I mean is it not clear that companies are just an abstraction for a network of people, and you obviously must be be good with those people, ie seduce them into promoting you. And is it not clear that on the other side, you must keep your options open such that you find an alternative (job) if they are weird / toxic / dont like you / you dont like them?
This is not an easy question. It seemingly boils down to: what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state?
However, the root questions are: what should the state provide, how much, and of what nature? A secondary question then becomes how important the redistributive aspect is. That’s what you’re seemingly alluding to when you say: people work, get taxed on it, but others automate that work and this automation does not get taxed.
Following that line of thinking makes sense, but it also contradicts the core benefit of automation, which is to delete non-needed work, make things cheaper, and make the value creator richer.
If the goal of redistribution is usually that “more” people reach a higher standard of living, then adding taxes and friction to processes like automation may conflict with that goal, given that automation is arguably one of the strongest natural drivers of higher living standards overall.
Of course, the counterpoint to “what and how much should the state provide” is “who should pitch in, and how much,” which is what you’re focusing on. I mostly agree that everyone should be taxed fairly, but I also see many exemption cases, because taxes are friction and we often want certain things to be frictionless. For example, I would oppose taxes on life-saving surgeries. But where do you draw the line? What about automation that indirectly enables or improves life-saving surgery?
You could argue that the point of creating an oligopoly and then squeezing customers after the fact also is adding friction. All value creation is not great for the people. But it is hidden under the name. Financial engineering and rent-seeking are getting quite advanced nowadays, because of the political class.
I like the idea of classifying it into four buckets: those that are below tax net gains for a country, those who are above and those that are above the tax net gains using just their wealth, and then the government.
There are core features of the state that we have collectively agreed must be provided - social safety (including police and safety nets), infrastructure, defense, core research funding and more.
The cost of providing the basic obligations and debt service of the U.S. amounts to roughly 1/3rd of the U.S. GDP, while taxation on any activity induces friction and higher costs - the bill will need to be paid either via capital markets or taxation. The investment in automation is no more important than food, or my children's education in my view.
Taxation is generally preferable for capital owners compared to currency debasement and forced debt purchases as it maintains boundaries on what the state can and cannot do. If the current trend is towards a greater share of the economy accruing to capital owners is maintained, then capital taxes will eventually need to rise to sustain state obligations.
Nah, you could reasonably regard a tax system where everybody pays <2% of their income in tax as fair and likewise one where everybody pays 50%, but there is no way to call a system fair where ordinary working people pay higher effective rates than multinational corporations.
The tax rate for corporations should be zero. The need to do tax accounting and associated financial engineering is a deadweight economic loss. Eliminate corporate income tax and raise taxes on the highest income employees and investors to make the change revenue neutral. Ultimately the profits flow to those individuals one way or another so better to collect all the tax revenue from them anyway. This change would increase economic growth and benefit everyone.
That would work if you were going to use VAT for everyone, but as long as you're using income tax for individuals, setting the corporate rate to zero would be an obvious tax dodge. You'd put all your assets and income into a corporation that pays no taxes and then have it loan you money when you want to spend it on something.
> That would work if you were going to use VAT for everyone, but as long as you're using income tax for individuals, setting the corporate rate to zero would be an obvious tax dodge. You'd put all your assets and income into a corporation that pays no taxes and then have it loan you money when you want to spend it on something.
Unfortunately this doesn't work for individuals: tax codes in, well, every first world jurisdiction, are very clear that any money going to an individual for their exclusive use is taxed.
I operate as a consultancy (registered tax-paying business); If I use my revenue to pay my bond or get surgery, that $amount is considered personal income even if the company pays for it.[1]
The real problem is that corporations are taxed on profit and individuals are taxed on revenue!
All the costs that a corporation has to foot just to remain in existence is tax-deductible. All the costs that an individual has to foot to remain in existence is taxed (double-taxed, in some cases).
A corporation that pays $amount for rent won't pay tax on $amount in income, while an individual who pays $amount in rent is taxed on the $amount in income.
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[1] I hear what you are saying about a loan that is paid back, and maybe that is one loophole I can explore, but the revenue services have seen all "hacks" and this is no doubt one of them. This is why the tax codes are so complex and convoluted - each time a hack is discovered, a new code is added to specifically shutdown that loophole. The only remaining "hacks" are those that are allowed anyway by the overall tax policy, like "individuals are taxed on all revenue, corporates are taxed on profits only"
That's not an actual problem. The IRS already has clear rules requiring that certain corporate expenses are treated as taxable individual income if they directly benefit a particular employee or investor.
