While Israel pounds the snot out of it, Hamas continues its long-running video deception operations. “Pallywood” usually uses its video editing to gin up more Palestinian civilian casualties from Israeli, but this time they’re trying to convince the world they make their own “al-Ghoul” sniper rifles. Ian McCollum looks at the resulting video, and concludes that, once again, they’re full of it.
Pretty much nothing they’re doing in the video involves actual manufacturing of sniper rifles.
“Yesterday Hamas posted a video on Twitter/X that is purporting to show them manufacturing what they call the al-Ghoul sniper rifles in some secret bunker, presumably in Gaza. This is nonsense. I thought we should take a minute and let’s go through this video and see what’s actually being shown in it.”
“Because I’ve manufactured rifles, I’ve been in a lot of rifle factories, I’ve done hand loading, I’ve seen a lot of hand loading, I’ve seen ammunition factories, and this video includes none of that.”
“They’ve got the two guys working on lathes. And they clearly want you to think that these are barrels on the lathes. However, what they are doing here is turning the outside profile of the barrel. The difficult element in manufacturing a barrel, if you want to convince me that you are actually manufacturing barrels, what I want to see is the rifling process, because otherwise you got nothing.”
“If you are making a barrel, the first thing you’re going to do is center bore it (what they actually call ‘gun drill’ it), then you are going to ream it, then you are going to rifle it and then lastly you are going to turn the outside diameter.”
“Immediately on the next shot we see them turning the outside profile of this piece of steel and there is smoke coming off of it. You don’t want smoke coming off. They are not running lubricant on this. That’s a problem, that’s not how you manufacture precision anything, much less precision sniper rifles.”
“What they are doing looks like machining, but it’s wrong in all sorts of ways.” I’m going to omit some of the technical details, but What He Said.
“The al-Ghoul is not a domestic Gazan or Palestinian designed firearm, the al-Ghoul is actually an Iranian AM-50, which is like the Steyr HS .50 that we have at home. Iran purchased like 800 HS .50s a bunch of years ago. They then reverse engineered it and made a really crude copy of it that they call the AM-50, that they have provided to all sorts of basically terror and terror-associated groups.”
“What we’re looking at here is an Iranian manufactured AM-50.”
“I think they are making dummy parts for the sake of video here.”
He thinks they may actually be manufacturing the optics mount.
“He guy’s pulled one [part] off of the mill and he’s measuring it, like let’s measure a random part to look good on camera.”
He said it looks a whole lot like how reality TV depicts gun manufacturing.
“There is absolutely nothing in that shot that couldn’t be take a complete Iranian rifle, detail strip it, take all the pieces apart, and then turn on the camera and put the pieces back together.”
“One of the most interesting shots in the video, which is the marking on the side of this gun. Because this says something like Al Qassam Brigade Sniper Rifle, 12.7x99mm. 12.7×99 by the way is .50 Browning.” AKA .50 BMG.
“The guy pulls out a round of 12.7 ammo and now they want to show you their manufacturing process of precision ammo. And there’s some stuff in here that is definitely wrong.” Like the steel case, which may be fine for Soviet designed crap, but isn’t right for .50 BMG, and is much harder to reload properly than brass.
There are a lot more details why the ammo loading process is wrong. I’m just going to note that Hamas has a lower-rate, cruder ammo-reloading setup than random Texas gun owners I’ve known. You can get a fully progressive reloading press for under a grand these days, none of this hand-loading assembly line crap that takes Hamas members away from their main job of killing Israeli women and children.
“I don’t think we saw any actual loading of ammunition here.”
“I’m pretty sure that the al-Ghoul is, in fact, essentially is a re-badged Steyr AM-50.”
“The AM-50 is not a particularly great rifle.”
“The only thing we can see 100% in this video is that they have complete AM-50s that they have disassembled and put back together. And they want you to think that they are manufacturing stuff.”
The Colorado Supreme Court goes full TDS, IDF blows more Hamas tunnels, more unconstitutional gun laws are struck down, and news about two different Francises. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The big news this week is that the Colorado Supreme Court got way, way, way out over their skis by kicking Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot despite him not being convicted of any crimes.
