>Another culture clash, this time between Discovery’s unscripted empire and Warner’s premium sensibilities, a wannabe mogul overpaying so he could cosplay as Robert Evans (ask Claude), and a 5x debt-to-EBITDA ratio. The good news? The sequel had a short runtime. CEO David Zaslav slashed costs, engineered a good bank / bad bank structure to spin WBD’s declining linear assets, and ultimately orchestrated a bidding war that restored shareholder value. As an operator, Zaz is Ed Wood (see: the worst branding decision in history, deprecating HBO), but as an investment banker, he’s Steven Spielberg.
WTF is this slop? I've never seen a an article so riddled with analogies and pop culture references that actively degrade the ability to understand whatever argument might be lurking behind the obscurantism.
What body of work has Scott Galloway produced that should cause me or any other reader to suffer this kind of self-indulgence normally found in a 8th grade creative writing class, in the hopes of learning something meaningful about these topics?
It depends on whether or not you like that style of writing. It has always been consistent with Galloway; I like it, but I prefer listening to it over reading it.
Whereas I definitely prefer reading PG’s writing over listening to it, interestingly enough.
Just personal preference. Scott’s a good storyteller; if you let him finish the story. :)
To me it feels like you're reading his insecurity. He can't be direct. He needs to fluff it up so you know how smart he is. I'm guilty of the same bullshit.
Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (I and II), Afghanistan, etc. were not technically wars in the sense that there was any form of formal declaration by congress. The U.S. constitution allocates the authority to declare war to congress but, in practice, it's been under the sole authority of the POTUS since long before Trump.
This reallocation of authority hasn't been a huge problem until now. Now you have a POTUS whose motives for starting a war are entirely suspect. It's true that negotiations between Iran and the U.S. would have had significant trust hurdles to overcome. The U.S. and Iran had a deal that granted Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for a halt to Iran's nuclear program. It was working, but Trump is the president who unilaterally broke that agreement in his previous term[1]. Trump has also repeatedly broken his own agreements in his current term. Even his own signature is now completely worthless. What would it have taken to assure Iran the U.S. could be trusted to honour its word with Trump in power?
Moreover, the timing of this war makes it hard to view as anything other than the bloodiest case of "Wag the Dog" of the modern era. Americans need to put this "president of peace" behind bars or he'll just keep starting wars. Once that's done, serious consideration should be given to restoring many of the powers the constitution allocates to congress, including the authority to declare war.
> Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (I and II), Afghanistan, etc. were not technically wars in the sense that there was any form of formal declaration by congress.
(1) A declaration of war is not necessary for a war to legally exist, except in the context of specific US laws that might rely on a declared state of war,
(2) Congress constitutional power to declare war is not dependent on the use of special words; every (conditional or unconditional) “authorization for the use of military force” (including the broad but time limited authorization in the War Powers Act) and similar is an application of the Constitutional power to declare war.
I just wish we'd apply this rule slightly more widely and didn't let countries get away with say - just as example - killing 20k children in Gaza. I guess you did say "generally".
Neither the US nor Europe would have cared about Hitler's mass murder as long as he kept it in Germany and didn't disrupt business, his antisemitism was not unusual, and he was generally popular in the US. Stalin got away with it. Mao Zedong got away with it, and his authoritarian regime is a nascent superpower. Pol Pot more or less got away with it. He was deposed by his own people and died in his sleep. Israel has killed tens of thousands Palestinians and the world did nothing to stop it, America funded it. Idi Amin murdered hundreds of thousands of people and died in luxury. How many Russians and Ukrainians has Putin and his invasion of Ukraine sent to the slaughterhouse? Do you think anything is going to happen to him? How many North Koreans have the Kims starved to death or executed? Repercussions for the Armenian genocide? None. History is replete leaders whom the "civilized world" let "get away with it."
Israel does not need a declaration of war to kill heads of state. Their targeted killing policy has been upheld by their own Supreme Court. Whether international law agrees is another matter.
The US has also done this since 1945 (at least) although executive orders have, at times, placed some restraint on the practice.
