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> On the point of democracy, none of the candidates who spend the most on major elections seem to be winning much lately,

Thomas Massie was just ousted in the most expensive house primary in US history.

The difference between 1-2 mil that is normally spent and the $30+ million spent on that election alone.


Tom steyer spent half a billion to not even make it onto the final ca ballot

I think you'd find more examples of people spending much much less money to influence elections, or buy certain positions than you will people spending money to make the public vote for them. The money influences policies, regulations, wars, etc.

The problem isn’t necessarily that some one can buy a seat for themselves (though some people out there could spend 1000x as much as half a billion and still have 500 billion to spend), it's that for less than half a billion, someone can buy 20 house or senate seats for more conventional candidates that are willing to vote the way the financier wants.


Trump said they would sign something today.

An hour later, now they're not signing anything until Friday.


This is absolutely correct in my experience. It's solely finger pointing insurance.

It is probably not a baseline for what they're selling.

https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-h...

> Title 13 provides the following protections to individuals and businesses:

> Private information is never published. It is against the law to disclose or publish any private information that identifies an individual or business such, including names, addresses (including GPS coordinates), Social Security Numbers, and telephone numbers.

> The Census Bureau collects information to produce statistics. Personal information cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court.

> Census Bureau employees are sworn to protect confidentiality. People sworn to uphold Title 13 are legally required to maintain the confidentiality of your data. Every person with access to your data is sworn for life to protect your information and understands that the penalties for violating this law are applicable for a lifetime. Violating the law is a serious federal crime. Anyone who violates this law will face severe penalties, including a federal prison sentence of up to five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both.


I worked for Data company for a year. We absolutely used Census and ACS as baselines and checks. In fact, there was some talk about getting rid of ACS in Congress and we got emails about "EMAIL YOUR CONGRESSIONAL PERSON, DEMAND ACS STAY. Here are talking points."

I am indeed sworn to not reveal lots of data I knocked on doors for. My memory isn't that good, especially compared to the database it went into, anyway.

I hope it's not a baseline for individual records, but my assumption was that the census data would be pretty useful as a baseline for aggregate information, especially when it comes to comparing to private sets they're working with.


> Does anyone actually believe this crap?

> You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)?

I think, and history shows, they would use the tools at their disposal.

Example: https://stateline.org/2026/01/20/ice-is-using-medicaid-data-...


That isn't the census. Census data is stale. These data are not stale. If you no longer qualify for medicaid you need to update medicaid office within 10 days for example.

You act like anybody is actually following that.

And some IPs stick to users for over a decade, and over time the data pieces add up and connect the dots.

Can you show me a world power that is not trying to use cutting edge AI for military purposes?

Can you tell me when the last time China used AI to bomb a school was?

Hell can you tell me when the last time China bombed a school was even without AI?

The last time China bombed anyone was in 1979.


Because other countries are starting to use AI for military purposes, other countries are also looking into it to asses and learn. Here in Europe there is the EU AI Act to limit harm everyday harm to citizens caused by AI systems. However, it currently excludes military. The new legislation is just started to be enforced to high risk uses (employment filtering, biometrics, etc.) in august 2026, and full rollout in august 2027. In April 2025 there is a report from EU this legislation may help pave the road for military AI usage conventions [1]

[1]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7695...


This is a poor way of framing the question, a better one would be can you find me another world power that is misallocating trillions of capital in vaporware with very little to show for it?

The United States government isn't, capital is. That capital can come from outside the US and much of it is.

That said: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-09/china-pre...


> it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.

Okay. Let's say I agreed with you.

If you look at all technology and break down the total market for Critical Workloads vs non-critical workloads, what do you think that works out too, percentage wise? 12% critical? 18%? What if it was 30%! That would still mean 70% of the world's software could possibly be handled by an LLM. If that happens, the 30% of the Critical Workloads stuff is gonna get very, very competitive.


Not if the government bans them.

What government? Models are available all over the world. They can be run locally. Are we banning the Internet?

Genies and bottles.


There are sooooo many exfil methods, including with air gapped systems that are off-network.

Not at all beyond the capabilities of any of the top ~9 or so best State actors.

Edit: To answer your question, very easily on the 20TB.

One crude method with a simple device in particular works well if you just clone the monitor data and then use HDMI and pass through. Then just cat dir in encrypted chunks to something like a USB key connected to the passthrough. 4TB USB keys are out there. A week of that gets you 20TB.


How many of those methods can realistically exfiltrate 20Tb of data? That's quite hard even for well funded actors.

> Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.

Nah, SpaceX just IPO'd.


How much of the value of the IPO was based on the revenue from AI data centers?

Probably not much, since bulk of the valuation was based on hot air expelled by musk as with all of his ventures.

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