The Colorado supreme court on Tuesday ruled that former president Donald Trump is ineligible to appear on the state’s ballot in the 2024 presidential election.
In a 4–3 ruling, the court held that Trump’s presence on the ballot “would be a wrongful act under the Election Code,” arguing that the former president is disqualified from holding the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
“The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) destroyed a vast network on underground tunnels inside Gaza City this week that belonged to top Hamas terrorist officials. Yahalom Unit Combat Engineering Forces discovered Hamas’ “Elite Quarter” on Wednesday, including “a large network of strategic underground tunnels which connect hideouts, and bureaus belonging to Hamas’ senior military and political leadership,” the IDF said in a statement.”
It blew up real good:
IDF destroyed a Hamas central tunnel system in Gaza city, and the explosion is spectacular. pic.twitter.com/yC3QIggskY
“Oklahoma bans DEI requirements at public colleges and universities, requires cuts to ‘non-critical personnel.’ Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt announced the mandate Wednesday, citing a need to spend more money on preparing young Oklahomans for the workforce, and less on ‘six-figure salaries to DEI staff.'” Faster, please. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
On Wednesday, a federal judge blocked a California law that would have banned the carrying of firearms in many public places, calling the legislation “sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.”
According to Fox News, US District Judge Cormac Carney granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law, adding that it removes people’s ability to defend themselves and their families.
The law was signed into law in September by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and was scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1. The legislation banned people from carrying concealed firearms in places such as public parks, playgrounds, and religious institutions, regardless if they have a concealed weapon carry permit or not.
Chuck Michel, president of the California Rifle and Pistol Association, which sued to block the law, said in a statement, “California progressive politicians refuse to accept the Supreme Court’s mandate from the Bruen case and are trying every creative ploy they can imagine to get around it. The Court saw through the State’s gambit.”
He added that if that law had gone into effect, permit holders “wouldn’t be able to drive across town without passing through a prohibited area and breaking the law.”
Gay has been credibly accused of more than 40 acts of plagiarism during her tenure at Harvard – which the university secretly investigated, threatened journalists over, and ultimately concluded was no big deal – clearing her of breaching Harvard’s “standards for research misconduct.”
The Times, looking at just five examples of Gay’s plagiarism, wrote: “her papers sometimes lift passages verbatim from other scholars and at other times make minor adjustments, like changing the word “adage” to “popular saying” or “Black male children” to “young black athletes.””
One rule for the elite, another for you…
“Investigators Beginning To Suspect Claudine Gay’s Novel ‘Larry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Rock’ May Have Been Plagiarized.”
Returning convicted defense contractor Leonard “Fat Leonard” Francis to U.S. custody as part of the Venezuelan prisoner swap on Wednesday is the latest twist in a decade-long salacious saga and bribery scheme that swept up dozens of American Navy officers.
One of the biggest bribery investigations in U.S. military history led to the conviction and sentencing of nearly two dozen Navy officials, defense contractors and others on various fraud and corruption charges. And it was punctuated by Francis’ daring escape last year, when he fled from house arrest at his San Diego home to South America.
An enigmatic figure who was 6-foot-3 and weighed 350 pounds at one time, Francis owned and operated his family’s ship servicing business, Singapore-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia Ltd. or GDMA, which supplied food, water and fuel to vessels. The Malaysian defense contractor was a key contact for U.S. Navy ships at ports across Asia for more than two decades. During that time he wooed naval officers with Kobe beef, expensive cigars, concert tickets and wild sex parties at luxury hotels from Thailand to the Philippines.
In exchange, the officers, including the first active-duty admiral to be convicted of a federal crime, concealed the scheme in which Francis would overcharge for supplying ships or charge for fake services at ports he controlled in Southeast Asia. The officers passed him classified information and even went so far as redirecting military vessels to ports that were lucrative for his Singapore-based ship servicing company.
