I think one of the reasons politicians can be bought so cheaply by interest groups is that the opponents of the interests groups have practically no money. The interest groups don't need to spend a ton as long as they spend more than their opponents.
The linked post talks about the effectiveness of AIPAC but fails to mention how much is spent by say, Palestinian interest groups. Perhaps there's a good reason for this: do Palestinian groups have any money to spend on US elections? Try fundraising in Gaza right now.
Likewise, business interest groups have a lot more money to spend on elections than, say, environmental groups. The latter have to beg for small donations from individuals just to stay afloat. Thus, it's relatively easy for business groups to outspend environmental groups. To win an auction, you just have to be the highest bidder.
This assumes enough of the small dollar population agrees on anything to meaningfully compete on the cost of buying.
They may on paper, but of course a lot of money goes to dividing us up come election time. What you are suggesting is no shortcut - it would rather be almost like inventing an alternative political party.
Exactly, that is the proof. We are already losing this game. Trying to outspend lobbyists using some kind of crowdfunding sounds interesting at first, but is just restating the same terms on which the game is already rigged, which means you will just lose again.
I think there might be a way to make it work, however you would have to be very aware and plan for a way to not reinvent the same losing dynamics. It might not be possible.
Humorous of you to think they would be against AIPAC.
Gulf states have little to nothing in common with Palestinians. Citizens of most gulf states are born into relative wealth merely by the fact their countries are rich in petrodollars. They build lavish cities and have standards of living (for their citizens) that increasingly put the West to shame. They are "diversifying" from oil by building massive AI datacenters and essentially catering to Westerners who want to live unencumbered by Western pretensions of civic duty, avoid taxes in their home countries, etc. They make deals with the Israelis and have for over a decade now, even if under the table. They buy American weapons, their elites have frequently been educated at the most exclusive British or American universities. They like expensive Italian cars. Money is money.
Meanwhile Palestinians are born poor, in a failed state with no autonomy. Some UAE crypto influencer is yolo gambling away more money than most Palestinian kids will see in their lifetimes. They live under an occupation and have basically no rights in that regard. They are poor. Just google image a picture of Gaza vs the UAE. It just doesn't even compare. Maybe on some level they are both Arabs. But the same rule applies. Money is money.
The gulf state governments gave up on trying to care about them many many decades ago. They realized it was cheaper (and more prosperous) to go along to get along with the United States and Israel. If they hadn't, their capitals might look like Tehran right now. Over the years it became easy to blame other people for the problem - Iran, even the Palestinians themselves. They have long since washed their hands of caring.
Don't conflate the Gulf States with Palestinians, or associate them with anyone on the losing side of anything when it comes to money and power. They are as corrupt and bought-in to this system of wealth/might makes right as anyone.
Feels like a lot of words to avoid thinking about “black” money and favors in kind. For example, nobody would include Trump’s golden bar from Switzerland in such ann estimate - repeated ad nauseam for all lobbying corruption.
"Emails from October 2005 show that after Mandelson complained to Epstein about a lack of British Airways air miles, Epstein offered to pay for his plane tickets to the Caribbean."[1]
The biggest shocker to me has been just how "cheap" a lot of people are to buy off. Mandelson is complaining about air miles FFS. So much of this is a few thousand here, some fancy tickets there, a jet ride elsewhere, etc. In my mind it was always much, much bigger sums that people were selling their countries & souls out for, sadly, it turns out a lot of people, even in really high positions, are shockingly cheap.
I donated $100 to my state's gubernatorial campaign as a part of my annual "make the world a better place" campaign, and was surprised to receive a call from an unknown number the following day. It was the Governor, thanking me for my donation personally, and wondering if there were any issues close to my heart that she could keep in mind. Note that this was from her personal cell phone (for whatever value of personal an executive politician actually has, but still), and she invited me to phone her if I had any issues that the state government could resolve.
That's a wildly low sum of money for a 5 minute personal call, let alone even a modest intervention.
The Internet thinks that lobbying is bribery. If you wanted a bribery like vehicle, you'd just donate to a PAC or more recently, the new ballroom. Lobbying is just paying people to speak to politicians. After a company has said everything that wanted to every politician that can possibly support their cause, there isn't anything left for them to do.
I think they just did that because of the energy around it for open source models. Their heart probably wasn't in it and the amount of people fine tuning given the prices were probably too low to continue putting in attention there.
There is none. It's just a way for coders to feel or be able to say they "work with AI" imo. Same with doing light wrapper coding to do agents stuff. The real AI work is on actual math and ML with the internet scale data, but only four big companies does that and this is the closest regular coders can get.
This is classic sama policy. With your words act with grace and counter to what observers will think you would. But in actions and behind the scenes take every step to undermine the competition.
Makes me think that mass analysis of archive.org websites (on a much larger scale than 2000 sites) for color distribution from screenshots or other stuff like this is a cool project ripe for picking.
> It took them two months, to develop chip for Llama 3.1 8B. In the AI world where one week is a year, it's super slow. But in a world of custom chips, this is supposed to be insanely fast.
LLama 3.1 is like 2 years at this point. Taking two months to convert a model that only updates every 2 years is very fast
2 months of design work is fast, but how much time does fabrication, packaging, testing add? And that just gets you chips, whatever products incorporate them also need to be built and tested.
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