If I owe the bank $750,000 and can't pay, it's my problem.
If I owe the bank $1,750,000,000 and can't pay, it's the bank's problem.
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If you are a collection of 5 companies with annual net income in the hundreds of billions of dollars, the debt is actually still their problem.
Everyone likes to repeat this tired cliche but skips all of the steps that would have to happen to get to that point.
If you have to pay $200k you can afford to spend $2k fighting it and hold it up a few days.
if Google had to pay a $2b bill they can spend $20m fighting it.
If they have to pay a $2t bill they can spend $20b fighting it
You can buy a lot more justice with $20b than with $2000
If the bank is owed $1,650,000,000,000 and isn't paid, then it becomes the tax payers problem apparently
2008 all over again, but instead of Washington Mutual and Countrywide, we have whatever the heck is going on now.
I don’t know if the public would be as accepting of a bailout for AI companies… trillion dollar businesses that pushed technology with the goal of eliminating 50% of white collar workers… that isn’t really mission critical.
If they want the reward, they need to accept the risk when the bet doesn’t go their way. If they aren’t willing to accept that, they shouldn’t be making such big bets.
> I don’t know if the public would be as accepting of a bailout for AI companies
It won't be framed as bailing out the AI companies. It will be sold to the public as bailing out their pensions and investments.
It's all about the marketing...
The public has been apathetic about every single thing and will just continue scrolling their TikToks
Public anger is a very pre-smartphone thing. You don’t worry about those sort of things when you’ve hyperoptimized the circus and made the bread cheap enough
> Public anger is a very pre-smartphone thing.
Public anger has gotten to the point that right-wing groups are pushing US legislation to outlaw it as “terrorism” [1], with the president of the right-wing American Heritage think tank pointing to examples such as “college students who took over campus quads” [2] and town halls with congress members getting shut down [3] - they say new laws are needed because public anger over “political purposes” is disturbing “civil tranquility” in the U.S. so those who are aiming to impact “civil tranquility” need to be “held accountable” under the law.
The legislation being pushed starts with:
> Section 1. Short Title. This Act shall be known and may be cited as the “Combatting Civil Terrorism Act.”
> Section 2. Purpose. To promote civil tranquility by holding those who seek to disrupt it for political purposes accountable.
And aside from that, social media (Reddit) seems awash in “public anger” etc.
[1] https://sapirjournal.org/fixing-america/2026/islam-in-americ...
[2] https://manhattan.institute/article/model-legislation-an-act...
[3] https://www.city-journal.org/article/adam-smith-israel-civil...
I gotta know, which of those specific points in your second citation do you have a problem with? The only one I can see having a problem with is "d. Subversion...".
I expect that most voters welcome efforts that aim to stop other groups using violence and intimidation to suppress their speech or legal religious activities.
The only problem with these proposed laws is the same problem with all existing laws - selective enforcement.
I was responding to the grandparent commenter’s claims that ‘public anger’ no longer exists - so whether you want to point to one of those examples, right-wing pushes to pass new laws labeling those impacting “civil tranquility” as domestic “civil terrorists”, or public anger seen across social media (Reddit, etc), my point is that the argument that public anger no longer exists seems unsupported.
I dont think anything you wrote in that paragraph has anything to do with actual public anger as it exists. It is just Heritage think tank advancing their authoritarian dictatorship agenda yet again, this time more openly. As far as they are concerned, anyone left to them speaking is a grave danger to the republic, attack on their right to be supported all the time and must be punished. They dont ask for similar laws in relation to far right, despite the fact it is more violent.
There is a lot of public anger tho. Facebook and Twitter are working overtime to stroke it. Heritage loves it as long as it ends up being in MAGA colors.
> made the bread cheap enough
The circus is distracting from the price of bread, apparently.
> I don’t know if the public would be as accepting of a bailout for AI companies
That's putting it mildly, IMO.
An AI bailout would be a poison pill that would electorally doom whichever party was behind it for decades.
After seeing _what_ level of buffoonery, incompetence, and pure idiocy the gerrymandered American electoral system is capable of producing, nope, no, AI bailout won’t matter at all.
