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elefanten commented on Chinese astronauts make rocket fuel and oxygen in space   livescience.com/space/spa... · Posted by u/Teever
sneak · 14 hours ago
FYI “begs the question” does not mean “raises the question”.
elefanten · 14 hours ago
Classically it doesn't, but colloquially it does. The dreaded "language changes and evolves" defense that frustrates pedants everywhere.

(I say this in the friendly spirit of a long-defeated fellow pedant who has hit people with your exact comment for decades)

elefanten commented on South Park creator’s 2007 digital ad revenue sharing clause   readtrung.com/p/south-par... · Posted by u/JustExAWS
righthand · 13 days ago
You aren’t wrong that there is/was a group of people that consider themselves South Park Conservative but the creators reject the notion that South Park is specifically liberal or conservative, because their intent is to parody any people they can. The creators dislike political correctness but they also dislike the forceful nature of conservatives applying their beliefs on other people. Read the South Park wikipedia page, it explains it pretty well.

Insinuating that South Park conservatives evolved into the alt-right is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Trey and Matt didn’t invent disliking political correctness.

elefanten · 13 days ago
I concur with this take. Like many facets of culture, some people/groups will project what they want onto a given cultural entity (South Park, in this case), but that doesn’t mean one should assume they speak for it.

For example, the “men’s rights activists” group appropriated the idea of “the red pill” from The Matrix. They certainly differ wildly in worldview from the Wachowski siblings.

elefanten commented on Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny   techcrunch.com/2025/08/02... · Posted by u/bingden
linotype · 25 days ago
What errors?
elefanten · 25 days ago
A lot beyond the scope of the time I have to comment here. Read it with an open mind, knowledge of tech business, knowledge of how things unfolded since it was published and see for yourself.

But some short hand:

-Assumes vertical integration is necessarily abusive

-Assumes lowering price is necessarily a setup for anti-competitive practices. This one’s particularly ironic because lowering prices is definitely a first-order good for consumers and businesses that buy those goods. Bezos’ famous saying was “your margin is my opportunity” —- would you rather the standard continue to be massive retailer markup profit that goes straight to retail corps?

-Vague scare tactic claims that expanding into media production etc will somehow (yadda yadda, Step 2: ???) lead to monopolies in every category they enter.

The TLDR of the problem with Neobrandeis is it forms a very opinionated paranoid notion that size can only lead to bad things and no good things. It is a lazy dodge around the traditional responsibility of regulators to identify and regulate actual anti-competitive behavior when it actually happens By constraining companies from using any form of size or integration-related advantage, it lowers the pressure to actually be competitive and innovative for everyone else. I’m not saying everything should be unconditionally allowed, there’s a balance to strike. But when you just have a blunt “anti-size” hammer, you’re gonna do collateral damage to a healthy competitive ecosystem in a damaging way.

elefanten commented on Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny   techcrunch.com/2025/08/02... · Posted by u/bingden
tptacek · 25 days ago
I'm not a Khan fan, like, at all, but by the time you're at the point where the FTC is getting involved in your M&A, you've crossed the threshold of success; all the signals to future startups about your path being promising have been sent.
elefanten · 25 days ago
I agree with your general point, but Khan was excessively trigger happy in a way that highlights exceptions to your observation. E.g. blocking Meta acquisition of Within was nonsense that did nothing to validate the concept of VR fitness as a promising category (anytime soon)

Edit: Within, not Withings

elefanten commented on Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny   techcrunch.com/2025/08/02... · Posted by u/bingden
gruez · 25 days ago
>The essay (literally, a homework assignment she did at law school) for which she became famous that criticizes Amazon for being big is so chock full of errors, misconstructions and faulty logic, that it's an indictment of some really poor political habits and instincts that the US is prone to.

source?

elefanten · 25 days ago
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...

She got boosted by an insurgent group of law professors who spearhead whats called the Neobrandeis moment. Their theory is that anti-trust should be preemptively enforced against size for its own sake.

This is the article she wrote for her law review as a law student which put her on their radar and they started calling her a "rising star" etc etc, which snowballed into the performative appointment by the Biden admin.

Feel free to read through it.

elefanten commented on Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny   techcrunch.com/2025/08/02... · Posted by u/bingden
bix6 · 25 days ago
You expect a perfect success rate against the highest paid lawyers in the world? At least she was trying to enforce antitrust for once.

