The long awaited Gerard/Zitron crossover: I'm on Better Offline saying the stuff I always say, about OpenClaw, Moltbook and the coming Great Depression 2

I outlined it here a bit. Basically there's a lot of Wall St fuck fuck games - AI is just one of them - that's a tottering heap of dollar-denominated accounting entries for lies and trash. But also, the institutions have been white anted. Trump's pick for the next Fed chair is a bitcoiner who espouses Austrian economics - that is, literally the same gold standard economics that made Great Depression 1 worse.

I haven't listened yet. Enron quite interestingly wasn't audited. Enron participated in the dot-com bubble; they had an energy-exchange Web app. Enron's owners, who were members of the stock-holding public, started doing Zitron-style napkin math after Enron posted too-big-to-believe numbers, causing Enron's stock price to start sliding down. By early 2001, a group of stockholders filed a lawsuit to investigate what happened to stock prices, prompting the SEC to open their own investigation. It turns out that Enron's auditor, Arthur Andersen, was complicit! The scandal annihilated them internationally.

From that perspective, the issue isn't regulatory capture of SEC as much as a complete lack of stock-holding public who could partially own OpenAI and hold them responsible. But nVidia is publicly traded…

I've now listened to the section about Enron. The point about Coreweave is exactly what I'm thinking with nVidia; private equity can say yes but stocks and bonds will say no. I think that it's worth noting that private equity is limited in scale and the biggest players, Softbank and Saudi/UAE sovereign wealth, are already fully engaged; private equity is like musical chairs and people must sit somewhere when the music stops.

Perhaps something like this: https://lemmy.world/post/42528038/22000735

Deferring responsibility for risk and compliance obligations to AI is bound to lead to some kind of tremendous problem, that's a given. But the EU has been pretty keen lately on embedding requirements into their newer digital-realm laws about giving market regulators access to internal documents on request.

This is not to suggest it's anywhere close to a certainty that an Enron will happen though. There is still the exceptionally large problem of company executives are part of the power structures which selectively target who to prosecute, if their lobbyists haven't already succeeded in watering the legislation down to be functionally useless before they're in force. So it will take a huge fuck up and public pressure for any of the countries to make good on their own rules.

Given that almost all the media heat from the Trump-Epstein files has been directed at easy target single public personalities, completely ignoring the obvious systemic corruption by multiple corporate entities, I don't have high hopes for that part. But if the impending fuck up and scale of noncompliance is big enough, there's a chance there will be audits and EU courts involved.

I used to be young and pretty, now I'm old and well preserved

I expect we could rant for hours without drawing breath

I get the worst bottom of the barrel AI ads on the YouTube. At least the viewers find them hilarious.