It’s gone from can’t everyone just pay your fair share of taxes?

To can’t we at least tax the rich?

How about just the 1%?

Ok…, how about just the 0.001%?

And then somehow conservatives leaders will convince a voter base to take to the streets with pitchforks and torches, claiming it’s tyranny, then once they’re elected, the leaders will still tax the fucking voter base.

These people are mentally ill

Yes and I don’t say this as a knock on mental illness. I say it because many conservatives are raised to believe that mental illness is either a supernatural force of the devil or a moral failing. I sincerely believe that if many conservatives would just give therapy a trial run, and try to unpack half the shit that they instead insist on holding on to then unleashing upon society, the world would be a much more pleasant and peaceful place.

However, most will never do that because not going to therapy A. proves they’re totally not crazy otherwise they’d be in therapy, right? and B. Trying to control everyone else, provides them with their own sense of control.

But if the broligarchs don’t actually expect to ever get any of this “AI” shit actually working, then what is the end game?

Obviously the majority of people are only in it to make quick money, but what about the psychos at the very top who are directing policy and building these giant nuclear powered “AI” data centers?

If Thiel/Musk/Zuckerberg don’t actually have the expectation that “AI” will eventually work itself out, then it won’t matter how money the rich (but not broligarch rich) Wall Street bros and bankers dumped into the “AI” boom.

It won’t be like the .com boom and the Internet, because it doesn’t actually exist. If the economy completely collapses, and dollar becomes worthless currency, the “money” the average rich asshole hoards away after investing in the 2025 “AI” boom, will have about as much value as monopoly money.

Meanwhile the fucking Bond villain billionaires like Thiel (who have been dreaming of this exact scenario for over 20 years) hold all resources (including a recently purchased uranium mine).

So, “hypothetically,” if that was Thiel’s endgame, and the “AI” jig is up, then they no longer have to pretend they’re trying to develop artificial intelligence or AGI. But they do already hold control of most resources, have mass surveillance capabilities, and each broligarch owns one or more of these giant supercomputers/data centers that have been built in cities all over the U.S. world and soon in outer space.

In this totally fictional scenario, once the dollar collapses (likely followed by all of society collapsing along with it), what do the broligarchs actually use their giant nuclear powered “AI” data centers for?

AI or no AI, they’re currently being built, so what is their actual purpose?

I mean, there is actual “AI” tech that exists, and isn’t just people working in sweatshops, like this: https://deeplabcut.github.io/DeepLabCut/README.html

It’s just kind of difficult to get consistency between trials, and reliability seems to boil down to completely eliminating variability. So kind of useless outside of a lab setting (as is).

I tend to feel like it’s more trouble than it’s worth and too unreliable (as is) to usually bother with it, but I know people who are just fellow lab rats (not broligarchs) and are super devoted to getting AI to work for their projects. Like most sectors in this country, even science is being forced to embrace AI. Regardless of if it actually makes sense for your line of work or not, the expectation is get it working or face the chopping block, and there are definitely people who are trying their hardest to really get this shit off the ground (because the alternative is be prepared to be out of a job for being obsolete).

This is also why it’s kind of surprising to learn that even “AI” that’s simply comparing license plates from one camera to the next, is actually just due to human slave labor.

So, do any of the broligarchs receiving these huge contracts actually believe that eventually they’ll get AI to work once enough data and money is dumped into it and the little people at the bottom figure out all the kinks for them?

Or is it just that everybody at the top acknowledges this is a dead end, but once you’re in the secret club at the top of the food chain, and you’re making ridiculous amounts of money, your incentive is just to keep your mouth shut, keep making money, and fuck the consequences because once society collapses you’ll get to be kings of your own little monarchs anyway?

If it is the second, and nobody at the top really believes AI is going anywhere, then what are all the giant, energy sucking data centers that are being built across the country actually for?

I mean there are legit companies doing good work that get passed over all the time.

How did these 3 guys get hundreds of millions in government contracts for a product that didn’t even exist.

And not only did it not exist, they were demanding everybody let them violate their privacy so that their non-existent product could “end crime.”

I’ll just come out and say it, the “scandal” imo isn’t the company was a fraud part. The scandal is that people within the government wanted so badly to amp up surveillance and the police state within the U.S. they just went ahead and dumped all this money into A.I. that didn’t actually exist because “A.I. is already here and it will fix everything, and even if you don’t want it, too fucking bad.”

Like it was never that the government thought A.I. tech was that important, or the future, or whatever bullshit. They’ve just realized the tech industry allows them the ability to spy on people, control information, and make a shit ton of money doing it.

