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Silicon Valley's man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends
https://archive.ph/uJxZo https://archive.ph/uJxZo
- truegoric 10mo agohttps://archive.ph/uJxZo https://archive.ph/uJxZo
- LightBug1 10mo ago"Wet your beaks!!!!" ... stinks of corruption. But I guess the USA is happy with that.
- ReptileMan 10mo agoTrump admin is a godsend. He just does what everyone before him did, just openly. Which is better in a way - before him the upper classes in the west were quite adept at hiding corruption. The presidential libraries, the foundations, the speaking fees, the books, the revolving door between companies and regulators - was it any different in essence?
- fuzzygroup 10mo agoNo. While there has always been corruption, this is a different order of magnitude.
- ReptileMan 10mo agoAs the old joke said - We already figured out what kind of woman you are madam, we just haggle about the price. If someone is going to sell out the commons - isn't it better if they sell them out for a high price not a pittance.
- LunaSea 10mo agoIt is absolutely. A murderer is not the same as a person that committed genocide. A very silly argument you tried to pull there.
- ReptileMan 10mo agoThe crime is the same, Trump just wants higher payment.
- LunaSea 10mo agoCrimes have degrees of severity. Also Trump is already a convicted criminal.
- retsibsi 10mo agoThe important difference is not the price, but the extent of the corruption. A politician whose public persona is clean, law-abiding, respectful of norms and institutions, and generally benevolent will be limited in how far they will go to abuse their power and sell out their country -- even if they are secretly very cynical and amoral. A politician who is openly corrupt, above the law, norm breaking, and vindictive will be free to do much more damage.
- cjbgkagh 10mo agoThe Netflix deal with Obama for $50M and book deals for $65M are a bit blatant. Certainly a $8B crypto rug pull is far worse by a few orders of magnitude. I think it’s weird that these are the new standards, I really hate presidential politics. Perhaps Jimmy Carter was the least damaging and he was forced to give up his family farm. One difference is that the few on the right that I know (I’m sure a biased sampling) think that what Trump did is wrong but those on the left seem to have forgotten all about Obama’s deals or worse they think that its kosher.
- encomiast 10mo agoMaybe you can explain why the Netflix deal is corruption? The deal was signed after he was out of office (2018). Did he or people in his administration create policy that benefited Netflix in exchange for this deal? Was there any sort of quid pro quo? Where is the abuse of office?
- cjbgkagh 10mo agoThe ability for Netflix to operate as it does is entirely dependent on banks lending it vast sums of money, the same banks that staffed the Obama admin who continued the bailouts. Corruption doesn’t have to be a direct quid pro quo, that’s the standard needed for bribery, I did not suggest Obama was bribed. Because it’s in the interest of the corrupt to hide their practices the general way of avoiding it is to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and on that standard I believe Obama has failed.
- jaybrendansmith 10mo agoThere's a difference between favors and corruption, there has always been. It's something called regulations. We the people must tolerate a certain amount of favors, but there's a line: You cannot accept these favors while in office, particularly so when the exchange involves a public good or decision. You must sell your peanut farm before you hold office. You can't accept a plane from a foreign government in exchange for use of an airbase while in office. The things you do in office must be for the people. The things you do after may be immoral but they don't impact your decisions while in public service.
- brazukadev 10mo agoIt is not, the west corporations history of corruption in Latin America, Africa and Asia is at this same level but was heavily under-reported/persecuted, for obvious reasons.
- encomiast 10mo agoYou must see the difference between making money from books/speaking fees and using the full power of the US government to create policy that directly benefits your investments (possibly at the detriment to your competitor).
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- fuzzygroup 10mo agoNo. Large numbers of Americans aren't. Corruption and abuse of power is why we we have millions of people protesting. It may not be covered on the mainstream news but I was on the ground in Chicago where I easily saw a quarter of a million protestors. New York, Los Angeles and other big cities had similar numbers.
- jfengel 10mo agoLarge numbers are not. But if you reran the 2024 election today you'd likely get the same result. Nothing has happened to change anyone's mind. They were very clear about their priorities, and those who voted for it accepted that. And would again.
