In my area owning a trailer park home requires being in like the top 1% internationally. Owning 1 home in Oakland may be worse than owning 4 in Detroit, in terms of being an under-hated under-taxed elite.
It’s here to stay not because it solves a legitimate problem or makes people’s lives better, but because like cancer, there is no cure. Bitcoin and other crypto are for crime, mostly. It’s not useable as actual money given volatility and other properties.
Grandmothers having their life savings stolen by scammers to the tune of 10s of billions annually, that is the primary use case for bitcoin. That and churning out a handful of SBF style gamer turned politically connected billionaires. Nakamoto was smart enough to remain anonymous, lest history remember his name as the person responsible.
The bubble won’t pop on anything that’s correlated with scammers. Exhibit A: bitcoin. The problem is not one of public knowledge or will of the people, it’s congress being irresponsible because it’s captured by the 2 parties. You can’t politicize scamming in a way that benefits either party so nothing happens. And the scammers themselves may be big donors (eg SBF’s ties to the dem party, certain ai players purchase of Trump’s favor with respect to their business interests, etc). Scammers all the way down.
I think cognitive dissonance explains much of it. Assuming Altman isn’t a sociopath (not unheard of in CEOs) he must feel awful about himself on some level. He may be many things, but he is certainly not naive about the impact ai will have on labor and need for ubi. The mind flips from the uncomfortable feeling of “I’m getting rich by destroying society as we know it” to “I am going to save the world with my super important ai innovations!”
Cognitive dissonance drives a lot “save the world” energy. People have undeserved wealth they might feel bad about, given prevailing moral traditions, if they weren’t so busy fighting for justice or saving the planet or something that allows them to feel more like a super hero than just another sinful human.
But if it gets built one town over wouldn’t that be a double whammy: higher energy prices and no tax revenue to offset that increase? Seems like prisoners’ dilemma.
Ironically, those may have been the staff with the most institutional knowledge. Seeing people argue, here of all places, that loc or commit frequency == institutional knowledge is … unexpected. New hires committing “whitespace cleanup” != institutional knowledge.
“Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software.”
It may not be the most important choice, but it’s not irrelevant. And whether the staff he fired had useful institutional knowledge is an open question. Didn’t he fire a lot of non-technical, recent hires and people likely to leave eventually due to his muskism? I’m not convinced that his initial firings are the wpest move he made. Sadly, being overconfident, he assumed the same model could be applied to government, a mistake that will take a long time to fix if it is even fixable given America’s overall trajectory and the fate of the dollar.