In a federal sting, Francis was lured to San Diego on false pretenses and arrested at a hotel in September 2013. He pleaded guilty in 2015, admitting that he had offered more than $500,000 in cash bribes to Navy officials, defense contractors and others. Prosecutors say he bilked the Navy out of at least $35 million. As part of his plea deal, he cooperated with the investigation leading to the Navy convictions. He faced up to 25 years in prison.
While awaiting sentencing, Francis was hospitalized and treated for renal cancer and other medical issues. After leaving the hospital, he was allowed to stay out of jail at a rental home, on house arrest with a GPS ankle monitor and security guards.
An Austin, Texas Democrat politician is demanding police step up their patrols in his neighborhood despite previously voting to defund them.
Yes, in the latest example of ‘Do as I say not as I do,’ Representative Greg Casar now says that he wants more police for at least the next week. It’s unclear why the Congressman wanted the extra police.
The Austin Police Retired Officers Association however did not hold back and called out the Congressman’s sudden change of tone.
“We want everyone in Austin to feel safe, but this seems to us as the height of hypocrisy from the congressman. Maybe he should hire private security like his fellow squad members do. Sure seems like he wants the police in his neighborhood just not yours,” the ROA tweeted out.
Snip. “In 2020, Casar couldn’t hold back how happy he was when he helped the Austin City Council reduce the Austin Police Department’s budget by over $100 million.” (Previously.)
Good: A fat Christmas duck roasting in your oven. Bad: A fat duck roasting in your engine right after takeoff. “Do you need an emergency vehicle?” “We need everything you have.” This was two days ago.
Dwight occasionally sends me emails titled “The Most Dangerous Profession in America,” each containing links to news stories demonstrating that the rapper lifestyle is frequently not conducive to the “life” part. So I was happy to return the favor when this Nate the Lawyer video on the Young Thug trial popped up in my feed, since the stupidity on display there is off the hook.
“A juror was arrested and sent to jail. The judge slaps a potential juror with jail time. Her offense: shooting video of courtroom proceedings.”
“A defense attorney [Anastsios Mannettas] was arrested and sent to jail.”
“Even a court officer was arrested and sent to jail.”
“Fulton County Sheriff’s deputy [Akeiba Stanley] arrested earlier today and accused of trying to smuggle contraband to a defendant in the case.”
“We’re talking about Grammy award-winning rapper Young Thug in his Rico trial in Georgia. Now, he comes from a poor Atlanta neighborhood. He grew up in a housing project, and then made it to rap superstar, having the number one album in the country.”
May 2020: A Fulton County grand jury “handed down indictments to Young Thug and 26 other people under the state’s RICO statute.”
“Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffrey Lamar Williams, is one of 28 defendants charged in a sweeping 56 count indictment against the criminal street gang Young Slim Life, also known as YSL.”
“The charges [range] from conspiracy to violate the Georgia criminal racketing law, murder, armed robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Also named: Sergio Kitchens, who performs under the name Gunna.”
Fulton County DA Fani Willis (she of trumped-up Trump charges) claims that gangs are responsible for 75-80% of violent crime in the area, which I rather doubt.
“According to the indictment, YSL is a criminal street gang. Started in late 2012 in the Cleveland Avenue area of Atlanta, prosecutors say Young Thug is a co-founder. He and his affiliates have played a role in some of the city’s most violent crimes.”
On RICO: “The only element that the prosecution would have to prove is that this gang is organized as a racketeering enterprise.”
“Now, after those indictments, people are looking at decades in prison, and the defendants start flipping like fish. Check this out:”
“Last week, Sergio Kitchens, better known as rapper Gunna, took the first plea deal, followed by Walter Murphy, an alleged YSL co-founder. Then Wunnie Lee (rapper Slimelife Shawty) and Martinez Arnold (rapper Lil Duke) cut deals. Now today Quantavious Grier (rapper Unfoonk) entered a guilty plea.” Grier is Young Thug’s brother.
“All five have been said sentenced between 9 and 10 years on probation. They will also have to testify at the YSL trial.”
