Given the state of ... well, everything ... it still surprises me when people pretend there's some level of modesty or decorum the rich and powerful still need to abide by at the risk of some sort of popular revolt. I guess it's a way to compensate for the material powerlessness most people actually experience (especially in politics), much like the handwringing over the Second Amendment in the US as if merely handing a town full of ordinary people guns is sufficient to defeat a modern military. Sure, it looks like nowadays you can do that with a stockpile of low budget drones because even the military industrial complex has found a way to optimize for profit by literally delivering nothing in return for extracting the lion's share of the federal budget, but even that still requires actual work like planning, training and organizing with sufficient political motivation, not just going to the range or "hunting".

The expectation of a need for decorum against all evidence almost seems like a quaint remnant of the aristocracy at this point. There's no advantage to being a nice or sensible person if you're a billionaire. People talk about "business" like it's still the 1800s and billionaires are the factory owners. The real economy (i.e. anything involving any pretense of being an exchange of goods and services in any shape or form) is now a minute fraction of the global economy. Everything else is finance. And if the nature of the finance "industry" wasn't obvious enough the US has given up all pretense to the point that members of the US government now intentionally manipulate online betting "markets" directly.

You may have needed some table manners to be able to run a tincan factory. You can let your entire ass hang out on TV 24/7 and still be a billionaire today. And people will still cheer you on like you're the inventor of sliced bread.

I guess you don't observe those billionaires yourself. Is it possible the cartoonish image you assume to be obvious comes through media channels and your societal bubble layers?

This “billionaires couldn’t spend their money” thing comes up a lot, and it show’s a child’s idea of what people might spend money on. “$1000 a month buys more ice cream than I can eat and more toy cars than anyone can play with, and I don’t want anything other than ice cream and toy cars, so nobody needs more than $1000 a month.”

I can think of loads of things I’d do with hundreds of millions of dollars of disposable income. Make large buildings that look like how I think buildings should look, fund scientific research in areas I’m personally interested in but have little aptitude for, find artists that align with my tastes and give them the ability to realise their visions, contribute to political organisations and charities that align with my values, et cetera. Those all are basically infinite money sinks.

In the past, the ultra-wealthy did do all of these things, funding loss-making research and expeditions, monumental architecture, philanthropic organisation and artistic works. The problem might be that you think billionaires shouldn’t do some or all of these things, but that is a very different position than that they can’t do any of these things.

The specifics are certainly cultural and locally relative, but Marx nailed it when he talked about ownership of the means of production, rather than being part of the production of goods and services.

The reason that the ultrawealthy behave like toddlers is that toddlers are, relatively speaking, ultrawealthy: all their needs are met without any effort on their part, and so many of their desires are fulfilled simply by expressing those desires out loud that any impediment or refusal is obviously enemy action.

I think that it depends on which bot, and how they are set up.

It's been a while, but I remember changing a setting on mine, so it is less sycophantic.

Mine says "I don't know," frequently, and also suggests against ideas.

But it also confidently states complete garbage, much more frequently. I have to stay on my toes.

Greatly varies by the model, but such a flat denial along with calling those with (verifiably accurate [0]) experiences which happen to be different from yours "the anti-AI crew" and just assuming they can't possible use LLMs and couldn't possibly have formed their opinions on evidence, well, says a lot.

LLMs, even frontier models by major providers, still have no reliable internalised way to assess the accuracy of their output and they have, do and will continue to for the foreseeable future, lead people down paths they shouldn't [1], partly by their architecture and the limits of the technology, partly by an intent for maximising retention.

For what it's worth on people, I have, both in politics and business, unfortunately made the painful discovery that, whether intentional (because the powerful person in question cannot or doesn't want to deal with different opinions to their own) or unintentionally (because those with sycophantic tendencies simply managed to manipulate themselves into their inner circle over years and became trusted), there are people in (financial, political or other types of) power which are surrounded by few willing to tell them when they are wrong and even fewer that are actually listened to if push comes to shove, which often affects the personality and mental health of said powerful people negatively, to the detriment of society, their family, their employees, etc.

Members of the media are actually complicity. I very much disagree that the media presents obscenely powerful people in too negative a light, more the opposite. Am very firm that, to retain access to the rich, powerful and famous, there is far too much sane-washing of utterly ridiculous, unacceptable, harmful and/or dangerous behaviour. Sometimes the person in questions own health and safety are put at risk, because neither the people around them, nor public opinion or reporting treat their behaviour in the way appropriate. Sometimes this again leads to harm for the public, their family, those working under them, etc.

What'd get someone with less power or in a lower tax bracket ridiculed or even sectioned is often reported as "eccentricities", just being "passionate about a topic" and trying to do the "marketing rounds".

[0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/?omniscience=omniscience-hallu...

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2602.19141v1