.0.pdf
My hot take is if we have something to worry about it’s accidental fuck-ups due to Krause being a techbro and not having the right interface for civil service.
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Last edited by subego; Feb 12, 2025 at 07:15 PM.
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Join Date: Jun 2000
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How nice that he used his testimony to plug his companies.
From this:
Broadcom is one of the most valuable
companies in the world today and was built largely by acquiring underperforming
semiconductor and enterprise software businesses and improving their effectiveness and
efficiency.
He's not just a techbro, he's a venture capitalist techbro.
As such I take anything he says with a huge grain of salt. Elon has already been caught in lies and has shrugged them off.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
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Originally Posted by andi*pandi
As such I take anything he says with a huge grain of salt. Elon has already been caught in lies and has shrugged them off.
Lies under oath?
As for the VC techbro angle, that might actually work.
It also might not.
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Join Date: May 2001
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Originally Posted by subego
Google claims this has been planned for awhile.
Yes, I'm fairly certain this has been in the works since November 5th.
Originally Posted by andi*pandi
He's not just a techbro, he's a venture capitalist techbro.
As such I take anything he says with a huge grain of salt. Elon has already been caught in lies and has shrugged them off.
Personally, I would put the focus back on Trump. Yes, a lot of Trump's appointees are, hmm, problematic, but they are his appointees. Given who Trump is, the quality of his appointees should not be surprising. Yes, Elon Musk has done a lot of things that are at the least outside of what is normal procedure. But Musk is in this position because Trump has given it to him and allows him to. The buck stops with him.
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I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
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Clinically Insane
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Originally Posted by subego
Lies under oath?
As for the VC techbro angle, that might actually work.
It also might not.
Are there any VC techbo stories that don't end in either bankruptcy or enshittification?
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Clinically Insane
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Is VC what drives enshitification? I mean, it happens without VC involvement. An old-school example is the Discovery Channel. VC didn’t wreck that. Market forces and a bad attitude did.
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Clinically Insane
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It's not the only cause, but it's an accelerant. It's a hyper focus on maximizing short term profits at the expense of the users. Ideally for the VC it's an Uber situation where there's a really bad existing competitor (legacy taxi services), desperate labor resource that you can exploit (unemployed, immigrants, etc.), and a customer base with few other options so they're stuck with you.
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Clinically Insane
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Putting the enshitification on hold for a moment, isn’t Elon a VC techbro success story, or not enough VC involvement?
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Join Date: Jun 2000
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I don't think the companies he bought and then pretended to have invented were struggling, per se... so not the usual vc scenario. In fact many said he overpaid for Twitter.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Mar 2001
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Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday directing the US justice department to halt prosecuting Americans accused of bribing foreign government officials to win business.
According to the White House, the law puts US firms at a disadvantage to foreign competitors because they cannot engage in practices that are “common among international competitors, creating an uneven playing field”
That'll help.
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Chris. T.
"... in 6 months if WMD are found, I hope all clear-thinking people who opposed the war will say "You're right, we were wrong -- good job". Similarly, if after 6 months no WMD are found, people who supported the war should say the same thing -- and move to impeach Mr. Bush." - moki, 04/16/03
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Clinically Insane
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Originally Posted by subego
As for the VC techbro angle, that might actually work.
It also might not.
Let me elaborate a bit on what I was getting at.
In a general sense, I’m talking about the idea of putting private sector people into high-ranking public sector jobs. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.
As for the VC techbro aspect, just look at the about page. Like Thorzdad pointed out, the BFS already come off like a techbro outfit. Krause might actually be a good fit in that regard.
He might not. I can’t really claim to know either way at this point.
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The way I would approach it is: what (valuable experience and skills) is this person bringing to the table? And are these skills helpful in solving the big problems (lawfully)? Are there (potential) conflicts of interests?
If some tech guy has led efforts to migrate a bank from an aging COBOL backend to a modern one written in C, I’d consider that relevant experience. What does Krause bring to the table?
Zooming out, what nominees and non-nominees have stood out positively? Even people who could be assets aren’t. In an alternate universe where Elon separated himself from his companies (to avoid conflicts of interests), he could be a great head of NASA, help with the switch to green technologies, etc.
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Clinically Insane
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Originally Posted by subego
Putting the enshitification on hold for a moment, isn’t Elon a VC techbro success story, or not enough VC involvement?
Paypal was formed when his company with no future prospect merged with another company and they decided to pursue that other company's direction, which was digital online payments.
Musk joined Tesla in 2004 after its founding and provided a significant chunk of its initial funding ($6.5mil out of $7.5 mil). Two years later they got VC funding to continue setup. By 2008 Musk had invested 70mil of his own money, and in 2009 Tesla got $465 million in government loans so they could set up mass production.