Stanley: “Her arrest warrants detail her having an inappropriate relationship with an inmate: visiting his cell, communicating with an inmate through Instagram [Do prisoners in Georgia get access to Instagram? Is Internet access now a right? – LP] and trying to smuggle contraband to Christian Eppinger from one of his relatives. Eppinger is accused of shooting a veteran Atlanta police officer several times last year while he was being taken into custody.” Is Eppinger an aspiring rapper? Of course he is, under the moniker “Big Bhris.”
If you remember this SNL commercial, you’re officially old.
“A defense attorney for Young Thug and his crew was arrested for possession of prescription drugs and attempting to toss a phone to allegedly another attorney but missing it, hitting a deputy upside the head so they charged him with assault.”
“One of the defendants was caught passing Young Thug drugs in court.”
“Young Thug’s fellow defendant Khalif Adams [real name: Jeffery Williams -LP] passed Percocet to Young Thug under the guise of a handshake right in front of the entire courtroom. Adams is serving a life sentence per murder.”
The juror caught filming got three days for contempt.
“Things are getting so petty that a lawyer for one of the defendants was ordered by the judge to buy lunch for everybody from a nearby strip club, and, and, and with given the penalty of writing a 17 page essay or spending 20 days in jail for the crime of being late to court a couple of times he’s got to write a paper on being professional in court. I am not joking. It’s literally 20 days in jail or write this paper.”
The judge specifies “Papaer is to be published quality, in APA format, and at least 10 primary and 10 secondary sources.”
I’m skipping over the question of using Young Thug’s rap lyrics in the trial.
Speaking of Dwight, he sent over a link that one of Young Thug’s co-defendants was stabbed in jail.
One of the five co-defendants on trial with rapper Young Thug has been stabbed at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, delaying the proceedings for at least a day, authorities said.
Shannon Stillwell was stabbed multiple times Sunday evening and was in stable condition, the county sheriff’s office said in a news release Monday.
Is Stillwell an aspiring rapper? Of course he is, being known as “SB” or “Shannon Jackson.”
Stillwell was stabbed by another inmate, Willie Brown, during a fight between the two men, who were housed in the same zone, the sheriff’s office said. The cause of the fight wasn’t known, the release said.
Brown, who was arrested in July 202O and was being held without bond, was charged with aggravated assault and possession of prohibited items in relation to Stillwell’s stabbing.
You may remember New Mexico Democratic Governor Lujan Grisham from such previous hits as I can unilaterally suspend parts of the Constitution I don’t like by decree. She made the foolish decision to try to extend her illegal decree, and was smacked down yet again by the courts. Here’s William Kirk of Washington Gun Law on the case:
“The case we’re talking about today is Springer v Grisham. This is one of many many challenges to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s gubernatorial order, where she sua sponte suspended the Second Amendment rights of everybody in the city of Albuquerque as well as the surrounding county.”
“There was certain parts of that order that were stripped down right away by the courts, but there are other parts that kept going.”
“A gubernatorial order on a public health emergency. Where have we ever seen that before?”
“In the the People’s Republic of Washington, we had a public health emergency a few years ago, where our governor promised us 15 days to flatten the curve and he shut down the whole state…after almost 900 days, 900 days, the governor finally released most of his emergency power.”
Grisham keeps extending the emergency gun order.
“The two issues that were challenged here in Springer were governor Grisham’s prohibition on firearms in parks and in playgrounds, and this ended up before the United States district court for the District of New Mexico and the judge here has enjoined the order on parks.”
“The restrictions on the playgrounds still remain in effect.” Per the decision: “The government has demonstrated that playgrounds are analogous to sensitive places where there is a longstanding history of firearm regulations.” Responsible gun owners may argue against this on a the basis of logic (lawfully armed citizens prevent unlawful behavior), but at least the court is now applying the Bruen decision.
Indeed, the decision itself states “defendants have not satisfied the test set forth in Bruen at this stage, as they have not demonstrated a historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of firearms in public parks. The Court therefore enters a preliminary injunction enjoining the public health order to the extent it prohibits carrying firearms in public parks in Bernalillo County and Albuquerque, New Mexico.” Just the fact that district courts are now citing Bruen in the first pages of their decisions is a huge win.