> The IRS already has clear rules requiring that certain corporate expenses are treated as taxable individual income if they directly benefit a particular employee or investor.
I replied to GP with the same thought as you, but I think there might be some merit in the "loan" angle.
Lets look at the case that you operate as a consultant/contractor/etc. Your "startup" starts making some very large revenue, and you'd like to use that money to pay rent, go on vacation, pay for surgery, etc.
Any money (say, $amount) the business pays on your behalf (hospital, landlord, etc) is considered your personal income and taxed appropriately.
But, if the books reflect that it was given as a loan, and you are now on the books as a debtor (with the business being your creditor), then that specific $amount isn't taxed as your personal income (loans aren't considered income, as far as I know, because they are a liability).
So, as long as you are in control of the business, the business doesn't need to initiate the "pay back now or we start legal proceedings" process. What instead happens is that this loan amount in the business books just grows and grows (interest accumulates) until the business dies/ends/is sold without ever collecting on it.
As long as the business itself does not have outstanding creditors when it eventually comes to an end, that "loan" can be just written off.
What's the revenue service going to do? Claim that businesses can't write off debt anymore?
There's a simple way out of it if you just want to get rid of double taxation though: Make dividends a tax deduction to the corporation. Then if the corporation makes money and doesn't issue it as dividends, they pay tax on it. If they do, the corporation doesn't, but the investor does. And then it gets taxed once one way or another but not twice.
I think each company should pay a low rate on all money passing through. Let’s say 0.1 to 1%.
Building huge pyramids of shell companies has probably no economic benefit and is mostly done to evade some regulation or taxes or liability. The ideas how to abuse this are too numerous to count so the government should not try to but simply disincentivize the use of corporations just a little bit. The cost would be borne by the individuals who have the most elaborate company architectures which is probably synonymous with the biggest tax evaders.
The core benefit of automation is to give back time to humans to free us to do more creative things with our big beautiful brains. At least, that would be the core benefit if humanity was on a positive trajectory.
> what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state?
The right question is who benefits the most from state’s services. For example if a whole lot of security, legislative or admin services go to protecting the capital, then those who has the most capital need to chip in the most.
> redistribution is usually that “more” people reach a higher standard of living, then adding taxes and friction to processes like automation may conflict with that goal
This is basically a 50 year old trickle down argument. But real wages have not increased in comparison to gdp since 70s, so nothing trickled down. We are demonstratedly bad at sharing what we have achieved together, no reason to believe more tech will magically get better treatment than that.
Besides redistribution is not about shifting the curve up, but making it flatter - see gini coefficient.
> the core benefit of automation, which is to delete non-needed work, make things cheaper, and make the value creator richer.
Except the era of classical capitalism and inventor’s profit is over, since 70s it is rentiers unreciprocated extraction on top of purported value people didn’t necessarily ask for or need in the first place. Likewise most people aren’t dying for AI automation, and not even for structural threats; it is not even proven that it will provide a net total productivity gain when the hype cools down, despite being shoved down people’s throats.
Let’s not kid ourselves, there is little concern for real value creation but a capture-the-flag on a gigantic data-moated compute monopoly. Whatever democratic means enabled proper taxation would have already prevented this type of speculative berserk, failures of which I assure you will be socialized.
So friction = societal consent, internalizing externalized costs, revealing what is actually value versus monopolist’s rent. It is healthy for the society, it is healthy for capitalism.
Actually real wages have increased a lot since the 70s if you count employer contributions to employee heath insurance. The problem is that a lot of that money is being wasted by an inefficient healthcare system, and employers probably shouldn't even be involved in sponsoring group health plans in the first place.
Employers paid for healthcare in 1970s too, and even for higher percentages of the workforce. If there is a premium inflation surpassed the CPI, that is still inflation, not real growth. If there’s an inflation problem in delivering a temporally comparable service, that is not a “real wage” item for the employee [1]. So what the nominal figure today shouldn’t be relevant.
I agree it shouldn’t be an employer item too, but whatever employers lose on premiums, they get more on an overall stickier and cheaper labor supply.
[1] one could argue the productivity of healthcare increased, and the data indeed supports this with the overall life expectancy increase from 70s to now mid 70s plus quality of life treatments. But again most of the spend is actually on the tail end at this age group, which raises the workers’ premium without delivering the benefit. Therefore not much structural gain for the actual working age employee.
