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Beyond the info and guidance, there's also the classic sycophantic encouragement. Humans are allowed to publish the Anarchist's Cookbook, but they tend to get into trouble when it becomes "based on your manifesto, I would suggest the following targets". Of course, AI isn't human, and treating a software program like a human probably isn't good law, but OpenAI are very keen to suggest it's legally equivalent to a human when it suits them...

> OpenAI are very keen to suggest it's legally equivalent to a human when it suits them

When is/was that?

(Not rhetorical)


Think it's more to do with hilly, wooded courses unfavourable to horses and a requirement that the horse's heart rate remain below a certain threshold when inspected by a vet in the middle and end of a course, whereas the leading humans are maxing out their efforts

I don't think the Mongol cavalry would lose races to humans over any distance of steppe


Yeah I think on say, a proper road the horse would win at any distance.

the road adds some infrastructure - i think at that point the person should get a bike?

1990: For a few joyous years there was the Man v Horse v Bike competition in Mid-Wales - https://youtu.be/vFlglZUIKO8

Well that’s just not fair. Even the fastest human on earth can’t be expected to keep up with a horse riding a bike.

There's probably some upper limit to it, i am not sure a horse could live through the ultra marathon moab race in the western us.

Yeah, tbh I want more personalization in that I want posts from my friends, not clickbait the algorithm has decided I'm interested in because people who engage with this also engage with that...

But would governments defined by a cadre of techno-authoritarians disproportionately close to Mr Tariff do a better job?

Mr Tariff is probably slightly better to keep those around than not, but ideally I'd rather the government curate experts they employ to advise them.

I guess I kinda walked right into handing technocrats power, but I really just want the government to understand the tech they regulate. We'd rather have populist zingers on TV though.


Technoauthoritarians writing pretentious manifestos disavowing democracy explicitly don't want the government to understand the tech they regulate though, never mind curating experts, which is why they're so keen on the likes of Mr Tariff.

Unfortunately they're choosing to surround themselves with experts who have a massive financial interest in things going their way.

Mr. Tariff was trying to replace the income tax with tariffs with a bonus of having personal power over other countries economies by whatever tariff he decree'd. The "more jobs" was a smokescreen, and I'm sure you're aware of that

Trade policy should be as holistic as possible (tariffs, taxes, subsidies, etc), with the goal of aiding a robust domestic economy.

The 70's neoliberalism took Smith's comparative advantage argument and stripped it of context — optimizing for quarterly returns and capital mobility while ignoring the industrial ecosystem those returns depend on. You can't offshore your entire manufacturing base and expect to retain the innovation, workforce capacity, and supply chain resilience that made those profits possible in the first place.

Contrast this with "For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country."

That era was not without its issues as well, but there was a sense that "we're all in it together" vs the "greed is good" crowd.


Also, tickbox "I've considered this issue" questions which don't actually stop you from receiving grant funding with a team of middle aged, white male citizens from privileged educational backgrounds is not remotely the same as a clause enabling the administration to arbitrarily cancel your contract mid way through your project.

Especially not when said administration has a track record of cancelling things because they Ctrl-Fed outgroups they considered to be the enemy and discovered a completely irrelevant Latin prefix in someone's abstract.


Now that's double standard here, isn't it? Putting up questions on forms that require you to reveal your political pole and follow the politics of one party to answer isn't really kosher in any academic environment.

Trying to reframe them as "we didn't REALLY mean it!" (while also insulting a race and sex) doesn't help your case.

This is what the communist leads of universities did here in eastern europe and it was disgusting back then as well.


Yeah, me pointing out the people exactly like me totally can and do fill in boxes like this and secure grants is totally "insulting a race and sex". I thought it was supposed to be the libs who were grievance mongers desperate to feel discriminated against...

Honestly, if filling in those boxes with anything other than a diatribe against the suitability of women and minorities and poor people to do research is "following the politics of one party" now, that says more about the conformance demanded by the other party than the science. Good to hear you're much happier now they're in charge and introducing formal komissar roles to ensure that any studies whose results contradict RFK Lysenko Jr or reference transgenic mice or Transjordan or employ too many research assistants with funny foreign names are liable to be defunded before publication.


If filling those boxes was so easy, you won't have issues filling up republican boxes with content they want to hear to get funding, right?

That's what happens when academia politicizes themselves - they become part of the game. And that means begging for scraps of who ever is currently on the top.

It's horrible... but you said yourself - you just need to fill some boxes correctly.


Except, of course, that it isn't a matter of simply filling in checkboxes stating how research is going to contribute towards Americans' greatness. It's a matter of mass retrospective cancellation of research funding and the replacement of peer review with commissar review by the sort of people that can't tell the difference between transgenic and transgender and block the publication of studies if they don't align with the administration's position on vaccines

Nobody honestly believes the two are equivalent.

Ultimately an argument that an application question with option for researchers to state they have an equal opportunities policy is as much of an imposition as legislating for studies to be retrospectively defunded if the clinical outcomes don't align with the administrations' preferred pseudoscience says more about you than it does about past politicization of science...