- reactordev 10mo agoI know a lot of people who would change their votes due to what has happened to their businesses and farms.
- metalman 10mo agoit's telling that travelling "first class" means more leg room , a wet towlett, and microwaved slop, but all in all is just bieng pushed through a big metal tube, like everybody else, and the important people are gone, as they travel private, bank private, go to private clubs, etc Hard working generational busineses and farm familys are now explisetly, second class, and even having millions will only get you an airplane with propellors and not the required jet, with the rapidly changing and irrational policys making those smaller, hard won fortunes, precarious. It's a situation where the "base" is waking up under threat from all sides and will start to make exceptionaly, pragmatic decsions.
- reactordev 10mo agoExactly. An Etsy shop and a CNC will only get you so far. The tariffs are killing businesses bottom lines and either they raise prices or close up shop. If they raise prices, they anger their customers. If they close shop, they anger their customers. My friends are furious that they are in this position. Then there’s a few local farmers who basically sold their land to housing and gone are 150 year old heritage sites. Replaced with a Ryan Homes banner for townhomes starting in the low $400k’s. It’s back to the point where only generational wealth will survive and the American dream of working hard to achieve it is gone unless you scam people with AI slop or fake accounting. The back and forth over what’s “true”. As if truth itself has no solid underlying footing in reasoning and science. No. It all doesn’t make sense because ReasonGPT is down…
- ifwinterco 10mo ago[flagged]
- pavlov 10mo agoUseless cynicism that prevents any reform and is more befitting of a banana republic.
- pavlov 10mo agoEvery man in the White House is benefiting himself first. Look at Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. In his previous job as CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, he became deeply involved with stablecoin cryptocurrency Tether. Supposedly Cantor Fitzgerald holds close to a hundred billion dollars of funds for Tether, but this has never been verified by an audit — the only confirmation is from Lutnick himself. In his White House job, he has worked hard to make it easier for companies like Tether to operate in the US with no oversight. And why wouldn’t he? As the sole guarantor of Tether’s credibility, he’s probably making billions from them.
- nova22033 10mo agoLutnick's sons run Canton Fitzgerald.
- pavlov 10mo agoThat’s not an endorsement for a finance organization. Bernie Madoff and Donald Trump also ran closely-held family businesses. It makes it easier to hide the skeletons.
- amelius 10mo agoAren't there safeguards against such obvious forms of conflict of interest?
- encomiast 10mo ago
- TrackerFF 10mo agoIn every practical sense, this is the grifter administration. They know they are untouchable at the moment, so everyone is out to get their piece of the pie. All decisions and plays have some financial motives behind them. There's a reason POTUS admires Russia, and their style of governance - if he could, and had the time, the US would be a mirror of just that. Keep the people occupied with a non-stop firehose of grievance bullshit, and be laser focused on enriching yourself and your allies. EDIT: Gotta love the downvotes. The sheer level of shamelessness exhibited by the this admin, and people somehow still run to their defense.
- mlinhares 10mo agoAnd there's going to be a blank pardon at the end for all crimes committed so they're all safe. Assuming there will be elections again.
- nickthegreek 10mo agoAssuming the old unhealthy man doesnt die and can make those pardons, and you are still in his good graces when he is handing them out… sounds like a risky bet to me.
- mlinhares 10mo agoThey have never been held accountable, nothing short of a revolution would hold them accountable right now. They're also becoming rich beyond consequences, so doesn't even matter if there are some consequences for it later.
- tastyface 10mo agoIf Trump can reverse pardons due to "autopen" use, so can a future president, for similarly arbitrary reasons.
- mlinhares 10mo agoNah. The Supreme Court will rule it unconstitutional if anyone else does it. And Trump doesn’t use the auto pen, he has plenty of time to sign everything as he’s not really doing anything else other than watching TV.
- nova22033 10mo agoMr. Huang argued that restricting exports of Nvidia’s chips would push Chinese companies to develop more powerful alternatives. This is so disingenuous. You think they'll stop developing local alternatives if you sell them your high end chips? That won't even stop Google, much less a command economy like China.
