pfdietz•1d
The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epsteinscottaaronson.blog
460 comments
  • iwanttocomment•6h

    I was hoping the comments would be full of similar stories, in which a demon makes a half-hearted effort to pull you into his clutches, only to be naively blown off, then not thought of again until his true nature was revealed.

    Our story of this sort comes from when my partner interviewed at Theranos (!) long before the collapse or any public recognition, related the super-creepy interview process, and I was like "sounds like a big no to me." When the Theranos story blew up it was like "oh boy".

    • throwjefferey•2h

      One observes that all the stories about the cloven hoof being found out and the devil shooed away always seem to have peasants or naive every-men as their protagonists, mayhaps the upstairs strata are just less bothered by a bone or two leaking from the closet, maybe it is just table stakes for them.

    • tantalor•3h

      What was creepy about the interview process?

      • iwanttocomment•3h

        Keeping in mind that I wasn't the interviewee and this happened over 15 years ago, there was apparently a combination of extreme secrecy about the organization and a massive disconnect between the largely military experience of the interviewers and the company's supposed product space. Partner left wondering "black ops or bullshit?"

        • IG_Semmelweiss•3h

          Its certainly not everyday that you are left wondering

          "black ops or bullshit?"

    • belter•2h

      If you want to see the story of creepy, and what monster Epstein was and Ghislaine Maxwell is, watch this interview from today: https://youtu.be/xSkzN7R5VAM?t=57

      It is from an extremely articulate and intelligent Epstein victim, that is only speaking out after the DOJ, either trough incompetence or most likely via malicious compliance, had her personal information in the released files.

  • palata•9h

    > If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

    Well it looks like Bill Gates had his wife for advice, and apparently his not following it played a part in ending his marriage.

    • 5o1ecist•5h

      The question of how he snuck the anti-biotics into her food remains unanswered!

      • taco_emoji•3h

        i just had to go and google this. now that's something i wish i could un-read

      • roryirvine•4h

        If that happened, it would be classed as assault in the UK - is it the same in America? And, if so, is Gates likely to be investigated by the police?

        • nradov•3h

          Yes, that would be considered a criminal act in most or all US states. Depending on the exact facts of the case it could be prosecuted as fourth-degree assault (misdemeanor), or it could fall under other statutes covering food adulteration or delivery of prescription drugs. I am answering in general terms and have no knowledge of what happened with Gates. A police investigation seems unlikely because so much time has passed (possibly exceeding the statute of limitations) and it would be hard to find admissible evidence.

        • SketchySeaBeast•3h

          > And, if so, is Gates likely to be investigated by the police?

          What a bizarre turn of events that would be if THIS was the thing that got investigated.

          • throwjefferey•3h

            It would be a bit like Al Capone and justice by unusual legal means.

        • jMyles•4h

          With a bunch of specific exceptions, violence is handled by the states, so it depends on the state in which it occurred. My best guess is that it's some kind of criminal offense in all 50.

          • anigbrowl•3h

            Isn't use of the internet to facilitate crimes commonly cited as a reason for federal prosecution, on the grounds that all internet communications involve interstate commerce?

            • pfdietz•1h

              Wire Fraud

              https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

            • mcherm•2h

              No, not that I am aware of. I'm not an expert on the topic, but it is my understanding that the majority of prosecuted crimes involving the Internet in the US are prosecuted in State courts, not Federal.

              • anigbrowl•40m

                I wouldn't call myself an expert on this topic, but I think you're severely missing the point: virtually any case involving use of the internet can be federalized under the interstate commerce doctrine.

                https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48764

            • mulmen•3h

              That would be strange because not all Internet communications involve interstate commerce.

              • anigbrowl•42m

                They absolutely do, because packets regularly bounce across state boundaries even if I am just sending a message to my next door neighbor. For example, my phone service provider is headquartered in a different state, so using their network to send an SMS message automatically creates an interstate nexus. If a US attorney wants to take over a case for reasons of professional or political advancement the argument is trivially easy to make.

              • jMyles•41m

                From the dissent in Gonzales v. Raich:

                > Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything – and the federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.

              • thayne•3h

                Just because it is strange doesn't mean it isn't true

      • hermitcrab•2h

        If it happened.

  • whatever1•14h

    Power corrupts, end of story.

    Democracy (limited terms), taxation and anti-monopoly regulation are examples that show a path to cure the disease.

    Nobody should be trusted with too much power for too long.

    • yboris•6h

      Sortition may be what you're looking for: "sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e. by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample". No one can amass power because it's short term and random.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

      • dragonwriter•3h

        People can amass power in a system with sortition, but those people don't amass it in the role of office holders (in those offices subject to sortition.) Of course, the office holders aren't the people amassing the most durable political power in the current system, either.

        If you don't think officeholders that are randomly chosen amateurs in the field that are guaranteed to be out of it in short time aren't very often going to be extremely vulnerable to manipulation by people whose interests are stronger, more permanent, and durable, then you haven't thought things through very well, IMO.

      • Tachyooon•4h

        I heard about lottocracy/sortition for the first time not long ago and I quite like the idea. The last time was when I heard a professor talk about it, and I was recommended reading the book "Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections" by Guerrero [0].

        [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217981747-lottocracy

        • abecode•3h

          I just had a nice trip to Venice and I was curious about it's history. Supposedly, the Venice republic lasted almost 1000 years, basically from after the fall of Rome to Napoleon based on a weird lottery system for choosing the Doge.

          • Tachyooon•3h

            I've never read up on the republic of Venice, but after quickly scanning the Wikipedia article on its election procedure... that is a strangely large number of voting rounds and lotteries.

        • idiotsecant•4h

          Before you get too excited about this just imagine the average line of people at the DMV or the Grocery store and now imagine that those people are in charge of the lives of hundreds of millions. If you think HOAs are bad, you aint seen nothing yet.

          The current system of oligarch patronage is bad, but at least it keeps the train mostly on the rails.

          • pavel_lishin•4h

            But aren't most HOA horror stories based on people who'd been running them for years if not decades, and only end happily when someone replaces those entrenched in power with new people?

            • idiotsecant•4h

              There are equally many HOA horror stories where it functions reasonably for years and then new leadership shows up and turns it into a nightmare.

              • anigbrowl•3h

                But such groups are almost invariably coordinated. In a legislature based on sortition, there will be a percentage of busybodies/ assholes/ opportunists but they'll have a coordination problem, opponents, and term limits acting to restrain them.

                • timschmidt•2h

                  Term limits incentivize a deep state exactly one layer removed from those to which the limits apply, as a repository of institutional knowledge about how things actually get done.

                  • anigbrowl•47m

                    This seems rational. We on't have term limits int he US Congress and it doesn't seem any the better for it.

                    Japan, a heavily bureaucratized country, systematically moves junior and mid-tier staff around in some departments to minimize the possibility of nest-feathering and empire-building, although I would not say it's perfect by a long way.

                    • timschmidt•22m

                      We do have term limits for positions like the presidency, and what we see is a perpetual power structure one layer removed, in the party system, which effectively chooses who we're permitted to vote for.

                      Introducing term limits only forces the wealth and power to change it's face periodically. It is addressing a symptom, not the cause.

                      At least one constitutional scholar has argued that campaign finance reform strikes closer to the root of the problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootstrikers ) by enabling interested regular folk to afford to run for office. I would add some form of ranked choice voting to that, which permits folks to vote for a third party candidate without "wasting" their vote or throwing the race to an opponent. As well as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

          • Tachyooon•4h

            It's a potentially big problem for sure. It reminds me of stories I've heard about the public education system in some of the Scandinavian countries. From what I remember off the top of my head, Finland has a system where private educational facilities do not exist. Meaning that, if rich or otherwise elite people want their kids to receive a good education, they need to support the public education facilities their own kid attends. I quite like this idea that everyone is nudged towards helping everyone else, even if they mostly care about their own family and friends.

            Similarly in a lottocracy you'd want everyone to be a capable leader when their name is picked from the hat. As the professor I listened to put it, lottocracy makes you think what a democracy really values. Is it about everyone's voice being heard, or is there another goal we should care about more? Not an easy question to answer.

            • opo•3h

              >...From what I remember off the top of my head, Finland has a system where private educational facilities do not exist.

              Not quite. Private education is not prohibited in Finland, but for-profit basic education is prohibited and private education is pretty rare.

              https://www.aacrao.org/edge/emergent-news/private-education-...

            • idiotsecant•4h

              Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw. I just don't think we live in anything resembling that society and I'm not sure whether such a society is possible once you reach a certain population size.

              I think it's a nice idea, but I'm not sure how we get from here to there

              • dragonwriter•3h

                > Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw.

                If you can find good leaders by random draw, that means the average citizen is a good leader, which would seem to suggest that the average citizen should be a reasonable an hard-to-dupe judge of good leaders, and therefore that elections also work well.

                If elections don't work well to select leaders, that's a pretty good piece of evidence that sortition won't, either.

                OTOH, the particular failures of sortition and elections may be different, and using a system where both are used for different veto points might be net less problematic than either alone. Consider a bicameral legislature with one house chosen by elections and the other by sortition, for instance.

                (OTOH, there is plenty of solid evidence in comparative government of how to do electoral democracy better and people in the US don't seem too interested in that, which is probably a better focus for immediate reform than relatively untested, on a large scale, ideas about avoiding electoral democracy.)

              • tekne•3h

                Bit of a nerd-snipe, but I wonder about the idea of sortition of a set of candidates -- say 200 -- out of a larger voting pool, and then voting for one of the randomly selected candidates.

                Then you get "at least approx. top 1%" -- but it's still not necessarily an entrenched elite.

              • Tachyooon•3h

                Agreed, I'm not sure if it can be made to work either. I have an inkling of a thought that instead of an egalitarian society being required for lottocracy to work, an egalitarian society can be created using lottocracy. But it's just a thought. Hopefully that book holds something close to an answer, but I'll see :)

      • lykahb•4h

        Before applying sortition to the civil service, it'd be wise to observe how it works on a smaller scale. Some corporations may attempt it. Though it's more radical than the flat structure or other organization alternatives.

      • HaZeust•5h

        I knew about the strategy for using randomness to control corruption, but didn't know it had a procedural name in governance. Thanks for this!

        • kiba•5h

          We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty, but that should be expanded into more roles and duties. That's one way to make society truly democratic.

          In any case, you might be interested in Georgism, which is an anti-monopoly ideology most famously associated with very Strong Opinions on taxation of land and natural resources and untaxing production, along with taxation on pollution and negative externalities.

          My impression is that sortition is very much in vogue within Georgist circles.

          • jMyles•4h

            > We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty,

            ...and even there, it's terribly corrupted. There are all kinds of bizarre ways that people are excluded from juries which bias the result. One commonly-cited example is that people who report moral objections to capital punishment are excluded from being empaneled on a federal jury, under the pretext that because capital punishment is legal under federal law, they'd be unable to carry out the gammut of their duties. Of course this has the convenient result of dramatically biasing juries in favor of the state.

            There's also no commonly-implemented proof-of-randomness for selection. We're told that people are randomly selected and get a notice in the mail, but there's no public event where one can go and watch a number tumbler generate the entropy used to select names from the voter rolls, etc.

            • ghaff•3h

              Well, and for grand juries in particular, you're told that (more or less) this will be your life for six months. I certainly opted out as best I could.

            • AndrewKemendo•3h

              It’s only registered voters too in most states

              • ghaff•2h

                My understanding is that not registering to vote isn't automatically an opt-out but IANAL.

            • Der_Einzige•3h

              I just say "I believe in jury nullification and will use that power if necessary".

              Easiest out from jury duty ever, and if the judge want's to be a bltch and force me on anyway, well, let's just say that if the law is immoral than the defendant is going to walk.

              • opo•3h

                > I just say "I believe in jury nullification and will use that power if necessary".

                Have you actually said that during voir dire, or is this a hypothetical?

                • mulmen•3h

                  The last time I was called for jury duty someone said this during jury selection and we were all immediately dismissed and a new pool of jurors brought in.

              • mulmen•3h

                You shouldn’t brag about shirking civic duty.

                • Der_Einzige•2h

                  I unironically want to be on the jury. It's the judges fault for refusing to let principled believers in nullification on. I'm unironically not trying to shrink civic duty.

                  • HaZeust•2h

                    Then be quiet and don't mention it, lol. EVERYWHERE one learns about jury nullification makes it clear not to mention it in the selection process if you're anywhere near interested in participating.

                    It's an extraprocedural consequence of how the system is designed to function, the same way the right to revolution is an extralegal option in the Union. Yeah, you can know it and apply it - but don't say it out loud if you want to show any semblance of virtuosity.

      • PlatoIsADisease•6h

        Do this but with technocracy.

        Also best of luck being random... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_(probability) and The Problem of Priors.

        • wtallis•5h

          That link says the Bertrand paradox only applies when the domain of possibilities is infinite. That doesn't seem to cover tasks like randomly selecting people from a finite population.

    • alphazard•9h

      Taxation is the mechanism that moves power from the people to the government, and increasingly politicians and their specific interests. Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power? Every government goon doing authoritarian dirty work collects a paycheck and wouldn't do their job without it.

      • nicoburns•8h

        > Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power?

        Absolutely. The source of most of the corruption I see in the world today is wealth, and specifically wealthy people paying people off to get their own way. If there was less wealth inequality there'd be much less scope for this.

        Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government (not that I suggest that's what we do).

        Politics has it's fair share of corruption too. But at least in my country (the UK) it's the lesser evil. And even if you look at a country like the US where there is a lot more political corruption, the source of a lot of that seems to be private money influencing elections.

        • CGMthrowaway•6h

          Every marginal dollar* taxed is a dollar politicians don't have to scrounge from a wealthy donor, in order to get that politician's pet interests achieved. You are saying MORE taxation means less wealthy donor influence on private citizens. And parent is saying LESS taxation means less policy influence on private citizens.

          Here's what I say: how about both? Or neither? I think the scope of the problem is defined too narrowly so far in this particular thread.

          *Or say, 10 dollars, since a donor's dollar is leveraged

          • jjtheblunt•5h

            why assume extra marginal dollars arriving via taxes correspond to less wealthy donor courting, though?

          • cucumber3732842•2h

            >Every marginal dollar* taxed is a dollar politicians don't have to scrounge from a wealthy donor, in order to get that politician's pet interests achieved.

            You fundamentally misunderstand the relationship.

            The donors donate because the politician will then direct more money at the donors interests.

            I spend $1mil on lobbying, $1mil on bunk science at labs I fund or astro turf'd grass roots support (something the government can point to to justify their action), $1mil on donations I get a preferential change in law or rule, or perhaps even government investment in my industry, that lets my business make billions, bringing back say $6mil in profit to me personally. Repeat for all my other business activities.

            Politician, political appointees and regulatory agencies pet interests only matter insofar as I get better value for my money by choose one who's interests align.

            • fragmede•2h

              If you're getting back $6 million, just spend $1 million each on both candidates so it doesn't matter which one wins.

              • CGMthrowaway•1h

                Now I'm starting to understand why the US seems to end up funding both sides of every conflict in the Mideast

        • zozbot234•7h

          > Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government

          No need to literally burn the money, either: just use the entirety of that increased tax revenue on paying down the national debt, and lower the debt ceiling by the exact same amount so it can't go back up. This is an even better deal if you think "interest rates are too high, the Fed should cut a lot more". It all fits. And we managed this throughout the 1990s.

        • ozgrakkurt•6h

          Burning money might actually be a legitimate thing to do since it causes deflation as far as I can understand

          • bawolff•5h

            Deflation is a very bad thing...

            • onraglanroad•2h

              Of course it is. Things getting cheaper is really bad for the economy.

              That's why computers never became an industry, they just kept getting cheaper every year so nobody bought them. If only computing power had kept getting more expensive every year, we might have some kind of tech industry!

              • bawolff•1h

                A single (luxury) sector getting cheaper is not the same thing as generalized deflation

          • jMyles•4h

            In the traditional / academic sense of the word, it _is_ deflation. The repurposing of inflation/deflation to refer to consumer price action is much more recent.

