Meta has no strategy. The people that made llama work left two years ago. MSI are a bunch of charlatans who are trying to change the culutre and tooling of meta from the outside (I can see their point, trying to work outside of the defaults is incredibly hard.)
its basically a bun fight, with all of your productive workers being poached by frontier labs, and everyone else is either a new grad, burnt out, or a master bullshitter.
I disagree. The strategy was unclear until now. Spending billions on acquisitions and targeted hires, clearing ranks, playing catch-up on coding and multimodal, open sourcing weak models, the AI girlfriends. It was all very confusing.
It is clear now. Alex and co have refocused Meta on Personal AGI or pAGI. The AI that runs your life. It feels appropriate for a social media company that hosts your photos and group chats. Most users will not pay for pAGI so the tokens need to be cheap. Muse is targeted at intelligence per dollar. Many sites do not offer API access. The marketing is focused on computer usage. Installing software adds friction. It runs securely in the cloud. If this isn't the right AI play for Meta then I don't know what would be.
From the outside looking in, I don't think Meta has a clear vision. I think it's a stretch to say that this one announcement makes it clear. There are AI announcements from Meta every month, recent ones more focused on coding (Muse Spark/Muse Code)
Their ads team wants AI to improve their targeting and ad creation. Some want to have frontier AI including coding. Others might want personal AI agent. Then there's the flirting with renting their compute
And I'm not even taking shots at them. I think Google is exactly the same. I think OpenAI is largely the same (though lately more following Anthropic footsteps and focusing on productivity). And I think the whole field is so new and allows change in so many places - that it's sort of normal or fine to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.
But nothing as of now says to me that Meta has a clear strategy around llms
I would say they should put ALL their focus on Next Generation content generation… I honestly think in the ~10 years we’re going to see cinema completely flip from high budget blockbusters to way cheaper, personalised “Choose Your Own Adventure” content but where the story changes/rewrites itself in realtime based on constant user feedback (thumbs up from popups mid movie, facial expressions etc).
Meta could be the next generation’s Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal etc
it was always "personal AI", thats why Zuck wants AR so much.
The problem is, before about 2025, there were a bunch of clear systems and procedures that stopped your personal data from being used for dodgy things. For example the browser inside oculus didn't emit any site specific usage metrics. This means that they couldn't use your VR porn habit to target you.
The same with the raybans. There was a perm block on processing user data offsite/outside of meta systems. (which is why we couldn't use FAIRs AWS cluster to do research on research data, because even though it was paid for data, it was still technically 'user' data because it had non-public domain PII [peoples faces, voices and locations in it]) So getting access to any kind of data that came in from raybans was a massive "nope never"
Then we find out that someone convinced Zuck to let people train on private rayban data? and they send it to fucking third party annotators, and new fucking annotators at that. That to me smells like MSL. To get how much of a big fucking deal that is, the original raybans had two cameras, so that FAIR could do some research or other. but because they didn't want to make a separate infra just for research, they couldn't get permission to use any of the data.
Meta had a working always on assistant that could locate, transcribe and recall any thing inside the offices (assuming you wanted to carry a fannypack with a jetson in it) it was always personal.
its now a case of how much shit they can get away with, its not like the FCC are going to audit them anymore.
People dont even trust meta with their personal data anymore but somehow they'll use it to run every aspect of their lives? This feels like another big failure in the making. Give me an AI that doesn't use my data at all and maybe I'll use it. I already have Google AI Mode for that. Does that steal my data too, maybe, but at least it doesn't have Metas history of abusing repeatedly. They burned that bridge so many times even non techies know not to trust Meta.
Meta certainly do give the impression that they are burning through ridiculous amounts of cash with not much to show for it, and thats just from the outside.
Someone had a poster up of Pam "this is the same thing" on the one side had the apollo space missions, and the other a picture of Zuck avatar next to the Eiffel tower. At the top it had the current RL spend (something like 45billion) they like me working in RL.
there were three teams for everything, sometimes in the same org.
Take hand interactions for example.
There was production hand detection, they were in the OS/product team. They spent a lot of time trying to make sure it was reliable and useable.
Then there was a near research team, who took old state of the art and salmi sliced it until it worked well enough on either current or next gen hardware.