The history of the organization seems very odd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety

It began as a side project in which the three co-founders built their first video surveillance cameras by hand around Langley’s dining room table. When a DeKalb County detective told Langley that his camera product had helped with solving a home break-in, Langley called the two other co-founders and told them to quit their jobs.

What?? How did a detective use it to solve a crime? Who was he? And based off of this one dude you all 3 just quit your jobs??? What??

Then we just jump ahead to 2022 and these cameras that didn’t even work had raised over $380 million in venture funding?

Then by the next year they were being used to sub for actual police due to a shortage of police officers?

So they just go from the Hardy Boys help solve a mystery in Georgia in 2017 and then suddenly by 2023 Marc Andreesen (big surprise) is suddenly funnelling millions into their business.

Oh, good, this citation will probably help make clear what the fuck actually happened between 2017 and 2023: Flock Safety. “Media Kit: Our Founding Story”. Flock Safety. Retrieved April 8, 2022.

The main thing flock is really supposed to do is capture and match pictures of license plates at different locations. It’s not even complex.

So how tf did they get the green light for the first government contract if they never even had that capability?

Wait, what? I was just making a joke.

Unless you are the coked out billionaire? In that case I would like to know what you were thinking when you vouched for these people.

I was just pointing out it’s definitely going to contribute to the bubble popping, but it’s even worse than other AI companies bc it was mainly government contracts (which means they’ll probably still be getting funded for the foreseeable future even while other companies go under).

It’s insane they were ever allowed to receive a government contract for tech that didn’t even exist, so I would just really like to know how that happened? Like legally how could this have happened if not for somebody in some position of power helping these people get their foot in the door.

But it’s especially infuriating that this company has received so many government contracts from ICE and all over the U.S., and in some cases literally just gone into towns and put cameras up without permission. Then refused to get around to taking them down in some cases, so towns just started covering them up with trash bags.

Its like an entire business model where some creepers with a cardboard box pretend lemonade stand just decided one day to start selling pretend AI instead. And we just let them? Who fucking signed off on this?

Who is it that even helped them get their foot in the door in the first place? Who was the coked out billionaire who apparently just fucking picked their name from a list he glanced at for 5 minutes on his way to rehab? Somebody needs to find that person, and we all need to be allowed to give him a swift public kick in the ass.

I have to give the broligarchs credit for always somehow managing to leave me stunned. Every time I learn some unbelievable bullshit like this, it’s like falling in hate all over again.

As we leave the stagnation of society behind in the ruins of regulations and democracy that only held us back, and the technocratic elite steer us full speed ahead through this “Renaissance” we are truly blessed to be forced to live through, the line between technology and magic continues to blur…

Or maybe it’s just 700 sweatshop workers in a trenchcoat. Who’s to say?

You suck Motherfucker. I hate “White Power” I hate your band. Can’t you see This ain’t Nazi Germany

Yeah at this point, I am more than confident that it’s pretty safe to just lump every loyalist still following orders being given from the war criminals (who are the face of being) in charge of the government under the shared title of secret police.

If the CIA and plenty of other powerful conservatives didn’t want Trump to be doing the things he’s doing, he wouldn’t be sitting in the fucking white house right now taking a shit on the constitution.

Ok, thanks for the update! We will cancel the BNB reservation we had waiting for you.

To be clear, this doesn’t change how we feel about you, carol.

With the added bonus of keeping track of the public response to videos of children crying when being separated from their parents?

And using AI to build psychological profiles in order to continue to target them with a tailored algorithm?

Earlier this year, The Intercept wrote about surveillance contractors sought by ICE, who would be expected to perform algorithm- and AI-aided deep dives into social media users’ post histories, searching for, among other things, “proclivity for violence,” which could include “empathy with a group which has violent tendencies,” among other things. Hope you haven’t expressed “empathy” at any point for any group with “violent tendencies,” right? How does it feel to know that you’d be at the mercy of a freelance surveillance contractor’s mastery of “social and behavioral sciences” and “psychological profiles,” according to ICE’s statement of objectives?

How fucking creepy is it to think about this psychological manipulation pre-crime bullshit and take into account that one of the briefings released yesterday took note of people in New Orleans seeming especially disturbed by videos with the sound of crying children.

Officials track public sentiment, noting negative impact of ‘videos with sounds of children crying’ as parents arrested

It seems very unlikely this is being noted in order to answer questions like “How do we tone it down a bit and keep things from boiling over?”

Imo (and obviously feel free to take that with a grain of salt since I’m totally “overly-paranoid” about how evil these people are and the levels they would stoop to) it seems more likely this is to answer a question of “How do we use psychological warfare against the American people and send them closer to their breaking point?”

Aw man! Where’s a drone strike when you need it?