        • jMyles•4h

          Is there a strong correlation between higher taxes and decreasing wealth inequality?

          The one part of your comment with which I certainly agree is:

          > Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government (not that I suggest that's what we do).

          ...except, I am perhaps prepared to suggest actually implementing such a system, at least as an experiment.

          Removing spending power from places where it's concentrated seems to have obvious benefits, but giving it to the state (the entity in which political power is maximally concentrated, at least with respect to the legitimate initiation of violence) seems like it's moving the power dynamic in the wrong direction.

          • nicoburns•3h

            > Is there a strong correlation between higher taxes and decreasing wealth inequality?

            A sufficiently strong progressive taxation regime would obviously have this effect, assuming you could actually enforce it. For example, if you taxed 99% of earnings above $10 million that would greatly reduce the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, even without taking into account how that money was redistributed.

            That's obviously an extreme, and I'm not suggesting we do exactly that. But 80% tax rates were common as recently as the late 20th century, and coincidentally there were much lower rates of wealth inequality during this time.

            • jMyles•3h

              Well I think we all understand the basic arithmetic; that's not what's in dispute.

              The question is,

              > even without taking into account how that money was redistributed.

              ...if you're taking money from people earning $11 million, and giving it instead of the military and prison industrial complexes, obviously you've concentrated, rather than diluting power.

              I think there's a real question about how possible it is for a taxation regime to ever have a progressive effect inside the belly of empire.

        • VirusNewbie•5h

          > it's the lesser evil

          Lol. No wonder your country is such a fucking shit show, people believe this.

        • Jensson•7h

          > The source of most of the corruption I see in the world today is wealth, and specifically wealthy people paying people off to get their own way

          This is so wrong, its not expensive to bribe politicians so higher taxes wouldn't stop this at all. The problem is that its possible to bribe politicians, meaning government has too much power, taxes would make that worse not better. And even more important most bribes doesn't come from individuals, it comes from super PACs and corporations, and those would exist regardless how much you tax rich people.

          What you need is a less centralized government so its harder to bribe a few key people to get what you want, and a more direct democracy that can eliminate politicians that takes bribes.

          When voters can't punish bad politicians since the incumbents has so much power to draw voting lines and decide who is on the ballots then corruption will always escalate out of control.

          • breuleux•7h

            If the government doesn't have enough power, the wealthy won't need to bribe politicians to do their bidding. They will do their own bidding directly, and there will be nobody to stop them.

            It's like, if you want to sell your cyanide penis pills under big government, you need to bribe someone. If you want to sell them under small government, you just... you just sell them, that's what.

            There may be ways to design a government where power is better distributed, e.g. using sortition, but ultimately it needs to be richer and more powerful than its wealthiest citizens, otherwise these wealthy citizens will assess, correctly, that when push comes to shove, the laws won't apply to them, and they do not need the government's permission to do what they want.

            • zozbot234•7h

              Even a small government still has courts, in fact they would be a far more sizeable fraction of the government and thus a lot more effective. So if people like Epstein engage in criminal behavior, or even just unlawful behavior that they would be liable for, they can definitely be held accountable.

              • throwway120385•5h

                Courts are only a remedy if you're breathing. If the cyanide penis pills kill you and your family then who is left to file suit?

              • pharrington•5h

                What stops me, a multibillionaire, from hiring someone to shoot the small government judge in the head?

            • tekne•3h

              But suppose you have egalitarian nation N -- what stops the billionaire from non-egalitarian nation B from influencing your politicians? Especially if nation N is small and nation B is large.

              Moreover -- why would low-level elites (think: entrepreneurs, small business owners, etc.) stay in nation N if it was more profitable to do business in nation B -- recall this is precisely the type of person that is often most mobile and internationalized.

        • alphazard•7h

          > Politics has it's fair share of corruption too. But at least in my country (the UK) it's the lesser evil.

          Is this a widespread view where you live? As an outsider watching the fall of Britain in slow motion, this explains so much.

      • palata•9h

        I think they mean "taxation of the too rich" in that case.

        > moves power from the people to the government

        In a functioning democracy, the government is the people. If the government is against the people, it's not a functioning democracy.

        And needless to say, a non-functioning democracy is not a proof that the concept of democracy doesn't work.

        • prometheus76•8h

          The government is the majority of people. So the government very well can be against 49% of the people and it would still fit your definition.

          If 100 people were about to embark on a journey on a ship, what makes you think 51 of them know who should run the ship if none of them have ever even been on a ship?

          • macNchz•7h

            There are a variety of ways that democratic governments are structure that make this an inaccurate characterization of how things work.

            The US, for example, apportions representatives and votes for President in a way that overweights less populated states, and there are various aspects of parliamentary systems that help avoid landing in a two-party system where a simple majority gets the say in everything—they force compromise and coalition building among disparate groups. Additionally, Constitutional systems will enumerate the rights of its citizens such that they cannot simply be taken away by a simple majority of any body.

            Democratic countries are also basically never "pure" democracies where everyone votes on every decision as in your Plato's ship analogy—we elect people who audition for the role of running the ship, ostensibly those among the people who are best suited to the task.

            • iso1631•3h

              > , Constitutional systems will enumerate the rights of its citizens such that they cannot simply be taken away by a simple majority of any body.

              Only if those are enforced. The wealthiest are the ones with the power, as they can pay for the guns.

          • deepthaw•6h

            Governance by democracy isn't about qualification, it's about legitimacy.

            If the government ends up filled with incompetents that's a failure of the people that elected them.

        • alphazard•8h

          > I think they mean "taxation of the too rich" in that case.

          Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down. The problem is this is a collective negotiation, not a discussion about what to ask the genie for when we rub the lamp. If the middle class wants to decrease their own taxes (which is the political issue that objectively affects them the most, and how they lose their power), then they are going to have to meet the wealthy half way. Idealism is the enemy of the the common sense, rational, self-interested move.

          > And needless to say, a non-functioning democracy is not a proof that the concept of democracy doesn't work.

          Yes, democracy is a good idea precisely because imperfect implementations of it work well. If it worked in theory and not in practice, then it wouldn't be a good idea. Contrast it to communism, which is literally an info-hazard. If you try to bring it in to existence, you won't achieve your goal, and the system you do create will be much worse for you. Even if it works in theory, it's a bad idea because it doesn't work in practice.

          • palata•8h

            > Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them

            That is a different debate. I think what the parent means is that taxing the rich is a way to prevent them from becoming too powerful.

            I do agree that it should be illegal to be too powerful. One should not be more powerful than an entire country, it makes no sense.

            • zozbot234•8h

              There's no way that even the richest people in the world are "powerful" enough in that sense unless you're talking about literal royalty in resource-rich countries. Even Epstein's power was largely about his cronyism, not about directly expending his wealth.

              • Jensson•7h

                Yeah, Epstein was removed since he didn't have much power compared to country leaders and so on. Even the richest people of the world has very little power compared to an authoritarian country leader.

          • nicoburns•6h

            > Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down.

            That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.

            I believe this attitude is pretty common in many parts of the world.

            That being said, I do think the extremes of wealth (there is a big difference between a millionaire and a billionaire) have a particularly detrimental effect on society by completely distorting our economic system (there can be no such thing as a free market when such a small number of individuals control such a large proportion of the spending power).

            • nec4b•5h

              Here you go: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/voluntary-payments-donations-to-...

            • alphazard•6h

              > That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.

              This confusion is precisely why the middle class has less power than ever before. You and many others have been sold a meme that your tax dollars are in service to a greater good, and you are a bad person if you recognize this to be a scam.

              At an individual level, for each person in the middle class, 90% of the social programs they pay for are negative EV for them personally. It would be better for each of them if they just kept what they earned, and didn't expect to get it back "later" or "when they really need it" whenever that is. This is an empirical, testable claim, and the math will be slightly different for each person. You should check for yourself.

              If everyone turned off the news, and totally ignored the messaging around taxes and government programs and just looked at their own cash inflows and outflows to/from the government, the middle class would retain far more power than they do.

              • nicoburns•3h

                > If everyone turned off the news, and totally ignored the messaging around taxes and government programs and just looked at their own cash inflows and outflows to/from the government, the middle class would retain far more power than they do.

                Are you only counting material benefit that you personally get from the government rather than the benefit that other less well off people get in your calculations? Because if my tax dollars enable otherwise less well off people to live a lifestyle closer to my own, then I would consider that a benefit to me and a large part of the intended outcome of that taxation.

                • zozbot234•3h

                  > Because if my tax dollars enable otherwise less well off people to live a lifestyle closer to my own

                  That's a very big 'if'. Less well off people have to pay taxes too, such as payroll taxes on their labor income, or sales taxes on essential purchases that amount to a large fraction of what they spend money on. And government redistribution is extremely inefficient. They'd be far better off if most of these taxes were done away with for lower-income folks, letting them keep far more of what they earn from their work.

                  • nicoburns•3h

                    > They'd be far better off if most of these taxes were done away with for lower-income folks, letting them keep far more of what they earn from their work.

                    Well I'd certainly be in favour of a more progressive taxation system that taxes higher earners more and lower earners less, and puts more emphasis on wealth and income (incl. capita gains) taxes and less on sales taxes.

                    But I'm also realistic that as a software engineer, my salary is above the average, and thus in such a setup I'd likely end up paying more.

              • throwway120385•5h

                > At an individual level, for each person in the middle class, 90% of the social programs they pay for are negative EV for them personally. It would be better for each of them if they just kept what they earned, and didn't expect to get it back "later" or "when they really need it" whenever that is. This is an empirical, testable claim, and the math will be slightly different for each person. You should check for yourself.

                This whole "expected value" concept when taken to the extreme is just rationalist patter. It's a useful exercise when you're running a business, but there is more to life than fiscal efficiency. Empiricism, when taken to an extreme, is as dystopian as anything else.

                90% of those social programs are what keep us from being killed in the street for our watches and jewelry. They keep people less fortunate than us from becoming desperate. They level the playing field so our children aren't all victims of the circumstances of their birth. By those metrics, which are my preferred metrics and not the size of my paycheck, they are a huge benefit.

                Also one could argue that the US military is the world's largest social service program in that it provides jobs for a large part of the country that otherwise has no prospects for a good life.

            • opo•5h

              >...I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.

              The federal government does have a system to accept gifts which you might want to check out: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html

              Whether your gift will make a better society, I can't know - much like your taxes you have very little control over what the money is going to be used for.

              >...(there can be no such thing as a free market when such a small number of individuals control such a large proportion of the spending power).

              A free market is generally considered a system where there are voluntary exchanges between buyers and sellers based on mutual benefit. It seems odd to claim that since there are some very wealthy people in the country that somehow a consumer can't buy bread from a baker, etc. Maybe you can expand a bit on how you are defining free market.

          • felixgallo•8h

            I'm having difficulty parsing what you're saying in your first paragraph. What is it to 'meet the wealthy half way'? Did the ultra wealthy meet the middle class or the poor half way when they essentially ended their tax obligations and legalized mass influence buying in Citizens United? What's the 'half measure' that is going to rein all that back in?

            • alphazard•8h

              No they did not. It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number. The wealthy have about as much power as the entire middle class, but can wield it better because they are more nimble.

              That doesn't change the state of the negotiation, which is that cutting taxes for the middle class will also require cutting them for the wealthy. If you optimize for your own personal notion of fairness, or retribution, you may very well fail to coordinate in your own self-interest.

              • breuleux•7h

                > It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.

                That's basically my main argument for replacing election-based democracy by lottery-based democracy. Electing the right representatives is a coordination problem in and of itself, a process which the wealthy are already quite adept at manipulating, so we might as well cut the middle man and pick a random representative sample of the population instead, who can then coordinate properly.

                • krapp•6h

                  Whomever controls the process that decides what a representative sample is and selects candidates is now the middleman.

                  • breuleux•6h

                    It's generally easier to make such a process tamper-proof than an election. You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment. Then anyone can verify the integrity of the process by verifying the seed includes their contribution, and computing the candidates themselves.

                    • krapp•6h

                      >You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment.

                      If that were a viable model for the real world, we could make existing elections just as tamper-proof.

              • mapt•7h

                I don't really want to cut taxes for the working/middle class though. I want to tax the everliving fuck out of the hyper-wealthy, to the point that they cease to exist. The money should go into providing goods and services for the working/middle class, but collecting that money and lighting it on fire (or parking assets in a sovereign wealth fund) is a superior option to doing nothing.

                Neither our democracy nor our position as a world power survived capitalism eating itself and everything else. We are down to single individuals holding more nominal wealth than whole continents, and the worship of the billionaire has replaced the worship of Jesus Christ for most Americans, a palace cult committing national suicide on your behalf. If you want any of the things that America pitched as its merits in fighting for influence in the Cold War, you want this situation over with.

                Let them eat three commas and not a penny more. When you become a billionaire we give you a medal and confiscate every dollar above 1 billion. Using a carrier strike group if necessary.

                • SV_BubbleTime•7h

                  This is just silly. Not many animals will stand completely still while you attack them.

                  It sure sounds tough though! Literal war with people for being successful, how much time have you spent on this line of thought?

                  • mapt•7h

                    They're not standing still now. They're eating our entrails. Right now.

                    We haven't passed a budget in almost 30 years, we've been routinely filibustering nearly all legislation for 15 (breaking the gameplay loop for electoral democracy), we're unilaterally withdrawing from trade and military alliances week by week. We have fascist armies on the streets pulling people from their cars and houses. Our leaders openly brag about their corruption and a good fraction of our people praise them for it simply because it pisses other people off.

                    We are allegedly about to "Federalize Elections" and also enter a war with Iran that a supermajority of voters do not want.

                    In terms of state capacity, in terms of our agency in the world, in terms of what we historically regarded as our legacy and our culture and our material security and our institutions, we are in freefall. And it is mostly down to having far too much wealth concentrated in far too few people.

                  • mapt•7h

                    The prospect of "Attack" and "Literal War" is limited by the fact that worst-case resistance involves a drone strike, and worst-case compliance involves retaining enough wealth for you and everyone you know to live on the beach sipping mojitos for the rest of your natural lives, while holding a nice trophy.

                    Just not, you know, a space program and a larger military than Krushchev's reporting to you personally.

                    • SV_BubbleTime•4h

                      Worst case scenario? It was the first you brought up.

            • SpicyLemonZest•8h

              Tax cuts for the ultra wealthy are routinely paired with tax cuts for the less wealthy, for the same reason that countries which tax the ultra wealthy a lot also tax the less wealthy a lot. Building support for taxation means convincing people that taxes are great and they should embrace the benefits of living in a society with lots of tax revenue to spend.

          • ses1984•6h

            > Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them

            Everyone except about 90% of republican voters, aka temporarily poor millionaires

            • mulmen•3h

              That’s unfair. Some of them are just racist.

        • zozbot234•8h

          >In a functioning democracy, the government is the people. If the government is against the people, it's not a functioning democracy.

          The U.S. are a republic not a democracy. The people vote for the government but are not expected to be directly involved with it after the fact.

      • kace91•8h

        The natural flow of money tends towards pooling on certain individuals and groups, because accumulating capital is significantly easier when you start with capital.

        This is unwanted, first because it produces individuals powerful enough to topple the people’s will, and second because it is not in the interest of society for wealth to be accumulated rather than moving.

        By first principles you need a system to limit accumulation and redistribute it. That’s taxation.

        The money not being extracted from the right places, or not being distributed where it should, is a sign that the government is unwilling or incapable or working for the people.

        It is the people’s collective responsibility to prevent and fix that problem.

        • program_whiz•8h

          Agree, I think the issue is that taxes specifically flow to "the government" in the abstract. If there was a simple law like "95% of income or gains above $10M are taxed and redistributed equally via check / IRS rebate to every citizen automatically" then it could be a high-trust system that helps out everyone. Politicians, though greedy and self-interested, would have little choice but to continue the program untouched, similar to social security.

          I'd also feel a lot better about "Elon gets $200B payout", because he gets $2B and $198B goes to tax payers -- seems pretty fair. $2B is still more than anyone ever needs to live a lavish life of luxury and/or start any reasonable self-business, or buy off any politicians.