Then there was the production research people, who were derived from control labs, who for some reason were not in RL-research but buried deep in "production"
Then in RL-Research, the biggest org was agios, who also did hand interaction, but hardly any of their work actually made it near to prod. They liked wrist mounted cameras with no privacy systems, because why would you need it on your wrist? its not like those head mounted twats who spent two years trying to master privacy.
You also have to demonstrate "impact" every 6 months. which is really great when your delivery pipeline is 1-7 years.
If you scroll Instagram for a few minutes you'll see what they have been working on and that are also making a ridiculous amount of cash by selling and serving ads while burning some on side projects like that.
I had to laugh to the point of tears the other day when I saw my friend scrolling through Instagram and they encountered an "Ad Break". The app simply doesn't let you scroll through another post, story or reel until you sit there like a good boy and let the ad sit for 10 seconds or whatever.
How people put up with that kinda crap and continue to use these apps daily for hours on end is mind blowing to me.
I wonder if the prevalence of adblock has helped make a lot of things like this possible. Like, it's hard to imagine people putting up with this without literally protesting in the streets. But the people who can't tolerate it have mostly gone through the effort of opting out, and those who can just put up with it. And thus, the frog boils.
How is it a bad thing if a company goes all in on burning cash but at the time have never reported a net loss quarter since its IPO? Its their money to burn at this point who cares
But what you say is not entirely true. There is much to love about companies burning cash on R&D. That's how a lot of greatness happened.
But what is wrong in the meta situation is that while Meta officially projects its 2026 AI capital expenditures to be between $130 billion and $145 billion, investigative reports indicate its true future liabilities exceed $690 billion once unlisted back-end deals and lease commitments are factored in. They have used shadow accounting in many places to hide these things. As it's a publicly traded company so if that goes south it hits a lot of 401ks. So that in a nutshell is why its kinda a bad thing. But you are still kinda right in that its not an existential threat and it's not going to wipe Meta out even though those numbers could totally destroy the vast majority of public companies.
Can you link to those reports? How reputable are the investigators? Financial market has great incentive to stay informed. Those 401ks are their bread and butter customers, and not every bank/fund is Meta's co-conspirator in its shady deals, if any.
Its in every 10-Q and 10-K. Original poster read 1 article in the WSJ and thinks he/they uncovered a massive conspiracy. Its disclosed exactly as it should be according to GAAP accounting. They went above & beyond to disclose them in the text narrative of the filings because the GAAP requirements require them not to include them in the numbers.
WSJ just needs to sound alarm bells so people keep paying for their crappy journalism, and thus everything they write becomes alarmist slop.
Ultimately, the equity is really cheap even today on trailing numbers. ~12x EV/trailing EBITDA excluding-RL losses and still growing 25%-34% in each of the last 4 quarters organically at $200B+ of scale.
One of my pet peeves is that people who dont understand business forbid these companies from making investments or starting new businesses now or in the future. Meta has been sitting on $50-100b of cash on the balance sheet for years, and people lose their minds when they start to meaningfully invest it. I think theyve earned the right to diversify
I would have to say that its tragic more than bad. Meta consumed whole industries that used to spend the money on a bunch of different things. Now all the revenue goes to Meta shareholders and whatever it is Zuck is wasting billions of dollars on pursuing.
I genuinely think big tech co's top leadership have very sophisticated strategies/positioning that they simply cannot communicate or explicitly canonize due to their position as spokespeople for the company (and society writ large, news media, investors, customers, employees, vendors). Of course there are a lot of bozos and incompetent people flailing around and a lot of work ultimately gets wasted (which understandably bothers line employees a lot), but is inevitable and even necessary to eg hedge product strategy/comp and take risks on ideas and people.
It would not really be useful to have that conversation with employees because it's incredibly distracting (now product strategy is up for debate with way too many cooks in the kitchen), and very few employees have the exposure or skills to meaningfully contribute even if they think they do. I saw it firsthand at Google TGIFs.