There’s a reason every POTUS has a Secret Service detail. So yeah, it’s been imagined. Presidents have been shot and killed before, and Trump himself was shot during the lead up to the most recent election.
Again, the Secret Service is there to protect against all threats and the US Military there for every single other threat above the Secret Service’s pay grade and scale.
It’s the most dangerous and most protected job in America no matter what the POTUS is actively doing at any and every single moment.
I think y’all are so quick to try and criticize everything around the President that you’re kinda missing my point:
Of course there are people that would love to target the POTUS. The Secret Service detail exists for a reason. That reason being that yeah, it’s an unsafe job, and having them there is how we prevent a foreign adversary from just walking right into the White House and doing what we did to Maduro.
All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive.
The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere else is a waste.
Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. Such a thought would be unbearable if it weren't laughably impossible. The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that. Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.
To watch CEOs of private corporations being mythologized for something that a) they should never be able to do and b) are incapable of doing is a testament to how distorted our picture of reality has become.
The private corporation is not dictating to the military, it’s setting the terms of the contract. The military is free to go sign a contract with a different company with different terms, but they didn’t, and now they want to change the terms after the contact was already signed. No mytholgization needed, just contract law.
The country is sovereign. It can just make a law democratically that changes things. The sovereign must act on whatever is in its best interest. The method of action is democratic in this case.
During a war with national mobilization, that would make sense. Or in a country like China. This kind of coercion is not an expected part of democratic rule.
It has always been a part of democratic rule, in peacetime and war. All telco's share virtually all of their technology with the government. Governments in europe and elsewhere routinely requisition services from many of their large corporations. I think it's absurd to think llm's can meaningfully participate in realworld cmd+ctrl systems and the government already has access to ml-enhanced targeting capabilities. I really have no idea what dod normies think of ai, other than that it's infinitely smarter than them, but that's not saying much.
Not the same thing. The parent comment was talking about government “requisiting” services as in forceful compliance, takeovers, not collaboration or regulatory compliance.
If you're referring to telcos sharing their tech with government there are a few examples of Ericsson working with the Swedish military:
> Brigadier-General Mattias Hanson, CIO, Swedish Armed Forces, says: “Strengthening Sweden’s militarily and acting as part of a collective defense requires us to increase our defensive capabilities. We need to utilize the latest technology and all the innovative power of the Swedish private sector. Sweden has unique skills and capabilities in both telecoms and defense technology..." [0]
The question of whether or not the government should be able to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans is a wartime question, since that is the only time the military should be killing people.
Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot.
The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed.
Edit:
There's a yet larger question on whether any legal constraints on the military's use of technology even makes sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no society will willingly handicap its means of defense against an external threat.
It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the technology.
You could view various non-proliferation agreements as a legislative constraint on military technology.
Same for chemical and biologicals. Those do prove your point that the law will be ignored if expedient. But it doesn't invalidate the notion of a society putting constraints on itself.
It's also downstream of voters who voted in a president who promised to be dictatorial after failing at an attempted insurrection. We need to deprogram like 70M very confused people.
That seems relatively straightforward, so likely incomplete: the left is a collective of various interests that often don't align internally and the right has very consistent and largely aligned interests. One of those is easier to steer. Another facet could also be education levels. As they say, a lie can get across town before the truth has its pants on. Being educated takes time and effort, and the educated lean left.
They are also absolutely shameless about lying and feel no obligation to stick to facts or data, but rather appeal to and cultivate ignorance, binary thinking, fear, us-versus-them thinking, and scapegoating. In short, their propaganda is more effective because they lean into it being propaganda.
I really encourage you to avoid the language of "they" and "we." It's a discussion, and it doesn't need to be an attack of which you are putting yourself on a side, or as you put it, binary thinking. As written I can't know if you are talking about either the right or left.