          • zozbot234•8h

            Most super-wealthy folks are not going to spend anywhere on the order of $200B or even $20B (in the broad timeframe of Elon's payout) on their own consumption. Even if Elon spent $100B on a mission to Mars or whatever it is that he cares about, would you really have reason to object to that, any more than if the money was spent by NASA? (The whole Apollo program and surrounding stuff probably cost on the order of that amount of money once you control for inflation, so there's plenty of precedent.)

            • program_whiz•7h

              Nope no complaints, but most wealth isn't being spent. If the majority of the wealth was being spent, then there wouldn't be wealth imbalance (as all that money would flow elsewhere into the economy).

              The only way a wealth imbalance can occur is that someone sits on wealth and that it continues to compound. The top 1% have wealth greater than the bottom 95% of the population combined. I don't see why its more moral for someone to sit on investments than to have the money distributed to others to spend.

              In one case, the money goes to whichever investment the individual favors (e.g. buying tons of gold). In the "redistribute" scenario, it goes to improving the lives of many millions of people in real tangible ways, and creating a more equitable and balanced society and social trust.

              The top 1% of the US hold roughly 30% of all the wealth. That's roughly the same as the bottom 90% of the population. I understand there are implementation issues, but I'm merely calling out the obvious immorality of "90% of people should scrape to get by while trustfund kid lives in 4th mansion, because 'market efficiency'".

              • zozbot234•7h

                Wealth that isn't being spent is effectively inert and frozen. It may have some precautionary value for the person who's holding it, but this is immaterial once you get to the million-dollar range, let alone the billions. The only interesting thing to ask about is what happens once the wealth is in fact being spent. (Of course, this wealth is generally invested in productive ventures and not literally 'frozen'; but this is a happy side effect, not something that's expressly chosen by whoever holds it. They're simply allocating it so that it 'compounds' effectively.)

              • weirdmantis69•4h

                That's just not how the economy works.

              • SpicyLemonZest•6h

                > The only way a wealth imbalance can occur is that someone sits on wealth and that it continues to compound. The top 1% have wealth greater than the bottom 95% of the population combined. I don't see why its more moral for someone to sit on investments than to have the money distributed to others to spend.

                The critical insight is that this doesn't actually work. When we say Jeff Bezos is worth $200B, we don't mean that he has $200B of money that's locked up in a vault when it could be redistributed. We mean that there are a variety of productive businesses in the world - for Bezos, mostly Amazon - which he holds ownership claims to. The vast majority of wealth in the modern US isn't money, and can only be converted to money by finding people with lots of money and selling them the right to sit on the investments instead.

            • nicoburns•6h

              > Even if Elon spent $100B on a mission to Mars or whatever it is that he cares about, would you really have reason to object to that

              Of course I would. It shouldn't be up to Elon how that money (and the capital/labour they command) gets spent. It should be up to all of us. And if I want it spent on libraries or healthcare instead of space exploration then I should get my equal say in that.

              • ifyoubuildit•5h

                Maybe this is me being a dumb peasant, but I can't imagine where I would get the right to have a say in that.

                How is it different from me looking at my neighbor in his bigger house with his nicer car and deciding that those should be mine instead? Or my neighbor with a smaller house wanting my stuff?

                • AngryData•3h

                  There is a pretty big difference in scale. How would you feel if you could barely afford ramen and your neighor was using prime steaks as fire wood?

                  • ifyoubuildit•3h

                    Sure it would feel bad, but would my feelings justify taking the steaks from them?

        • alphazard•8h

          > This is unwanted, first because it produces individuals powerful enough to topple the people’s will

          Making the government resistant to manipulation is a distinct problem. It's a game theory/mechanism design problem, and its solution doesn't require taking in lots of money. Giving the government more power/money causes people to spend more effort to manipulate it, so any weaknesses are exploited to the fullest extent.

          > and second because it is not in the interest of society for wealth to be accumulated rather than moving.

          This reveals a significant misunderstanding of how capital works in an economy. None of the billionaires that come up when you type in "billionaires" into Google have access to liquid cash anywhere near the number that shows up next to their face. Their money is invested in productive projects, it's paying salaries and invested in equipment. Concentrating capital is what allows a civilization to take on big projects. As a society we want big projects to be paid for by individuals bearing the risk (skin in the game). In a free-market, capital concentrates in individuals who, empirically, know how to use it well. Spending other people's money is a great way to make sure that money is spent frivolously. You can criticize luxury spending all you want, and taxing that is something most people consider "fair", but you aren't speaking for anyone economically literate when you say that you don't want capital to concentrate. I want it to concentrate as much as it does naturally.

          • srean•6h

            Ideally yes, capital would be the machinery. Now, however, a lot of wealth is numbers sitting on a ledger and backed by stock valuations that have broken their connection with main Street. Or its rolling from one owner to another in derivative markets, doing scarcely little for the economy.

      • lm28469•6h

        Power concentration can happen regardless of taxation level though. You can have relatively high taxes and relatively low authoritarianism. But you can also have low taxes and full blow dictatorship.

        Taxes are much lower in Belarus and Russia vs western Europe, and they're much more authoritarian, coupled with third world tier public services outside of their capitals.

      • lux-lux-lux•5h

        If that were true, then the wealthy and political establishment wouldn’t fight tax increases so damn hard. Over my lifetime, I’ve repeatedly watched wealthy individuals spend more money fighting tax increases than they’d end up paying.

      • IG_Semmelweiss•2h

        Take that to the next level.

        How about taxing the...Government ?

        For example: I am a teacher. I run for office. I win. Now, as a consequence of my win, my tax bracket for the rest of my life, is 100% after i exceed the higher of either: a) my elected official salary, OR b) the average last 5 years of W2 income, OR c) the average last 2 years of W2 income.

        You'd delete inmediately all the grifters getting into government to be rich. And because those narcissists griefters people would self select themselves out of the running; it gives breathing room to those willing to actually do their DUTY for country. Those willing to sacrifice lifetime income.

        This is pathway to the less charismatic, but more duty-oriented people that would not mind working in the govt and also do a good job. Under these rules, you dont care if I stay in govt forever, either. Limited terms have no point, when you can't grift.

        This also takes care of those pesky post-election speaking fees, as well!

        • zozbot234•1h

          This would have deeply weird and counterproductive effects on election candidacies; ultimately, people are willing to do their duty for the country, but not at the expense of their entire future income growth. It's the constituents' job to vote for better candidates, there are no foolproof rules beyond that.

      • elliotec•5h

        Money is power. So to answer your question literally, if MY taxes went up, I would not have more power, but if the rich's did, I would because they'd have less power.

        • alphazard•5h

          That's only true in relative terms. In reality tax rates go up or down on everyone at the same time, because that's how the negotiations shake out.

          If taxes go up on everyone, the rich are still the ones that manipulate the government, but now they have control over more tax revenue. If taxes go down for everyone, the rich are still the ones that can manipulate the government, but now the government has less revenue and can't cause as much damage.

          • elliotec•4h

            > In reality tax rates go up or down on everyone at the same time, because that's how the negotiations shake out.

            This is absolutely false, especially in the US. Progressive tax brackets, breaks for the rich, and targeted changes for capital vs. income, deductions, etc. are the norm. Tax rate change is _always_ selective.

      • triceratops•7h

        Only if the government is allowed to spend the tax money. What if they were forced to give it away?

      • mrcartmeneses•6h

        Taxation is what moves power from the powerful to the people. All of the Epstein crap was proceeded by Reagan and Thatcher and their trickle down BS that made the rich and powerful even more rich and powerful while everyone else could languish

      • iso1631•8h

        Higher corruption tends to be associated with lower tax-to-GDP ratios, which seems the opposite to your assertion.

        Of course there's the cause and effect issue -- does the high corruption cause lower tax, or do the lower taxes enable the corruption.

      • mulmen•3h

        I don’t want my taxes to go up. I want billionaires to pay taxes that are as uncomfortable to them as mine are to me. Share the burden.

      • dauertewigkeit•8h

        Weird post.

        Who is saying YOUR taxes or MY taxes should go up? Our taxes should go down. Billionaires should be taxed more instead.

    • a-french-anon•12h

      > end of story.

      Is it? Here's another version I like even more that unsettles democracy dogmatics: power attracts the corrupt.

      • whatever1•12h

        It is absolutely correct, hence why limited terms are a prerequisite for functioning democracies.

        An ill intentioned participant in power will not have unlimited time to do that much damage. A good intentioned participant will not have too much time to become corrupted.

        The downside is that a good intentioned ruler, may not have enough time to accomplish their good vision. But my thesis is that is a reasonable price to pay to avoid the opposite. A malicious ruler with infinite time to complete their destructive plan.

        • AnthonyMouse•11h

          > A good intentioned participant will not have too much time to become corrupted.

          The operation of the revolving door would seem to imply otherwise. You set up a situation where politicians are not just expected but required to leave office and then need a job in the private sector. Are they then inclined to do things while in office that make it more or less likely that they get a lucrative gig as soon as their term is up?

          > A malicious ruler with infinite time to complete their destructive plan.

          The assumption is that the ruler is the elected official. What do you do if the malicious ruler is a corporation and the elected official is just a fungible subordinate?

          • bitmasher9•9h

            Campaign finance is another piece of the puzzle to avoid revolving doors. Cutting it slows down the initial introduction phase.

            Group A invests millions of dollars into your campaign.

            You go into politics in a debt to Group A that you feel obligated to repay.

            You give favorable treatment to Group A in your political career.

            Group A provides a lucrative contract to you after you leave politics so that they have a good reputation with the other politicians they finance.

            • AnthonyMouse•40m

              > Group A invests millions of dollars into your campaign.

              The problem is elections aren't just about donations. Suppose you're not a fan of Zuck/Musk/whoever, or pick your least favorite media conglomerate. Is limiting their financial contributions to a campaign going to meaningfully reduce their influence? Of course not, because it mainly comes from controlling the feed or the reporting, so limiting money is primarily to the detriment of their opponents. This is one of the reasons you hear some talk about "campaign finance" from the media industry -- it lets billion dollar media corporations pretend they're defending the little guy when they're really trying to cement an asymmetric advantage in influencing politics because they can de facto donate airtime rather than money. But they have a mixed incentive, because they're also the ones getting money from the ads and don't actually want the spigot closed, which is probably why it's more talk than action.

              And then there's this:

              > Group A provides a lucrative contract to you after you leave politics so that they have a good reputation with the other politicians they finance.

              Which isn't campaign finance at all. It's also kind of a hard problem, because after someone leaves office, it's reasonably expected that they're going to work somewhere, but then how are you supposed to tell if they're getting a fat paycheck because they're currently providing a valuable service or because they were previously providing a valuable service? It's not like they're going to put "deferred bribe" in the memo field of the check.

        • direwolf20•12h

          A good intentioned participant will not have unlimited time to do good

          • geeunits•11h

            If infinity joins the discussion, I'd venture it is Time that corrupts.

        • msh•10h

          But will the elected representatives have the time needed to get good at their jobs? If not they might just be pushed around by bad actors.

        • adolph•7h

            >> power attracts the corrupt
  >  hence why limited terms are a prerequisite for functioning democracies.
          The practical effect of limited terms is a set of hapless electeds who depend on the kindness of lobbyists or other stakeholders to perform core duties, such as write effective legislation. In terms of the Gervais Principle [0], the sociopaths move from elected to lobby (which is a natural career progression already) and emplace more of the clueless as elected officials.

          But if you want to take Vienna, take Vienna! Embrace limited power

          Limited government power is often rightfully challenged as being unbalanced to the tremendous power of non-government entities such as corporations. However, this claim elides that the power and charter of any particular entity is downstream of what is granted and enabled by government functions. Less government power makes for less powerful corporations.

          However, once everything is cut down a few notches, will the remaining power still attract the "corrupt?" Yes, power, status and other social markers will still exist and act like a bug lamp for sociopaths. But on the plus side they won't be as able, as you say, "to do that much damage."

          0. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

          • zozbot234•7h

            > a set of hapless electeds who depend on the kindness of lobbyists or other stakeholders to perform core duties

            You have this already without term limits. An elected officeholder is given more than enough resources to be enabled to perform her duties, if she wants to. It's a matter of willingness, term limits aren't making things worse than they might otherwise be.

      • noosphr•11h

        Sortition is the only system that ensures high quality universal education. If anyone can become president for a year then everyone needs to be able to be president for a year.

        • derektank•7h

          I would like to see sortition implemented in one house of a bicameral legislature. Executive office is not where I would want to see it tested first (and I think it’s ill suited even in theory).

        • Der_Einzige•10h

          This but unironically.

      • atoav•10h

        Well why not both? It is certainly true that power attracts those who seek to abuse it. But it is also true that a good fraction of those who are demonstrably corrupt started out way more idealistic.

        • derektank•7h

          Is it demonstrably true? Or do people just start out with zero record, making them appear more idealistic/allowing them to adopt more idealistic rhetoric without accusations of hypocrisy?

          • atoav•5h

            Well it isn't as if we don't have historical evidence on thousands of political leaders including private diaries etc. Robespierre, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Castro, Napoleon to name only some of the very high profile ones.

            Not that there is any specific number we can attach to this, but yes, there are actual idealists who then abused their powers and we know that because there is ample historical evidence of it.

            On top of that I know some people personally who were part of the 68 student movement who also have been true idealists in their youth, but since them became defenders of their own order.

      • actionfromafar•12h

        Shouldn't it unsettle King dogmatics just as much?

        • A_D_E_P_T•12h

          Not really, because aristocrats and monarchs don't seek power in most systems; rather, they're simply born into it. Those modes of government don't actively select for the power-hungry.

          (Granted, in e.g. the Ottoman Empire and Imperial China, it was frequently the case that there were dozens of princelings who were, de facto, pitted against each other in contests for the throne. That definitely selected for ambition, brutality, and a willingness to get one's hands dirty.)

          • vintermann•11h

            Even European monarchs, with the Catholic church holding much of the keys to their authority and being very against it, managed to do a considerable amount of tactical relative-killing. Everywhere else it's basically the norm for monarchies that princes murder each other.

            A shattering bow

            A burning flame

            A gaping wolf

            A screeching pig

            A rootless tree

            A mounting sea

            A flying spear

            A falling wave

            One night's ice

            A coiled serpent

            A bride's bed-talk

            or a breaking sword

            A bear's play

            or a child of a king.

            (Odin listing up some of the things a wise man never trusts, in stanza 85 and 86 of Hávamál)

          • notahacker•12h

            Being brought up believing you have a divine right to rule and a duty to enlarge your kingdom isn't a selection effect, but worked to pretty much the same outcome in terms of brutality. Even in European states where there were pretty straightforward primogeniture rules of succession, you ended up with hundreds of years of "legitimate" inheritors displaying fondness for foreign military expeditions and tactical ploys to acquire tendentious claims to other territory, and as soon as a direct adult male descendant from a single wife wasn't available succession selected for ambition and ruthlessness considerably more than a parliamentary system.

          • triceratops•7h

            > aristocrats and monarchs don't seek power in most systems; rather, they're simply born into it.

            That's not what the Crusader Kings series tells me. Or Brett Devereaux's description of pre-industrial states as a "Red Queen's race" where the strong had to devour the weak to stay ahead of the competition.

          • actionfromafar•12h

            In theory, born into it. That was just a foil to put an air of legitimacy over the institution.

            In the real world, there was (and is!) an incredible power game over who decides over what, who gets to live, who must abdicate, how much the real power lies with the King and how much with aristocracy or the Church and so on. It's a constant rebalancing of power factors.

            • A_D_E_P_T•11h

              Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. One can point to dozens of historical examples of well-run and stable monarchies, just as one can point to "monarchies" where the power rested with power-hungry and corrupt eunuchs, bishops, or chancellors -- or where the entire process of succession was as red in tooth and claw as anything in nature.

              The trouble with representative democracy is that it always selects for the most power-hungry of its denizens.