WK: “There is a litany of case law out there that says ‘Listen, if you’re violating a constitutional right in general, then we will presume that to be irreparable harm. So we’re talking about the violation of one’s Second Amendment rights, this activity is clearly covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment. So the Court’s willingness to enjoin this law is incredibly positive, because it also shows the court believe that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail.”
New Mexico relied heavily on the case Maryland Shall Issue Inc. vs. Montgomery County, but the decision pointed out that was decided pre-Bruen.
By actually applying the Bruen test, and using it to strike down half of the remaining decree, the courts have giving gun owners at east three-fourths of a loaf here.
This is a very interesting clip of Dave Rubin interviewing the always-interesting Bret Weinstein on a variety of intertwined topics.
The main focus of this segment is a mystery: Why did Musk block Weinstein on Twitter right after spending a fair amount of time agreeing with him on the need to fight censorship, but they touch on a whole lot of interesting ideas in the process.
DR:
That’s why I talk about Elon as much as I do on the show. Because I don’t I think if you would have said to Elon 10 years ago: “You’d own Twitter, you’d be in this free speech fight, you’d have, you know, the ADL calling you an anti-semite,” like the list of craziness that everyone now knows. I think he’d say “What are you talking about? That’s completely insane. I’m trying to get us to Mars. I’m building this cool car, blah blah blah.” But he, I think, is sort of the avatar for what you’re talking about there, the brave person that doesn’t know exactly what they’re going towards, something like that. But then he’s like “I better buy this freaking Twitter thing because I see all the danger.”
BW:
I think you’re right about Elon. I don’t know for sure that you are, but I think you’re right about what he’s trying to do, and how he ended up there, and how it would surprise him. I had a meeting with him. I flew to San Francisco, and I had a meeting with him, and he said it had been a very good meeting, and he wanted to meet again. A series of events unfolded over the course of the next 24 hours. My Twitter account got commandeered. Maybe that was organic, maybe it wasn’t. I don’t think—I know Elon had nothing to do with it. But anyway, I reached out to him, and tried to alert him to this, because I was concerned that he and I had private communications, and he didn’t, want you know… I don’t think there was anything compromising in them, but he didn’t want them in the world, and he needed to know that this…and he ended up, uh, blocking me after having this meeting, and I remain blocked.
Curious.
BW:
Now, the reason I raise it is because there’s a defect in all of those players that I mentioned who have all been shoved onto the same team, right? They have some incredible strengths, and I have to tell you um there’s been a lot of pain inflicted on us for standing up. But the camaraderie, the discovery of people, people who were up to the challenge, their coming together as a coalition, has been extremely rewarding and dwarfs any suffering that might have come along with this.
DR: “Yeah, it sounds kind of corny, but I mean that those three days or whatever it was we had at ARC [Alliance for Responsible Citizenship] to see everybody together again, and all be, like, we’re still alive we’re still here it’s powerful.”
BW: “The problem is, that all of those people who have the characteristics that I listed, that are courageous, that are insightful, and that have integrity, they tend they have a lot of Lone wolfess in them. Which means that they have a defect they’re terrible at confederating.”
BW: “I see him as very strategically clever, but I don’t think he’s any good at confederating, either. And my little story where he blocked me, it’s like, look, hey Elon, there aren’t that many people out here trying to advance the ball who have something um meaningful to contribute to the team. We have to stop tripping over each other.”
BW: “What happened was…I believe that Dark Horse [podcast] that [wife] Heather [Heying] and I [do] have faced a whole bunch of suppression that that has not yet shown up anywhere.”
BW: “We are demonetized to this day. YouTube demonetized us. I believe they were going to throw us off. Joe Rogan held an emergency podcast, and you know YouTube hasn’t messed with us since. But they didn’t remonetize. More than half our income in a one fell swoop. And we know that decision happened in the C-suite at Google.”
Weinstein believes that the real push to demonetize and silence him came when he started to examine alternatives to the consensus Flu Manchu narrative.