It’s funny because drones were probably being used to murder children the moment this picture was taken so that these shit stains could have more money they eventually just set on fire and use to light their cigars.

Ukraine’s defense relies increasingly on huge volumes of civilian data stored on cloud platforms. An adversary’s military may supply their targeting algorithm with an individual’s location, health, and online behavior. Military actors regularly mine, analyze, and repurpose social media posts.

It is not clear, however, that the deep learning systems integral to some of these new weapons can overcome the fog of war. These systems treat all data as objective representations of reality, when in fact information drawn from social media platforms is shaped by users’ emotional and cognitive experiences in ways that can skew its utility for wartime intelligence. The “learned knowledge” generated by analytic systems is probabilistic, not causal—leading to the risk that algorithms are “enforc[ing] their version of ‘reality’ from patterns and probabilities derived from data.”

These venture-backed firms view contemporary conflicts as live testing grounds.

Global digital platforms such as TikTok and Telegram illustrate the wider environment in which these dependencies are forming. Though neither company develops military technologies, both shape the information environment surrounding war. TikTok’s recommendation algorithm influences how audiences perceive the conflict in Ukraine, shaping global narratives and public opinion. Yet its complex ownership structure, rooted in Chinese parent company ByteDance and entangled with global venture capital, has sparked geopolitical concern. … These concerns highlight how platforms created for civilian use can also become entangled in the political and informational dimensions of war.

The overlapping interests of finance capital and private technology corporations transcend national borders, creating forms of influence that do not fit neatly into binary friend-or-enemy distinctions. ByteDance’s global investment network, spanning Chinese state-linked entities, American private equity funds, and international investors, illustrates this transnational ownership model. It complicates national regulatory and security responses, as policymakers must ask not merely who owns a given platform, but who controls the data, infrastructure, and decisionmaking power that states increasingly depend on.

This illustrates a deeper shift in the relationship between the market and the military. The problem is not that defense firms are publicly traded—Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics have been for decades—but that contemporary defense-tech companies retain proprietary control over data-driven systems central to military operations. Their technologies are not merely delivered to the state; the companies are embedded in the decisionmaking architecture of warfare. When a firm’s market value depends on its perceived wartime success, its incentives may diverge from those of the state it ostensibly serves. This intertwining of commercial strategy, military dependency, and investor confidence represents a new kind of vulnerability for states.

What is at stake, beyond the conflict itself, is the nature of state sovereignty. The ability of states to govern, defend, and act independently is increasingly mediated by private technology firms and global finance. This is not entirely new. States have long relied on private contractors, but the kind of dependency has changed. Unlike traditional arms manufacturers, today’s defense-tech firms control the digital platforms, data flows, and algorithmic systems that underpin military decisionmaking. At the same time, civilian platforms like Telegram and TikTok shape the informational terrain of conflict, influencing how wars are perceived and fought.

I just want to make sure I’m understanding this.

•You have companies like Meta (just an example) working for both sides of a conflict via government contract, but not necessarily bound to either side of a conflict because of global venture capital/transnational ownership model

•We know Facebook/Meta has been intentionally manipulating the emotions of social media users for over a decade now

•That social media data is then collected and used to train military platforms, which may be directly or indirectly linked to the social media company

•These companies very likely have an incentive to create an endless war (and endless profits for themselves) by manipulating the emotions and behavior of social media users, knowing that data will be used to train military platforms

Basically, a private tech company could manipulate data to give one side of a conflict an advantage over the other, but it could also intentionally pit adversaries against each other in an endless loop by manipulating social media content, and by extension, manipulating the military platforms being trained.

A company could potentially profit from both sides of a conflict it’s manipulating because the states have turned to it and other big tech companies to help them reach “victory” in the endless conflict the company helped create. Correct?

I mean they want a one government, they just want to be the ones in charge of that one government.

The entire argument is that it’s somehow safer bc it’s a private corporation/business, and not the government. Except it’s a private monopoly protected and contracted by the fucking government!

The only way that argument could possibly make the slightest bit of sense would be in an imaginary world where there was legitimate competition between other corporations (but if that was the case corporations probably wouldn’t exist) and the American people actually had some say in which private company got government contracts.

Instead, government officials (who are allegedly the reason we have to turn to private businesses bc we can’t trust the government) are buying stock in private companies, and then handing government contracts to the fucking private companies where they own stock.

Creepy ass conservatives: Stay asleep so I can keep doing stuff to you while you’re unaware.

Remember when he did that Nazi salute, and we kept hearing it totally wasn’t a Nazi salute, and the Trump administration kept saying that we were all just looking for imaginary things to be outraged over?

Then why is he having Grok rewrite Wiki and calling Hitler the Führer, Bart?