I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will undoubtedly have Mythos 2 ready soon.
And I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That’s not my style.
Tesla open sourced its patents and we made the Supercharger network available to all competitors, even though we could have made it a walled garden.
SpaceX launches competing satellite systems with no increase in price or use of unfair terms.
Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform.
…
When you're 200 years into "Getting rid of monarchs for freedom and chill" and the democratically unelected bureaucrat hits you with the "get into the panopticon" look
The socialist playbook is to correctly identify favoritism for the rich as an injustice, falsely label it capitalism, then reject the capitalist solution of equality under the law. Instead, they demand that government simply favor them instead. The problem isn't favoritism itself, it's who receives it.
NOBODY tells Americans this part of the story.
In 2009, Japan elected a government that treated your alliance like garbage.
Our Prime Minister looked your President in the eye and said "Trust me."
Then he broke his word.
Your bases were called a burden. Your soldiers were treated like a problem. US-Japan relations hit their COLDEST point in 50 years.
And our economy? Two lost decades. Deflation. Despair.
Then March 11, 2011.
America had EVERY excuse to say "not our problem."
A government that insulted you.
An ally that acted ungrateful.
A country that seemed to have forgotten you.
You know what America did?
24,000 troops. 24 ships. 189 aircraft.
You didn't ask if our politicians deserved it.
You saw old people freezing in the dark with no food, no water, no heat.
That was enough for you.
Here is what every Japanese person understood that day:
You didn't come for our government.
You came for US. The people.
Governments fight. Governments fail. Governments apologize and lie.
But you dug through black mud for strangers whose leaders had spit on you.
That autumn, 82% of Japanese said they felt friendly toward America. The highest ever recorded.
Not because of a treaty.
Because when we were at our weakest, and you had every reason to turn away —
YOU. SHOWED. UP.
Japan will never forget who came when even our own leaders had failed us. 🇺🇸🇯🇵
Now that the US is knocked out, I am formally extending an invitation to the American people to support Norway.
Why?
1: The Vikings discovered America before Columbus.
2: There are more ethnic Norwegians in the US than in Norway.
3: Next weekend we can pillage the English peasants together.
4:
This basically describes the air conditioner debate as well. Americans are like "just fix it" and Europeans see some sort of dignity in being miserable for no reason when a solution exists.
The most interesting part of the red card saga isn't the ruling. It's how differently Americans and Europeans process the idea that they might have been wronged.
Europeans are fundamentally different from Americans in one particular way: they expect life to be aggravating and at times unfair. It's just a fact of moving through the world. I joke that in Europe, the customer is always wrong. You didn't read the fine print. The only pharmacy in town is closed every other Tuesday for three hours, and even if the times weren't posted, that's still your problem. Too bad if you want the bill, because the waiter's on his union-mandated half-hour smoke break, and you're just going to have to wait.
To quote the great Mark Knopfler: sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug. There's something freeing in that. Things are less in your control, so there's less angst in managing your expectations.
In America, things couldn't be more different. We simply can't accept a wrong left unrighted.
The flight attendant sneezed handing you a drink on your one-hour flight? 15,000 frequent flyer miles. Didn't like your appetizer? A replacement is on the way, and the whole course comes off the bill. There's a reason our interstates are lined with trial lawyer billboards.
Europeans have turned complaining into a continental pastime with no expectation that the universe owes them a remedy for their grief. You gripe about the train being late, your friends nod solemnly and everyone goes back to their apéro. In America, we launch a full-blown investigation of the train system, sue the government (and its contractors) that allowed for the tardiness and hold a Congressional hearing on the state of national infrastructure.
So to an objective observer, the red card shouldn't have happened, and VAR was a travesty. To Americans, our star player shouldn't be unfairly banned from a match we couldn't afford to lose for a card he so obviously didn't deserve.
Who cares that FIFA used a little-used reversal to fix it. Who cares that other people are mad about it. We. Were. Wronged. It was unjust. It must be corrected. We would accept nothing less.
Europeans waxing poetic about the sanctity of the game are, of course, talking about a governing body whose last tournament host was decided via confirmed cash bribes — one that imposed dress codes on women, shrugged off widespread allegations of modern slavery and reconfigured the entire tournament calendar to suit the host country. Which is exactly the point. If you've made peace with all of that, at least enough to watch the tournament four years later, a probationary suspension isn't actually a scandal.
Maybe that's the real divide. Over millennia, Europeans have made peace with being the bug. Americans have never once considered it, and apparently, we're not about to start now.
You avoid cronyism the same way you avoid corruption in any other area: stop giving people the power to hand out favors. Protect property rights instead of political privilege.