I think you want to read my comment a certain way and it's not allowing you to, so you posted both:
> it doesn't need to be an attack of which you are putting yourself on a side
and also
> I can't know if you are talking about either the right or left
Which are contradictory, if you think about it. I am not sure what you want me to write if I can't use "they" to refer to other people. Also, I didn't use "we", something you somehow also seem to want me to say, and didn't.
"They" is exclusive. "We" is inclusive. One goes with the other. The point I was getting at was that when you use that language in a discussion it comes off as if you are directly involved, rather than commenting from the outside, or having an opinion.
I didn't want you to use "we" either :) Here's your comment, rewritten twice, that fits in better with HN rules and avoids emotion:
> The left are also absolutely shameless about lying and feel no obligation to stick to facts or data, but rather appeal to and cultivate ignorance, binary thinking, fear, us-versus-them thinking, and scapegoating. In short, the left's propaganda is more effective because they lean into it being propaganda.
> The right are also absolutely shameless about lying and feel no obligation to stick to facts or data, but rather appeal to and cultivate ignorance, binary thinking, fear, us-versus-them thinking, and scapegoating. In short, the right's propaganda is more effective because they lean into it being propaganda.
As you can see, I couldn't tell which side you were talking about. I hope the above example helps. A lot of political discussion denigrates to us-vs-them. It is not helpful.
Because it's easy when you don't let facts block you. Spread lie number 1 on Monday morning, lie number 2 in the afternoon, lie number 3 the next day, and do that for years and decades.
Whenever someone spends the time, and it takes a long time, to correct you, laugh, mock them, spew a few more lies.
And it's easy to do when the rich, the owner class side with you, because they buy newspapers, websites, ads, which you can't do if you lean left because acquiring money at all cost is not a priority of left wing people.
I'm curious for your understanding of why Trump won in 2024. If I'm understanding right, you think it was because American voters were rejecting Maoism ("it was called re-education"), to which you think the previous commenter likely subscribes, and which voters associated with Harris/Walz? But I suspect I'm not getting it quite right, and it would be helpful if you would spell out what you mean, rather than just relying on allusion.
(I myself don't have a clear answer to why Trump won, but I don't think it speaks well to the decision-making of the median voter on their own terms, whatever those were, that Trump's now so unpopular despite governing in pretty much the way he said he would.)
> Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence. Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of Energy... Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error...
This is just totally disconnected from policy reality. Biden did not tolerate mass border crossings. (I _wish_ he'd dismantled ICE, but he very clearly did not.) A relatively minor DoE appointment going to a member of an unpopular minority both has nothing to do with policy and is the kind of thing that must necessarily be acceptable if minorities are actually going to be "treated equally under the law". This is a ludicrous basis to infer "the subservience of the political class" to transgender people.
On the other hand, Trump is a billionaire with Epstein connections and entirely unabashed about making money for his businesses and family using his government position. If this isn't "decadence", or "elitism", what meaning could the words possibly have?
"Deprogramming" might be an unfriendly word but it's hard for me to imagine how you have a functional democracy when a plurality of voters are making decisions on the basis of straightforward falsehoods, or even inversions of reality, just because "at least that is the perception". This isn't a sustainable situation, and it will end with either re-connecting these people to reality or disenfranchising them (really, them disenfranchising themselves along with the rest of us, e.g. by re-empowering someone who tried to steal an election). The former seems vastly preferable.
Speaking of unfriendly words - I also broadly have very little sympathy for a demand that people on the left speak respectfully of Trump voters given the total lack of any reciprocation. Even if it is the right way to do politics, the asymmetry between the way Democratic politicians talk about rural areas and the way Republican politicians talk about cities is another thing that's totally unsustainable.
This is a great example of a well put together, level-headed analysis, that I still think misses some key facts about how right wing propaganda works.
> Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error, representing a final decoupling of the democratic party from their ideological roots in the labor movement which was always militantly against illegal immigration
Both Biden and Obama turned away more immigrants than Trump did in his first term. And Clinton is the kind of denying asylum. The idea that we just had completely open borders and nothing was being done about is a fabrication.