Meta's strategy seems to be "personal agents" quite consistently. Remember they tried to buy Manus? And note that Muse Spark and the meta AI platform products clearly seem to prioritize web search, computer/browser use, and vision/language tasks over coding, which is something that had to bake for a long time. Also, this product launch itself is pretty interesting:
1. It's clearly a fast follow to the current FOTM hype startup Instinct with a much more comprehensive implementation and integration with their other agent products.
2. It's kind of like openclaw, which got a lot of non-developers very excited but was basically consistently unusable. Except this agent's compute runs remotely and presumably has slightly more sane development practices. IMO it's the first main openclaw-like product that has made it to the "just works" level of usability.
3. The focus on ecommerce is actually really really important, because Meta is trying to capture the intent/demand-driven purchasing flow that Google currently owns through search. Controlling the top of funnel is what enables google to make hundreds of billions of dollars per year on search ads. Meta is an advertising company and Google's search ads business is the most lucrative and centralized/well-defended advertising market in human history.
So it is actually a really big deal that Meta is trying to go after it (at least, the CUJ, it's possible that they'd monetize the agent-driven UX differently than search ads) because it's probably their best shot at disrupting that market and one of the few growth opportunities that would actually make a dent on their balance sheet. Obviously Meta is not going to lay out all that strategy stuff explicitly because for all intents and purposes it's a distraction and shifts the conversation in an unproductive direction (the strat behind the product, rather than the product itself). But it's pretty clear if you look for it.
Edit: Actually I thought about the advertising business more and I think in the short term this is partially about attribution/conversion. In 2022 the Apple tracking changes cost Meta $10B in lost conversion metrics; an agent-driven and proxied purchasing flow has built-in attribution and funnel measurement which is very valuable in its own right!
> very sophisticated strategies/positioning that they simply cannot communicate
It's Matryoshka nested parallel construction for corporate strategy.
There's a real, coherent, aggressive strategy that only a few in the inner concentric circle know, that's ring-zero.
Then there's the strategy that ring-zero tells ring-one, which isn't the real strategy, but it's sufficient to get EVPs and VPs to execute in rough alignment with the true, ring-zero strategy.
Then ring-one does the same dance with ring-two, etc.
All of this is a problem because someone exerted influence over the US government.
Google _knew_ that openai was scraping youtube to train whisper et al. They didn't stop it because they realised that they if they sued them, they would have to pay to train.
So they silently also did the same thing.
With that, copyright in training went to shit.
Copyright, should, allow you or me to make a living from "intellectual works" or anything else tangible/not tangible
As its the EU and regulation, its time to trott out your hobby horse.
So let me trot out mine: regulation is good so long as it is backed up by even handed, robust, transparent, quick and effective sanctions.
the Online safety act is a good example of a bad law, which is enforced badly. The first big test (X producing industrial quantities of minors engaging in sexual activity) was failed. Had a small company produced a service that did they same thing, they would have been fined, servers ceased and owners thrown in jail. X got a letter saying they should stop.
An example of good enforcement is the UK's scores on the doors, where the public can see what the standard is, and if they fall below a certain level, the food place is fined/shutdown/other until it improves.
Old school methods like what McDonald's use, literally allow the customer to see in to the kitchen are very effective.
Not always ideal for every type establishment but I've seen high end Indian restaurants even do it by having the POS at the back where you can see the kitchen when paying which keeps the noise separate for the desired quiet atmosphere of a fine dining restaurant
I'm not sure how to translate this to the smartphone market though. Fairphone and LaJolla seem to do well in this regard though so back to brand reputation for a lot of this.
> I'm not sure how to translate this to the smartphone market though. Fairphone and LaJolla seem to do well in this regard though so back to brand reputation for a lot of this.
I'm not here with a silver bullet or anything, but I'd say the EU's energy efficiency labeling works well and has a fairly low level of being gamed/falsified.
I don't think there's any big reason why the EU couldn't enforce labeling of a similar kind to IFixit's repair-ability scoring[0] for set devices.
On a separate note, the article mentions the lousy attempts some smart phone makers are guilty of with regards to repair instructions:
> Some records even refer customers to Temu or AliExpress for spare parts and repair instructions.