When we started to take it out of the realm of “Here’s a bunch of stuff you can’t understand and leave it to the virologists and the epidemiologists and the public health authorities” and the answer was “No, actually you can understand it and some of what you’re being told isn’t right.” Right when we started to do that and then we started to interact with people like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, Pierre Kory, and then those people went on to affect a huge audience, largely on Joe Rogan’s program. That changed the narrative, and so I think something has meddled with us in a particular, in a unique way, because frankly there weren’t that many people who could bridge the scientific to public.
Rubin brings the subject back to Musk. BW: “You talked to Elon about the things he was discovering inside of the crime scene that he bought. And one of the things that he discovered was that there were lots of mechanisms that caused things to be deboosted that weren’t labeled as such. And so he kept finding more and more levels and I was trying to convey to him, ‘Look, I think you will find something special when you figure out what happened to us.'”
When Musk blocked him over these, he said “Stop spamming me!”
DR: “What you’re really saying, in essence, is that you were a little too ahead of something in the game at which the speed is played that he may not want to be involved in that just yet.”
BW: “On Dark Horse we have the phrase ‘Zero is a special number.’ What that means is if you can turn a single social media platform, a single newspaper, or a single university so that it functions towards its stated goal, you actually stand a chance of fixing the, system because if there’s one social media platform on which you’re treated like an adult and you can exchange ideas freely and discuss them back and forth, nobody’s going to want to be on the ones in which you’re treated like a child.” I would like to think he’s right here, but I see an awful lot of people on the left acting as though the only good thing about the pre-Musk Twitter was the ability to banish users for WrongThink.
It’s an interesting conversation with a lot to chew on. Just why is their such a strong nexus between Social Justice and wanting to force conformity on Coronavirus?
But I also wonder: Just how much of a remnant is there on the left in favor of free speech? Are are any significant advocates for it under the age of, say, 50?
Hey, remember that whole “Sam Altman fired as CEO/reinstated as CEO of OpenAI” thing a couple of weeks ago? Here’s the archive story.
Sam Altman was reinstated late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, successfully reversing his ouster by the company’s board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees and investors, the company said.
The board would be remade without several members who had opposed Mr. Altman.
“We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo,” OpenAI said in a post to X, formerly known as Twitter. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”
The return of Mr. Altmanand the potential remaking of the board, capped a frenetic five days that upended OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot and one of the world’s highest-profile artificial intelligence companies.
“i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” Mr. Altman said in a post to X. “with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft.”
OpenAI’s board surprised Mr. Altman and the company’s employees on Friday afternoon when it told him he was being pushed out. Greg Brockman, the company’s president who co-founded the company with Mr. Altman and others, resigned in protest.
The ouster kicked off efforts by Mr. Altman, 38, his allies in the tech industry and OpenAI’s employees to force the company’s board to bring him back. On Sunday evening, after a weekend of negotiations, the board said it was going to stick with its decision.
But in a head-spinning development just hours later, Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, said that Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and others would be joining the company to start a new advanced artificial intelligence lab.
Nearly all of OpenAI’s more than 700 employees signed a letter telling the board they would walk out and follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft if he wasn’t reinstated, throwing the future of the start-up into jeopardy.
Four board members — Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI founder; Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora; Helen Toner, a director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology; and Tasha McCauley, an entrepreneur and computer scientist — had initially decided to push Mr. Altman out.
Well, here’s Patrick Boyle to provide some context:
A few takeaways:
There are two OpenAIs: “The non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware, and its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC.”
Musk was an early, and big, investor in the non-profit. “The founders pledged over one billion dollars to the venture, but actually only contributed around $130 million dollars- the majority of which came from Elon Musk.”
When he felt OpenAI was falling behind in 2018, he wanted to take over OpenAI himself. When the board rejected that, he resigned and took future pledged money with him, which blew a huge hole in their budget. (Whatever you think of Musk, I don’t think not being busy enough is his problem.)
Then came the for-profit doppelganger.
“The profits being capped at 100 times any investment.”
“The company explained this decision saying, ‘We need to invest billions of dollars in the coming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers.’ This transition from nonprofit to for-profit required OpenAI to balance its desire to make money with its stated commitment to ethical AI development.”
