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When we decline to speak ill of the dead, it’s because we have compassion for the living. In this respect, I am sorry for Kirk’s children. I don’t know if Kirk was a good father, but if he was, that does little to mitigate the damage he did to other people’s children. I can only hope for the sake of his kids that they have role models who will teach them that it is wrong to profit off the dehumanization of people because of who they are.

Kirk was fine with murder as long the right people were dying.

His entire business was saying the other side was evil and dehumanizing them.

Today, fundamental model providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft are in a position equivalent to that of Microsoft in the 1990s and 2000s. They are now responsible for ensuring that all the computing power brought to market each year is consumed.

And the frame for me is when we started The Verge, the only thing we were ever going to start was a website.

Increasingly, you’ve got to find other sources of inspiration to make a website – which by the way are still the coolest fucking things ever.

Adding to my befuddlement is the fact that he’s every single stereotype of a loathsome shitheel from the last one hundred years of popular culture, all at once—the ignorant blowhard at the end of the bar, the entitled silver spoon trust fund asshole, the clueless boss who does nothing but create crises for his employees to clean up, the lecherous old man, the vapid self-important celebrity, the penny pinching miser who stiffs the honest working man, the oily corrupt politician, the cowardly bully, the draft-dodging faux-patriot, the scumbag crook who gets off on a technicality. He’s almost literally every repugnant trope from generations of literature, movies, and TV shows. This is the man— the clown, the ignoramous—who ends our Republic?

Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.

the United States is not made up of well-adjusted adults; it’s made up of Americans

It’s sort of pathetic to reflect that we have so few—maybe no—authentic and unmediated experiences that the thing that now really upsets people is an alteration of a simulation of authenticity.

You can read conspiracy theorization itself as a nostalgia for the reality of political power in a situation where people feel powerless.

“Nobody owns any piece of me,” he says, exhaling. “I’m at a point in my life where if something isn’t going to be fun or a pleasant experience, I have no problem saying no, even if it’s a lot of money or a lot of eyeballs. I can do literally whatever I feel like doing.”

A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.

Among the most important are immortality, and, if the expression may be allowed, individuality; properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are considered as the same, and may act as a single individual.

If by American democracy we mean a pluralistic, multiracial society of political and social equals, then American democracy as we know it began with the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 60 years ago today.

“There is no middle ground in this question,” Ross continued. “We must concede the right of suffrage to everyone who stands as our equal in the scale of creation, or we must deny it to all. It is universal suffrage or autocracy.”

The relationship between the firm and this network is cemented by blatant self-dealing. The most glaring example is End Citizens United. In 2015, just one year after founding their consulting firm, Mothership principals Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes also co-founded this PAC. It quickly became one of their largest and most reliable clients, a perfect circle of revenue generation that blurs the line between vendor and client.

This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.