              And now we're in the midst of a situation that Polybius would immediately recognize: The crossroads where one path leads to rule by entrenched and corrupt oligarchs, at least as bad as any of the court eunuchs of old, and where the other path leads to ochlocracy. I'd take my chances with the latter, especially in this era where direct democracy is possible, but I'm afraid that's not likely how things are going to turn out.

              • myrmidon•8h

                > The crossroads where one path leads to rule by entrenched and corrupt oligarchs, at least as bad as any of the court eunuchs of old, and where the other path leads to ochlocracy.

                I'm a bit confused; assuming you are aiming at the US situation with this, I kinda fail to see a clear contrast between entrenched oligarchy and ochlocracy.

                Isn't the Trump side a pretty good example of combining both?

                Riling up the masses, promoting selfish "got mine" attitude from the top down, partial and weaponized use of the law are basically textbook fits for mob rule?

                On the other hand, if you put Harrison or Waltz on a "entrenched oligarch" scale, there is no way they weight as heavy as Trump and his cronies in the current administration, at least in my view? Both of them did an actual job instead of just enjoying a life in the spotlight funded by generational wealth and the work of others...

                I'm very interested in conflicting viewpoints-- if you disagree with my perspective, please tell me how instead of just downvoting!

              • foldr•11h

                That seems an entirely false sense of inevitability. Once perfectly possible outcome is that representative democracy keeps chugging along as usual in most of the West and we don’t have mob rule or rule by a corrupt group of oligarchs. The present situation in the USA isn’t encouraging, but Trump hasn’t canceled the midterms yet.

                • A_D_E_P_T•11h

                  Things in Europe aren't looking good. The consent of the governed is being eroded and manipulated just as badly as it is in the US. The UK, for instance, is a tinder box, where the share of the population that simply votes against the status quo is growing to become an absolute majority.

                  • foldr•10h

                    The UK is a country where the Prime Minister may very probably have to resign because he is unpopular. See also Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. Prime Ministers in the UK don’t usually last that long if the public turns against them. Compare to the US, where Trump is deeply unpopular but also in an essentially unassailable position as POTUS. If Keir Starmer, or any other British Prime Minister, gave one press conference where they attacked a female journalist instead of responding to her question, and then criticized her for not smiling enough, they would be out of Downing Street within a day. So no, things are not going “just as badly” in the UK as they are in the US. You’re comparing general problems of discontent in a representative democracy with a total breakdown in standards of public life.

                    I’m not sure exactly what you mean by Brits “voting against the status quo”. That’s what happens any time you change from one party to another in a democracy. Wouldn’t it be more worrying if everyone kept voting for the same party and same policies all the time?

                    • iso1631•8h

                      > If Keir Starmer, or any other British Prime Minister, gave one press conference where they attacked a female journalist instead of responding to her question, and then criticized her for not smiling enough, they would be out of Downing Street within a day

                      Gordon Brown did an interview with a member of the public and forgot to take his microphone off when he got in the car. He said (in private) he'd just spoken to a biggoted woman. That was broadcast and it lost him the election.

                      https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bigotgate-gor...

          • Nursie•9h

            > because aristocrats and monarchs don't seek power in most systems;

            This… well, I’d urge you to read some English history. I’m choosing English because it’s the one I know best.

            It is a litany of power struggles, of brother and sister plotting to kill aunt, uncle and father, nephew cousin, niece and anybody else. Of factionalism in court, bloody takeovers and power struggles. Noble houses vying for position as the monarch’s favoured ones, taking land and riches from less favoured houses, or winning it back. Scions of noble houses at war with each other over succession. Monarchs slaughtering potential usurpers. 9 day monarchies as one successor is positioned against another when the old king died, all based on religious backing…

            There were long periods of stability under certain monarchs too, but often these coincide with periods of extrinsic conflict. Sometimes their wars of adventure would come close to bankrupting the country. Other times their choice of who to marry (or divorce) would cause massive loss of life.

            They very much select for the power hungry, the venal, the egotistical and those capable of subterfuge and great violence to their own blood.

        • Der_Einzige•10h

          In a world where the best ran country on earth is a "enlighten despotism" AKA Singapore, Nope.

          They think we just need more LKYs, or really, AI systems controlling everything. A benevolent dictatorial AI running society is exactly what all the futurists think is coming. Go read Orions Arm.

          • actionfromafar•6h

            Disney land with a death penalty. If that's your thing.

      • api•10h

        Why is that only a problem for democracy? It’s one of the central problems of civilization and has been discussed by philosophers since the Greeks.

        In monarchies you’d often end up with kings and people in line for the throne being murdered and all kinds of palace intrigue to select for the most conniving psychopath.

        In theocratic systems you get hypocrite self dealing priests.

        In socialist and communist systems you get an aristocracy of political pull where high ranking bureaucrats are basically identical to our billionaires and political elites.

        I’m not aware of any system that durably protects against being taken over by deranged dark triad personalities. Democracy’s virtue is that it provides some way to clean house without destroying the stability of the whole system, at least when it works.

        • thrance•8h

          > Why is that only a problem for democracy?

          Because democracy at least pretends to give power to the people. Except letting a few individuals wield enough wealth and power to buy media, politicians and judges is completely antagonistic to the basic ideals of democracy, and not many realize this (yet).

          > I’m not aware of any system that [...]

          Liberal democracy is better than feudalism, I see no reason why our systems of governance can't be improved further. And, at least to me, the obvious path forward is to keep any of those "deranged dark triad personalities" from gaining too much power, maybe by limiting the amount of wealth any single individual can hold unto.

          • takklob•6h

            > Liberal democracy is better than feudalism, I see no reason why our systems of governance can't be improved further.

            It took a disease killing a massive portion of the working population to weaken feudalism in Western Europe.

            And don’t underestimate the portion of population that yearn to be peasants.

            • thrance•3h

              > It took a disease killing a massive portion of the working population to weaken feudalism in Western Europe.

              Erm... sure, but I don't see what that has to do with my comment? Transitions between political systems are rarely pleasant and are usually motivated by crisis.

              > And don’t underestimate the portion of population that yearn to be peasants.

              I don't buy that. People learn submission, it is not inherent to the human mind.

        • carlosjobim•8h

          I see things the same way as you do. Human behaviour and conflict can never be solved, and especially not by any kind of "system", which is just thin air of imagination.

          The closest we can get is striving to elevate our cultural and spiritual level as individuals, family, friends, neighbours and strangers.

          The entire power of the psychopaths in charge all stem from corrupting normal people, and the more that can be avoided, the less power they have.

          But it is difficult, because they corrupt our strongest feelings: fear, greed, pride, laziness, desire, community.

          Millions of young men have died in senseless wars because they didn't want to be seen as "cowards", they thought of their "honour". Who remembers them now?

          Who even thinks about the thousands of young soldiers dying in the battlefields in Ukraine? Why is Trump the only leader who talks about their deaths?

          Billions of people are paying taxes to support their psychopath rulers, because of simple fear. If everybody stopped tomorrow, the world would be liberated. But people are held in fear.

    • tirant•13h

      Fully agree on the root cause, but not on the solution.

      We should strive for extremely limited power by our public representatives, so their corruption impact is reduced to a minimum. But not only limited power, but also limited budget access, as an extension to limit that power. And that actually means reduced taxation.

      But at the same time, the budget for justice system needs to increase. It should be most probably the strongest branch of the government. Delayed justice is one of the most common ways of injustice.

      Corruption within private companies is irrelevant, as the main ones to suffer from it are usually shareholders. Government has no say in that. That is unless companies break the law, and that's why a strong Justice system is necessary. With a reduced size of the state there's also way less risk of private companies and individuals to corrupt public representatives.

      Monopolies are not always a negative outcome on a free market if the company in Monopoly situation reaches that position by offering better products within the law. However they can be specially dangerous when they're artificially created by the Government (e.g. allocation of a common resource to a specific company --> corruption almost always follows).

      • pintxo•12h

        > But at the same time, the budget for justice system needs to increase. It should be most probably the strongest branch of the government. Delayed justice is one of the most common ways of injustice.

        The judical branch should very much NOT be a part of the government itself, but a fully separate branch.

        > Corruption within private companies is irrelevant, as the main ones to suffer from it are usually shareholders.

        As we have seen in the past, we have the same, if not worse, power imbalances in private companies as in the public sector. I would therefore not call it irrelevant, but agree that the Justice system can help here if appropriatly staffed.

        > Monopolies are not always a negative outcome on a free market if the company in Monopoly situation reaches that position by offering better products within the law. However they can be specially dangerous when they're artificially created by the Government (e.g. allocation of a common resource to a specific company --> corruption almost always follows).

        Do you have a single example for a company who did not over time monetized its monopoly power to the detriment of the customer?

        • technothrasher•11h

          > The judical branch should very much NOT be a part of the government itself, but a fully separate branch.

          If you don't give that entirely separate branch any executive power, it cannot enforce its rulings. If you do give it separate executive power, there is nothing to rein it in when it becomes corrupt.

          • vharuck•3h

            I was thinking about this yesterday. For the US system, what if the top roles of an independent Prosecutorial Branch were appointed by the Judicial Branch, but Congress would control them by using the budget and impeachments? The President could still work with the appointees on setting the overall agenda and priorities. Executive control could be enforced with allowing or denying cooperation with executive agencies.

            But Prosecutorial would have to be its own branch to avoid the current SCOTUS crushing on the "unitary executive" theory.

          • rayiner•11h

            Correct. If you conceive of the “rule of law” as being the operating system kernel on top of which the rest of society runs, then there are no checks on the law enforcers and interpreters.

            This is not a theoretical problem. Prosecuting politicians is a preferred approach in dysfunctional democracies, like Pakistan: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly77v0n8e9o

      • dauertewigkeit•8h

        It's fundamentally still a problem of asymmetry of power and connections.

        Try to put yourself in the shoes of an FBI agent tasked with investigating this same case. The accused are very wealthy very powerful people with deep pockets. They can and will take action against you, if you're revealed to be chasing after them. Plus, their network of allies is so vast, that you cannot even trust your superiors or other government agencies to back you up. And indeed that is exactly what happened here.

      • gib444•13h

        > Corruption within private companies is irrelevant

        I'll have some of whatever you're smoking.

        It's not that useful separating public and private when there are revolving doors and the people who run the companies bribe — sorry, lobby — politicians. It's an incredibly intimate relationship

        • whatever1•13h

          Politicians also go to the private sector after they retire.

      • Cthulhu_•11h

        Wouldn't limiting power also mean limiting their effectiveness? A government (at any layer) needs to have a certain amount of power, else they're just civilians.

        As for budget, a country needs money to do stuff; if they don't have money they can't do stuff. Stuff can range from having the world's biggest army (several times over) to providing free education to everyone (the great social equalizer IMO, as in social mobility).

        As for your justice argument, it depends - if power corrupts, wouldn't giving more power to justice corrupt them as well? You see what's happening in the US with various law enforcement branches getting A Lot Of Money - militarization of local police force for example, meaning they have the means to apply more violence.

        TL;DR, governments and justice systems need a clear description of what they can and cannot do, and checks, balances and consequences when they don't.

        > Corruption within private companies is irrelevant, as the main ones to suffer from it are usually shareholders.

        This ignores the vast majority of anyone involved in a private company - the customers. Or even the not-customers that are still affected by what a private company does (think e.g. pollution), but that's where as you say the law should come in.

      • addicted•8h

        > Corruption within private companies is irrelevant, as the main ones to suffer from it are usually shareholders.

        And a few millions of people suffering because they're being misled into buying "wellness" solutions.

        And a few hundreds of millions of people around the world suffering the effects of local pollution and clean water laws being skirted.

        And a few billion folks who are gonna suffer the effects of climate change.

        etc...

        Other than the 6-7 billion humans who suffer due to private company corruption, it's basically only the shareholders.

      • lp4v4n•11h

        I always laugh when libertarians propose all kinds of mechanism to prevent the concentration of power in the public administration but at the same time see no problem with a few individuals concentrating exponentially the most important and corrupting of the powers: wealth.

        God forbid a representative being reelected but there is no problem with a billionaire destabilizing dozens of democracies and around the world.

        Libertarianism is just the blind worship of people who have money.

        • srean•9h

          Yes. With enough money, power can be bought, judges can be bought, laws can be ...

      • thrance•8h

        Weak public servants mean strong private actors: that's what's currently eating the US republic from the inside. You have a few billionaires (Trump, Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg...) able to buy their way into power and keeping the opposition down. Reducing taxation only makes these people even more powerful, and worsen the situation. You can't have democracy when some people are able to get this much richer and more powerful than the rest, it's as simple as that.

      • fzeroracer•12h

        Are you just completely unaware with what's going on in the US or something? The reason why we're here is because of corruption within private companies leading to mass accumulation of wealth which has reality-bending effects on politics. Trump and the cronies is as much a symptom as it is a cause; related to the way billionaires bought literally all of news and social media over 30 years and weaponized it for their own personal propaganda.

        You're not going to solve this problem with a 'strong justice system', you're going to solve it by making sure no one can get that wealthy in the first place. I mean we're literally in a topic about Jeffry Epstein who is so deeply connected to everything that it would make your average TV show seem like a hack.

    • 7sigma•12h

      There is another saying from Robert Caro: "Power doesn't corrupt, it reveals". The more power, the more their flaws are amplified.

    • ghtbircshotbe•8h

      There was a big long article in the Atlantic recently called "what happened to Pam Bondi?" The answer is obviously corruption, and you probably don't need to read a big long article to see it.

      https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/pam-bondi-trump...

    • myrmidon•13h

      I do agree with this. If you followed this approach consistently, you would need back pressure against individual and company wealth growth.

      This could be quite good for competition, but would probably hurt sectors a lot that have high fixed costs/barriers of entry and need to compete with (foreign) unlimited-size companies.

      I do think that this could fix or at least vastly improve some really difficult problems: The whole judiciary is IMO blatantly unjust right now, because higher wealth can basically buy you better outcomes, democratic representation is flawed because wealth/donations buy you access to politicians (or allows you to enter politics yourself) and even national public opinion on anything is essentially for sale to a degree via profit-driven media.

      Such wealth-gap limiting could be possibly achieved by progressive taxation that rises logarithmically with revenue for companies and individual wealth (giving a strong incentive to split up wealth, and no leeway via declaring zero profits): Think 1% of revenue under 1M, 2% under 10M, ...

      I'm very curious how a nation that made strong efforts in that direction would fare.

    • veunes•9h

      I'd rephrase it as: nobody should be trusted with unchecked power, especially when it's exercised quietly and indirectly

    • tehjoker•2h

      Limited terms are anti-democratic. They were instituted for the U.S. presidency after FDR won 4 terms and scared the rich into making sure that if that ever happened again, it would be more limited in scope.

    • baxtr•10h

      It’s probably a vicious cycle I’d say.

    • pooper•9h

      > Power corrupts, end of story.

      Not all corruption is obvious though. Sometimes you think you are doing the right thing, "just need to bend the rules slightly over here". It is all for a "good cause". I feel like I am as much worried about people who are the righteous wrong, as much as people who are just out there trying to grift to make a buck.

    • havblue•8h

      I was under the impression that Epstein was powerful because he was corrupt, not the other way around.

    • sdellis•5h

      We can see that the two-party democracy in the United States has been one of the primary power tools of the 1%. They buy politicians from both parties and then sit back and laugh on their yachts while everyone else goes red in the face, outraged, arguing, and distracted. We are indeed the suckers yet again, but maybe, just maybe this time will be different?

    • wslh•8h

      I would add strong and fast consumer protection biased to big companies. Also, the elephant in the room: a modern, and not impossble expensive, legal system.

    • YetAnotherNick•10h

      Isn't it the opposite? If someone can change "democracy, taxation and anti-monopoly regulation" across the country, they have substantially more power than Elon Musk.

    • thrance•8h

      Billionaires should be taxed away from existence. This much wealth and power is hugely detrimental to society. It's not even good for themselves, with how miserable and wretched they look and behave.

