As always, a reminder that this administration has Silicon Valley money and people up and down its roster. The founders should refuse to take money from the VCs that support this regime, and the engineers should refuse to work for portfolio companies. Things will change quite rapidly if that becomes the norm.
Founders need to stop taking money from a16z et al. These VC's brands should be so completely tarnished that they are never given a seat in the halls of serious people ever again
> You know, the one that the Trump team cut to shreds?
I looked this up and sounds like they let probationary employees go (40/140 employees at dept of commerce CHIPS office) + 20 voluntarily resigned. I wonder if that was intentional or just the usual DOGE indiscriminate chaos.
> The staff cuts, while significant, aren’t as deep as some within the government and chip industry anticipated. In particular, they won’t have a major impact on the teams responsible for negotiating with companies and evaluating their progress toward contractual benchmarks, a person familiar with the matter said. The chips office leadership urged against cuts to those departments in recent meetings with Lutnick.
Addtionally, NIST's CHIPS office also had probationary cuts...CHIPS has two parts, one subsidizing companies via Dept of Commerce and a 2nd big investment in public sector research which NIST was doing.
It's also congress assigned money so they probably can't claw it back (legally), the legislative branch controls the purse. But they could slow walk it or try to change the rules.
Trump has long boasted that he could have gotten semiconductor investments without subsidies. He would see it as a win if TSMC did the same thing, or even more, for free.
This is a really generous take. Much more likely is that the Trump admin is very friendly with Putin, sees Putin as an ally, and sees Ukraine as an enemy. (I'll leave the 'why' for future speculation)
It seems fashionable recently for analysts to leave "why" for future speculation. No one wants to bluntly say that Trump is in Putin's pocket. But that's not really what's important here.
Trump and Putin could hate each other or love each other. What matters is that America and Russia are on the verge of signing a redux of the Hitler/Stalin pact, in which Poland was conquered and divided. One can wonder who bullied whom, or who will be the first to violate it and stab the other in the back. But the point is, these agreements do not happen when either of the parties is a free county. They happen between autocrats.
A massive part of modern military operations, including cyberwarfare, is the understanding that a battle happening in someone else's territory is better than one happening at home. Or, more prosaically, "the best defense is a good offense".
Offensive cyberops help us identify when our own systems have been breached and give us valuable information about future attacks, even before you get into the very real physical warfare happening in Ukraine.
Every day it seems more like these guys are _actually_ working for the Russians
Trump and his kids have admitted that their real estate business had a disproportionate amount of its revenue originating from Russia — most probably money laundering or simply keeping wealth safe from Putin.
Trump doesn’t see any problem with Russia because he’s not personally negatively affected by them, but he profits from their business.
He's been "represented by the media, both mainstream and popular-alternative, as some kind of anti-vaxx leader" because he has gone on record multiple times questioning the efficacy of vaccines and advocating for people not to take them. Just because there are people even crazier than he is doesn't change the reality of his beliefs. Don't giga-brain your way into the wrong conclusion, occam's razor is right there.
Wow, thank you for providing this source. I was about to respond to this news with something like "that RFK jr. is not anti vaccine but pro safe vaccine". But after seeing this I see that he is just a flip flopper
What's really infuriating to me is the way in which members of the startup world -- people who claim to wear the mantle of creators and builders -- have actively supported this nonsense. A16Z, Founders Fund, Sequoia all talk a big game about America being the greatest nation on the planet, and then turn around and back this regime in a naked grab for power and money. The hypocrisy is astounding.
By definition it's not possible for fascists to be hypocrites, because fascists do not use language to describe the world or pursue the truth, they only use language to gain power. If you accuse them of hypocrisy you've already lost, because you've failed to realize that they're not even playing the same game as you are. It's like accusing a Markov chain of being a hypocrite; you have fundamentally misunderstood the nature your opponent.
I think your misunderstanding is in the "turning around" part. If you read any of the unhinged manifestos A16Z et al have written, you'll understand it's all very consistent with what you are witnessing now. Some people have been calling on this for at least a decade, but they are largely ignored.
For all the intelligence they seem to purport, being complicit in supporting the takedown of democracy and the once good name of the US... Catastrophe for business, the startup world, and innovation.
Don't s** where you sleep.
And all those crypto bros thinking this would be a good thing... They seemed to forget that blockchain participation is essentially a luxury item. A dead economy is awful for crypto.
