It was funny a few years ago when the English Premier League was all moralistic, having players “take the knee” before matches in solidarity with social justice, meanwhile all the stadiums and team shirts and television broadcasts were abound with online gambling ads and sponsorships.
Ah yes now that I think about it, I remember the nuns in my neighbourhood, between feeding the poor and preaching love and inclusion, would hand out casino memberships and bet coupons to the local youths.
>“The Premier League is clear on guidance to all its clubs in that flags, banners or other materials (including replica shirts and t-shirts) that display potential inflammatory content, which could include flags of countries in conflict, or content considered discriminatory, offensive or politically motivated, should not be permitted.
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The club also say: “In line with Premier League guidance, supporters are advised that Israeli or Palestinian flags, banners, t-shirts or materials will not be permitted to be displayed at fixtures for the foreseeable future.”
I couldn't find any of this on the Premier League website - it's all done by proxy (the clubs).
> and enabled things that were impractical previously
I think that there are not _that_ many use-cases that have been opened up by this that tool-calling on other models didn't solve already. Really depends what benchmark you're looking at. This one against BANKING77[0] has many issues, but suggests it's really not far off DeepSeek 4.1 Flash. This one against BoolQ[1] shows marginal improvement over Qwen3.6. This one against MMLU-Pro[2] (same author as the previous) shows significant improvements over two Qwen models.
So there's definitely _some_ alpha there, but I don't think it's the sea-change that the hype would suggest; that is to say, yes, some things that weren't practical before are now, but many things were already very practical with the existing tools.
The part about "tool-calling on other models didn't solve already" is what gets you, sure I could tool call deepseek, glm or any other model, but the latency is huge and you get no confidence score. I gave JEV a shot via OpenRouter and it has a reply in less than 400ms, it's fast enough and cheap enough that you can hook it up to a game loop for example (so highly state dependant) and it can do decisions in real time.
What about all the people that Berkshire provides with gainful employment? What about all the goods and services its businesses provide to communities? What about all the tax it pays? What about the wealth he created for his investors? What about the high standards of corporate governance he upheld in the companies he controlled? You don’t hear about corporate sleaze and kleptocratic management at Berkshire companies. What about the fact that rather than consuming his personal wealth he’s left it mostly to a charitable foundation?
I literally said in my first sentence that the fact he's a billionaire advocating for paying taxes makes him praise worthy and more important than any criticism you might think of. I do think there is a lot to admire and I've used some good advice he's given (not to me personally).
I just think it's interesting that the people who should be criticizing him are actually other capitalists. Because real meaningful economic progress comes from investing in new groundbreaking things, not getting a good return on insurance float or See's Candies. That is all. He says he won't invest in cars, but also that it was obvious it was a machine that would change the world. Coca Cola is another big home run of his, yet a company who's contribution to society is probably overall negative. Etc. That I admire some things or a lot of things even does not mean I idolize anyone.
There was that leaked video of a Cambridge Analytica exec bragging that they came up with the handcuffs in the Crooked Hillary meme. Except that was hardly a big thing. The phrase Crooked Hillary was arguably “linguistic killshot” by Trump; CA’s little riff on it was insignificant - and that was them trying to sell their services with their most impressive feats.
People seem to love attributing the success to memes rather than a decades long campaign to destroy the media, the legal system, education, political checks and balances and unlimited funding by billionaires.
When future supreme court judges are writing their manifesto to business interests on how to stop Ivy League graduates from caring about the environmental impacts of capitalism in the 70s, le funny memes were not mentioned.
On Hillary specifically, she was the subject of the the movie that the Citizens United court case was about!
And sad thing is they will
be mostly scrolling through pictures and videos, with extremely low information density, when the could be scrolling high quality text like HN comments or a well curated X feed.
Well under Dubya it was pretty successful. Firstly, there was never a repeat of 9/11. Secondly, they pulled off one of the most overwhelming military victories of all time against Iraq, a full-blown invasion completed in weeks with hardly any losses. This also secured Israel’s long term prospects in the region, which seems to be one of the most sacred directives of American policy. It did also lead ultimately to civil war in Syria and political destabilisation in Germany/Europe (from refugees), but that is no skin off Uncle Sam’s nose. You may not like it, but in the history books that’s what peak foreign policy looks like.
A wouldn’t say the Iraq finished in “a few weeks.” They knew if they just left it would go back to the same business as usual. So the USA stayed for years playing Sim City. Trillions of dollars all said and done doesn’t seem like a win. These proxy’s are just that, proxies, because foreign policy on a grander scale is harder to accomplish like with China or Russia. USA won one proxy in the region but it’s more akin to winning the battle not the war. Iran is showing this as I type.
Looking forward to the future where Americans wake up to learn why they are the most hated country in the world. They’ll still think it’s only because of Trump.
> This also secured Israel’s long term prospects in the region, which seems to be one of the most sacred directives of American policy.
Not really—it massively increased Iran's influence in the area, which is why in 2007 they had to panic, reverse course, and start backing al-Qaeda again ("the redirection").
Israel is currently in the position where it can bomb Tehran, using American tech and logistical support, with complete impunity. This is the golden age of Israel.
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