    • SilverElfin•6h

      Yep. It corrupts those people and makes them disconnected. Then they go on to do worse things. The only fix is to change tax policy to not allow billionaires. Redistribute wealth above some amount. One billion seems fine as a starting point.

      • m0llusk•5h

        This obsession over a billion as a marker is toxic nonsense. Having nine hundred something million is not that much different. The main way to deal with this is progressive taxation of both income and wealth which should provide increasing resistance to growth, a mechanism that needs to particular breaking point or limit and is stronger because of that.

        One of the best businessmen I have known is Paul Orfalea, broadly known as Kinko. When he couldn't hold a job he started a company, he focused on trying to make things work for employees and customers alike, and it grew. When he sold Kinko's Copies it had a record of serving not only individuals well, but also the broader society as capitalist enterprise ideally should. And he got five billion out of that deal, which he shared with this family. Now I am supposed to believe that this is all a horrible tale of darkness cursing us all because there was some boundary that he accidentally blew through with his extensive business success. In all honesty the one who sounds corrupted and disconnected here is you.

    • carlosjobim•8h

      > taxation

      Taxation is the system where innocent people are forced to pay enormous amounts of money to the rich, powerful, corrupt. The whole basis for the Babylon system is taxation. Epstein and associates are able to thrive thanks to taxation. It has always been from the poor to the rich, never the other way around. Why do you think kings invented taxation in the first place?

      • ogogmad•8h

        If not for taxes, how would you fund prisons, police, the army, etc? Not to mention other things.

      • thrance•8h

        Then why are billionaires so anti-taxation? This is completely incoherent.

        • carlosjobim•8h

          When was the last time you heard a bank owner or large industrialist being against the taxation of everyday people?

          Even the famous/infamous billionaires never come out against income tax for normal people. At most they're against taxation of themselves.

          When did you hear the owner of a bank or a large hedge fund or a major industry talk against income taxes which the poor pay?

          The rich are 100% pro taxes. It funnels money to themselves from the population, and keeps competition down.

          • thrance•3h

            Trump's BBB brought more than $1 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthy.

  • soperj•1d

    > If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

    Doubt it would have changed anything for Bill. There's a pattern there and this is just a piece of that pattern.

    • scruple•6h

      > Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least.

      I get the sense that Bill does care about money, and so does Larry Summers, so Mom's advice probably wouldn't have done much there.

    • sgentle•14h

      A curiously frivolous way to frame the decision to get involved with a notorious sex trafficker. Nothing to do with values, integrity or culpability, just some boys missing their mommies.

      • TheOtherHobbes•11h

        He's strangely breezy about the whole thing.

        '...a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.'

        Uh. Really?

        • canjobear•6h

          He's criticizing other people's attitudes there, not stating his own.

        • SpicyLemonZest•8h

          Really. If you polled a random selection of academics, I'm confident you'd find that a majority of them consider soliciting prostitution to be somewhere between "shouldn't even be illegal" and "bar fight".

          (I repeat for emphasis, since I know people will bring it up if I don't, that the ages of the people Epstein solicited and the circumstances under which he solicited them were not as widely known at the time.)

        • TimorousBestie•9h

          Scott’s experience burning most of his friendship bridges over Israel/Palestine has left him with a cynical image of academia.

          “Secular liberal morality” here plays the same role as “cultural Marxism” elsewhere: neither exists concretely as an actual entity, but if you abstract away enough of the details you can still point to it like a bogeyman or a cryptid.

      • actionfromafar•12h

        Wait - I thought it was a Democratic hoax and that only Epstein was the bad guy? Is Trump wrong?

    • gowld•9h

      There's a comment exchange on the blog:

      Peter Says: You think Bill Gates or Larry Summers would have listened to your Mom’s advice?

      Scott Says: Peter #1: If she was their mom, maybe they would!

    • veunes•9h

      But it might've changed one decision, one meeting, one normalization step

    • pixl97•1d

      Turns out Bill is just actually a piece of shit through and through

      • decimalenough•1d

        The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? And actual charity at that, not Ellison style "Larry Ellison Research Foundation for Prolonging the Life of Larry Ellison and Getting Some Tax Breaks Along the Way".

        • soperj•1d

          You'll have to prove the "an actual charity" at that. It's literally in his name, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and Melinda had enough of Bill that she nixed their relationship.

          Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are also behind Common Core and basically ruined public education in the US.

          The foundation is a way for Bill to keep doing what he likes without having to pay taxes on it, he's just done a better job of repairing his image than Larry.

          • decimalenough•18h

            Malaria deaths have fallen by 60% in the last 15 years, saving on the order of 12 million lives. Bill's foundation has donated around $4B to the cause.

            And yeah, it's got Melinda's name on it, but let's face it, virtually all the money is from Bill/Microsoft.

            • mrg3_2013•16h

              meh..Just because he donated doesn't mean one should ignore or dilute the severity of alleged crimes. Infact, I would trade someone who doesn't commit any such acts and still does not donate over someone who donates but does worst of all the crimes.

              • SpicyLemonZest•16h

                Bill Gates isn't alleged to have participated in Epstein's crimes. He does seem to have cheated on his wife repeatedly, which I agree is terrible behavior.

            • spiderice•5h

              Is your stance that a shitty person can donate a tiny percent of their fortune to a good cause and it makes them a good person?

              Follow up question: do you buy indulgences?

            • saulpw•18h

              But much of the motivation for starting a foundation is from Melinda.

              • nearbuy•16h

                I think it's the opposite. Bill credited his parents for his philanthropic drive and Warren buffet as the person who first introduced him to the idea of giving everything away. He's been active and knowledgeable in his philanthropy and posts frequently about global health, poverty, aid, etc.

                Melinda also, of course, did work for their joint foundation before she left. Since leaving, she shifted her philanthropic focus more to US women's health and reproductive rights.

                Bill has committed to giving away nearly all his wealth (99%) over the next 19 years. Melinda is still committed to giving away over 50% of her wealth over her lifetime.

                I don't see any evidence that Melinda was the primary driver for Bill's philanthropy.

              • lazide•17h

                It’s almost like it was done… as a team.

                Where one side provided all the money, the other side provided the direction.

                Both were necessary. Weird huh?

                • spiderice•4h

                  It's really easy to give away money you didn't earn lol

                  • saint_fiasco•2h

                    Sounds very hard actually. If you asked me to spend a significant fraction of Bill Gates' money I wouldn't even know how to begin.

                    How would you do it? Do you have a way to earn his trust, a service to offer him that he values a lot, a way to steal from him, or anything like that?

                    Melania apparently managed to do it with true love and kindness. Are you capable of sincerely loving Bill Gates for a period of several years, or fake it in a perfectly convincing way for several years?

          • BigTTYGothGF•9h

            > Melinda had enough of Bill that she nixed their relationship

            Him giving her STDs and then trying to sneak antibiotics in her food without her noticing would have been grounds all by itself.

        • Lammy•1d

          You don't get that rich in the first place without being a ruthless asshole.

        • dakiol•1d

          You can be both good and bad. Like, it's not an impossibility.

          • bradlys•1d

            Yeah, doing shitty things while “donating” a bunch of money to make your legacy look really good is a classic move throughout history.

            These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.

          • dwd•19h

            "But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?".

          • colechristensen•17h

            Earning a tremendous amount of money and then amusing yourself by spending it on "charity" for the rest of your life doesn't make you a good person.

            It's just one more method of buying good feelings and trying to buy good will while being in control of large numbers of people.

            He wants to feel like he's doing good and using money to give him that feeling.

            • triceratops•7h

              "A good act does not wash out the bad, nor the bad the good, each should have its own reward"

            • idiotsecant•17h

              It's like you're allergic to subtlety. Yes, saving untold numbers of children from malaria is a good thing. You can do bad things and good things and while everyone else is arguing about morality, the thing that matters is the end effect. Did Bill Gate's time on earth result in a better world when he's gone or a worse one? I won't pretend to know enough about his life to answer that, but he has prevented a lot of really, really brutal suffering.

              • colechristensen•16h

                Nope. I'm not weighing "good deeds" that amount to his entertainment against the aggressive selfish business destroying greed that got him the money to spend and everything else he's clearly done in his personal life, shrugging my shoulders, and saying "who knows! maybe him doing all this is all for the best"

                I'd rather have better men had that money to spend and his victims both personal and business leave him penniless and alone at the end.

        • gessha•6h

          I saw a recent video by Zizek where he mentioned the original gray eminence - François Leclerc du Tremblay who was Cardinal Richelieu’s right hand man. During the day he orchestrated the thirty year war and during the night he wrote the most beautiful meditations. Does doing good excuse the bad?

        • bigfatkitten•16h

          I’m sure Peter Scully[1] donated to charity at some point, too, and doesn’t make him any less evil.

          [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scully

        • ceejayoz•1d

          > The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity?

          https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ ranks him at #13 wealthiest in the world with $108B net worth.

          He's donated about half his fortune, and 60% of that to his own org.

        • saalweachter•1d

          Listen, billionaires just have to do three things to be beloved:

            1. Donate 5-10% of their fortune to random unobjectionable charities.
  2. Don't abuse children.
  3. Stay off Twitter.
          It's not a high bar, we don't need to give a silver medal to those that fall short.
          • MengerSponge•1d

            This was enough for Carnegie, and the fact that they're not pursuing similar public works simply illustrates that while they may want to be loved, they don't care if they're loved or not.

            Because they don't want to be beloved, they want to turn people into dinosaurs. (to adapt the Spiderman quote)

        • gosub100•6h

          The charity was cover for something. Just like the "Clinton foundation".

        • godelski•23h

            > basically his entire fortune
          Money is a completely different concept for someone that rich.

          If I give away 50% of my fortune my entire life falls apart and I am struggling. If I give away 10% it is going to hurt.

          But Gates? He gives away 99% of his money and he's still a billionaire. His life isn't really going to change in any meaningful way. His money still generates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year without him lifting a finger. He gives away 99.9% of his money and he's still worth $100m and again, his life effectively does not change, making now only millions of dollars a year doing nothing.

          Don't get me wrong, I am glad he's giving his money away and this is far better than Ellison or plenty of others, but that doesn't absolve their crimes/behavior. There's definitely a hierarchy of wrongness, being a cheater is definitely better than being a pedo cheater but neither is good or an excuse. The dude was associating with a known sex trafficker. Definitely not an "ops, I didn't know", his wife definitely knew and told him...

          • globular-toast•15h

            Warren Buffet wrote about this years ago. If you want to judge how "good" someone is you need to look at what they sacrifice. Gates sacrifices nothing. In fact, the entire thing is just marketing and basically worked for a long time. I was shocked to see people talking about Gates like he was a saint a few years ago. Glad to see that's changing.

        • jmyeet•17h

          A lot of the so-called "charity" by wealthy individuals is anything but. It's placing assets in a tax-advantaged positions where some of the proceeds gets used for "charity" (whatever that means) but they still maintain control.

          For example, the typical tax structure is to put assets into a foundation. That allows the assets to grow and earn income without being taxed. The only requirement is that 5% of the asset pool has to be used on the stated goal of the foundation. That might sound good but it also includes costs like "administration" so, say, having your family as employees. There are limits to this but it's still somewhat of a slush fund.

          That charity can be used for political influence. A foundation can't donate to candidates or PACs but can instead, for example, fund a think tank from which policy is created or influenced. That think tank will employ people while their party is out of the White House and otherwise nurture people who will go into the administration when their party returns to power.

          Also, a large foundation such as this wields influence just by its size, by choosing what to fund and where. It can exact generous conditions from governments. Those conditions can extend to companies the foundation's benefactors have an interest in.

          All of this is about influence. Governments are accountable to their people. Outsized private foundations are accountable to no one.

          • technothrasher•7h

            Naive me was pretty shocked when, after my financial advisor suggested I start a donor advised fund for the tax advantages, my lawyer then explained the loopholes to use to cheat and have the tax free money come back to me instead of actually to charities.

            I guess I'm not cut out to be a "big shot". I opened the DAF, but use the money for actually donating to charitable organizations to which I have no other connection.

          • verisimi•15h

            Also, don't forget, that the work itself can be about 'preparing the ground' for your non-charitable interests (which are probably held in trust, ie not held personally). Eg if you involve yourself in child education (perhaps making it worse) this is not an issue if it makes it more like that your classroom software is adopted. Or, if you are heavily invested in pharmaceuticals, singing the praises of vaccines, is just a tax savvy way of increasing the market that you will benefit from.

        • testing22321•6h

          How many dollars does one have to donate to make up for raping a child?

          Put a dollar figure on your daughter, sister, mother.

          Now you get it.

        • Larrikin•17h

          Its like George Washington and the other founding fathers, didn't become a king voluntarily, helped create the country and modern democracy, but loved his slaves so much they could only be freed after he was dead. You can create good while actually still being a terrible person. Much of this era is people being upset about their fallen "heroes"

          • manuelmoreale•16h

            > helped create the country and modern democracy

            I’ll give you the creation of the country but modern democracy was not born in the USA. Your overall point is still valid though.

        • owebmaster•12h

          No, decimalenough, "donating" his money doesn't change what he did, doesn't even make it slightly better.

        • lifestyleguru•1d

          I'd prefer if rich simply paid their taxes and contributions instead of spending money on fighting poor children in Africa.

          • mikepurvis•1d

            One of Michael Shellenberger's central theses is, I think, that the government's ability to invest in "extras" like overseas aid, science, the environment, space exploration, etc is directly a function of how large and healthy the middle class is because that's where the political capital to do these things really comes from.

            Basically the post-WWII period was a golden age for all of the above because the middle class of returning soldiers was there, and it was as power and wealth consolidated in the 80s and onward that there was less and less interest and agreement about spending on stuff other the essentials (which turned out to be mostly just defense).

            So really it's a two pronged thing:

            * the wealthy need to pay much more, and the government needs to invest that in services that benefit the middle class (education, health care, energy & transportation infrastructure) and also which keep people from falling out of the middle class (social safety net, consumer protections).

            * eventually there's a critical mass of middle class people comfortable enough to look out their windows and feel concern about pollution, the poor, etc, and then you ultimately get a combination of individual action, NGOs, and government programmes that meet the very needs that are noticed and lobbied for.

            But I think the issue is that many advocates want to jump directly from "more taxes on the rich" to "gov't spends directly on my pet issue", and if you miss the second step, you're never going to get the willpower to either raise the taxes or direct the money into environmental initiatives or whatever else.

            • pfdietz•1d

              The same Michael Shellenberger who assured us PV cells are made with rare earth elements?

              • mikepurvis•1d

                I think you're referring to this piece: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...

                Yes, I don't love that he puts out hits like that on solar and wind in his effort to promote nuclear as a sole solution, but I still find his larger arguments around the dynamics of environmentalism as a movement persuasive.

                • pfdietz•22h

                  After he has lost his integrity by posting obvious propaganda like that, why believe him on anything?

                  • curiosity42•16h

                    One thing that has helped me immensely, given that everything that is typed has an agenda (don't worry, I am an anonymous no body, from whom even thinking of having a agenda will be nothing short of fake-puffery), is that: 1. Analyze the written word no it's own merit, regardless of who has written it 2. Look at who has written it and all the agendas that might have been wrapped into it 3. Apply a discount or multiplier, given your own world view. Else, a lot of good thought gets thrown out (again, at least for me).

            • lifestyleguru•1d

              I mean literally taxing the literally rich. Most population by "taxing the rich" mean those earning >90k EUR/USD on employment contract. They see the real rich maybe few times in life from a distance on a yacht in Caribbean or Mediterranean but don't connect the dots.

              • mikepurvis•1d

                I don't have a magic answer for how to get people on board, but I can say that I make a lot more than that number, and my taxes (in Canada) are way too low.

                I think some of it is the psychology that government is incompetent and will just waste the money anyway ("let Bill keep his money and build toilets in Africa himself, at least he'll get it done"), and the best way to fight that is probably what Carney is trying to do right now: kick off a bunch of ambitious programmes to build new things like pipelines, rail, airport expansions, etc on an accelerated timeline. Perhaps if people see visible progress they'll be more open to saying yeah okay, I'm all right with paying more to live in a country where we get stuff done.