I don't understand your point. Very few people in their 70s have employer sponsored group health insurance. Most are only on Medicare, perhaps with a commercial Medicare Advantage or Medicare Supplement plan.
My bad, skipped a chain of thought there. Since medicare pays less than private insurance, hospitals can and do shift costs (which in reality is "opportunity cost of profit") to the latter, which pushes to private premiums up. Regardless, this is a minor effect. Very little of the inflation is justified with productivity gains, as you said it is a very inefficient healthcare system. US prices clock 2x-4x of comparable OPEC peers, admin percent is higher etc.
>if you count employer contributions to employee heath insurance
You shouldn't.
>and employers probably shouldn't even be involved in sponsoring group health plans in the first place.
They are free to lobby for socialized medicine, but they don't because they like how the current system helps lock employees into bad jobs for any amount of healthcare.
If you're trying to understand changes in the share of income going to workers versus employers, then you must count those contributions. For the average family, employers pay $20,143 annually in premiums: https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/annual-family-premiu....
From the perspective of the employer, that's real money, no different than if they had paid the $20,143 directly to the employee as wages. It's not the employer's concern what happens to that money after they fork it over.
Maybe people would view it more like that if they actually had the option to get paid cash instead of an insurance plan of the same supposed value. With some employees that is possible to negotiate, but for the vast majority of employees with a healthcare plan that is a big no unless they are willing to accept a tiny fraction of the insurance value.
Adam Smith and old school Capitalism hate rent seeking though, and when does moving all jobs to AI companies become rent seeking? It definitely destroys the labor/capital relationship part of Capitalism, but it's goal is to also turn the entire economy into rent seeking. Something considered very bad in traditional Capitalist thought. The current path has basically the total destruction of actual Capitalist thought at it's heart.
The problem is that libertarians have been able to retcon their fan fiction into what Capitalism is and gloss over the original anti-rent seeking, anti-monopoly, pro-government oversight parts that Capitalism REQUIRES in order to stay healthy,functioning, and beneficial to society. And people just accept that 'capitalism good' = 'late 20th/early 21st century libertarian fanfiction of what capitalism is' is the definition of Capitalism, when it is very far from it and has zero relation to the functional Capitalism that lifted the world up.
Combining this late 20th/early 21st century fanfiction version of Capitalism with the current tech company goals for AI is something totally new, zero percent Capitalism, and 100% would be hated by original Capitalist thinkers as damaging.
> extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state
This is extremely aggressive framing. It smashes together two wildly different kinds of citizen with wildly different, often opposing incentives and access to power: those who sell their labor for a living and those who literally own the economy. It poses them both in opposition to the government which has 1/5th the revenue of the latter.
If capital is the big bad, this framing is a mind-virus that makes the problem hard to think about and speak about.
> friction
Friction plays a key role in "the unreasonable effectiveness of capitalism." It's a big part of the reason why we can rig the game in favor of capital and not simply have the economy immediately degenerate into "capital rules, labor drools" due to the exponentials inherent in "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are."
Removing friction is not necessarily a net good if it contributes more to distributional problems than it relieves in deadweight loss. Nobody is a fan of deadweight loss, but I'd be a lot more sanguine about eliminating it if I thought we had a credible handle on the distributional problems. But we don't.
I see a natural equilibrium with a tension: automation (also through AI) causes unit economics to drop and results in cheaper prices. At the same time, salaries for contributors grow because their impact is so high. So you end up with a new equilibrium of much cheaper prices and much higher salaries. What, however, about the people who can’t contribute? IMO the most natural and fair approach is to support (through whatever means) people’s “education”, allowing them to upgrade their skills so that they can contribute. IMO this leads to a new tension: not rich vs poor, or useful vs useless, but people who can up-level their skills vs those who don’t. And I think, at its extreme, it boils down to this: how much plasticity does your brain have? Because every other constraint, society can adapt or accommodate for.
That is a game thoery approach but it completely fails in the face of reality.
The reality is that the floor to become "useful" is relatively low, which means the few billioanires have a large pool of potentially useful people of which they only employ some, leading to no greater salaries due to labour competition.
The other potentially useful workers cannot pool together and compete as the barrier of entry in the sector is prohibitely high.
