Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- No amount of campaign donations will save them when the market crashes. They're going to find themselves short on friends.
- They are too big to fail at this point.by peezd
- This guy hasn't watched the Big Short.by post-it
- Gotta protect the windfall LoLby nothrowaways
- I am so tired of hearing about NVIDA.by bix6
- Yeah for a graphics company they sure do a lot of noiseby speed_spread
- It'll cool down as soon as the AI hype wave subsides.by recursive
- How did they not already have one before? Surely every big company does this?by manyatoms
- Wait, I think I've seen this one before...by wishgreen
- "As a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated for its primary benefit." - George Stiglerby gigel82
- Hopefully Huang will ask for tariffs on solar panels & batteries to be lifted. After several years of tariffs, there is no American solar panel industry anywhere near as good as China's. Open the floodgates & reap clean, silent energy at 5-6 cents per kWh. There's plenty of land for those panels.by formvoltron
- we live in cyberpunk without all of the cool stuffby lapkaaaa
- From your downvotes, I can only assume some people think this is the cool cyberpunk stuff. :-D
- "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can't remember what the second one is." - Mark Hanna
Mark Hanna was a political consultant in the late 1800's, in the US.
Source: https://quote.org/quote/there-are-two-things-that-are-import...
by cs702 - I treat this as a sign of the inevitable terminal phase of any private cooperation in US: they start to invest their resources to stretch into areas that are irrelevant to their core mission, but they have to, because their core mission is accomplished already, and their business, which is built on top of the fruits of their core mission, needs protection beyond direct means relevant to their core mission.
When pursing a core mission, many corps fail, either because lack of resources, or mission itself is not meaningful, execution failure, etc.; the fortunate few, might be in growth, while their mission keeps self-reinforce into bigger and bigger scope, that's the wonderful time of growth driven by meaningful mission.
When the core mission is done. The corp resets.
Vast majority of them make profit that is small enough that the normal corporate logic prevail, and they behave normally, primarily to survive.
Extremely rarely, when the core mission is so meaningful, the corp reaps so large a profit, and so many stakeholders are attracted, that they no longer focus on core mission, they start to focus on profit.
That's why NVDA is now buying assets across the whole stack of AI, while still increase price to maintain its profit. NVDA wants to maximize profit.
The inherent flaw is that private corp in US system, has no meaningful end game when they are in this state of astronomical profit.
- They need protection from other oligarchs, and they know the Prince hasn't read chapter 23.
- Their biggest customers are struggling to build out locations to use their products. This is nothing more than an attempt to engage in regulatory capture to overrule local politics on behalf of their customers.by zdragnar
- The company first invests in engineering/technology/product, in order to actually build a product, find the market fit, and innovate.
Then the company invests in operations to scale the success they are having.
Then the company invests in accounting and finance to squeeze costs and move numbers around, so they can make line go up without physically doing anything.
Then the company invests in lawyers to attack competition and defend their business from attacks.
Finally, the company invests in lobbying to shape the rules such that they don't even have to do any of the above four to make line go up.
by ryandrake - Is the problem here NVIDIA or is the problem that our government doesn't function unless there's a pac funneling money into decision-making?
Hardly surprising to see a company with strategic interests strategically try to achieve them. A business exists to make money, and if pulling policy levers is required to make money, you'll see them try to pull the levers.
Reverse Citizens United and you solve these kind of problems at the source.
- So the first step down the lobbying-is-good-for-governance that both sides embraced was when they defunded the congressional research office. So a vital way in which congress "informed themselves" was basically minimized to the point that the only way for congress to now inform themselves is via lobbying and th eonly way to write complex legislation is via those lobbyings.
This is the endpoint of that effort and the people who pushed it most likely knew what they were doing.
by cyanydeez - Yeah I generally lean libertarian but I tend to agree with reversing citizens united.by y1n0
- PACs are an investment. You'd be stupid (principles be damned) not to invest. (Not defending this--this is the system that promotes wealth hoarding and theft of government funds)by nielsbot
- The mundane solution is to give congressional offices more money for in-house staff with expertise on technical issues.
A lot of the "lobbying" is not really pressure groups, it's sort of a corporate-financed knowledge base congressmen can ask questions when they want to understand like, how to expand the semiconductor manufacturing base in their state. Of course it's not all altruistic on the PAC's part, but it is seen positively by individual congressmen because it solves a real need on their side they can't meet with underpaid 24 year old staffers.
by bpodgursky - It's worth listening to Lawrence Lessig, speaking in 2011, "Republic Lost" on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc (It's a "Talk at Google")
I think he laid it out very clearly, but never found traction to try to change this (I don't think US Congress wants to be changed, though).
by kzrdude