                • lifestyleguru•1d

                  If government is so ineffective and incompetent then stop charging people in the lower band of salaries 35%-45% from their monthly payslips as well.

                • verisimi•15h

                  > my taxes (in Canada) are way too low

                  I'm sure the government will accept donations. Just pay extra as you think they are worth it.

          • wrs•1d

            That made some sense back when the government used to use the taxes to help poor children in Africa, or poor children in the US for that matter. As of 2025 it seems to just leave that sort of thing up to Bill.

            • refulgentis•1d

              You're absolutely right in a cold logical sense, even if it makes other people emotionally react to the comment. This was a kind way to react to a lazy false dichotomy, that it's either taxes or donations.

          • verisimi•15h

            They do pay their taxes. It's just that they wrote the laws too. And, if you use trusts, foundations, corporations, etc, you are able to legally avoid taxes, while retaining the same control.

        • bsder•16h

          Andrew Carnegie funded a whole lot of stuff we still enjoy today. He was still a piece of shit and responsible for a lot of people winding up dead.

          Gates has always been a piece of shit. For example, when Paul Allen got diagnosed with cancer, Gates and Ballmer tried to screw him out of Microsoft stock that he owned (this was roughly 1982-ish?).

          You're a shit person if you try to screw over your "friend" like this. You're a shit person squared if you do it when they just got diagnosed with cancer.

        • stronglikedan•1d

          Okay, a complete piece of shit with an undigested kernel of sweet corn stuck in it.

        • mrguyorama•1d

          Jeffrey Epstein ran a child sex slavery operation for rich people.

          There is nothing at all you can do that could ever overcome the harm of helping that man, participating in his business, and calling him a friend.

          I don't care if Jesus Christ himself comes down and says Bill Gates is solely responsible for the ending of all suffering.

          Raping kids is Bad. Enslaving kids to rape is Bad. This is as clear as you can get in real human society to being The Bad Guy, and Bill Gates spent his precious, limited time on this earth helping him, legitimizing him, and participating in his influence peddling and child rape and slavery

          Bill Gates is a piece of shit.

          • jacquesm•14h

            It's confusing to me how this needs to be spelled out. It seems pretty obvious and anybody in IT should know - long before the general public - that Gates is a complete asshole.

          • fromMars•6h

            As far as I am aware, Gates was not knowledgeable of the extent of Epstein's crimes.

            At the time they met in 2011, Epstein had been convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008.

            How did he help him and call him a friend?

        • oulipo2•1d

          The problem is how the society allowed him to build that wealth. It shouldn't be allowed, not in that way.

          He took more from the society than he gave back. And when you take from society, you're not supposed to decide alone how to redistribute. That's the issue

        • sobkas•1d

          >The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity?

          So he is no longer a billionaire? And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls? The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone? Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was. What a sacrifice it was for him...

          • com2kid•1d

            They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard.

            Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.

            • sobkas•1d

              >They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard.

              It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary.

              >Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.

              They helped so many people by not allowing them getting covid vaccine or by fighting generics? Also their "good" deeds weren't without negative consequences that could be avoided if someone actually listened to people they were "helping".

              • JuniperMesos•17h

                > It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary.

                Why are charter schools bad? What is the ostensible easy way to improve US education that you know for sure will work?

                • sobkas•7h

                  Easy way is not doing charter schools. Why are they bad? Charter school can choose what children they will teach when public schools don't have that choice, then people point at charter schools as having higher outcomes. In essence charter schools are a tool to discriminate students from poor families.

                  • com2kid•20m

                    It is complicated.

                    I am a big supporter of public schools, but I also understand that only allowing rich parents to opt out of public schools can lead to some very bad outcomes as schools don't have to respond directly to public pressure.

                    Recently the Seattle public schools reverted some very bad decisions because so many parents in Seattle pulled their kids out of public schools to go to private, at such a high numbers it started to cause budget issues.

                    That was only possible because the so many parents here can afford to do that.

                    Another example is with how many schools stopped using phonics for reading and an entire generation of kids ended up with poor reading skills. No marketplace of ideas means even if parents wanted to have their kid learn phonics, only rich parents could afford to switch to private schools. Even today Seattle schools is just slowly switching back to phonics (my local school is a pilot for returning to phonics! Year later!)

                    Same goes for 1:1 laptop usage. Evidence now shows that every school that moves to one to one laptops (a dedicated laptop for every kid in every classroom) has educational outcomes plummet. It will take years of concerted effort by parents to get those laptops out of public schools (to be fair, took years of effort to get them into the schools....) and break the contracts to school district has with technology providers.

                    Having all the kids in the city go to a single School district has many huge benefits that lift everybody up, and a well-funded public school system is essential to democracy.

                    But there are also issues with putting all your eggs in one basket.

                    I don't think anyone has a good solution to these problems.

      • Insanity•1d

        These binary distinctions (mostly) don't work for people in the real world. It's not a book or movie where people are clearly either good or bad, in reality all people are a mix of both.

        He's still doing his work on philanthropy which is IMO a good thing.

        The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.

        • protocolture•17h

          >The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.

          Yeah everyone forgets, he killed Hitler. That was a huge win for Germany. But no one ever gives him the credit.

        • _whiteCaps_•1d

          You mean his philanthropy work that influences where public money goes, into companies like Monsanto and Cargill which his foundation profits from?

          • Insanity•1d

            They work in healthcare, education, gender equality initiatives, green energy..

            I’m not a fan of MSFT but there are worse uses of the money he made from the company.

            I think it’s a bit unfair to categorize all of his contributions to charity as “not charitable”.

            • sobkas•1d

              His "charitable" contributions are only in place to charity wash his awful actions in the past and now. And it worked, everyone thinks of Saint Bill and his supposed good deeds while forgetting what he actually did or doing right now.

          • jmcgough•1d

            I don't think a healthy society has anything close to our level of wealth concentration, but even if he's made mistakes, he's saved many millions of lives.

            Compare that to Elon Musk, who uses his Musk Foundation as a tax shelter, only spending from it for a private school for his children.

            • sobkas•1d

              And how many people would have been saved if he didn't forcibly extracted that money from society to begin with?

              Because it's almost impossible to not help someone if he just throw wads of money at random. What important is how many people weren't saved because he decided to be a middle man in all of it?

        • sobkas•1d

          He uses philanthropy to force his ideology on everyone and his ideology doesn't work. His philanthropy makes things worse not better.

          At some point it stops being a philanthropy when it makes lives of people he tries to "help" worse. Like his actions have a ulterior motives...

          • Insanity•1d

            Interesting. Honestly I don't know as much about his philanthropy, which ideology does he push? How did it make lives worse?

            • soperj•1d

              Common Core for one.

              • analog31•18h

                This is the thing that really baffles me. My kids went through K-12 when Common Core was a thing, and there was a huge backlash about it, so I decided to look it up and to see how it was being used in our school district.

                A few states published their Common Core guidelines. I looked at one state, and the curriculum goals looked no different than the things that I learned when I was a kid. It seemed completely ordinary. I remain baffled about why it was so controversial.

                • nickstinemates•17h

                  The way they teach math is stupid

                  • zeroonetwothree•16h

                    I like the common core math curriculum. I think it makes a lot of sense. I prefer it to how I was taught.

                    I have a kid in school and a math degree so I have some knowledge of this.

                  • analog31•17h

                    Math education has always been a failure, or a "crisis." The number of people who come out of school with any functional math ability has been fairly constant over the decades, and depends a lot on family background and economic class. I'm not even sure that differences across countries are all that significant when people reach adulthood.

                    Don't get me wrong. I was one of the successful ones, but I think math education is in need of reform. In fact I would reform it quite radically.

    • watwut•1d

      Same with Summers. He had reputation beyond Epstein contacts.

      • vintermann•16h

        "There are two kinds of politicians, insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price for their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes." -- Larry Summers, according to Yanis Varoufakis in "Adults in the Room"

        It sounds a bit cartoon villainy, but honestly, I see no reason to doubt that he said this. Everything points to these people being casually desperate to be let into ever innermore circles. Even now that this particularly ugly circle is blown open, notice that they still simply do not talk about what their fellow insiders did except in vague generalities.

        • Nevermark•15h

          It isn't really surprising that discretion matters to villains. As much as it matters to everyone else.

          Except for the parts involving criminal coverups. That seems to plague close-nit groups at any level of society, e.g. world religions, police, finance, families, etc.

        • disqard•4h

          You reminded me of this excellent essay by CS Lewis, titled "The Inner Ring":

          https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

        • watwut•14h

          I cant help myself. "Adults in the Room ... with half naked teenagers putting the cloth down" or "Adults in the Room ... working hard to destroy the democracy and create violent authoritarian world".

          Back to your main point, mafia operates similarly. In fact, there is not much difference between the two. What is Larry Summers not saying there is that being part of this circle is making this circle more powerful. Them not talking about what they know is itself "influencing powerful people and outcomes".

    • Cthulhu_•11h

      Not to go full pizzagate conspiracy theorist, but, Epstein is just the most out in the open and famous tip of the proverbial iceberg. These people didn't stop being nonces because some of them got caught.

      • gosub100•6h

        He was the access agent and the one procuring girls for powerful men. He would then produce blackmail and force the men to capitulate to his demands. He was a mossad operative.

  • praptak•9h

    Since it's ultimately about morals, maybe it is time to reread CS Lewis' "The Inner Ring" from 1944[0,1]. It's about the same kind of choices but in situations which are much harder to extricate oneself from than just a random sleazeball messaging you out of the blue.

    [0] Link: https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

    [1] HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38696764

    • andrewflnr•4h

      It's also one of the major subjects of his novel, That Hideous Strength. The novel is honestly a bit of a slog until it gets going, but I appreciated it more as I started feeling the same pull to be on The Inside. The speech linked above is simply very good.

  • mlmonkey•6h

    > If only Bill Gates . . . had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

    That's assuming Bill Gates didn't know what he was doing. Sadly, it sounds like he knew exactly what he was doing.

  • stein1946•14h

    While I understand that once one attains those short of connections, certain intelligence agencies will reach out offering lucrative opportunities for your co-operation.

    Disgusting nature aside, I can't help but be amazed as to how someone can be so well connected. What sort of skills did Epstein have that managed to have so many people on speed dial?

    How do you get in a position to correspond with presidents, royals, celebrities and getting them all hooked on you?

    Amazing indeed.

    • tokioyoyo•9h

      A few years ago there was some news articles about “group chats that rule the world”, and for some reason people didn’t take it seriously enough. Closer to the top, it feels like it’s “everyone knows everyone” game. Playing against those groups just leads to a perma-loss, so you’re incentivized to partake.

      This is/was one of such groups.

      • Teever•3h

        Some people would love to play against those groups with the goal of not winning but costing their opponents dearly.

        They never get the opportunity though because those groups are intentionally protected from those kinds of players.

    • ricardo81•14h

      Isn't part of it that he had leverage on many people, given the amount of evidence there seems to be? I guess that would be one way to further the network via 'favours'.

    • gehsty•14h

      Wealth and the party scene (drugs and sex) as a carrot and then a stick. It is not amazing, it is vile.

    • unregistereddev•7h

      He was a talented con artist. While I don't have the link offhand, I recall reading an in-depth article the New York Times published on Epstein's rise. He gained connections first by exaggerating his own credentials, and later by exaggerating the depth and nature of his other connections. He was very good at convincing people that he was someone they needed to know.

    • veunes•9h

      But less about personal brilliance and more about how social power actually works when money, status, and weak accountability intersect

    • Zigurd•9h

      Being omniconnected was his job, if you think he was being managed, and his business, to the extent he was freelancing and trading on his own account.

      How do you become omniconnected? You offer people a good time. How do you have repeat customers? You offer them a too good time. Why the disgusting acts? Because mere sex isn't scandalous enough.

      Sometimes you do it because you've been commissioned to do it to a specific person. Sometimes you do it on spec because you think you can sell it. There is no one goal or ideology or theme to it other than it's gotta be nasty enough to blackmail a target.

    • 0dayz•11h

      If one stops seeing Epstein as only a blackmailer and instead see him as both a blackmailer and a fixer I think things falls into place.

      There are after all multiple people being "given" girlfriends or contacts for social networking, shown in the Epstein files.

      Most obvious example is of course Donald Trump with Melania.

    • lostlogin•14h

      > What sort of skills did Epstein have that managed to have so many people on speed dial?

      The answer may be disturbing.

    • KoftaBob•13h

      He was basically their drug dealer, except the drug was underage girls. Almost anyone else can’t get away with providing that for as long as he did without getting locked up, but he could do it because he was doing it on behalf of Mossad.

      • tokioyoyo•9h

        I think it’s an oversimplification. Epstein isn’t the only “connecting big people to other big people” person. It just happened to be on top of all the shady stuff, he also trafficked kids. I believe there are more people like him, just flying under the radar.

        • deadbabe•5h

          Well, it’s not a crime to connect big people to other big people. If you are not trafficking underage people or smuggling drugs and weapons, chances are no one cares. Doesn’t mean you’re under the radar.

      • navigate8310•12h

        What triggered Mossad to toss their best informant?

        • ix101•12h

          The fact he got locked up?

        • lifestyleguru•12h

          look up their email as ask them yourself

        • KoftaBob•12h

          Him being in jail awaiting trial, which risked him exposing the details of the operation if he felt it could help him get a lighter sentence.

          If the choice for Mossad was either risk Epstein exposing that Israel was essentially running a state-sponsored underage sex trafficking ring, or kill him before he can do that, you know what they'd choose.

          • hshdhdhj4444•11h

            Right, so pretty much every rich person was implicated by and at risk because of Epstein, including the sitting U.S. President at the time, but it was actually Mossad…

            • Aerbil313•10h

              How do you run a crime organization that big and that out in the open (communicating openly via email, which not even the biggest drug cartels dare to do) without getting taken down by the various intelligence agencies of the world, even avoiding the U.S. federal law enforcement for the longest time?

              There is one answer: Epstein was protected by state forces, not that of U.S. but of its closest "ally" (more like master at this point).

              Not that they need it that much today, anyway. AIPAC sponsors almost all of U.S. congress, check out how much your congressmen and women received from AIPAC here: https://www.trackaipac.com/congress

              • woodruffw•8h

                > There is one answer: Epstein was protected by state forces, not that of U.S. but of its closest "ally" (more like master at this point).

                This is a bog-standard white nationalist trope (“ZOG”), gussied up with current affairs.

                Epstein avoided the consequences of his actions because he was a wealthy, powerful man surrounded by other wealthy, powerful men (who in turn stand to lose a great deal by having their behavior exposed). Not because the Jews secretly run the world.

                • MaxHoppersGhost•6h

                  Just because a bad group of people also believe the same thing doesn't make that thing false. Nice attempt.

      • gowld•9h

        It's at a minimum extremely ignorant to believe or pretent that this begins and end at "Mossad" being a magical shady force that controls the world. Looking for tight little narrative misses the complexity of human sociery.

  • JumpCrisscross•1d

    > adding: “perhaps you will know Jeffrey and his background and situation."

    This is the most-interesting bit. The introducer put this up front. Maybe it's Nigerian-prince scame logic? Or maybe there really is that much sympathy for pedophiles in Silicon Valley [1].

    [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/business/epstein-investme...

    • gpm•1d

      Reading more charitably than is likely deserved, it could be "his background and situation (of knowing tons of rich people who might also put funds into this)"

      • JumpCrisscross•1d

        I'm struggling to read the word "situation" charitably in the context of an introduction.

        • gpm•1d

          I'm reading "situation" as "engaged in the occupation of networking, but it's not a job" in the above... but yeah that's one part of why it's an overly charitable reading.

        • 1-more•1d

          Best I can do is that the middleman took the sweetheart deal conviction for solicitation at face value, and did not know it was a plea down from crimes against children? IDK

        • sonofhans•1d

          Because you’re not the audience. Clearly, in 2010, many people were still angling for Epstein introductions for the obvious reasons. The “warning” is a signal.