I'm the last person to accuse the US of being sanely-governed, but you'll forgive me for not worrying any more about a conspiracy of billionaires with access to US nuclear arsenal all agreeing that the best way to ensure they live long and healthy lives unencumbered by vengeful proles/superpowers is to nuke the top 500 cities than I do about Roko's Basilisk or the end of the world as predicted by the Aztecs...

I'm not worried about the billionaires, I'm worried about the models they are empowering.

I'm even less worried about AI models obtaining corporeal form to stride into the US nuclear bunkers to launch missiles against their own power infrastructure and datacenters...

If you think that is what is required, you aren't keeping up.

Okay then. What does the infrastructure around launching a nuclear weapon look like?

Well, its changing. Palantir is signing DOD contracts. Sorry, DOW. Kegsbreath probably would think it would be fucking sick brah to have our nuclear arsenal controlled by a for profit ai model. Trump would approve after thiel gives him a solid gold bust of his face. Morons run this country now. Is any of this hypothetical future really so surprising?

That's not really an answer to my question though.

This assumes it is literally impossible for anyone else to reduce their battery costs to a level which makes them competitive with Tesla in an environment when battery prices are falling rapidly and the tech continues to evolve (and Tesla's EVs are not even unusually cheap or experimental in their battery supply chains)

That sounds less likely than the bull case Tesla is trying to make on "we're a robotics company now" or "one day all cars will be autonomous taxis controlled by us".


Exactly. Looking at competition from China, but also the West, I don't see Tesla having a moat in EVs, in robots, or even in batteries in the medium term (compare e.g. [1]).

How can they produce the extraordinary growth and excess profits that would justify their valuation?

Fundamentals will reassert themselves sooner or later, but as we see it can take a long time.

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/05/07/tesla-4680-battery-cell-perfo...


> Fundamentals will reassert themselves sooner or later

I don't believe that's true, anymore.

TSLA is a pure meme stock. No one is investing in it because they believe in the numerous, actionable lies Musk tells. No one is investing because they think the P/E makes sense. They're doing it because they think the memes are fun, or because they think the people who think the memes are fun are bag-holders, or because they think the memes are fun AND Musk is actually still smart and adding value, etc.

It's the clearest, most obvious case for "the markets are not the economy".


Only if you're terminally online and believe everyone else must be as well. If you don't know what a meme stock is and think the humanoid robot is going to sell like hotcakes, TSLA seems like a great investment.

That's a thought-provoking and somewhat resigned point.

My response is this: Over time (say 20 years later) you will have gotten certain dividends, and the firm will be in a new position in terms of price and earnings. If I'm right, and the firm will not have been able to produce large profits and pay them out, then the people who bought today at today's valuation and P/E ratio will have massively overpaid for the dividends they will have gotten, and the only way they could have made capital gains to make up for it is if either the P/E ratio has increased even more, or earnings have really shot up at the end of those 20 years.

Either way, it's not sustainable. Unless, of course, people are willing to push up the P/E ratio up and up without limit. And I submit that's not going to happen indefinitely.

TL;DR: 20 years later you can see what share holders got for the price they paid 20 years ago (namely 20 yrs of dividends, plus they still have the share). If you thought the shares were cheap and you were right, you got a lot for what you paid. If the shares were overpriced, that'll have come out by then.

(I agree though that it seems to take longer than it used to take for the fundamentals to reassert themselves.)


Their per-car profit margin is the moat. Which non-Chinese company can compete?

Tesla's moat is bipartisan support for 100%+ tariffs on Chinese EVs in the United States.

How long that lasts remains to be seen. American consumers living close to either border are going to be able to see Chinese EVs themselves.


Tesla has vertical integration with their batteries, which is why they can make them cheaply.

> This assumes it is literally impossible for anyone else to reduce their battery costs to a level which makes them competitive with Tesla in an environment when battery prices are falling rapidly and the tech continues to evolve

No - it just means they can't do it as fast as the Chinese. The Chinese have been investing in battery technology for 10-15 years longer than most auto manufacturers. (And their labor is cheaper).


This is fair but I'm not sure the low hanging fruit is going to be developing technology that can reach earth escape velocity without being extremely sensitive to how well built and prepared the system applying the enormous amount force required is. Even the hypothetical stuff like Spin Launch and space elevators is going to have catastrophic failure modes....

You've just got the problem of building a fixed wing aircraft which can carry your rocket full of explosive propellant, successfully release it pointing in the right direction and then get the hell out of the way....

Every country has hurdles. It's not like the US doesn't have weird worlds of tax exemptions, and 50 sets of state tax regulation to consider [or outsource to your fulfilment platform...] when shipping to consumers, and if I was a US business importing microelectronics from China, 21% import tax that doesn't change every couple of months would sound like a *dream...

Of course every country throws hurdles onto the student entrepreneur's path. Belgium, unlike the Baltics, the US (for now) or many others, just happens to be a world championship contender in this discipline.

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