“This unconventional structure meant that Open AI had a board of directors, which in theory controls the entire corporate structure (which includes the charity and the capped profit company) – but which unlike other boards is not accountable to shareholders. The directors are in fact not allowed to own any stock to prevent a conflict of interest, because they are specifically not supposed to be aligned with shareholders.”
“The companies operating agreement – to investors – says – in writing: ‘It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.’ Documents like this – that were written by an actual lawyer – highlight the problems we are starting to see from the combined popularity of science fiction in Silicon Valley and widespread microdosing of hallucinogens.”
“In the real world, where the role of money is reasonably well defined, Open AI is an unprofitable company and is expected to need to raise a lot more money over time from investors like Microsoft, to keep up with the high costs of building more sophisticated chatbots.”
“Despite this lack of profitability, the company is valued by investors at 86 billion dollars, and Bloomberg reported last weekend that ‘some investors were considering writing down the entire value of their OpenAI holdings to zero.'”
“Former colleagues would have an open door to follow and join a new AI unit, according to Microsoft chief Satya Nadella. As much of a win as this might have appeared for Microsoft (people were saying that they had managed to buy the hottest AI firm for zero), this might not have been the optimal outcome for them, as they would likely have had to deal with antitrust regulators and lawsuits from other Open AI investors.”
“The majority of Open AI’s 700 or so employees signed an open letter to the board demanding that the board resign and that they rehire Altman. The letter stated that the board had told the employee leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission.’ The employees said that unless their demands were met, they would resign from Open AI and join the new subsidiary of Microsoft being headed up by Altman and Brockman.”
“You have to wonder what the employee contracts at Open AI look like that the entire staff could leave to work for a major investor in the company leaving Open Ai as an empty shell.”
“Typically, executives like Altman would have contracts that prevent them from hiring away key staff once they are no longer at the firm, and staff would have signed NDA’s preventing them from taking any technology with them.”
“The OpenAI story is a bit of a crazy one, where Microsoft and a number of other sophisticated investors agreed to put billions of dollars in, and employees got stock grants, all at an $86 billion valuation, without the contractual or fiduciary rights that investors might normally expect.”
Rival Anthropic has a similar structure.
“Bad corporate governance has been a growing issue particularly in Silicon Valley where companies like Google, Facebook and Snap structured their IPO’s such that founders were left with unchallenged power to do almost anything that they want.” Google and Facebook are garbage companies, but there are some scenarios where only founders can keep the company on a long-term vision rather than goosing quarterly profits (Jobs at Apple comes to mind).
Warren Buffet has a similar mechanism (A shares of stock only he controls) to keep control of Berkshire Hatheway.
“Since you are buying shares of companies in perpetuity, leadership who are not accountable to shareholders can take value destructive paths without answering to anyone. Meta’s Reality Labs division, which houses its efforts to build the metaverse, has lost around $46.5 billion dollars since 2019. Would Mark Zuckerberg have been able to waste this much money if he was accountable to investors?” I have a fairly strong suspicion that division is being used to hide all sorts of shenanigans.
Boyle is deeply suspicious of “stakeholder capitalism” as opposed to the old-fashioned, profit-maximizing kind.”
The thing missing from this summary, and all the coverage of the story I’ve seen, is why Altman was originally let go, and none of the principals involved seem to be talking about it…
One reason to be cautiously optimistic of anarcho-capitalist outsider Javier Milei’s victory in their presidential election is just how freaked out the international left is over it.
In a world with two (or more) major wars going on, China imploding, and a major U.S. recession, a libertarian winning election in Argentina is suddenly the new Worst Thing Ever.
“This came after years of far left fascist rule which has plunged the country into crisis, with the inflation rate hitting 143% earlier this month. Argentina has gone from a wealthy nation with an enviable standard of living to one destroyed by socialist lunacy.”
“That’s why firebrand Javier Milei, a conservative, a libertarian, a vehemently anti-socialist, anti-woke outsider won the presidential election in a landslide.”
