> Then in maybe one of the best rug pulls of all time, in July they quietly
changed their valuation to $500 million. A 75% cut in four months. I’ve
never seen anything like that since the 2008 financial crisis.
Not sure where the author is getting their information from but there is seemingly little correlation between the investment rounds quoted in this post and other online sources. No mention for example of the Series E that valued Groq at $6.9bn.
It’s good that you have done that but does that section make sense? It says there was a 75% revenue cut, but the prior number is valuation, not revenue. Or was valuation and revenue the same at that time (seems unlikely)?
Edit: some searching about suggests that Groq initially projected $2 billion in revenue for 2025, later cutting that forecast to $500 million. That appears to have be what this article is trying to say.
> About a year ago, Groq announced a $1.5 billion infrastructure investment deal with Saudi Arabia. They also secured a $750 million Series D funding round.... Then in maybe one of the best rug pulls of all time, in July they quietly changed their revenue projections to $500 million. A 75% cut in four months. I’ve never seen anything like that since the 2008 financial crisis.
Not following the core argument here. Author seems to be comparing valuation in funding rounds to revenue projections. Revenue projection was revised downward, valuation was not.
Good point about not running the proprietary models, but that doesn't preclude strategic fit with Nvidia.
Any time a forward-looking statement is given in an investment context it has a safe harbor caveat attached about how it could be wrong. Companies miss revenue projections all of the time. That's not fraud.
This is not new in any way. Famously, Cisco has done this for decades, having been on a nonstop mad acquisition spree since the nineties, and more than once even acquiring companies that started as Cisco spin-out.
Also many of Google’s flagship products come from acquisitions. Eg Android, Docs, YouTube, their entire ad network, Firebase, DeepMind, lots more.
This isn’t easy! Equally famously, Microsoft routinely botches acquisitions, eg Skype, Nokia etc. Seems to me the only MS acquisitions that don’t fail are the ones they mostly leave alone (eg LinkedIn, GitHub).
Almost the entire biotech industry has been this way for decades once the small molecule patent cliff hit pharma and the R&D costs for therapies skyrocketed. If you look at biotech IPOs, the majority of the startups IPO pre-revenue, long before they’re even legally allowed to sell anything.
Which is totally fine: anyone who is a biotech investor knows this and everyone makes tons of money in this arrangement. Investors (both public and private) take on the science risk and some of the regulatory risk, and the pharmaceutical companies provide a guaranteed (big $$$) exit and take over scaling manufacturing to bring a drug to market. Most people with retirement accounts and pensions and index funds rarely touch this stuff except as a diversification strategy that pools the risky stuff to get the upside on the whole industry.
It's the same in medical devices. Most startups take it from idea through R&D then go public or are acquired right as they go through FDA approval or submit for it.
Cadence is one of the big companies in EDA (Electronic Design Automation - semiconductor chip design software)
I met someone that left to go to a startup and was bought by Cadence. He did this 5 times and about 2-3 years later Cadence would buy the startup he was at. He just couldn't get away.
It's low risk from the acquirer's point of view. Somebody else paid for that research, you just get to buy it once it's proven itself sufficiently to your liking.
The tv series Silicon Valley has a good episode where they discuss the importance of a start-up not having any revenue. Being pre revenue apparently means unlimited potential, with any level of revenue being bad, as you always have to grow it.
I don't exactly disagree. But the word "obvious" doesn't work very well during a bubble. Sure, yes, the current revenue doesn't justify the purchase price. But that doesn't mean that anything justifies the purchase price.
We can't work backward rationally from "this deal makes sense" and get to "here's why". Corporate acquisitions often don't work that way, even when there's no bubble. The price is often just not justified at all. By anything.
In many cases they're just capitalizing testosterone.
It could mean different things I guess, but here’s my take:
If you do very risky R&D in a big corpo then the risk creeps into other things: other projects might look at the R&D and say, “we will just use that when it’s done”. It’s a lazy kind of move for tech leaders to make, because it makes you look like a team player, and if the R&D goes belly up then you have someone else to blame. This ultimately leads to risky R&D in a big corpo not being compartmentalized as much as it should be. If it fails, it fails super hard with lots of fallout.
But risky R&D at a startup is compartmentalized. Nobody will say they use the output of the startup until there are signs of life, and even then healthy caution is applied.