SpaceX is probably the closest thing to something he actually created himself? He is said to have personally interviewed and approved all early employees. Their first rocket was developed for $90-100mil of "internal funding," which I assume was Musk's money? When the launches kept failing it nearly bankrupt Musk, but after their first successful launch, they were funded by hundreds of millions of government contracts.
The Boring Company was a joke I guess?
Are any of those the traditional VC story of an investment firm injecting money into a flailing company and saving it?
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Clinically Insane
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Originally Posted by OreoCookie
In an alternate universe where Elon separated himself from his companies (to avoid conflicts of interests), he could be a great head of NASA, help with the switch to green technologies, etc.
What are his actual skills? So far he's shown great skill for directing narratives and marketing, but it's impossible to tell from the outside how much he brings to the table from a technical and personnel-management standpoint. There are lots of stories about how there are people at SpaceX and Tesla assigned to keeping him busy and distracted so the real bosses can keep things running smoothly, though that's the kind of story that would spread well on the internet so I don't know if I believe it.
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Clearly, this was a hypothetical and I was speaking of a younger, less insane version of Elon Musk. His behavior and lack of focus have hurt his “real” businesses (Tesla and SpaceX) for quite a while.
What you wrote about the history of Tesla and SpaceX (and PayPal before it) is correct, but shows that once upon a time he did have entrepreneurial skills and a vision for these companies. Tesla contributed quite a bit into the shift towards EVs. You and I don’t have to agree with his visions for these companies, but these skills, had he the selfcontrol to tap into into them, could be useful to implement change on a large scale. (I would still say that this “break things” approach is not a good fit for many situations you encounter in government, but I would understand the reasoning behind hiring someone with that profile.)
In any case, we don’t live in this hypothetical universe and Elon is a walking conflict of interest who will benefit directly from government contract with Tesla over armored Cybertrucks (presumably ones that are really bulletproof), who is involved in decisions with direct competitors to his companies (Boeing, all other car manufacturers, etc.).
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I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
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The orange toad installed himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center and immediately removed all board members who weren’t sufficiently loyal to him.
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Clinically Insane
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Originally Posted by OreoCookie
Clearly, this was a hypothetical and I was speaking of a younger, less insane version of Elon Musk. His behavior and lack of focus have hurt his “real” businesses (Tesla and SpaceX) for quite a while.
You say that, but I'd say his behavior in the past 5-10 years hasn't been optimized for success of his companies as much as it has been optimized for maximizing his wealth and power. As stock valuation continues to diverge further from tangible value and more toward hype (a consequence of end-run VC culture), he wouldn't waste his time creating actual value as much as he would spend time generating hype and pushing narratives that drive engagement and conflict. From this perspective, his purchase of Twitter makes perfect sense.
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Clinically Insane
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My fault for mentioning Musk. Though we should by all means continue to talk about him, it’s halted discussion of Krause.
I didn’t challenge it when initially proposed, but I don’t think Krause is a venture capitalist. He’s C-suite management. Based upon what he highlights about his career in the affidavit, I’d somewhat uncharitably call him a “hatchet man”.
I don’t think the plan is to break the place, however I do think these guys have identified the BFS is a bottleneck so massive that it has inherent strategic value.
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Originally Posted by subego
I don’t think the plan is to break the place, however I do think these guys have identified the BFS is a bottleneck so massive that it has inherent strategic value.
Of course, they intend to break it. That’s the entire point of all of this, to break the entire federal government. The work began in earnest today, with the first of the involuntary layoffs beginning.
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Originally Posted by Laminar
You say that, but I'd say his behavior in the past 5-10 years hasn't been optimized for success of his companies as much as it has been optimized for maximizing his wealth and power.
I'm in complete agreement with you. I was trying to steelman the counterargument of an outsider with experience in the private sector who could implement change in government.
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It never fails to baffle me why the idea that running a private sector, for profit, company makes one more than capable of running an ostensibly service-based, not-for-profit government has become engraved as given wisdom in our society. It’s like saying the manager of a Wal*Mart can run a hospital emergency room. I mean...maybe? But it’s far more likely to result in a dumpster fire.
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Clinically Insane
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I wouldn’t personally say it’s a given.
The general appeal is that of bringing in an outsider. They aren’t shackled to the current paradigm.
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That assumes the current paradigm is somehow broken, instead of having organically evolved into what it is due to the needs of the people they serve. It also assumes an outsider is somehow uniquely qualified simply due to them being an outsider.
And, let’s be fair here, most of these “outsiders” are hardly political outsiders. Far from it. They have their hands in the political cookiejar (usually financially) and are chums with the party powerbrokers. And almost universally, their stance isn’t to actually fix what they claim is broken. It’s to crush it completely and/or privatize it. See, for instance, Medicaid in blood-red states.
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