OpenAI (2015)

> The American society is just as corrupt and screwed up as any other country

That's a weird phrase. It hints at an assumption or widespread belief that we aren't as corrupt or screwed up. Which I get; I was born and raised in the US, and I got a full dose of American exceptionalism too.

Corruption in particular is a tricky thing to define. Currently, it is patently obvious that we are quite a bit more corrupt than the median. The recent big spike is new, but if you pay attention to the news, you'll see that over and over again we're being presented with evidence that this is not a new thing. This is a longstanding thing and the only thing that's new is the degree of exposure. We may have been this corrupt in the past; there's some pretty mindblowing stuff in the history books. But I don't recall this level of naked corruption at any point in the country's history.

As for screwed up, we've held the crown on that for decades at this point. We've exported that trait throughout the world, so it's getting a little harder to tell. Also, there's plenty of homegrown screwed-upness for our variety to interbreed with.

But this is just an American talking to an American. To the rest of the world, the corruption and decay is and has been extremely obvious. Talk to Europeans. They see us as a third world country who happens to still have the biggest military and hold the world's reserve currency. (For now.) But the "third world" part is not an exaggeration, from the people I've talked to. And I can't really argue? Fascism is risen, we're ok with secret police disappearing people from our streets, we're ok with our public money being used to pay people to vote for a particular party. (If you object to "ok", protesting and writing strongly-worded messages on social media doesn't count. I confess that that's all I do.)

> Communism is better than capitalism.

Here's where I disagree. "Structure X is better than structure Y" conveys very little information and is not a useful framing. It's a real example of "ideas are worthless, execution is everything". Capitalism is fine. Free trade is powerful; it's capable of and has accomplished an enormous amount of good. It just needs to be protected and managed; free trade being good does not mean the freer the better, for any definition of "free" that someone wants to come up with. Communism is fine too. It's not even incompatible with competition. Hell, the actual systems in use today aren't even one or the other, the pure forms don't work and aren't acceptable to any population.

But perhaps you mean late stage capitalism and late stage communism. Those both suck, from what I can tell.

Last I’d checked, Brockman is the largest single Trump Super PAC donor in 2026. It’s a midterm, though, and because of the existing focuses (Iran, Fed, etc) there isn’t much that needs bribing at the moment. Pardons cost less than Brockman’s given, no new taxes or reform are likely, and AI is safe.

The largest structural danger for the present economy is interest rates and AI investment (the primary driver of index returns) are (1) tightly linked (2) moving in the wrong directions.

We’ll see whether Anthropic goes through with an IPO and what happens. If the numbers look wrong (even if they’re good, but not good enough), everything could come tumbling down.