While in Austin, I was in a Waymo that blocked 3 lanes of incoming traffic while attempting to merge into a lane going into the opposite direction. It was a super unorthodox move, but none of the drivers (even while stopped for a red light) would let the Waymo* merge into their lane.

Thank God for the tinted windows, people were pulling their phones out to record (rightly so). It felt like I was responsible for holding up a major portion of Austin 5 pm traffic on a Friday.

Wish it just asserted itself ever-so-slightly to get itself out.

We just need lower standards of proof. Something like:

1) you had some level of responsibility within the organization (no specific knowledge of wrongdoing required) 2) some kind of violation occurred within the organization 3) your wealth increased over some time period in which such violations were later found to have occurred

If those things happened, you are liable. People who profit should be on the hook for everything a company does, not in proportion to their specific knowledge of or involvement in any particular illegal activities, but in proportion to their nominal or "global" level of responsibility and the magnitude of their profit.

A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.

A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.

A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".

Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.

The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.

This is particularly so because the advantage of this kind of school is networking, and it's in the interest of the disadvantaged to give them opportunity to network with the advantaged.

But it's also no big deal if we don't make that compromise.

Public money is precious, and we should think really hard about taking money from the general public just to give it to wealthy institutions any time we do it.