So a natural moat emerges over cost of setting up a company, workers beg for a job of which they will take for a small wage and a few billioanires control the market.
This is a much closer approximation to the market we currently see
Yeah, that definitely won't work at scale. The bar for what constitutes being "educated" keeps increasing. Previously it was knowing how to code, now it is having an ML PhD, for example. At the same time, AI keeps getting more and more capable, so no matter how much "education" you have, AI will eventually get to you.
In any case, the argument won't work for majority of the population without a college degree. Are you going to have 50+ year old truck drivers upskilling in a fancy new tool to keep a job? And again, how long until that new skill you upgraded them to is now done by AI as well.
There has been extensive debate around that topic since that paper came out. Some points to discuss:
1. Even the article you shared mentions that starting in 2003, earnings has stopped tracking productivity. "Total compensation remains close until 2003, but does not follow 2003’s uptick in productivity growth (behavior which remains a topic for future research)."
2. They use average earnings and not median earnings. Average earnings include people like CEOs. This by consequence shows that inequality among workers has also increased. Check out chart 4 here to see how much smaller median wages are compared to average: (https://www.csls.ca/ipm/23/IPM-23-Mishel-Gee.pdf)
3. Apart from the average vs median difference, the biggest point of contention between that study and more recent ones is the measure of inflation used. The 2007 study you cite uses a measure of inflation that also includes things paid by employers like medical insurance. It turns out that using that one leads to significantly lower inflation. If you use consumer price index, what workers actually pay out of pocket, the difference again becomes larger. Citing page 37 of the study above: "In other words, that the prices of consumer items has risen faster than a broader index of prices that includes net exports, government goods and services, and investment goods. Therefore, for a given increase in income, the purchasing power of the consumer has fallen faster than that of business for investment goods and foreigners for U.S. exports."
The article I shared before plus this other one describe all the discrepancies (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/). Specially see chart 10 in the PDF study. That shows all possible variations of how you measure productivity and income. No matter how you look at it, the most substantiated conclusion is that income has NOT matched productivity.
I think by vibe coding he means taking these things at face value instead of rigorously looking if they are up to the standard. When coding you would rigorously look if the code is good / produces any bugs. With vibe coding, you give a prompt and just accept the output, which might be full of errors and blow up (or melt). The analogy is that, yes you can print airplane parts, but they were sloppy and just accepted them at face value instead of rigorously looking if they are up to the required (bug free) standard, ie they wont melt.
The problem is we have different terms that all mean doing something without real risk management or analysis in software. Both "cowboy coding" and "vibe coding" mean the same thing, if you remove the agent doing the production.
And since vibe coding is so recently coined, I think a lot of people take it to specifically mean "LLM" and not some generalized "any third-party agent".
Then, a vibe coded engine part sounds like it would need a generative AI producing the CAD file that is then printed. And it might have some bizarre topology like a Klein bottle or some fever dream.
>I think by vibe coding he means taking these things at face value instead of rigorously looking if they are up to the standard.
Yeah, exactly -- which is why it's a stupid phrase for what happened here.
Not every negligence is somehow equatable to an AI pitfall, it's just on parents' mind so it's the only metaphor that gets applied.
A poorly fit hammer in a world of nails.
I say this as an engineer/proprietor with years of additive manufacturing experience, it's insulting. A poorly chosen and wrongly used process conveys nothing about the underlying fundamentals of the process itself -- it conveys everything about the engineer and the business processes that birthed the problem.
Similarly if I came across a poorly vibe-coded project I wouldn't blame Anthropic/oAI directly -- I would blame the programmer who decided to release such garbage made with such powerful tools..
tl;dr : it's not vibe-coding itself that makes vibe-coding a poor fit to rocket science and brain surgery -- it's the braindead engineer that pushes the code to the THERAC-25 without reading.
I think the idea was that 3D printing made doing a thing accessible, previously required solid fundamental knowledge (and very expensive kit). Now you can just take some specs off the internet and press go.
The comparison does not seem as absurd to me as it does to you. vOv
The lesson here is that one should never attempt analogies on HN, because people can't just relax and try to see the point of the analogy. They are compelled to fixate on the fact that an analogy is different from the thing it is being compared to.
I feel like Hacker News commenters love to make analogies more than average people in your average space, though. You can't come across a biology/health topic on here without someone chiming in with "it's like if X was code and it had this bug" or "it's like this body part is the Y of the computer."
