Microsoft already has all their business data in the form of handing document storage and emails. Trusting another of their services to also not use that data for Microsoft's own purposes is reasonable.
This is only a surprise to HN, because all the other threads about the corrupt US regime have been flagged before. I guess now is a good time as any to start paying attention. Who would've thought that attention is all you need?
I think you’re making a major unspoken assumption which is that all of the downvotes / flags are from real users. HN has no form of identity verification and is functionally equivalent to 4chan. Theres no telling how many bot farms exist on here with the sole purpose of manipulating discourse to be favorable to the current US administration and also Israel.
When you say "HN", do you mean you? Who else was surprised? The place is full of people constantly commenting about how bad the US is, how corrupt the government is, how terrible CEOs (particularly Altman) are, late stage capitalism, etc., etc.
I’m one of those criticasters and I’m getting downvoted constantly. I don’t care about the downvotes. I do care about western countries slipping into fascism just because people are so proud to admit they voted for a stupid clown.
I'm more upset about the large group of people in the startup industry, possibly even a majority, who would be totally happy about countries slipping into fascism if they made a little more money along the way.
Who cares about ethics and morality? Those aren't profitable!
Yes, but it's not just personal moral failings, the system itself is corrupt. Rich people aren't supposed to be constantly living on the precipice and forced to double down on evil to keep their wealth. It shouldn't be all-or nothing. This is the result of our debt-based system. This is deeply abnormal. Rich people should be comfortable in every way and should have the surplus to take a moral stance without risking to lose everything. You can see this play out very clearly with OpenAI. Sam has enemies. He may have done some things that he fears would catch up with him if he loses power. It's always like this with the most powerful people; they usually end up making Faustian bargains which put them into extreme all-or-nothing situations and they take the entire world for a ride with them.
That's not to say anyone should be excused but the system's fragility compounds the problem.
Rich people aren't supposed to be constantly living on the precipice and forced to double down on evil to keep their wealth.
That does resonate to some extent, when I see people of actual merit (or at least, people who have done things with actual merit) like Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang, lining up to suck meritless people like Trump off.
The problem is, once the rich people have secured their fortunes through self-abasement, they never seem to use those fortunes to redress the humiliation they've suffered. That makes your argument a hard sell. Would Bezos and Musk and Cook and Huang and Dell and Altman and Soon-Shiong and Zuckerberg and Mickey Mouse -- all the figures from the famous Ann Telnaes cartoon and more -- still be as supportive of Trump if they didn't have to be?
Yep great point. I guess this is the most extreme case. This dependency that billionaires have on the government is a symptom of the same effect and it's terrible regardless of which party is in charge, just negatively impacts different people. The same dynamic of government dependency flows down to everyone else.
It's because the government can print money. The government is the ultimate fallback, if interest rates increase and money becomes scarce, these big corporations need the government to provide big contracts to back them up to get through that tough period.
This is what I mean by all-or-nothing situation. These big corporations NEED huge, constant inflows of cash to stay solvent. The system is always full of debt; the liquidity is always under threat of being sucked out rapidly... So all these big companies are terrified of such event. They need to know that if money gets scarce, they've got a reliable stream they can draw from and the only reliable source of money in times of monetary scarcity is the government.
There are a lot of comments criticizing who do not get downvoted constantly. I know because I have read them.
You may criticize and you may get downvoted, but it may not be the case that you are being downvoted just because you criticize, and it is certainly not the case that all criticism gets downvoted.
I think a lot of voters didn't know what they were getting the country into, or just were too ignorant or misinformed to notice, in voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. There are actual fascists too, of course. I'm just disappointed that they won; the damage has already been immeasurable, and to some extent irreversible, and we're not even halfway into the term.
The first term was just him being an idiot. He's stupid.
The second term is Elon dismantling the entire intelligence system, infiltrating every government agency and compromising every datacenter, piping all the data into a centralized database for stalking and mass deportation, etc.
While it was absolutely clear that Trump's bad news, I don't think anybody quite predicted the absolute fascism that would spring up, and just how quickly it would overwhelmingly FUCK everything.
His first term was relatively harmless but I guess it really rallied the goons, who proceeded to have four entire years to prepare the next dark ages.
This is too naive. A lot of voters were eager and happy to vote for hurting other people on the premise that it was somehow going to turn into personal benefit. They are only now upset because it turns out they're being hurt too.
An dpeople have short memories when it comes to this stuff. If the USA somehow manages to survive this and Trump and his allies are peacefully voted out and removed from power, I'd bet $250 that a lot of 2024 Trump voters would still happily vote for a platform consisting mostly of Trump's 2024 platform and Project 2025 plans. They're not learning the lesson that the core policy approach is designed to facilitate our decline into corporate feudalism; they're just learning the lesson that Trump himself and a few other specific individuals are bad, for them, personally. Trump Regret is not going to be enough to save us.
> This is too naive. A lot of voters were eager and happy to vote for hurting other people on the premise that it was somehow going to turn into personal benefit. They are only now upset because it turns out they're being hurt too.
That is literally exactly what Leopards Eating People's Faces Party means.
> "'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."
Right, but my point is that the people who vote for leopards eating faces in the first place aren't thinking critically about the leopard ended up eating their face. Conservatives are angry at Trump specifically, and they are completely missing the big picture that the entire movement of conservatism is controlled by powerful interests in service of furthering along the corporate feudalism project. They are voting emotionally with a narrow focus on whatever issues are right in front of them, unaware how extensively their attention and focus is manipulated by propaganda and the media, both mainstream and alternative. That is why people keep voting for the leopards eating faces over and over.
You know those people have existed since practically forever, right? You learn to tune it out and then you never notice if they start being less wrong.
It's the surface details problem: people post nice sounding things on the internet but don't think about them and do the nostradamus thing of predicting everything because caused by everything.
If you predict a corrupt cartel in "the US" will do a thing, then on a long enough timescale you'll eventually be right in general but wrong about every significant detail.
(also the people with this opinion don't seem to do anything with it - it doesn't appear to motivate them to vote, organize, think critically or come up with compromises - they simply turn out to belittle people on the internet while actually acting to normalize new excesses).
They've been around forever, even before Trump's first administration. But a broken clock is right twice a day.
Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.
Clearly, HN doesn't want us to listen to them.
Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?
That is "HN". HN is the people who read and post here.
> Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.
I'm sure some are but quite a few are not because I have been able to see them quite a lot without clicking.
> Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?
I must say that I have never seen that happen, but I don't tend to trawl through a lot of hidden comments. There certainly seem to be some favored billionaires who might upset people to criticize here. Trump is obviously not among them.
Mentioning the trick makes the question trivial, though. I think a better pretext would be, "My dirty car is parked in the driveway." That removes the ambiguity that the car could already be at the car wash, and that it needs to be driven there.
reply