matlag

And a few years later the bacteria is found to cause even worse diseases…

Absolutely agree! Why can’t we have a show where a strong army wipes out a minority from the Earth with the rest of the world cheering?

What? That exists and is called “Fox News”??

Assuming people upload their code to fix it, that means it’s non working code. Great training material!

I’m joking but I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t think that through…

Am I the only one who wonder about a Hamas “genocidal” strategy? That they wish they could kill all Israelis, no doubt, but “genocidal strategy”?

Are we supposed to believe they thought they would get all Israelis on Oct 7th or something??

Unfortunately France is only lagging behind, but on the same authoritarian path.

First thing done after terrorist attack: declare emergency state, a tool designed for cases where the state is at risk of collapsing because of invasion by a foreing country or violent insurrection…

The police gains the power to assign people considered at risk at their residence. Very first use: assign climate activists at residence during the COP.

Emergency state is reconducted multiple times without any rationale, other than vague “terrorist threat”.

One of the first actions from Macron once in power was to make it permanent, by passing its key elements in the law.

Protests against anti-social policies or for climate are now systematically met with a violent response. People come out with an eye or a hand missing due to flashballs and lacrymo grenades. Answer from the government is something like “they had it coming”.

Cases of activists and journalists intimidation by law enforcement are multiplying.

Give it a bit of time, and France will catch up.

Now, onto the presidential rifle!

Yeah, that’s what the rest of us try to convince ourself so that we can cope with it. That or the idea that these people must sleep very poorly thinking about what they’ve done, while we’re actually the ones who have poor sleep thinking about what they’ve done and feeling powerless.

“Oh yeah, that’s definitely settled: John has the biggest one! Ok folks, zip up before they realize what we’re doing!”

And you’ll have it. They have enough money to pay an army and you bet they will use that to stop you from taking their wealth. Understand that they have rationalized their immense wealth to the point where they trully believe they deserve it. You can see it sometimes in how they consider themselves hard working geniuses, or decide God somewhat chose them to be ridiculously rich.

Yes, they will resort to violence (but not themselves, of course). But they won’t need to get their hands too dirty.

They’ll fund campaigns, they’ll own law enforcements and will wield it against the people, meanwhile they’ll buy propaganda to convince as many people as they can it’s all for the best. That’s easy to predict because they already do exactly that.

Violent repression of demonstrations, violence and intimidation against activists and journalists. Owning of all the mainstream medias and a large share of the less mainstream ones. All of that is slowly normalized.

Maybe, but do you prefer someone failing while trying to improve things or someone successful at trickling up money? And how do you actually know the alternative will not be a total failure?

Any candidate is a risk of failure. Why would he be a bigger risk?

At least if he wins, he’ll show a leftist can win! That may inspire some more to get in politics.

Well, the proposal here is to prop a billionaire’s pawn to replace a left-leaning candidate who proved himself by winning the primaries.

Take your time with your assessment.

I doubt Elon will go to jail for being an asshole. Tesla may get in troubles for the promises of unsupervised FSD, but that’s not the issue here.

I was more thinking about the brand’s reputation recovery.

Some of them may quietly have the same political view as him, and at worse, most of them don’t care about his views. Their failure to understand the rest of the world does mind just show that they’re not half as smart as they think, and they’re totally disconnected from the normal world.

And at these times, they could claim “Nazism is dead”. The issue with Musk and Tesla is nazis are not going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe they should hire VW’s CEO, actually. He managed to get the brand past the diesel-gate.

Sooner or later, the stock price will tank. It’s actually quite something that it is still that high, if anyone needed anymore proof that stock investors are not smarter than average Joe.

But Tesla sales are crashing worldwide, not just because of the brand, but because competition has caught up and is now getting ahead. Robo-taxis are going to compete with players that are years ahead on self-driving and safety concerns are going to force Tesla to trim down their price (assuming they manage to no longer need their “safety monitors”, in which cas they will just not happen).

Humanoid robots are a tool that needs to find a use justifying its price (and there again, we might see competition from China…).

What’s left??

Don’t you know that he’s a genius and none of what he says or does can have any bad consequence? If it’s not because of him, it must be because of someone else. Oh, BTW: he also fired a manager in Tesla who voiced against him damaging the brand name.

https://electrek.co/2025/06/18/tesla-manager-fired-sounding-the-alarm-explains-why-automaker-screwed/

None of these people know anything about anything. Only Elon knows!!

Go explain that to Iran’s leaders. Good luck!

On 9/11, the message sent was very unclear (“we hate you for your overall activity in the middle-east and the rest of the world” and/or “death to America”).

This time, it may be very clear: “that’s retaliation for the unjustified bombing of our country” (though Iran had its share of chanting “death to America”, so yes, YMMV).

I agree with you, you know: more deaths will lead to more retaliations, from both sides. Someone has to act like a true adult responsible pragmatic leader now. But there is none in power on either side.

Or Ukraine’s civilians. Or the 500k–2M dead civilians during the war against Iraq. Oh, sorry, those were “collateral”…

Usually citizens are not considered fair targets. They’re just targeted all the same.

Iran does not have the military capabilities to fight off Israel, let alone the USA. So they will most likely use terrorist attacks, targeting civilians, because that’s the best hope they have to end the war: when the people back home get serious about ending it as they’re taking losses.

Unfortunately, and as usual, the very important people who decide to keep going or stop are also the least likely to see their life at risk. And in this case, they also happen to not give a flying fuck about civilians lives.

They’ve invested way too much to admit it’s almost totally useless, and only useful in niche app, using sketchy conditions (training material IP…) and under tight control.

So they engage into heavy marketing and comms ops to convince the world that “AI” (very vague term BTW, what they offer right now should rather be called systems resulting from stochastic learning, credit for that naming suggestion is not on me) was a revolution and whoever doesn’t get on board will be left behind in the dust.

It worked really well: corporate world is embracing the “AI everywhere” idea.

So now, everyone is competing to provide “the best AI assistant”. And believe it or not: some people do ask for it!

It’s not just the funding, it’s the business overall. Public companies need to show growing revenues year to year, and worse: growing revenues with a minimum yield. A product can grow by attracting more users up to a certain point. Then the only way to grow is by making more money out of the same users base. If the revenue is based on ads:

• Extend the product so that the user’s engagement increases (channels/others kind).
• Add paying features (freemium approach, that includes blue stars or whatever the hell you want it to look like…)
• Serve them ads

Freemium is not always working well and Meta never used it. They have no new great idea to extend the product without eating their other products users bases. So the only one left is more ads.

Funding is not the issue, for-profit companies are. Non-profit is the way to go. Federation is even better as individuals/families/small organizations can run their own servers.-