- numbers_guy 10mo agoIf NVIDIA is blocked in China and China keeps developing AI models of comparable quality using home grown chips, it puts into question the dominance of NVIDIA in the market. If NVIDIA is allowed to continue operating in China, it doesn't matter much if China actually uses NVIDIA or Huawei, as long as there is some plausible deniability that China is using NVIDIA powered clusters for their strongest models.
- lupire 10mo agoIt mostly worked in the US, when outsourcing manufacturing devastated domestic capabilities. There are only a few exceptions.
- analog31 10mo agoThe US had alternatives to manufacturing such as the IT and finance industries. The Chinese probably saw no alternative but to boost manufacturing.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- maxglute 10mo agoIt's not about stopping, it's about delaying. There's a reason Huang's quote is in context of PRC talent. PRC generates plurality of global AI talent and is projected to generate disproportionate more short/medium term. Nvidia want to delay future where 50%+ of global AI talent working on Huawei/Ascend ecosystem or fragment PRC talent pool so net 50%+ of global AI talent works on CUDA moat for as long as possible (which is strategicially significant depending if you're near/medium term AGI believer). The reality is huge % of foreseeable US AI talent is going to be from PRC anyway, but without fragmenting domestic PRC talent, PRC will be net talent winner. The second order effects of that is PRC will have single direction valve to siphon knowledge (knowledge diffusion + espionage) from SV but the vice versa will be more controlled, a PRC AI blackbox, and faster PRC proliferates domestic AI the less ability for west/NVIDIA to brain drain PRC talent developed from different system. And with hardware gap closing in 5/10/15 years, and energy gap firmly in PRC favour (i.e. US likely not able to close energy gap faster than PRC can close compute gap), and you basically have trendline where PRC will sprint from a few years behind to years ahead once compute constraint lifts from their talent advantage.
- m-hodges 10mo agoSometime around 2016 everyone learned that “corrupt” was just some synonym of “bad” and here we are, showered in a repeat of an administration of endless actual corruption.
- lupire 10mo agoAwful NYT-standard title Subtitle: David Sacks, the Trump administration’s A.I. and crypto czar, has helped formulate policies that aid his Silicon Valley friends and many of his own tech investments.
- pbiggar 10mo agoThe second I saw this I new it was David Sacks.
- dogmayor 10mo agoMost corrupt administration in American history by far. Sadly, not at all surprising. Many people are somehow ok with this cesspool and it is sickening.
- PleasureBot 10mo agoHalf the country will just grumble something about Nancy Pelosi and how everyone is corrupt in response to points about the current administration being corrupt. I feel like people have just lost all sense of scale when it comes to political matters. Yes, Nancy Pelosi making a series of improbably fortuitous trades while in office is bad and she should probably go to jail for insider trading. Is that the same thing as the Trump accepting many hundreds of millions, likely billions, in direct cryptocurrency bribes from foreign and domestic agents? Obviously not, the latter has a much, much larger in scale and has direct negative effect on the American people. Half the country is willing to equate the two and, throw their hands up, and say its all the same.
- dogmayor 10mo agoYeah the "everyone does it" crowd is ridiculous. Like there are degrees to this.
- saubeidl 10mo agoDrain the swamp, they said.
- cramcgrab 10mo agoCould be man or woman, and they’ve been doing it forever. Not news. Every time I see one of these political hit stories it makes me close the tab for ycombinator for the day.
- globalnode 10mo agoummm didnt dick cheney open an oil company in the middle east after womd? hehe this is nothing new.
- Steltek 10mo agoWhile the 2003 Iraq War was complete bullshit lies. No, Halliburton is over 100 years old and a bit of a unicorn company for oil engineering problems. There were definitely conflicts of interest that should have been resolved but it's no where near what we're seeing this year (sigh, "so far").
- treetalker 10mo agoCharacter matters.
- jimmydoe 10mo agoAmericans don’t believe in government, so bad people end up running it. Not a surprise.
- HardwareLust 10mo agoWhy is this flagged?
- refurb 10mo agoDavid Sacks' 5 page letter is pretty scathing response to the NYTimes. Seems like the NYT was throwing noodles at the wall and seeing what would stick. https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1995225152674533557?s=20 https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1995225152674533557?s=20