[bilekas]

It's calling him out on his BS. That might work for mindless investors who want number go up. But he's actively making the world worse for people.

Nevermind hoarding 40% of the worlds silicone 'just because'.

It's like Musk's lofty and outright BS claims. "Well I'm rich so I can do and say what I like, give me your money".

When did bald face lies become the norm in business ?

Edit.. Im keeping silicone in there.

[sigwinch]

Maybe starting with WorldCom?

The banking sector committed fraud along the way, and early after Lehman collapsed, observers wondered aloud about the moral hazard of bailing out everyone without making an example of someone.

Worldcom had a different ending. Enron had a different ending. But Wells Fargo left 2008 with attitudes that tolerated widespread fraud.

[rkomorn]

But... what are they going to do with all that silicone?

[qmr]

silicon*

[noduerme]

It was 40% more fun the first way you wrote it ;)

[noduerme]

>> When did bald face lies become the norm in business ?

When capital has nowhere to go, and the middle class become gamblers and speculators, and people who work become 'superfluous', lots of bad things start to happen. At least, that was my takeaway from "Origins of Totalitarianism".

[edit] To be more specific: Lying (and foreign wars, too) become viable business models when the moneyed class has so much to invest that they no longer know what to do with it, and lack any new markets to pry open, or the education or creativity to produce anything new of value that isn't extractive, and even the extractive methods of generating wealth have begun to dry up locally. Call it a bubble, call it fascism; fascism is basically just a way of keeping a bubble from collapsing indefinitely by pirating neighboring peoples' wealth and cannibalizing one's own society. So there's not a great difference between that and the stated vision of the major AI companies ATM.

[bubblewand]

Yeah, my semi-informed WAG for the core cause of many of the ills of our current situation is that we're wildly over-capitalized. The "trickle down" focus to put more of the "pie" on the investment side (setting aside whether the "trickle down" effect itself was meaningfully real, not relevant to this "take") was probably barely justified at the time, if at all, and we've just kept shoveling more fuel into that fire in the decades since.

You can't have demand without spreading buying power around. If you just keep shifting toward investment, that capital gets up to some really stupid shit because there's not enough demand to provide anything useful for it to do. Build a factory? Why would I do that, the returns are terrible. No, I'll "invest" in bitcoin... or do an NFT startup... or reserve way more memory capacity than I'll plausibly need just to fuck with my competition, in ways and in an environment that's so bubbly that this activity likely won't provoke capacity build-out to compensate...

We really, really needed some capital (by which I just mean investor-money, not real productive assets) destruction in the '08 crisis, and we didn't get it.