Groq is not a publicly traded company and has no legal reporting requirements. Sure, their projected revenue numbers they gave to investors dropped from $2b in February to $500m in July, but a later funding round in September showed it wasn't significant to how insiders saw the company. Contrary to what this article would imply, their valuation more than doubled from $2.8b last year to $6.9b this year after Groq's latest round of investment in September (after their revenue adjustment). Considering they increased revenue from $90m to $500m and got a $1.5b commitment from Saudi Arabia, I really don't see this being 'hype'.
The FTC requested significant increases for technology and economic analysis for FY2025 ($535M), but was given a static budget with plans to cut by 11%. FTC chair Ferguson reduced staff from 1,315 to 1,221 and aims to reach around 1,100 through attrition to align with lower budgets.
I know no one wants to hear this, but this “acquisition “ is nothing of the kind. It’s just Nvidia hiring the four or five guys they need without having to take on the rest of groq. Which, as it turns out, is worthless without those four or five guys.
This is what happens when companies figure out they don’t have to buy out other companies. They just need to pay off shareholders for the right to hire key employees. Which is convenient, since the key four or five guys are usually pretty big shareholders.
It’s no longer necessary to monopolize a market. You can monopolize intellectual capital by just paying ungodly sums of money. The rest will take care of itself.
"Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly. Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco
, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner."
POP QUIZ - Which minority partner is the key here?
> It's a shame. Groq was really great. Nvidia is stifling innovation here.
I don't share your view. Groq continues to exist. Nvidia did not take any or their hardware, so the same Groq you access on OpenRouter will exist tomorrow or one year from now. If anything, they'll significantly increase their presence, since they just got $20 billion in cash.
As for Nvidia stifling innovation: one can argue that they do the opposite. They hired key personnel from Groq (including their founder and CEO, Jonnathan Ross). These people agreed to the move, presumably for the money, but most likely also because they think they can deliver even more if they have access to Nvidia's resources. So, in terms of overall innovation, it will most likely go up.
But you can say that they stifle independent innovation. Maybe, but the case for that is not that open and shut as it might seem. They entered a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Groq. Which means Groq can provide their "secret sauce" to other interested entities, maybe Apple, maybe Intel or AMD, maybe OpenAI, maybe Oracle. The number of companies who could be interested in their tech is quite high.
Or simply, Groq, with the many billions in unencumbered cash they just received will decide to go for version 2.0 of their tech, or they can significantly expand the GroqCloud. Their valuation just went from $6.5B to significantly higher than $20B. They can pursue an IPO, or they can issue debt. There are countless possibilities for Groq now.
You are stating this as a fact. Do you have any links?
Otherwise, the simplest interpretation is that the $20B is paid by Nvidia to Groq, the company, not the investors. I don't even think it is legally possible for Nvidia to do a deal with Groq's investors directly, rather than with Groq.
Is that your opinion, or you have some more solid source to state that?
Because your argument sounds something like this: Nvidia did something (a fact), and I am sure that after that Groq will do something else (not a fact), therefore Nvidia is such a bad player. Do you consider this to be a correct argument?
The Axios article is reporting on a scoop, quite breathlessly. But read it more carefully.
All the employees who jumped ship (90%) had to be bought out, otherwise they would have a conflict of interests. The schedule is quite irrelevant. The remaining 10% also got cash. But the article is quite mum on the institutional investors. They can choose to cash out, or to keep the business running. Now that they have a lot of cash, they can choose to expand GroqCloud, or they can choose to pretend to keep the business running, just for show, to not trigger regulatory scrutiny. To claim it’s the second means you are quite confident the regulators in this administration will do their job. And prosecute Nvidia. Are you really saying that?
> I don't share your view. Groq continues to exist. Nvidia did not take any or their hardware, so the same Groq you access on OpenRouter will exist tomorrow or one year from now. If anything, they'll significantly increase their presence, since they just got $20 billion in cash.
The linked article expects differently:
> Nvidia’s buying them with their insanely inflated war chest. They don’t want a chunk taken out of their market share. They can’t afford to take that chance. So it’s like they’re just saying: “Shut up, take the $20 billion, walk away from this project.”
How much this is true I can't really verify myself but it certainly sounds concerning.