There are at least a lot less smart phone manufacturers than restaurants and cafes (comparing to scores on the doors) - if the EU really wanted to, it wouldn't be a huge resource to produce clear guidance on what expectations are for smart phone spare part provision, and issue fines whenever they're violated (you might think is a bad idea, and too much regulation, but my point is just that it's at least feasible)
>> labeling of a similar kind to IFixit's repair-ability
Because the public generally does not care one iota about repairability. Phones are more robust these days than ever. A fatal flaw like a screen break occures on the order of years. People just assume that, if something bad does happen, the phone will be out of date and/or no longer getting updates anyway. Many also get thier phones as part of a service plan and so dont even view them as an expense.
Look at desktop PCs. Infinitely repairable. But 90% of people will just buy a new one the moment anything significant fails.
They are certainly not more robust than ever. The trend of screen glass extending all the way to the edge of the phone and around it has ensured that most people need a case. Back in the 2010s I never used one and my phone would survive many drops.
I don't recall any where it was every easy to see into the kitchen. Yes you could see some of the fryers where they made french fries, and sort of see into the kitchen but there was a lot of food-holding bins, drink dispensers, and other equipment etc. obscuring most of it.
SOrry, yes I should point out its not perfect. The scores on the doors website is also a partial remedy for this. But I should concede that no solution is perfect, and you still need to allow for the evolution of fraudsters.
> I'm not sure how to translate this to the smartphone market though
Me neither, The pre-existing ways are independent lab testing ( euro-ncap for cars, or ifixit) or the "you have to pay for testing" like for large white goods. None of those work if they are not enforced though....
I am unfamiliar with these matters and I am also unsure what specifically you are referring to.
But in general, if big companies get away with wrongdoings by receiving a gentle slap on their fingers, figuratively speaking, it will, in my opinion, lead to no change whatsoever.
Because if there are no material consequences for wrongdoings, they probably would not care. And there are very few kinds of actually material consequences for big companies. One of them being a really hefty fine.
> Because if there are no material consequences for wrongdoings, they probably would not care. And there are very few kinds of actually material consequences for big companies. One of them being a really hefty fine.
In mono/oligo-poly situations there's no really such a thing as "a really hefty fine". Either the cost will be happily trickled to the very public that are being wronged or the fine is effectively unsurvivably hefty, which noone would levy against a too-big-to-fail entity.
Look at the recent fine for Meta for example. Settling a case against one of the core monopolic drivers for a couple percentage points of early revenue is peanuts. I can't believe the exec suite[-s] are thinking anything else than "which anti-consumer behavior can we buy indulgence for?", they would be stupid not to at these discounted rates.
I'm half joking here, but at this point it feels like the only reasonable way to instill some fear against building Torment Nexus and cyberpunk dystopia would be personal criminal liability of the boards and exec suites that is impossible to settle.
> An example of good enforcement is the UK's scores on the doors, where the public can see what the standard is, and if they fall below a certain level, the food place is fined/shutdown/other until it improves.
> Another good example is NCAP ratings.
Worth noting that NCAP and Scores on the Doors are not regulators. NCAP is an industry body; SotDs is run by TripAdvisor.
The restaurants are proactively inspected but nobody is checking that the sticker on the door matches the real rating unless you do it yourself*. Some companies have been taking the piss.
Sadly that mess had a political component, any attempt to regulate US big tech results in howls from over the Atlantic.
Frankly, I'd prefer it if we just let them howl and said fuck it more but it's probably a good job I'm not making those decisions (and in honesty the picture is complex for companies that size/the politics).
Ironically the fact that the howls need to come from the other side of the Atlantic, rather than having any domestically, should tell anyone all they need to know about the situation.
Don't disagree but the results are impossible to know from the US side, politicians have to balance everything and decide whether it's worth the political capital.
Not like it's the only issue in US/UK relations these days either.
> Ironically the fact that the howls need to come from the other side of the Atlantic, rather than having any domestically, should tell anyone all they need to know about the situation.
Europeans by and large don't care about American companies these days. They use American software products because frequently there are no alternatives. And most of the news about them are negative.
They also totally don't care bout Chinese companies, they use those products because there are really no alternatives. Apple and Samsung (reluctantly) comply. I guess we know which other companies don't?
South Korea is a very dynamic, tech heavy country and it hasn't managed to push any software product as a market leader.
