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> will result in less competition

The system working as intended.

“Competition is for losers” - Peter Thiel


Thiel is an idiot

>> “Competition is for losers” - Peter Thiel

> Thiel is an idiot

Sounds more like he's selfish, perhaps to an unusual degree. Monopoly is great for the monopolist. For everyone else? Not so much.


Thiel is not an idiot.

Competition is for losers, is a way to say to go and compete in a super crowded market where it is impossible to differentiate yourself is not going to make you a winner.

But usually people are called idiots because they don’t swallow the progressive propaganda wholesale.


But very rich...

One has very little to do with the other, contrary to popular belief. Exhibit A from 338 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutus_(play)

Rich!= smart

So are drug dealers

Maybe we should examine as an industry why so many mediocre men get elevated to positions of incredible power and run great businesses into the ground.

Luck (primarily) and connections. We feel psychologically safe believing there is some determinism _in the world_. But there's none. Studies show that you can have 140 IQ and still end up homeless if circumstances are poor.

> Luck (primarily)

This is an extraordinary claim. What is your extraordinary evidence?

Why didn’t it rain today? Good luck! Why was Michael Jordan so skillful at basketball? Just good luck. Why is Linux better than Windows? Good luck! Why did VMS fall off? Bad luck. Why does 2 + 2 = 4? I guess just good luck.

These are all laughably incurious, superstitious answers. Other factors must be at play. Yes, identifying them may require hard thinking and concentration.

Otherwise, what is democracy other than selecting the luckiest? We already had strange women lying in ponds distributing swords for that — and much cheaper and quicker to boot.

> Studies show that you can have 140 IQ and still end up homeless if circumstances are poor.

We’ve likely all known people who were book smart but didn’t have good walking-around sense. Everyone knows others who make poor or destructive choices. The interpersonal skills, soft skills, and emotional intelligence being dismissed in this thread as mere “luck and connections” may be severely lacking. The person may have poor mental health or addiction.

Are you using determinism in the automata theory sense or some other?


Luck here isn't referring to some invisible dice roll whose randomness can not be explained or is just a correlation (like no rain on your wedding day would be), it's refers to variables that the person can not influence. Being born into a rich family is lucky for that baby, and the baby can't have done anything about it.

Connections... It was always like this..

The same way mediocre men have been elevated for thousands of years.

A combination of being in the right place at the right time and connections to people with money


[flagged]


Who said you need to be great in an area to tell the difference between competent and incompetent?

While it helps, it doesn't take a genius to tell the difference. Picking the great from the great apart, that'd be another story all together.


A few days ago, after some very weird failed purchase attempts I made (payment couldn’t be validated or Smth) I received an even weirder mail from Amazon saying they had detected suspicious activity, all my devices got logged out and I was forced to change my password. I did it, after verifying it was a legit email (even if it looked sketchy af, pure text, unstyled, but sender verified and confirmed with in-app behavior), and next I know all my orders and browsing history had disappeared - +15 yrs of history, done.

Over the next few days my account history came back, except purchases made Q1 2026. Those are still missing. There are a few substantial purchases I made that are nowhere to be found anymore.

I attributed this Iranian missiles hitting some of their infrastructure in EU, as it had been reported.

Now I am not sure if it was blast radius from missiles or AI mishaps. Lmao - couldn’t happen to a worse company…


A massive media conglomerate for propaganda generation and distribution

Ohhh interesting - thanks

Love this kind of stuff

Their whole model predicates on the lack of privacy, so it’s crazy to expect anything else.

Particularly true as oligarchs co-opt gov

This statement would imply there was a time when there wasn't a ruling elite

L337 Hax0rs, of course

lol

It makes sense - they extract every possible bit of personal information from your device - why would they make you believe they care about your privacy?

You want to communicate privately? TikTok is not the place, and that’s ok. shrugs


Binders with classified information were hosted in a bathroom at a country club, so…you know…

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