> But you can say that they stifle independent innovation.
But this is exactly what a market watchdog is supposed to prevent. A market with one player (or two) is no market. And Groq was going in a decidedly different direction than Nvidia.
The linked article echoes my worries in other ways as well e.g. worker displacement, explosion of energy usage. I often equate it with the dotcom era, I worked on this thinking we made the world better. But the endgame, with the Google, Meta, pervasive tracking etc is much more dystopian. Especially considering the societal effects. Enshittification, corporate rule, polarisation due to social medias promoting "engagement" and thus conflicting content that get people riled up.
I don't want the same to happen with AI here and it feels like they are already aligning the stars to make exactly that happen.
Funny how everyone shits on Nvidia's monopoly when we've got Google walking around after winning a monumental antitrust case regarding their Android/Chrome/Google information monopoly.
> Funny how everyone shits on Nvidia's monopoly when we've got Google walking around after winning a monumental antitrust case regarding their Android/Chrome/Google information monopoly.
... are you implying people around here don't give google flak for monopolistic business practices? That doesn't square with my experience, here.
My understanding is Groq failed to deploy their second-gen chips on time, which caused their stock to deflate.
Groq's primary advantage over Cerebras and SambaNova, as I see it, is they don't fabricate on TSMC. That's attractive to Nvidia, who doesn't want to give up any of their datacenter GPU allocation.
> To visualize $1.5 billion: if you cashed that check out in $100 bills and stacked them one on top of another, it would reach a five story building. For ordinary plebeians like us, at the average US salary of around $75K, you’d need to work 20,000 years to earn that.
A stack of bills is roughly 0.5 inches. Assuming a 12-ft joist-to-joist spacing, that's 12 feet per floor \times 12 inches per foot \times 2 stacks per inch = 288 stacks per floor = $2.88M per floor since a stack of 100s is $10k
So that would be a 1,000M / 2.88M ~ 347 story building.
Or is my unit conversion wildly off from dealing with sick kids over the holidays?
The average US salary isn't $75k btw. That figure is usually quoted from the reported median household income in 2022[1]. The median personal income, which is the figure that should* be quoted, was around $45k for 2024[2].
Why do you think? Not because of any output of the company, of course.
But because buying it helps perpetuate the hype and money cycle of the 'AI' trend for awhile longer. It may not look like it directly, but a purchase like this keeps Nvidia's stock up in the future, which is all investors care about.
If this is true, is it just the HN community that understands this? Otherwise, wouldn’t it make sense that the market understands this already and doesn’t fall for the hype? It doesn’t pass the smell test for me that it’s that transparent of a play for hype. What am I missing?
AI is real and it's also hyped. There's circular financing and real money involved. Groq has good tech and smart people and Nvidia is also taking a competitor off the board. People who only see one side have a lack of imagination.
B) All info the OP(= author) knows is known to the professionals dealing with the due diligence. They decided to do so while looking at data which is not available the public. So assuming they know some things why we don’t know is not a far fetched idea.
You are missing the point that it is a strategic acquisition to kickstart a new vertical that they have struggled with: serving inference. They have tried to organically grow this and do weird things like inference within their other customers’ clouds.
It certainly isn’t a “panic” as nvidia is so flush with cash. This is a minuscule amount of money for them.
It's not - I prefer to record a YouTube video first (I speak better than I write) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2po-s2yOCcg Then I run that through a transcription app (so AI I suppose but still my words, shout out to Scriber Pro which I found via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591222) then I edit down and try to change my verbs (visual to written) where necessary.
I often tell startups if you have amazing revenue, that your startup might get a lower acquisition offer price because your acquirer doesn’t care about your revenue. They might just care about your tech.
What’s more concerning is the growing trend of big tech companies “acquiring” a startup’s leadership team and IP and screwing over all the employees holding equity.
chips designed to run ResNET? I guess the haskell compiler they built is impressive (it made it so 8 racks of chips designed to run ResNET can run llama 70b with extremely low latency).
Edit: my information might be old, I don't know if they successfully taped out their second gen chip or not. Can anyone corroborate?
> I don't understand how market regulators allow this.