    • dathinab•7h

      IMHO it's more like a disclaimer, if you hide it people will sooner or later still find out either if they do research (it was public), or randomly later. That then creates a situation of a "breach of trust" that "they where tricked to work with a evil person" etc.

      So given that it anyway comes out sooner or later it's better to be upfront about it as that can create a feeling of trust. It can create misconceptions like "if he where unserious he would have hidden that he works for Epstein" etc.

      At the same time it acts as filter, people with a upstanding moral compass will directly say no and you don't wast time on trying to recruit them.

      Lastly for people which some but not robust morals iff you can convince them to work with you and they start having doubts you now have the argument that "you told them upfront about the issue and they where okay with it, and bailing not would make them look like a very unreliable business partner affecting their carrier beyond this situation". To be clear I'm not saying that this is "true", but that this argument presented carefully in the right way at the right time can be effective to manipulate people _even if not true_.

    • notahacker•1d

      Feels mostly like "if you're responding to this you're already compromised", a bit like "I take it you understand that our Family expects its favours to be returned".

      I think it's pretty well established now that powerful people in and outside the Valley considered to think that Epstein was a useful contact knowing his "personal situation" rather well and sometimes explicitly referring to it. Suspect it's possible to have innocently accepted an introduction to him or even advice from him in the 2010s because he wasn't that famous at the time, but it seems like they were motivated to minimise that possibility. Even easier to add people to the list you can blackmail in future if you don't even have to arrange island visits for them

    • lifestyleguru•1d

      > He has paid for college educations for personal employees and students from Rwanda, and spent millions on a project to develop a thinking and feeling computer and on music intended to alleviate depression.

      Helping poor children from Africa, investing in AI, and burning CDs with dolphin sounds. A classic.

  • Seattle3503•2h

    This is interesting to me as it demonstrates that a normal person at the time could see for themselves that Epstein was someone you didn't want to associate. I've wondered if Epstein put up a good smoke screen that confounded ordinary judgements (rather than moral judgements). IMO this demonstrates that a normal person could see him for who he was, even in the midst of one of his charm offensives.

    • matthewdgreen•22m

      As far back as 2008 a quick Google for Epstein's name would reveal Wikipedia and mainstream news outlining the charges. He was convicted for soliciting a 14 year old, but the charges covered many other girls and sexual assaults.

  • Wistar•5h

    The names of someone close to me and his (adult) daughter both show up in the latest Epstein file release but for innocuous reasons. They both have published a lot and, apparently, Epstein was recommended some of their works.

  • direwolf20•12h

    The most surprising name in the Epstein files is Rebecca Watson also known as Skepchick on YouTube. She has been a thorn in their side for years and years.

    • tdeck•10h

      I've been enjoying her recent videos about this for sure e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoO9FZXUgv4

      • marai2•2h

        I had no idea about any of this! Thank you for sharing this!

    • cogman10•8h

      She was supremely harassed at one point (see: elevatorgate). Now I have to wonder how much of that was Epstein powered.

      • direwolf20•21m

        According to her videos, the timing lines up perfectly

  • martythemaniak•1d

    > If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

    The actual lesson is not "listen to your mom", but "character matters". It doesn't matter how much someone agrees with you, how smart they are, how rich they are, how many great ideas they have etc etc. A rotten character will eventually rot everything around it. Techines/nerds/geeks get so enamoured with ideas they tend to not even see the kind of people ideas come from.

    • veunes•9h

      Character matters but so does having people around you who are willing to call it early, before you've rationalized yourself into ignoring it

    • gowld•9h

      The implied lesson is that moms impart character.

      Bill Gates's mother was self-dealing up nepo baby business contracts while Scott's Mom was warning him away from bad people.

    • fragmede•14h

      > Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

      Is attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but probably has something to do with that.

  • veunes•9h

    Sometimes (sometimes) it just implies that someone sent an email, got ignored, and left a paper trail behind

    • bitmasher9•9h

      Just being named in the files doesn’t mean you are guilty. In this situation being named in the files gave him an opportunity to demonstrate high moral character. “I turned down his money because he was scummy”

      • cogman10•8h

        Yup. There's a few people like that in the files. But a distressingly large number of named people had ongoing correspondence.

  • amirhirsch•8h

    > S&S Deli in Cambridge

    Good lunch spot for a nudnik

  • moralestapia•1d

    Excerpt from one of the related emails (written by JE):

    "great proposal„ however, it needs to be more around deception alice -bob. communication. virus hacking, battle between defense and infiltration.. computation is already looked at in various fields. camoflauge , mimickry, signal processing, and its non random nature, misinformation. ( the anti- truth - but right answer for the moment ).. computation does not involve defending against interception, a key area for biological systems, if a predator breaks the code, it usually can accumulate its preys free energy at a discount . self deception, ( necessary to prevent accidental disclosure of inate algorithms. WE need more hackers , also interested in biological hacking , security, etc."

    Damn! I once worked with a guy that was exactly like this. Not just writing but his style of speech irl was like that, incoherent loosely bound ideas around one topic. Ironically, the harder he tried to appear smart the more idiotic were the things that spewed out of his mouth.

    We were working with GPUs, trying to find ways to optimize GPU code, he called the team for an informal meeting and told us dead serious, "Why can't you just like, ..., remove the GPUs from the server, then crack them open, turn them outside out and put them back in to see if they perform better". :O

    I don't know if this has a name, I just thought the guy had schizophrenia. So glad I moved on from that place.

    • accidentallfact•11h

      It's called "a stupid man with money". It's really quite simple:

      * He has money

      * People want a share of his money

      * He has enough people to tell him stuff to make his bullshit seem to have some connection with reality

      * Anybody who argues with his stupid bullshit is no longer welcome and gets no chance to get a share of his money

      • Aerbil313•10h

        Ugh. I worked for a guy like this, he was a full-on cybersecurity paranoiac. You need to be a special type of person with near-infinite patience of stupidity just to be able to work under them.

    • bhelkey•4h

      > "Why can't you just like, ..., remove the GPUs from the server, then crack them open, turn them outside out and put them back in to see if they perform better"

      I don' know what "turn them outside out" but it sounds like they are suggesting removing and replacing the heatsink. Funnily enough, replacing thermal paste can improve temperatures [1].

      [1] https://www.xda-developers.com/finally-replaced-gpu-thermal-...

      • andrewflnr•2h

        That's a very generous interpretation. Excessively so. He may have heard of someone suggesting that and repeated it in garbled form, but that would not refute the accusation of bullshittery.

    • rawgabbit•1d

      Pseudo-intellectual aka bullshitter. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pseudo-intellectu...

      computation does not involve defending against interception, a key area for biological systems,. He is confused about software/programming/hacking. Hacking absolutely involves intercepting messages e.g., man in the middle attack. I have no idea what he thinks biological systems is; does he think that bacteria/viruses intercept chemical messages that our brain sends to different organs in our body?

      if a predator breaks the code, it usually can accumulate its preys free energy at a discount. Free energy -- yuck -- that is what happens when scientists give a terrible name to "usable work" or "usable energy". Free energy is about the usable work you can get out of a e.g., coal powered steam engine. He is mixing physics/thermodynamics with biology.

      • direwolf20•12h

        biology is all about thermodynamics. Why do you think we eat?

        • rawgabbit•1h

          Not the same. We eat to get macro nutrients: fats, protein, and carbohydrates.

          • direwolf20•18m

            Why do we need those? Oh right thermodynamics.

            Don't let the label fool you. Thermodynamics is the study of energy flows at the fundamental level, not only heat.

    • mmsimanga•17h

      Reminds me of that academic paper that was generated by a computer, this was before current wave of AI agents. The paper was just word soup but was accepted into a journal. Apologies I don't have link typing on mobile.

    • direwolf20•12h

      Maybe he was saying remove the plastic shrouds for better cooling? In a server, it could work

    • lifestyleguru•1d

      My brain farts are more cohesive, yet I'm never drunk enough while writing them down to use spaces before punctuation or after a bracket.

      • rob74•13h

        Maybe this style indicates that drugs other than alcohol were involved?

        • lifestyleguru•12h

          Put away that pill Jeffray . It's NOT aspirin ,, Donnie took it.

    • cyode•14h

      Sounds like it could be narcissistic personality disorder.

    • arjie•9h

      Well, it's a prompt to his assistant. It's more short-hand communication than anything else. My self-notes often look like that. They're just phrases to bring to mind some ideas rather than others or direct towards something.

      Someone[3] mentioned how he sounded in an interview and I went and found his conversation with Steve Bannon. My daughter just went back to sleep and I'm not one for listening to stuff anyway so I sent it through Voxtral and put it through a visualizer[1] so I could read it and I can see why someone might want to listen to him.

      He name-drops famous people a lot, definitely farms those connections and so on, but the things he mentions do reveal a systems-level comprehension of many concepts and how they affect each other. And he does it by describing these things in a simple way that must have been easy for them to understand. Personally, I think it obscures a lot of the detail but it has the flavour of the insight porn genre that was once popular.

      A few of the examples are that he describes the subprime crisis as originating in Clinton-era home-ownership reform that pressured government lenders to essentially back many subprime mortgages (expanded during the Bush-era). Then he talks about mark-to-market accounting and how that accelerated (maybe even was one of the causes) of the 2008 crisis. That is sort of true, which is why new rules allow for some kinds of assets to be valued differently[2].

      Anyway, unlike others here I don't think he's incoherent or stupid or whatever. The crimes he was convicted and about to be convicted for are pretty horrific but I think people are treating him like some kind of moron when I don't think that's accurate. I'm not saying this to praise the guy or defend him. I just don't think it's true.

      0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWEc-LMT10

      1: https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/voxtral-viewer/?t=jeffrey-epste...

      2: https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/loa...

      3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911540

      • gtowey•2h

        > A few of the examples are that he describes the subprime crisis as originating in Clinton-era home-ownership reform that pressured government lenders to essentially back many subprime mortgages (expanded during the Bush-era).

        But I think that's incorrect. The lynchpin of the subprime crisis was really the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act in 1998, which made sure that consumer-facing banks had strict limits on how much they could be leveraged in their investments. This set them apart from investment banks which were allowed to take bigger risks.

        Then, a bunch of financial fuckery in new kinds derivatives generated the idea that they had "solved" the risk factor of subprime mortgages and that they could open the floodgates on accepting any and all mortgages without doing any of the traditional underwriting. They sliced them into tranches using a magic formula which nobody understood and sold them off. The ratings agencies helped by stamping this garbage with top grades and tricking institutional investors into holding the bag.

        The result was that when it all imploded the US consumers were the ones who got hosed -- because those consumer banks were over-leveraged in these bad investments.

        It was criminal activity all the way. It was conspiracy to make billions of the short-term commissions on all the mortgage transaction activity, while sticking someone else with the toxic waste.

        It was not a simple policy decision from the 90's. That narrative is just another way for the oligarchs to rewrite history and evade responsibility. Ensuring that we'll learn nothing and they can do this all over again once people forget.

      • throw310822•2h

        I took your transcript and discussed it with Claude Opus 4.6, after removing both Epstein's and Bannon names (not that it mattered, it understood perfectly who they both were, but didn't mention it until after I asked it explicitly).

        Claude suggested an interesting pattern: on several topics, Epstein starts with some medium level concept (not naive, but not expert-level), then distracts with a metaphor or a short anecdote, then drops some hint that he has great authority on the subject ("I was in the room", "I had insider knowledge") and finally changes subject or claims that nobody really knows, without ever going deeper.

    • cubefox•11h

      Sounds like he was confused but genuinely interested in cryptology, which contradicts the cynical narrative about him only donating for social reasons.

    • xorcist•7h

      Word salads can be very intimidating if the words are extremely technical and the person behind them carries a lot of clout. It's a bit of a trick that some people are very good at.

      Bill Gates was known for making PMs and tech lead type people scared, often literally so, by going deep into technical details.

      Elon Musk sometimes also talks a lot of details, to the point of actual rocket engineers working for him being impressed. At the same time, it is sometimes painfully obvious that he hasn't got the basics even remotely correct.

      I'm not saying that Epstein was like that, but the fact that these three people used to hang out isn't surprising, they're likely to be socially compatible.

    • dnautics•1d

      i don't think its schizophrenia?

      i mean working in tech you haven't run into that CTO or vp eng who snowjobs the c-suite with a word salad of hot button technical terms that don't quite add up?

      hell ive even interviewed developer candidates for positions who are like this.

      • moralestapia•1d

        >i mean working in tech you haven't run into [...]

        Yeah, it's on my comment.

    • EFreethought•1d

      When he was alive a lot of people said Epstein was really smart.

      But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.

      • lebca•1d

        I used to know someone wealthy whose continued wealth relied on working with local and state governments. This person's public correspondence in lawsuits and with local government officials was purposefully littered with spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization errors. When I asked them about it, their response was that it was on purpose so that they seemed less smart and thus less threatening, with the hope that they would get more favorable rulings and contracts by not seeming like "one of the big entities."

        I'm not asking you to believe me on this, but sharing it more as an anecdote of: something on the surface is sometimes not the reality of what's underneath.

        • ddq•1d

          In addition, it broadcasts that the sender is too busy with all their important work to spend time refining and proofreading, that you're getting their raw, unfiltered thoughts directly from them, not through an assistant, and that their time is more valuable than yours so the burden is on you to parse their stream of consciousness jumble for precious nuggets of their exclusive wisdom. The semiotics make sense, plus it's just easier and faster.

        • PlunderBunny•1d

          I remember being told that many of the spelling/grammar mistakes in (English) menus for ethnic restaurants were deliberate to make the (English native speaking) customers feel superior.

          (Also not saying I believe this at all, just relating an anecdote).

      • bawolff•14h

        > But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.

        I'd more focus on the ideas being expressed being incoherent. Spelling is surface level, but that word salad made no sense.

        • rob74•13h

          Spelling is a courtesy to the person who has to make sense of what you send them.

      • palmotea•1d

        > But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.

        I kinda assumed that was (at least partly) a "flex," basically doing something dumb to show you're such hot stuff you can get away with it. It's like Sam Altman writing in lowercase all the time.

        • Der_Einzige•15h

          Funny. Sam Altman is also accused by his own sister of being a diddler!

        • optimalsolver•1d

          Or SBF playing Legends on investor calls.

      • imetatroll•12h

        It has to be a "my time is worth more than your time" flex.

      • fatherwavelet•11h

        I listened to the two hour interview that was posted. It sounds nothing like this. He was extremely well spoken. How carefully he spoke is what stood out most in the interview to me.

      • astrange•13h

        He was probably dyslexic. I know people who type like that too but normal in person.

      • throwjefferey•1d

        He was probably more impressive in-person.

      • andrewflnr•1d

        I've found that problem solving intelligence and language skills are not that strongly correlated. He clearly had some kind of skill to keep his operation running, even before you consider the more cynical explanations in the other replies.

        • colechristensen•17h

          He was an asset being managed by intelligence service officers, this is the only explanation.

          A failing math teacher at a New York prep school leading to a job at Bear Stearns and then as a wealth manager for billionaires... let's say it doesn't add up unless there were other reasons than his own ambitions and organization skills.

          Mossad or the Russians engineered his life.

          • fatherwavelet•11h

            It only doesn't add up if you are viewing him like Warren Buffet in terms of finance. Obviously, his audited track record of returns is nowhere to be found.

            It very much all adds up if you view Epstein as a financial genius in terms of financial crimes.

            This idea he was some intelligence created stooge is just absurd. I would suspect he was an intelligence asset exactly because of his ability to launder money and commit financial crimes. His wealth came from taking a cut. The size of his wealth was a reflection of the amount of financial crimes committed. That level of financial crime is how you get a sweetheart deal to keep those crimes in the shadows.

            Also the kind of thing that would get you suicided. This podcast/social media narrative that he was a created intelligence asset to blackmail the rich and powerful is probably misdirection to not focus on the actual financial crimes. The cover up has been executed to perfection considering the misdirection narratives have taken on a life of their own and we know basically nothing about the financial crimes he commited.