> After seeing _what_ level of buffoonery, incompetence, and pure idiocy the gerrymandered American electoral system is capable of producing
I honestly can't tell if you're talking about the Right pandering (in words only) to the voters or the Left scoring own-goals in the last election?
Both are part of “the American electoral system”
> An AI bailout would be a poison pill that would electorally doom whichever party was behind it for decades.
One could only hope. In any case, in the short term, with AI having such a poor public-image story, if the Dems want to get back into power again they'd do everything they can to assure their voters that a bailout is not on the cards.
This is the first single-issue voter concern that has really popular support, and they'd be dumb for chasing identity politics again.
You are assuming the democrats run on the elections for the purpose of winning them.
But the latest election made me doubt that is actually their goal.
> An AI bailout would be a poison pill that would electorally doom whichever party was behind it for decades.
Two concerns:
1. In a duopoly it won't doom either one party, not if the bailout-seekers involved are able to bribe them both equally.
2. A politician in not-so-bad party could let the other party doom itself in a long-term diffuse sense... Or they could accept some generous short-term very concentrated-on-me donations. The interest of the group is not always the interest of the members.
The US desperately needs voting-reform, to reduce the spoiler-effect and winner-take-all mechanics.
I don't hold my breath for long term memory of average joe. Seems like US population was primed for short dopamine kicks for past 20 years with reality shows and similar clown stuff.
Look at who got elected, all those scandals, consistent lies, empty talk and fraud yet support is still strong.
What if they are already doomed and just looting?
"They" bailed out big banks whose gambling resulted in millions of people losing their homes, and the electoral effect was basically zero. Just invoke 'the other side' come election season and all is forgotten. Third parties fail to the same trick - by 'wasting' your vote on them, you're indirectly voting for 'the other side.'
It's one of the many reasons that partisanship is foolish - it essentially leaves governments unaccountable. Another is the reason I put "they" in quotes. There will be lots of partisan finger pointing when the bubble pops, but it was both the DNC and GOP that bailed out the banks, and it'll be both of them bailing out big money again.
> "They" bailed out big banks whose gambling resulted in millions of people losing their homes,
That gambling actually led to people getting those homes. The people losing them was the correction.
> the electoral effect was basically zero.
because...
> it was both the DNC and GOP that bailed out the banks
> That gambling actually led to people getting those homes. The people losing them was the correction.
Well, yes but there is a distinction between "led to" vs "losing them". The first is indirect, the second is not.
You could expand that as "That gambling by banks offering these risky mortgages to unsuspecting people, actually led to people getting those homes. When the banks who did this did not bear the costs of their actions, and passed them on to their customers, the people losing their homes was the correction."
The public is not "accepting" if a large number of things that US governments do nevertheless. I don't think that gets even factored in nowadays.
Socialise the losses, privatise the profits.
Until the public is willing and able to bring immediate consequences at scale to C-suites, boards, and billionaires, what the public accepts doesn't really matter.
Society is already being rewarded from the investments AI companies have made. These investments have created something so valuable that society is paying billions of dollars for the product they are making. Even without access to the raw weights, the option of being able to pay for access to these models has tremendous value to society that can not be ignored.
How about cheap healthcare? Or affordable housing, water, electricity and food? Is AI improving human quality of life?
Objectivly. Yes. Not only am seeing it being used to increase farming yields it's also improving healthcare. Both water and electricity are the lowest they have ever been as a percentage of income and only getting lower. People keep looking at flat dollar figures like inflation isn't a thing and it's still 1995 or something. In reality we're accelerating to an abundance economy.
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/most-us-richer-ev...
The pessimistic attitude here is exhausting. In reality it's by far the best time ever to be a human on this planet.
I must be living in a different universe. Where I am, people under 40 cannot afford to buy a house. This was certainly very different in the 80ies of 90ies.
There has always been a magic money tree, but it's not for everyone.
I don't know. The guy I bought my house from owed the bank $400k. He didn't make any payments for two years, and then they paid him $20k to go away.
As Australian failed rich guy /scumbag Alan Bond said... if you owe 30k you have problems, if you owe them 30 million they take you to lunch. Or words to that effect