> Something like 0.6% of people identify as transgender in the United States(1). They are vastly over-represented in the media, in left wing political programs, and in the general zeitgeist at large relative to their population size
If you actually pay attention to who is talking about Trans people, it is the right. Liberal media may be occasionally baited into arguing about it, but to say it was a major platform is a perception the right crafted. Fox was talking about it 24/7 leading up to the election [1]. Musk and Trump were tweeting about it constantly. They ran political ads saying they wanted to convert your kids to trans ideology. It's gotten so bad that our current president just harasses women that look kinda manly, saying they are trans.
If the Democrat leadership weren't going all-in on this ideology despite the demonstrable harms it's causing, the Republicans would have almost nothing to say about it.
As an example, replacing sex with "gender identity" in prisons policy has inflicted considerable harm on women prisoners, who have been sexually assaulted, raped and impregnated by male prisoners who were transferred to the female prison estate on the basis of their supposed "female gender identity".
Feminist groups like WoLF spoke up on the horrors of this first, and the Republicans followed when they realized they could capitalize on this politically. But really it shouldn't have happened at all.
>You should be asking why 70 million people voted the way they did in spite of the events you describe.
Propaganda, 1 in 6 Boomers being exposed to amounts of lead in childhood that lead to measurable cognitive declines, average age of the US population being on the rise with lower birth rates means most eligible votes are in the age groups most likely to suffer low grade dementia, and the weaponization of social media by foreign adversaries and wealthy elites.
There's maybe 4-5M true believers, the rest are gullible lead-addled old fools who got brainwashed by Fox News. That's the unvarnished truth of it.
There was no landslide. Trump got 49.9% of the vote. And it was after his attempted insurrection to overturn a valid election in which he was soundly rejected. He's never received 50% of the vote despite his relentless lies about voter fraud.
I'm not upset at people for having a differing opinion or being upset at some economic conditions attributable to Democrats, but rather their persistent belief in provably false information like the relative danger of immigrants, the causes of climate change, vaccine safety, election security or whether or not a particular ethnic group is eating their pets. This isn't a matter of opinion or it's a matter of observable reality and fundamental human morality.
It's on you to argue it was, e.g. by comparing it to other clear landslide victories like Reagan in 1984. Truth is that 2024 the final popular vote gap was 1.5%, compared to 4.5% for 2020, -2.0% for 2016 (yeah, really), 3.9% in 2012, 7.28% in 2008, and so on.
Does the term landslide have a widely accepted definition? One definition could be winning every single swing state, which Trump did.
I think you also have to factor in the degree of political polarization today, and in particular Trump's polarizing nature, which means that there is smaller pool of "effectively independent" voters to fight over. So 1% today is worth more than %1 in 1984. These, are of course, not particularly quantifiable measures.
The point is taken tough, "comprehensive victory" would have been the more appropriate description.
> The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that.
I strongly doubt this is true. I think if you gave the US government total control over Anthropic's assets right now, they would utterly fail to reach AGI or develop improved models. I doubt they would be capable even of operating the current gen models at the scale Anthropic does.
> Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.
I would bet my life savings the US government never produces a frontier model. Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?
> Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?
With a massive budget, too. Hundreds of millions iirc.
It felt like a website that the small web-dev shop I worked for could build without much problem in a couple months.
We didn't have 200 layers of beauracracy, though.
That said I don't doubt the military could take their current tech and keep it running. It's far different from the typical grift of government contractors.
Maybe they could keep it running. With the way models are improving though, I don't think that'd be useful for long. In 6 months or a year when the frontier is again pushed out, I don't think the military is going to want to be running Opus 4.6
And contrary to what the model-makers would like you to believe, I don't think we're anywhere close to the system being self-improving enough that you could just let it run without intervention and it spits out a new frontier model
This is just a weird Trump talking point. This situation is unprecedented on many levels. The pentagon already had a signed contract with these stipulations and wanted to unilaterally renegotiate with Anthropic under threat of deeming them a foreign adversary and destroying their business if they didn't accept the DoD demands. It's totally absurd to turn this around on Anthropic and paint them as trying to determine US Military policy.