“The world’s media went into a predictable meltdown, similar to when Italy’s center-right Giorgia Meloni was elected prime minister last year.”
“But the election results show Argentinians, including young Argentinians, importantly, have finally woken up to the lunacy of watching close to half the population live in poverty despite being blessed with abundant natural resources.”
Milei “has been clear in his desire to tackle the bloated bureaucracy that has so poorly served the country.”
And yes, he still intends to shut down Argentina’s central bank. “This weekend he confirmed that it was an absolute, non-negotiable.”
He wants to eliminate the Ministry of Sports and Tourism, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development, the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity, and Ministry of Public Works.
Says Milei: “We are crushing them in the cultural battle! We are not only economically superior, we’re culturally superior, we are aesthetically superior, we are better than them at everything, and that triggers them!”
And since they can’t beat him in the field of ideas, “they use the repressive power of the state to destroy their enemies.”
You know who else likes the cut of Milei’s jib? Donald Trump.
“Congratulations to Javier Milei on a great race for President of Argentina! The whole world was watching, and I’m very proud of you! You will turn your country around and truly make Argentina great again!”
…don’t need any of that newfangled computerized vote fraud. No sirree! They do things the old fashioned way: By handing out cash to homeless people.
“Videotape shows individuals being dropped off in black Suburbans and Expeditions and entering City Hall to vote. When they exit, a man takes out what appears to be a large bundle of cash and peels off a bill for each individual.” Old school!
Bonus: The man dropping people off appears to be Springfield Democratic mayoral candidate Justin Hurst himself. It’s not often you get candidates with the pluck, verve and raw stupidity to commit their own hands-on election fraud. Usually they delegate that sort of thing to underlings. (More experienced criminals call that underling “the cutout.”)
“According to sworn affidavits from the election workers, many of the people who came in they listed their address as being being a local homeless shelter. Furthermore, the affidavits claim that many of these voters who came inside were noticeably either drunk or under the influence of drugs, and many of them were confused about why they even came to City Hall in the first place.”
“One of the election workers wrote in her affidavit that she saw a man hovering over some of the voter shoulders while they were standing at the voting booth. At times he appeared to be pointing at the place on the ballot where the persons should vote.”
“Many of these individuals came up to them multiple times throughout the day and asked them where they’re supposed to go in order to get the $10 that they were promised as payment.”
“I had seven people ask me directly where they their $10 payment was. One man said in Spanish vote for Hurst and you’ll get $10.”
And yes, the exchange of money outside City Hall is on camera.
Five poll workers signed sworn affidavits attesting to the voting fraud.
Naturally, Hirsch swears up and down not voting fraud occurred.
“It is patently illegal to exchange money for votes within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Here’s specifically what the relevant part of the relevant statute: ‘No person shall directly or indirectly pay, give, or promise to a voter any gift or reward to influence his vote, or to induce him to withhold his vote.'” I’m pretty sure every state in the union has similar statutes.
At the current time, it does not appear that Mr. Hurst has been indicted…
London mayor Sadiq Khan’s much-hated, rent-seeking “Ultra-Low Emission Zone” scheme uses cameras and vans to catch and fine people using gas-powered cars a hefty £12.50-per-day in order to make clear to ordinary Londoners of limited means just how much he holds them in contempt “fight climate change.”
But a group of Londoners has found an innovative and amusing way to nullify the snooping cameras:
It turns out those dinosaur costumes are just the right height to block the snoop cameras.
A herd or pack of T-Rexes is evidently called “a terror.”
The ULEZ has recently been extended even to outer boroughs like Bexley. “There are lots of people in this sort of borough that are low income. So the reality of this is that if you have a vehicle that isn’t compliant, you may not be in a position where you can afford to: A.) Pay the charge, or B.) Buy a vehicle that’s compliant.”
“I’m shocked it’s come to this.”
“In central London you’ve got tubes, you’ve got trains. We simply don’t have that out here.”
“The people that this affects most of all [are] people at the bottom end of the social ladder.”
“I’m 75 and I’m coming out to to help the people that can’t afford to pay the £12.50. This is why we’re doing this.”