Analogies can be useful sometimes, but people also shouldn't feel like they need to see everything through the lens of their primary domain, because it usually results in losing nuances.
I don’t see how “tech” is limited to software. While your case might be made for software, according to many accounts Musk is a strong driver on the hardware side. For instance, I’ve read the Tesla and SpaceX books by Eric Berger, which are much more focused on technical things compared to the more mainstream books. And while Musk is not in the trenches with a screwdriver, he’s not faking it either.
To be honest, I’m actually interested in this hypothesis: is he legitimately skilled/knowledgeable, or is he indeed faking it? And for either side I would like to see evidence. This question is interesting to me because some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy).
If he is really faking it, that might even be good, because the success of his companies might be replicable and could continue without him. But what if he is not?
He has a public image of "geek/need hero" that is honestly inspiring.
And that benefits him a lot because it bring people to trust his decisions. He has all the interest of the world to maintain this image.
> some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy).
People he hired for these companies made contributions.
While your comment represents a common view, also here on HN, I find it bizarre: Hacker News is in part about innovative new technologies, and such new behaviours around them. For what it’s worth, in the last 5 years LLM have been extremely successful tech that has shaped society, maybe to the scale of the iPhone when it came out. Yet this comment is like the “I can’t believe everyone is staring at their phone in the subway instead of talking” trope or “this couple is on a date but they’re just on their phones.” On Hacker News I would expect people to be more open to such new behaviours as they emerge, instead of kind of kink-shaming them. I myself talk hours to ChatGPT, and am astounded by this new tech. I certainly find it better than TikTok (which after trying out I don’t allow myself to use).
I dont quite follow. I understand mono vs micro services, and in the last 3 weeks I had to study for system design and do the interviews to get offers.
Its a tradeoff, and the system design interview is meant to see if one understands how systems can scale to hypothetical (maybe unrealistic) high loads. In this context the only reason for a microservice is independent scaling and with that also fault tolerance if an unimportant service goes down. But its really the independent scaling. One would clearly say that a monolith is good for the start because it offer simplicity or low complexity but it doesn't scale well to the hypothetical of mega scale.
In practice, it seems not to be a tradeoff but an ideology. Largely because you can't measure the counter-factual of building the app the other way.
It's been a long time since I've done "normal" web development, but I've done a number of high-performance or high-reliability non-web applications, and I think people really underestimate vertical scaling. Even back in the early 2000s when it was slightly hard to get a machine with 128GB of RAM to run some chip design software, doing so was much easier than trying to design a distributed system to handle the problem.
(we had a distributed system of ccache/distcc to handle building the thing instead)
Do people have a good example of microservices they can point us to the source of? By definition it's not one of those things that makes much sense with toy-sized examples. Things like Amazon and Twitter have "micro" services that are very much not micro.
I dont disagree, but you can horizontally scale a monolith too, no? So scaling vert vs horiz is independent of microservices, its just that separating services allows you to be precise with your scaling. Ie you can scale up a compute heavy micorservice by 100x, the upload service by 10x but keep the user service at low scale. I agree that one can vert scale, why not. And I also agree that there are probably big microservices. At my last workplace, we also had people very bullish on microservices but for bad reasons and it didn't make sense, ie ideology.
Can you elaborate on the fault tolerance advantage of micro services?
For context, my current project is a monolith web app with services being part of the monolith and called with try/catch. I can understand perhaps faster, independent, less risky recovery in the micro services case but don’t quite understand the fault tolerance gain.
Im no world leading expert but as far as I understand, coupled with events, if an unimportant service goes offline for 5 min (due to some crash, ie "fault"), its possible to have a graceful degradation, meaning the rest of the system still works, maybe with reduced ability. With events, other systems simply stop receiving events from the dead service. I agree you can achieve a lot of this also in a monolith with try catch and error handling, but I guess there is an inherent decoupling in having different services run on separate nodes.
I fully agree on workplace politics, but for system design interviews, are you not also just supposed to ask your interviewer, ie give them your premises and if they like your conclusions? I also understand that some companies and their interviews are weird, but thats okay too, no? You just reject them and move on.
If there's a big enough bias, the questions become entirely about finding that bias. And on 90% of cases the systems design questions are about something they designed in-house, and they often don't have a lot of experience as well.
Also: if there's limited knowledge on the interviewer side, an incorrect answer to a question might throw off a more experienced candidate.