I think any such examination of a military that doesn't actually fight wars is meaningless. The question can only be really asked of a handful of countries.
I'm sorry I read this a lot and this is kind of an insane thing to say? Classified OLC memos giving legal cover to any military action has been a fixture for the last over twenty years! Congress never abdicated power, it just, by the nature of the constitution, practically has SO much less power than the president! The president is a single person that people elect, they expect the person to be a leader, and congress will always, always play a following role so long as the president has unilateral power over the military, is directly elected, and just in general has expansive interpreting authority over laws.
You know who doesn't have as much power? The swiss head of state, so weak you can't even reliably name them! THATS what it looks like to defeat personalization, not some hand wringing hoping a system does something that it wasn't designed to do.
It SHOULD be called the Department of War, as it was originally, since it makes its function clear. We are a society that has euphemized everything and so we no longer understand anything.
It's a funny thing that the most war-loving people and the most peace-loving people both love calling it "Department of War" - just for different reasons.
But the reason for "Department of Defense" name was bureaucratic. It's also not true that DOD is hard to understand.
The Department of War was responsible for naval affairs until The Department of the Navy was spun off from it in 1798, and aerial forces until the creation of the The Department of the Air Force in 1947, whereafter it was left with just the army and renamed the Department of the Army. All three branches were then subordinated to the new Department of Defense in 1949, which became functionally equivalent to the original entity.
The Department of War is what it was called when it was first created in 1789 by the Congress (establishing the department and the position of Secretary of War), the predecessor entity being called the The Board of War and Ordnance during the revolution.
The Department of "Defense" has never fought on home soil. Ever.
> The Department of War was responsible for naval affairs until The Department of the Navy was spun off from it in 1798.
After the Continental Navy was disbanded, there wasn't much of an American Navy to have a department around until... mid to late 1797, when the first three of the Original Six frigates was commissioned into active service.
If you look at the U.S. Constitution you'll find that the 'land' and 'naval' forces were separated quite early on in Art. I Sect. 8. Even the appropriations permitted were treated distinctly.
Obviously new domains of warfare will require new schemes of organization, but the "Department of War" that people think about that conducted military operations against America's enemies up through WWII was the Army's department. The operational Navy was always under the Department of the Navy.
> The Department of "Defense" has never fought on home soil. Ever.
What does this have to do with anything? Who argued otherwise?
Naming is important because it intuits what we expect to do with a thing. The Department of Defense invading Greenland is more invocative to inquiry than the Department of War invading Greenland because that's what a department of war would do.
It's one of the reasons why people get annoyed at jargon or are pissed off about pronouns, because it highlights that they should be putting mental effort into understanding why they're current mental model doesn't fit. It's much easier to ignore and be comfortable if there's not glaring sirens saying you've got some learning to do.
Most of us can't (or won't) be aware of everything that should be important to us, having glaring context clues that we should take notice of something incongruous is important. It's also why the Trump media approach works so well it's basically a case of alarm fatigue as republicans who would normally side against any particular one of his actions don't listen because they agreed with some of the actions that democrats previously raised alarms about.
Also while there is an abundance of reasons of varying legitimacy they're both good examples because people often run in to them and are annoyed by the use of the words out of proportion to running into the actual legitimate reasons to be annoyed by the concept.
The number of people annoyed, by words like rizz or are angry that doctor can refer to a female, far out weigh the people legitimately trying to figure out if rizz is something they need to protect their kids from or getting delayed medical care because they needed to wait because they only feel comfortable with their own sex.
Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is?
Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".
If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility.
I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear!
As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it.
If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way.
Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion.
Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.
WTF is this slop? I've never seen a an article so riddled with analogies and pop culture references that actively degrade the ability to understand whatever argument might be lurking behind the obscurantism.
What body of work has Scott Galloway produced that should cause me or any other reader to suffer this kind of self-indulgence normally found in a 8th grade creative writing class, in the hopes of learning something meaningful about these topics?
Gurus are going to guru I guess.
reply