          • Der_Einzige•15h

            John Kiriakou Openly says he had to be mossad.

            • colechristensen•15h

              John Kiriakou talks a lot. Not that I don't think things he says are convincing, but he sure has a lot to say for a former CIA officer.

          • bigDinosaur•11h

            There's no actual good evidence for being a Mossad operative and the agenda of trying desperately to link him to Mossad so strongly is such a transparent agenda it's almost funny.

      • furyofantares•10h

        > I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.

      • commandlinefan•2h

        > full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors

        I can spell correctly in a few different languages without having to think about it. I suspect you can, too. I can do a lot of math in my head that Jeffery Epstein probably couldn't have done with a calculator. I'm not a billionaire, though, and I never will be. The kind of smart - "street smart", it's sometimes called - that makes you that kind of rich is a different kind of smart that shows up as being a competent writer. Make no mistake, though, it wasn't stupidity or incompetence that got him where he was.

      • razingeden•1d

        I like using “astute businessman” as a backhanded compliment sometimes.

        Usually meaning the revenues and results are there .. although everything about their personal or professional ethos disgusts me.

        Eh. From time to time you’ll have that one brilliant but grossly tangential asset on a team who leaves you wondering if they’re manic or cracked out from the weekend.

        Who’s in infrastructure and hasn’t sent a few sleep-deprived and cringey status updates out at 6am :D

        Okay okay okay fine, it’s an internet comment section I don’t have to be PC. I think this one’s coke.

      • jalapenoi•1d

        somehow he was allowed to teach college classes without a degree, doors just open like that when you’re part of the tribe of pedophiles

      • moralestapia•1d

        I think that ... given one specific topic, few people understand it while the vast majority is completely oblivious to its workings.

        So they then hear someone who speaks like that, with a fast cadence and Andrew Tate's "Confidence" TM, and are inclined to think "yeah, the guy looks like he knows what he's talking about".

        But for people who have minimal knowledge about the thing, it's evident that said person is just stupid.

        • actionfromafar•12h

          It's on a different axis to stupid. These people play another kind of game, like scammers, they filter away people who can see through their bullshit.

          To them, actually learning a "normal" topic is a distraction. Their game is finding and exploiting weaknesses.

          • TheOtherHobbes•11h

            It's literally a marketing funnel for corruption. Having Smart People™ at your "parties" adds a layer of legitimacy and social proof you wouldn't get if you were Bubba from Nowhere Town.

            Some people will be attracted by the menu, some people won't realise what's happening until they see the video they're starring in.

            Either way, you own them.

            • prawn•9h

              It's seemed to me that he was a habitual/obsessive networker. Someone up-thread described it as an urge to collect smart/impressive people, with the advantage being as you described. I suspect if you took away his horrible other interests, he'd still have been extremely sociable. Maybe aspects of blackmail/control are near-inevitable at the conjunction of criminal behaviour and power?

      • doublerabbit•22h

        An email is an email. I used to talk to contacts like that all the time and they did too. These are quick interchanges with folk.

        The grammar police as well as PC became a thing and now everyone is expected to construct paragraphs of text without any grammatical errors otherwise you're mobbed and lynched.

        Just because you're expecting full pronunciation doesn't mean others do. I'd rather write with laziness and short hand than having to punctuate a whole paragraph and bore the person to death like this paragraph.

  • cogman10•8h

    This is what makes so much of the Epstein files damning. They are correspondents that happen after 2008 when he was publicly convicted of prostitution.

    The fact that Scott here was able to find that information and cut ties shows how corrupt every powerful person that didn't do that was. Sorry billionaires and politicians, you don't come out looking clean being friendly to the known pedophile pimp.

  • gowld•9h

    "Charles Harper" is a common name.

    Is Scott referring to this Charles Harper, of the Templeton Foundation, dedicated to the science of theology?

    http://capabilities.templeton.org/2006/interview/c_harper.ht...

    • ntnsndr•8h

      That was my first thought too!

  • BrokenCogs•5h

    What's your Epstein / Erdos number?

    • etothepii•2h

      How is this defined?

      • BrokenCogs•2h

        1 if you've been emailed or mentioned (cited) by Jeffrey Epstein. 2 if you've been emailed or cited by someone who has an Epstein number of 1, and so on.

  • niobe•1d

    Guily by (lack of) association!

  • simgt•12h

    > not yet a pitiful over-the-hill geezer in his 30s

    Hey. Fuck them. At least most of us are not greedy corrupt fucks. Or died in prison as a consequence of our own sins.

    • mvc•10h

      A cool thing to do by the way, when you have run over a hill like us. Is to run back over it the other way.

  • trhway•1d

    >Scott Aaronson was born on May 21st, 1981. He will be 30 in 2011. The conference could follow a theme of: “hurry to think together with Scott Aaronson while he is still in his 20s and not yet a pitiful over-the-hill geezer in his 30s.” This offers another nice opportunity for celebration.

    may be somebody would train a model on the Epstein and his associates emails/etc. which would allow to research the workings of the such psychopaths' minds

    • john-h-k•21h

      I can see some risks with creating a hyper intelligent mecha-Epstein

  • wewewedxfgdf•18h

    It would fit perfectly if Epstein was a Russian agent.

    - Where did he get his money from?

    - Who's interests are served by this whole dodgy setup?

    - The Trump connection.

    - The Trump Russia connection.

    Maybe I imagine but it all seems aligned.

    • jimbohn•13h

      As a European, I find it very funny to see how nobody in the US is willing to address the elephant in the room called Mossad. This looks more likely an israeli operation which sourced girls from russia and likely had the FSB as a customer/scratch my back I scratch yours/collab thing. I mean, most US politicians and the president seem to be on an "israel first" agenda.

      • Teever•3h

        This was mentioned on The Daily Show this past monday.[0]

        You're right that people on social media aren't talking about it very much for some reason but that doesn't mean that it isn't being talked about in American media.

        [0] https://youtu.be/cwXIq81eE24?t=881

      • Rzor•6h

        >As a European, I find it very funny to see how nobody in the US is willing to address the elephant in the room called Mossad.

        This is driving me up the wall. Look, I know part of this talk/accusation [about Mossad] is coming from Nazi/antisemitic circles, so people being hesitant to engage makes a bit of sense. But come on, it's not a stretch to consider. The idea that the US would let a Russian operation go unchecked like that is completely bonkers.

        • throw9235837•6h

          Something “not-being-a-stretch” doesn’t need any consideration without evidence.

          • Schmerika•1h

            There's no shortage of evidence of a strong relationship there [0], [1].

            What's missing is definitive proof, so far at least. I think you're conflating the two. Evidence and proof are different things - see [2] for a good example of this conflation used the other way.

            Anyway, yeah, you can very seriously consider this based on the evidence already out there. Considering the stakes, it would be kinda silly not to imo.

            0 - https://www.commondreams.org/news/epstein-israeli-intelligen...

            1 - https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA000903...

            2 - @NormalIsandNws on X:

            “Here is the proof Epstein was a Russian asset:

            - his girlfriend was the daughter of a Mossad agent

            - one of his best friends was Israel's lawyer

            - another of his best friends was a former Israeli prime minister

            - he met with the current Israeli prime minister

            - a senior Israeli spy would stay at his house for weeks at a time

            - a friend invited him to bring his girls to Israel

            - he fled to Israel when he was charged with sex crimes against a minor

            - he was pictured wearing an IDF shirt

            - he was funded by pro-Israel fanatics

            - he worked for the Rothschilds

            - he donated to pro-Israel student groups

            - he was responsible for the Wexner group's "pro-Israel philanthropy"

            - he supported Israeli settlement projects

            - his friends were all Zionists

            - he scathingly referred to non -Jews as "goyim"

            - he was involved in Israeli diplomacy efforts

            - he brokered security deals for Israel

            - he aimed to profit from regime changes in the Middle East

            - a former Israeli intelligence officer said he ran a honeypot for Israel

            - his business partner confirmed he ran a honeypot for Israel

            - one of his victims confirmed he ran a honeypot for Israel

            As you can see, all of this was done for the benefit of Russia. There is no other explanation.”

      • stef25•8h

        Also as a European, these mossad conspiracy theories are laughable. Story doesn't add up ? Mossad! You even threw in the FSB for good measure.

        • jimbohn•8h

          Who said the story doesn't add up? Things seem to add up pretty nicely. Mossad and FSB are the first suspects, given their history. The countries have quite an overlapping background among their elites, and it shows. Regardless, do you agree or not that in the US media it seems ok to point the finger at russia, but not at israel, when it comes to this?

      • throw9235837•7h

        As a “European” you are happy to simply fabricate an unsubstantiated conspiracy involving the Jews.

        • PlatoIsADisease•5h

          Only you are saying 'Jews'. The OP mentioned the Israeli secret service.

          These are not the same, even if the government of Israel deliberately conflates them.

          I think we need to start calling out this deliberate attempt from the Israeli government to correlate the two.

          • fromMars•3h

            The OP also mentioned Epstein, a Jew, and then made the leap that he must have been associated with Mossad.

      • Der_Einzige•11h

        I call him "Zion Don" for a reason.

      • Aerbil313•9h

        It doesn't help that almost all members of the U.S. congress is funded by AIPAC. See how much your representative received from AIPAC here: https://www.trackaipac.com/congress

    • regularization•17h

      His e-mails show him trying and failing to get a Russian visa. Not much of a Russian agent.

      Actually the person who was trying to help him was until this week the UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson. He had to resign this week due to the emails. He previously spent decades attacking the UK Labour's left like Corbyn and trying to make the party more amenable to the type of people Epstein hung around with.

      Odd that this very American American, with heavy Israeli contacts and some UK contacts is claimed to be associated with Russia with little evidence. He's American through and through (or failing that, Israeli aligned).

      • atl4s•11h

        Madelson was dismissed from the ambassadorship September 2025, not this week.

        You might be thinking of his stepping down from the House of Lords (upper house of UK parliament) which did happen recently.

      • Der_Einzige•15h

        John Kiriakou Openly claims he was mossad in recent interviews.

        Also look up Israel’s relationship with pedophilia (being a safe haven for the accused and convicted). You’ll find plenty of Jewish in isreal media sources reporting on this.

        • fromMars•6h

          The antisemitism is here. Pedophilia is essentially legal in Europe with the age of consent in many countries.

    • astrange•13h

      > - Where did he get his money from?

      Didn't he steal it from Les Wexner?

    • 837263292029•3h

      It's truly inconeivable that western self-styled elites are child-raping thugs.

      Must be russia.

  • vee-kay•16h

    Evil is, as evil does.

    Bill Gates and his Foundation have a bad rep long before his Epstein link came into the news.

    Who better to collude with a known child trafficker/molester, than one who has no qualms in killing children via illegal vaccines/drugs to help his nexus with Big Pharma.

    Bill & Melinda Gates' Foundation's evil illegal "vaccine trials" on tribal children (especially girls) in India (without the consent of them and their parents) directly caused the deaths of several children, hospitalizations of scores of such innocent victims, and it was a huge conspiracy and controversy that was uncovered during investigations by Supreme Court and police.

    https://m.economictimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/heal...

    The Gates Foundation operates like a monopolistic unethical pharmaceutical company (as a weapon and Think Tank of Big Pharma) under the guise of a charitable NGO or grantmaker.

    https://capitalresearch.org/article/bill-gates-big-philanthr...

    • leosanchez•14h

      My God, Your first link is horrifying.

      • gowld•2h

        Someone blaming every young person's illness on a vaccine, without any context for comparsion vs the population that didn't get the vaccine? That is horrifying. What are they trying to cover up?

      • vee-kay•14h

        Horrifying indeed. And yet, my comments to reveal this truth are getting downvoted.

        It is pure evil to give experimental drugs to poor people (especially children) without proper consent and close scrutiny.

        It is not the first time that Gates Foundation has been caught red-handed dealing experimental drugs to poor people, without their consent. This has happened before too.

        But if you want unbelievable horror stories, you should find out why Big Pharma companies are camped in Africa - they are doing all sorts of awful experiments on the poor illiterate masses there.

        https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/testing-d...

        At least, the current Indian government is a patriotic one, and it is trying its best to fight against such foreign evils. But the past governments were corrupt, and hands-in-glove with such powerful megacorporations up to no good.

        https://www.newsweek.com/foreign-funding-threatened-india-mo...

        https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/world/asia/india-health-n...

        Slowly though, the world is waking up to the reality of what subversive malicious evils these so-called humanitarian billionaires have really been doing, under the guise of charity.

  • lenerdenator•8h

    Linus Torvalds was found in Jeffrey's emails.

    A different Jeffrey, mind.

    Not sure how he's meant to come back from this.

  • MagicMoonlight•12h

    I thought this was going to be a joke article about how easy it is to not be a pedo. But it turns out the author did have engagements with Epstein, and is now trying to pretend he just randomly showed up in the files.

    Do you know how many times I’ve appeared in the files? Zero. It’s very easy to not appear in them. 99.999999% of people didn’t.

    • SauntSolaire•10h

      Epstein has at least one email where he just lists the names of interesting people. So I suppose not being interesting is one way to guarantee you're not in the files.

    • A_D_E_P_T•12h

      I mean, it depends what you mean by "engagements." He was invited to meet Epstein via an intermediary -- but he blew off the invitation and never had any contact with Epstein.

      In general, Epstein was fond of "collecting" scientists who might entertain his clientele and house guests at parties.

  • keepamovin•9h

    I think it's obvious Epstein was engineered as a "control theory lever" over a global financial/political system, that despite the best wargaming/simulation, could never be perfectly predicted. The system was simply too complex. So, real politik, and Machiavellian necessity required elements of control to be injected into this system to provide definiteness where ambiguity dared reign.

    Ne pas comprende? That means that the blackmail was used to ensure definiteness of otherwise variable elements. If we were in Ancient Greece, it wouldn't be pedophilia (then, a "good") it would have been "chthonic excess"- or "ideological heresy"- based blackmail. The architects of this twistedness merely used the tools available that leveraged the age we live in.

    So, that bacchic excess (beyond such needed for blackmail)? Human nature in secret succumbed to unchecked desires, itself a predictable outcome. The OG plan was not "evil" per se (ensure predictability of unpredictable system), it was pragmatic, but the implementation, necessarily became evil and the evil was normalized and justified by the "importance" of the plan to the stability of the playmakers.

    The banality of evil, eh?

  • tzs•5h

    > Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents

    I'm kind of disappointed that my name is not in there. (Well the name is in there but not as my name. When you have a last name that has been in the top 5 in the US for over 230 years and a first name that was top 20 when people in the age group most likely to be in those files were born, you get a lot of false positives).

    The bar to ending up in those files for perfectly innocent reasons is pretty low. Epstein was involved in a lot of legitimate things, probably to draw attention away from the illegitimate things.

    Do some interesting research that gets some attention in the popular science press and Epstein might want to talk about funding you. Write an interesting book or article that comes to his attention and he might mention it in an email. Heck, write an interesting answer on Quora and you might end up in the files, because Epstein was subscribed to Quora's digest email.

    If even 5% of what 15 year old tzs planned to accomplish with his life had happened, I'd be in there in at least one of those innocent ways. It highlights how mundane my life turned out.

  • dataengineer56•14h

    > For whatever reason, I forwarded this email to my parents, brother, and then-fiancee Dana.

    A very strange action to take for someone who claims to have no recollection of the meeting.

    • prawn•9h

      I don't know for sure, but from his CV, I'd guess I am similar in age to the author. He described remembering the venue (possibly separately to it being the meeting's venue) but not the meeting itself. I would have similar selective memories of business events from 10-15 years ago, amongst years of many meetings and opportunities. Sometimes I have a strong memory of one aspect, but no recollection at all of another. And I can identify with finding that email phrasing (about someone's "situation") being something that might prompt me to send it to people close to me as a sort of "look what happened to me today" thing.

    • navigate8310•12h

      Depends upon how tight knit is the family, yes, it seems strange for me as well. Members in some families are unusually friendly. My family won't even trust me hosting them an Immich library.

      • pfdietz•9h

        The Anna Karenina Principle: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."