Big is bad bro. There’s like 5 companies carrying the entire S&P rn how is that good for anyone outside of those 5 companies?

elefanten · 25 days ago
Doesn't have to be a perfect success rate... how about just something other than abysmal failure rate?

Asserting a sloganized refrain is not very convincing. Make a real argument. Here are some counterpoints to "big is bad" Neobrandeisianism: -Scale enables better economics for certain businesses which consumers and other businesses then benefit from. -Large size allows additional speculative cutting edge R&D funding which the whole world benefits from even if it never pays off. -Being big on its own is almost never a cheat code to permanent monopoly / monopsony lock-in, especially in the technology business. That comes from actual anti-competitive behavior or regulatory capture (which ARE the parts that should be regulated, rather than targeting or preventing size for its own sake).

The S&P point is more than a bit overstated and it also doesn't really matter? The subset of the S&P that's performing well will naturally get weighted higher over time, until the performance changes. It doesn't really matter if the S&P is driven by 5 enormous companies or 500 equally-sized ones. Whatever works at the moment is what gets rewarded with capital -- that's the point of the system and it's been more effective than any alternatives. Besides, it'd be poor investing practice to be literally all-in on the S&P.

elefanten commented on Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny   techcrunch.com/2025/08/02... · Posted by u/bingden
richwater · 25 days ago
Lina Khan's obsession with "big is bad", especially her preexisting prejudice of Big Tech should have disqualified her from any position well before she took the wheel.

How many times did the FTC fail in court under her watch? More than I can count on two hands.

Meanwhile local and state utility and cable tv monopolies continue to _flourish_ without so much as a peep.

elefanten · 25 days ago
Her opinion should not be taken seriously on the matter. It's not just the empirically terrible track record she had as a regulator and the baffling cases she brought to bear (imo proof of your point that she had an overgeneralized bias). It's also that she was demonstrably inexperienced at the time she was selected! It was clearly performative political appointment, which the Biden administration was pretty egregious about (and so have both Trump administrations, this is not a political point).

The essay (literally, a homework assignment she did at law school) for which she became famous that criticizes Amazon for being big is so chock full of errors, misconstructions and faulty logic, that it's an indictment of some really poor political habits and instincts that the US is prone to. That due diligence in vetting her as a rigorous and informed thinker on the topic failed is an unequivocal failure.

elefanten commented on OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025   twitter.com/alexwei_/stat... · Posted by u/Davidzheng
oceanplexian · a month ago
I know it’s a meme but there actually are fully self driving cars, they make thousands of trips every day in a couple US cities.
elefanten · a month ago
The capitalization makes it a Tesla reference, which has notoriously been promising that as an un-managed consumer capability for years, while it is not yet launched even now.
elefanten commented on Analyzing a Critique of the AI 2027 Timeline Forecasts   thezvi.substack.com/p/ana... · Posted by u/jsnider3
hollerith · 2 months ago
Same here. I ask the reader not to react to AI 2027 by dismissing the possibility that it is quite dangerous to let the AI labs continue with their labbing.
elefanten · 2 months ago
This is feeling like a retread of climate change messaging. Serious problem requiring serious thought (even without “AI doom” as the scenario, just the political economic and social disruptions suffice) but being most loudly championed via aggressive timelines and significant exaggerations.

The overreaction (on both sides) to be followed by fatigue and disinterest.

elefanten commented on Judge denies creating “mass surveillance program” harming all ChatGPT users   arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/merksittich
Akranazon · 2 months ago
> Judge denies creating “mass surveillance program” harming all ChatGPT users

What a horribly worded title.

A judge rejected the creation of a mass surveillance program?

A judge denied that creating a mass surveillance program harms all ChatGPT users?

A judge denied that she created a mass surveillance program, and its creation (in the opinion of the columnist) harms all ChatGPT users?

The judge's act of denying resulted in the creation of a mass surveillance program?

The fact that a judge denied what she did harms all ChatGPT users?

(After reading the article, it's apparently the third one.)

elefanten · 2 months ago
The third one is the only correct way to interpret the title.

u/elefanten

KarmaCake day3089October 7, 2016View Original