It's no big deal but it becomes more about reading the room and knowing the company/interviewers than being honest in what you would do. People don't want to hear that their pet solution is not the best. Of course you still need to know the tech and explain it all.
This is a catastrophic moral failing on who ever prompted this. Next thing they will ban chatgpt from teaching you stuff because its not a certified licensed teacher. A few weeks ago my right eye hurt a fair bit, and after it got worse for 24 ours, I consulted chatGPT. It gave me good advice. Of course it sort of hallucinated this or that but it gave me a good overview and different medications. With this knowledge I went to my pharmacy. I wanted to buy a cream chatGPT recommended, its purpose being a sort of disinfectant for the eye. The pharmacist was sceptical but said "sure, try it, maybe it will do good". He did tell me that the eye drops that gpt urged me to get were overkill so I didn't get those. I used the eye cream for some days, and the eye issue got better and went away as soon as I started using it. Maybe it was all a conincidence but I dont think so. In the past gpt has saved me from the kafkaesque healthcare system here in Berlin that I pay ~700 a month for, by explaining a MRI result (translating medical language), background info on injuries I've got such as a sprained ankle, and recovery time scenarios for a toe I've broke. Contrast the toe experience with the ER that made me wait for 6 hours and didn't believe me until they saw the X-rays, and gave me nothing (no cast or anything) and said "good luck". The medical system in germany will either never improve or at a glacial pace, so maybe in 60 years. But it has lost its monopoly thanks to chatGPT. If this news is real, I will probably switch to payed grok, which would be sad.
The tone of voice suggests you dislike Musk, but I will still answer in good faith. From what I can see from the outside, he has consistently for many years stated the same goals and worked on them. Any or most financial gains he made, he invested into his companies which work on accomplishing those goals (for example, going to Mars). The most notable example was investing his PayPal money into Tesla and SpaceX when they both were at risk of going out. He also has a reputation for working a lot, though it may be exaggerated, but he looks fairly unhealthy so maybe not too far off. Compared to other super rich people, he seems to spend less time in lavish ways, for example on yachts or similar. He probably still spends more money than we can imagine on unnecessary things, but on the spectrum of rich people he doesn't seem to be the most frivolous. Finally, he has said on Twitter that he doesn't care about money but needs resources for his goals, for example going to Mars. And after everything I’ve seen and the examples listed, it doesn’t seem totally implausible that he means it.
And all it took was ending public science funding and trust in public health and regulatory oversight and destroying the legislative and judiciary branches. Crazy how all the things it takes to get to Mars are also the same things that make him, personally, wealthier and more powerful.
Well, let’s assume you’re correct about all that. To me, it seems he was already quite rich before doing all the Trump-related things you mentioned. Those might have made him richer, but I’d suspect they didn’t move the needle much compared to his real profit centers (probably Starlink and Tesla). If anything, I’d argue those actions made him poorer by further damaging his reputation. And any “power grab” motives he may have had likely evaporated after his fallout with Trump. One current example is exactly what sparked this thread: the NASA Chief seemingly trying to impress Trump by attacking SpaceX.
The best theory into why Musk was so gung-ho about DOGE was specifically to shut down any government agency that was out to keep him from continuing to increase his wealth. By that measurement, he was in charge of the most successful government agency. Whether or not that had any positive/negative affect for Trump was merely an irrelevant by product of the actual mission.
That's not the best theory. He thinks government was too big, and wanted to cut waste. Trump, it turns out, wanted to have a "big beautiful bill" and Musk strongly opposed that, saying any bill that's big isn't beautiful. So he got moved off DOGE by Trump.
SpaceX has always complied with the regulations and timings needed by regulatory bodies. This isn't a thing.
Most CEOs presumably do want their companies to succeed and do good things in the abstract, but a lot of them would happily have them fail if it made them a huge pile of cash.
I mean, just as the phrase goes "your terrorist is my rebel," one could say "your propaganda is my information." That's exactly why a decentralized system matters. It doesn't just resist capture by a single authority, it allows competing narratives to exist side by side. What one group sees as misinformation, another might see as essential context. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate bias entirely, but to prevent any one group from controlling the flow of all information.
And how do you prevent the bad actors from flooding the decentralized systems with propaganda? Nowadays there are millions of bad actors each sending one propaganda message, all slightly different. When any other criteria is not reliable (like source of information, or lack of bias), volume of message distribution (how often that and related messages pop up in the feed) becomes the last indicator people use.
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