Comment by SpicyLemonZest
6 hours ago
I've been beating this drum for a while and I'm going to keep doing it. If you run or make strategic decisions for a tech company in 2025, you need to understand that many if not most of your competitors are working hard to figure out how to wield the federal government in their favor. I wouldn't advise doing it yourself, unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029, but any assumption that the current federal government will treat you fairly without taking their side in political battles is a grave strategic error.
> I wouldn't advise doing it yourself, unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029
That's optimistic that you think anyone is going to prison in 2029.
Well, early supporters of fascism do tend to end up in prison, because fascism needs purges. So in a monkey paw way, I wouldn't bet against the current crop of CEOs falling from graces very hard.
That's not quite how facism works.
There are the purges. But it's normally not the corporate or moneyed puppetmasters getting purged, rather it's the political allies of the fascists that get purged. Military and law enforcement leaders who start off as allies have a particularly dismal survival record in these kinds of governments, since they don't have even the ephemeral protection of democratic legitimacy.
It may take longer, but they will, eventually. Maybe not Tim Cook.
The companies that you could accuse of outright bribery are Meta, Twitter, Paramount, and Disney who all gave money that benefited the President directly.
Cook kissing ass and giving the President a meaningless trinket, doesn’t quite arise to that level.
I've seen values estimated at between $150,000 to $200,000 for that trinket. That's actually a pretty solid bribe for most politicians and that's just what's been visible to the public.
For comparison, in AZ we had legislators caught in a sting operation that were selling individual votes for gambling legislation for between $660 to $60,000 in the 1990s.
We should not normalize this. That was a outright bribe even if it wasn't as big as what others gave. I wouldn't get off the hook for murder just because I argued that Ted Bundy killed waaaaaaay more people than me.
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This.
I mean billionaires don't even go to prison for engaging in pedophilia. Which is just about the worst crime you can commit. If anyone thinks liberals or conservatives will put them in prison for bribery, they're being a little naive.
This nation is owned by the billionaires. In all honesty, they don't even need to be in alignment with the government. There's next to nothing the government can do to rein in giant banks. If anything, the government has to be certain to make sure the banks are appeased.
You could say "moneyed interests". There is a distinction - there are both huge companies and billionaires, and a lot of the companies are owned in part or in whole by the billionaires. But together, they increasingly determine how our political system is run.
It all seems to entrenched and at the same time escalating, it feels like it's inevitable it'll all fall apart. I'm surprised we're not seeing more moneyed interests colluding to establish equilibrium which is sustainable.
Trying to give something more power because you think it likes power is generally considered risky
https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1849951974944313590?lang...
The exception, of course, is if you expect to co-benefit - Intel sent their CEO to kiss the ring and now they might be getting free investment money out of the deal. But it's definitely a risky strategy.
It was literally less than 48 hours where the president went from fully negative to fully positive on the intel ceo. I don’t think the ring is all the ceo kissed. That’s the president’s plan for every ceo.
That is not an exception, it's exactly what the Tweet is talking about
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I doubt anyone will care about this in four years. Society grows accustomed to daily life, as with the Vichy. The job market will be in tatters, similar to what South Africa has now with 40% unemployment. Every time a homeless person steals copper wire from a street lamp in LA, they make $50 from illegal recyclers and it costs taxpayers $10k to fix. $20 million per year, $100 million since 2020. 2029 there will be crime drones swarming LA recording crimes and seeking overly tanned people in real time on YouTube. LA took out a $1 billion loan this year to keep the lights on, and now Denver wants to do the same with zero economic prospects, which is a weird sales pitch.
> as with the Vichy
Well, Vichy collaboraters certainly got executed afterwards
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89puration_l%C3%A9gale
Wow, this stood out. "Only 791 executions were carried out."
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Except the ones who founded the EU:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schuman#World_War_II
Note how softly it is put on Wikipedia, what he did, today. He "was in charge of refugees", not even mentioning the tiny little detail that he was in charge of refugees during the Nazi takeover of France. What he did was help the Nazis detain and deport tens of thousands of French citizens, as well letting cripples and mentally ill people, including children, freeze and starve to death (and worse). Yes he betrayed the Nazis afterwards, before the end of the war, and was let in government ... because there were a lot of Nazi collaborators and actual Nazis left in the postwar French government who were needed to rebuild France and needed to be reassured they wouldn't be hunted down like they deserved.
He is also the closest thing we have to the founder of the EU.
Oh and if you think this is the only EU leader that could be criticized for past decisions, including for killing their own countrymen, guess again.
> in 2029
Nope, King of America is a lifetime position.
> "unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029"
I don't understand how anyone could disagree with this assessment. This is the most transparent bribe ever,
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Getty... ("Donald Trump speaks behind an engraved glass disc gifted to him by Apple CEO Tim Cook during an event in the Oval Office of the White House")
>If you run or make strategic decisions for a tech company in 2025, you need to understand that many if not most of your competitors are working hard to figure out how to wield the federal government in their favor.
This has been true in every industry and every company for the last 100 years. It's not even illegal, unless you're out there offering quid pro quo bribes.
When the reckoning finally arrives the aristocrats will forgive themselves in the spirit of reconciliation and moving on, just like they did after WWII. Plenty of American companies like IBM made tons of money helping the Nazis and then after Berlin fell it turned out they were actually always on the side of freedom and there is absolutely no need to expand the war crimes trials to include collaborators.