The EU is bigger, but it's fractured, so functionally it's basically 2-3x South Korea in terms of "software power". And that's not enough to compete with the much larger US juggernaut. Only China has managed to hold its own by simply banning US software all together.
I'm actually all in favor of the EU banning all American software. Fairly sure that after a huge initial tumble a healthy EU software market would thrive.
Edit: I need to brace myself, the Americans are waking up :-)))
The EU needs a real single digital market with single patents, copyright, IP licensing.
The EU also needs easier financing of risky ventures, probably with tax incentives associated.
The EU needs specific regulation to facilitate accelerated scaling across all its countries. This last part is the hardest to do because by definition startups are challenges to big and rich incumbents.
I would just ban US software companies like China did (I'd obviously also ban Chinese software companies, too). The resulting chaos would end up with some pretty solid EU software companies, the know how is there.
Europe had the opportunity to create a silicon valley 30 years ago. They fumbled it so badly that most euro tech talent went to the US and worked or even founded their companies there. They still have not (and likely never will) implement the general reforms needed to create fertile grounds for tech to compete with the US.
If the current EU mindset existed 150 years ago, they would have banned steam engines because they are too loud and annoying. That's the level of shortsighted immediate gratification we are dealing with.
I don't know what SK has to do with this, they are basically still close to an emerging economy. Europe had a roaring economy when SK was still mostly farming.
The environment can absorb pollution, just not as quickly as we're currently polluting. It's okay to emit pollution sometimes. I'm totally in favor of heritage railways running their ancient smoke-belching steam trains on the third Sunday of every month so we can see them go. Just not every day.
That's just the world now. Delete China and the US has no more electronics and raw materials either. You wanted globalization and well that's what you got.
Besides, 6 weeks vacation is great. Also we don't need to have so much stuff, I don't even own or want a car, something that's very hard to do without in America. We don't have this exhausting desire to make things a race and to be number 1.
Not exactly that, but one thing that comes to mind: Germany was about to switch the phone network to fiber with data service in the late 80s(!), but then Helmut Kohl (CDU chancellor) decided to build TV cable instead. He wanted to promote private TV stations because the public ones weren't conservative enough for him. Spoiler: Private TV stations ended up doing barely any political programming anyway.
Technical note: For some years, the few regions that got the OPAL optical network had the worst internet, but that problem would not have occurred with OPAL everywhere: Fiber can always be upgraded at the endpoints, the numbers were just too small to develop the technology.
Child porn is an unavoidable consequence of having computers? Is that what you meant to say? I doubt it but can't find another reading of your comment.
From the article, it seems more about chinese brands, no?
> Some records even refer customers to Temu or AliExpress for spare parts and repair instructions.
> But even for products that are technically compliant, the listed weblink still rarely offers a direct path to parts prices. For major brands such as Apple and Samsung, it can take some clicking around before you find what you need, Right to Repair says.
There seems to be a very common idea why the EU is failing dramatically with these ideas that I didnt seem to understand. Knowing it has a US political context suddenly makes everything a little less weird.
As an example of sanctions both quick and accurate, X in Brazil. All ISPs blocked it and it was a crime to use X until Elon complied. Of course many people still accessed X through VPNs, but public figures couldn't because they'd be charged.
However, basically the same mechanism lets Spain block Cloudflare on Saturdays, which is bad. Even though I hate Cloudflare, that's worse.
> regulation is good so long as it is backed up by even handed, robust, transparent, quick and effective sanctions
Source for this claim? How can you say regulation is good without even defining what the regulation is? Or do you just believe that all regulation no matter what is always good?
Minors were involved. People were responding to pictures of minors and prompting Grok to sexualize them. People were uploading their own photos of real minors and asking Grok to make modifications to them.
However for point one, the samples I saw were a picture of a minor posted by a minor in a normal situation. Someone would say @grok show me her in a bikini.
for point 2, this is not born out by the examples that I saw.
The bigger point here is that under UK law, there is little distinction between "real" and "fake". Any depiction of a minor engaged in sexual activities is illegal. This was to get round the "oh its photoshoped" defence. In the USA is different, but I have no experience on that point.
