| ▲ | Silicon Valley's man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends(nytimes.com) |
| 69 points by fleahunter 4 hours ago | 48 comments |
| https://archive.ph/uJxZo |
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| ▲ | pavlov 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Every 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. |
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| ▲ | amelius an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Aren't there safeguards against such obvious forms of conflict of interest? | | |
| ▲ | encomiast an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Safeguards only matter when there are people and institutions to enforce them. Remember all those people they fired? All part of the plan. | | |
| ▲ | reactordev an hour ago | parent [-] | | This. Everyone is waiting for “the day” to come but they were all laid off back in April. This is why no one is stopping this. Everyone is doing it. |
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| ▲ | mattmaroon 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Actually no, not really. The safeguards were mostly customs, not laws, so they can be safely ignored. And what few laws there are, like the emoluments clause, seem to be entirely unenforceable because it’s not clear anyone has standing to bring a suit and the president presumably isn’t going to enforce the law on himself. What we’ve learned in the last twelve years is our democracy was built on the good will of the people we elected, and when we stopped demanding the good will with our votes it was no longer guaranteed. | | |
| ▲ | kayodelycaon 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Congress has the power to remove the President. That’s how this was supposed to work. IF the Supreme Court rules only Congress can impose the current tariffs, Trump will have a much harder time taking over. If the Supreme Court is also complicit, all three branches under control of a single president. |
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| ▲ | globalise83 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There were, but it turns out that the moral fortitude required to defend them was just a figment of the national imagination. | |
| ▲ | orwin an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The senate? |
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| ▲ | nova22033 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Lutnick's sons run Canton Fitzgerald. | | |
| ▲ | pavlov an hour ago | parent [-] | | That’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. | | |
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| ▲ | _factor an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | On the flip side, he may just like the technology and tries to proliferate it. Thats the problem with corruption, it's all about the angle of observation. |
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| ▲ | saubeidl a few seconds ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Drain the swamp, they said. |
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| ▲ | m-hodges an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sometime 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. |
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| ▲ | dogmayor 2 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Most corrupt administration in American history by far. Sadly, not at all surprising. Many people are somehow ok with this cesspool and it is sickening. |
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| ▲ | pbiggar 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The second I saw this I new it was David Sacks. |
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| ▲ | TrackerFF an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In 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. |
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| ▲ | mlinhares 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | And 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. |
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| ▲ | truegoric 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://archive.ph/uJxZo |
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| ▲ | LightBug1 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Wet your beaks!!!!" ... stinks of corruption. But I guess the USA is happy with that. |
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| ▲ | fuzzygroup an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | No. 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Large 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 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I know a lot of people who would change their votes due to what has happened to their businesses and farms. | | |
| ▲ | metalman 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | it'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 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Exactly. 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… |
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| ▲ | heresie-dabord 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Nothing has happened to change anyone's mind. If "We the People" means anything anymore, the blatant, pervasive criminality, incompetence, and corruption of this ghoulish administration will be judged harshly in the midterm elections. But it would take significant change in the US to regain the international trust that the country formerly enjoyed among allies. It is hard to see the latter happening. | |
| ▲ | lapcat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > But if you reran the 2024 election today you'd likely get the same result. Nothing has happened to change anyone's mind. I don't think this is true. Trump's approval rating among independents has dropped 20%+. There's a reason he lost the 2020 election, but voters had 4 years to forget those reasons and look back with rose-colored glasses. Now they remember. > They were very clear about their priorities, and those who voted for it accepted that. I don't think this is true either. (I did not vote for Trump, to be clear.) Project 2025 were very clear about their priorities, but before the election Trump tried to pretend that he had no knowledge of or involvement with Project 2025. After the election, he changed his tune. | | |
| ▲ | m-hodges an hour ago | parent [-] | | > There's a reason he lost the 2020 election, but voters had 4 years to forget those reasons and look back with rose-colored glasses. So many people forget that Joe Biden did, in fact, defeat Donald Trump. | | |
| ▲ | lupire 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | And that covid happened and made everyone mad and kicked out the incumbents in every major election in the world. |
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| ▲ | RickJWagner 13 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I believe you are right. There is a wall in place that causes people to believe things others don’t, and vice versa. To those seeing awful corruption here, Hunter Bidens $500k Ukrainian gas job was legitimate. They were not outraged by the emails describing a 10% cut for ‘the big guy’. Joe Biden joining business conference calls was fine. It seems like the end of the world, but it’s no worse than we’ve seen, historically. It’s always been there. |
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| ▲ | ReptileMan an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Trump 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? | | |
| ▲ | encomiast an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | You 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). | |
| ▲ | fuzzygroup an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | No. While there has always been corruption, this is a different order of magnitude. | | |
| ▲ | cjbgkagh an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The 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 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe 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 33 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The 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. |
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| ▲ | technothrasher 7 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > he was forced to give up his family farm. I don't know where this narrative comes from. He wasn't forced to do any such thing. He voluntarily put his family peanut seed business into a blind trust when elected, with his personal lawyer as trustee. He subsequently only gave up the business once he took control again after his presidency, because it was in massive debt. |
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| ▲ | ReptileMan an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | As 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. | | |
| ▲ | retsibsi 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The 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. | |
| ▲ | LunaSea an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is absolutely. A murderer is not the same as a person that committed genocide. A very silly argument you tried to pull there. | | |
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| ▲ | lupire 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Awful 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. |
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| ▲ | nova22033 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Mr. 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. |
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| ▲ | maxglute a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | It'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 ecosystem or fragment PRC talent pool so net 50%+ of global AI talent works on Nvidia moat. 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 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. | |
| ▲ | lupire 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It mostly worked in the US, when outsourcing manufacturing devastated domestic capabilities. There are only a few exceptions. | |
| ▲ | numbers_guy 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If 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. | |
| ▲ | woooooo 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | People are people everywhere. Before the chip restrictions (which started under Biden), most businesses in China were inclined to take the easiest path, buying Nvidia, just like everywhere else. While maybe handwringing about independence once in a while. Now there's real money going into domestic competition, it will take a decade or so. |
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