The only reason why I know is because a member of staff at a previous company was found to be using his workstation to store and distribute anime shit that depicted this stuff, and the company legal advice was "oh wow you are totally fucked." It was a huge faff to deal with and posed huge risks to everyone involved.
Social media is already full of hentai art of that sort and that isn't a problem to most countries, so a little thought leads to the obvious point that your basic assumptions are incorrect.
Minors were involved and people were generating sexually charged images ("donut glaze" etc). This is why other countries, like South Korea, also went after X under deepfake related regulations.
I guess when discussing the reasons for the law failing to bring about the intended changes, we only need to agree on that the law did not intend to make this distinction (though it definitely could have made them, even before LLM this was a deliberate choice) - not whether doing so would have been advisable.
Yes, Twitter frontpage should include a little counter with how much child exploitation it has facilitated today.
I don't think there's a single politician in Bruxelles that wouldn't love to come down hard on X. There is no love for Elon in those circles anymore. The problem is that he's attached himself to international politics through his daddy. Trump has threatened the EU with strict sanctions if they levy any sort of proportional fine to US tech companies.
The problem is no longer capitalist liberalism. The new challenge is American Fascism.
I don't care about any of your examples. I am explicitly not talking about Iran, China, Russia, Takedown requests by the UK, "downsizing" the government, or "remigration". I have opinions about all that, but it is not what I'm talking about here.
I am talking about weaponized trade relations, such as coupling embargoes or tariffs, to inner market fines. I am talking about explicitly threatening allies for enforcing their own legally sanctioned laws inside their sovereign territory. I am, in part, talking about threatening allies with invasion, if they don't do what you want.
The image literally says "inspired by Starship Troopers". Which was inspired by fascism and Nazi uniforms in particular.
> if you want to see a real fascist regime
Is it not worth looking at how such regimes got there? Maybe as a preventative? Do we have to wait for it to go all the way to Holocausts before we go "uh oh, should've said something"?
> An objectively good and very stylish film. It is like 30 years old and still grate to watch.
Yes, it's a great satire. You get problems when, as with The Boys' Homelander, people apparently can't figure out who the bad guys are.
> And what exactly does it change? Are you afraid that particular type of pants will make people Nazi or what?
I am afraid of people who are super into the Nazi aesthetic, yes, especially when they run the country I live in.
> The government get to many tools to influence every aspect of citizens' lives, and then uses those tools to get rid of all opposing voices. That is far more relevant to the Europe than to the US.
For a company I work for I needed to ship a machine through unknown channels and have some confidence that it wasn't fiddled with.
my threat model was reasonably technical engineer swapping drives for some reason, or someone claiming that the machine is "different". (no nation state shit)
after the machine was imaged, it would connect to our central config server, get its hostname and exchange keys which would be embedded in the TPM.
once the machine is shipped and booted, it'll check in and sign a challenge. any kind of action on the central API could have a challenge. Each machine is attested at least once an hour.
I'm not sure how "secure" it all is, but it seems to work.
I helped design the attestation framework for https://docs.cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance/docs/4.0/re... - the goal was to ensure that the device you're about to copy a bunch of sensitive information onto is actually the device you were shipped and is running the expected software. This is definitely used in the real world.
ie, I intended to steal money from you. Under common law stealing is "taking with intent to deprive". How thats determined is a bit harder.
But how can someone be "grossly negligent" if they didn't intend to cause an accident? well they either allowed a situation to happen, or didn't stop a situation happening that they could see was bad.
An example of this would be the igintion switch from GM that caused all those deaths. the engineer saw that it was shit, knew it didn't do what it was supposed to do, and half arsed the replacement to the point where it wasn't actually changed.
"We are going to test the cyber capabilities of this new model. Yeah it should be fine to have a package proxy. Hmm? whats that? isn't that a security issue? naaaa those proxies are secure."
Yes iran is a murderous regime, but thats not a get out of jail free for either failing to do logistics, plan for the enemy you face, or failing to properly vet your targets in a war of choice.
> And no, Trump can’t and isn’t dumb enough to start seizing assets of another country.
I mean Maduro would like a word.
He literally kidnapped a world leader to gain access to a country's oil system.
Then there is the agitation, visits and posturing to invade an ally's fucking land. Its not that difficult to imagine trump confiscating "foreign gold" to even up the "trade deficit". There are no effective controls on trump's actions.
> completely ruin the credibility of its financial system
Besent is doing a good job ruining that trying to shout at the bond market, and pissing about with the Yen.
Then there is the attempts to yeet parts of the Fed it's self.
> Yes iran is a murderous regime, but thats not a get out of jail free for either failing to do logistics, plan for the enemy you face, or failing to properly vet your targets in a war of choice.
Sure, but it’s brought up as though the US is going around arbitrarily bombing children and schools and it’s simply false. In wars, mistakes happen. In the case of the US it was a mistake and we owned up to it on someways (we should do more, IMO) but Iran is doing much worse and we should focus on that primarily. I didn’t bring Iran up here, someone else did, so I can only respond to their characterizations by informing them how they are incorrect.
> I mean Maduro would like a word. He literally kidnapped a world leader to gain access to a country's oil system.
He’s a criminal destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and the results of his and Hugo Chavez’s policies resulted in an exodus of around 1/3rd of the Venezuelan population. Our actions were good there and will be good in the long term. Plus he was helping Russia evade American and European sanctions. That alone is good enough justification to arrest him.
> Then there is the agitation, visits and posturing to invade an ally's fucking land. Its not that difficult to imagine trump confiscating "foreign gold" to even up the "trade deficit". There are no effective controls on trump's actions.
We would lose far more than a whatever the Dutch gold is worth and it’s also an insignificant amount of money so there’s no reason for that to happen. You’re whipping yourself up into psychosis around Donald Trump which is clouding your judgment.
> Besent is doing a good job ruining that trying to shout at the bond market, and pissing about with the Yen.
Read more about European bonds then. If this is your criticism it applies more to France, UK, &c.
yes he is. but since when has US led regime change been positive for the country?
Also trump is also a convicted criminal, so is he ripe for extradition? Thats the point right, it creates a precedent. Rules mean shit all, might is right.
> Read more about European bonds then.
The European countries are not trying to bring up the value of the Yen, or buyback longterm bonds with homeopathic amounts of shortterm bonds. The treasury cannot work against the fed, because the fed has way more control over the money supply.
> We would lose far more than a whatever the Dutch gold is worth
The iran war has already lost far more than the Dutch gold is worth.
I mean yes, but also there are some rumours about the new york gold vaults themselves.
There is a persistent rumour that there is a physical link between jpmorgan and comex. My understanding is that there is no real way to audit whats in there (unlike the BoE where they have tour guides that show you the gold)
What cases are you talking about?
My general understanding is that if the VPN provider does not keep any logs, all that is left is timing / bandwidth correlation. If the endpoint you are connecting to isn't compromised and you connect to a high traffic node wouldn't this be essentially impossible?
Unless you do some user error stuff like logging into accounts tied to your public persona?
but basically the point is, you are indellibly linking your machine to a service.
The difference between that an normal internet is because of NAT, you can argue that at home it wasn't your machine, it was someone else on the network.
When I use the VPN, I am connecting to an endpoint that 40 other people are also connected to. Did I download that file, or did one of the other 39 download it? Even the VPN provider can't tell... they keep no logs. I wouldn't want to use the VPN to phone in some bomb threat, that wouldn't even hide me 5 minutes from the feebs, but it's like an impenetrable shield for copyright troll lawyers. Smooth sailing for the last 13 or 14 years, for $3/month.
I'd be shocked if anyone in the United States is still downloading stuff without a VPN. There are entire countries that don't have to worry about it, but none in Europe or North America where that is the case.
And what do you think the Hollywood lawyers would have to offer in return for such favors? Looks pretty low-value from both sides. Maybe I need to dial up my narcissism a few notches to understand you, I'm just not that important enough to the folks who have the anti-vpn superpowers.
The user is asserting that this is "not a lived experience"
working out if the user has missed the LLM Cliche
Formulating a suitable response
"did you just argue with a joke?" No, thats to blunt
"Is it satire when it only applies to you?" no again passive aggressive
lets just print the dictionary definition of satire and hope the move on
> Satire is when...
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