The US government is literally for sale. Businesses know that this window is limited and are executing antitrust manuvers left and right while they can.
the window is un-limited so there is not rush. the government has been for sale for a long time and will continue to be so regardless of who is “running the country”
Can you tell me the last US president to accept literal bars of gold and jumbo jets from foreign monarchs? Or the last one who ran a crypto coin, pardoned a crypto billionaire who he claimed not to know?
You seem to have a problem with, for starters, differences of scale. All corrupt politicians should be prosecuted, and we have had our fair share. All politicians are not equally as corrupt, and the differences in the levels of corruption are staggering.
how do you measure this? by number of clickbait-y articles you get fed inside your echochamber? or is there a more scientific scale by which we measure corruption that I can educate myself on?
An imprecise, but workable start might be to count the dollar amounts in question and evidence of direct conflict of interests. In both, the current administration has far exceeded previous ones. As others have pointed out, the degree and magnitude of corruption matters. While all corruption is problematic, there is a vast difference between bribes of billions of dollars vs a few thousand.
Or, if you prefer, you can count the number of times a president has pardoned someone he openly says he doesn't know anything about. At least the previous presidents tried to make up a plausible sounding reason.
re-read your own comment and then question just how silly the argument you are making is. starting from the bottom, you are saying it was better before when President made an effort to lie about shit they did.
then you are talking about counting dollar amounts as if we have access to bank accounts and shit to check these “dollar amounts” to see who stole more (we don’t but I am sure you can find some stories about some made up numbers and go “here, Trump this, Clinton that, Trump > Clinton - boom)
And my fav, the “degree and magnitute” is the shit, that is also something we can scientifically measure LOL. I am left-leaning centrists, most of my friends are right-leaning and for the AOC is more corrupt than Trump so you know, whatever world you live in will define “degree and magnitude”
> the government has been for sale for a long time
The government has been under significant influence of corporations for a long time: this is true. But now bribes are being accepted unabashedly. Presumably, hopefully, this won't last beyond the current administration. To equate the two is dishonest.
Your entire rhetoric is nuts if you swap it out with other crimes:
"I prefer when we can just murder people openly in the streets with no consequences or even shame. It's hypocritical to say murder she be frowned upon and forced to be done in cover of night out of fear of reprisal."
No, what they're saying is that it has gotten so bad now that the crimes are being committed constantly and in the open with no fear or worry that anything bad will ever happen.
And you're over here being coy thinking you're so clever by ignoring the scale and long-term implications.
nope, I just don’t fall for the sensantionalism and clickbait shit like “oh oh shit is really bad now, OMG we were such a sancuary before but look at us now…”
> what they're saying is that it has gotten so bad now that the crimes are being committed constantly and in the open with no fear or worry that anything bad will ever happen.
this is all false and coming from your own echochamber. it has always been this way, just now you read to much shit on your social media feed and getting all upset how sky is falling, democracy is dying, shit real bad now…
because it is the same thing - just from a politically different point of view... you got your feeds telling you about what you believe is true and the opposite side has the same thing. asking ...just because maga people say something is true that it is actually true" is exactly the same as asking just because libs (or whatever we are derogatory called these days) say something about trump it is true?* which is why I am wondering if you are asking both? or just one-sided? :)
(Edit: I realize many other commenters were breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread, but I unfortunately don't have time to go over it thoroughly, and this was a particularly bad corner.)
Under current DoJ antitrust guidelines, there's nothing to stop a future administration from reviewing any anti-competitive actions ignored by the current one as part of an anti-competitive series of actions: https://www.justice.gov/atr/merger-guidelines/applying-merge...
So those businesses either know, or expect, that either:
a) these guidelines will be changed in a way that makes them hard or impossible to revert (i.e. through legislation or a Supreme Court judgement); or
b) there is little risk of a future change of administration.
Or (c) that any future administration is going to have a lot of more pressing concerns that will drown out seriously relitigating past mergers and acquisitions, and any concerns they do have will most likely be mollified with agreed remedies that sacrifice far less than the value of doing the merger.
Very few administrations do everything they theoretically could under the law and their own guidelines (even the ones that also do lots that violates both.)
Well there's also a c) - Whatever they get away with now they will have in pocket, and whatever penance they will have to do with a future administration will take years and years of legal back and forth to actually pan out, by which time it will be watered down so any fine will dwarf the profits made during this period.
Also, if they manage to reach "too big to fail" status by that point, whatever punishment will be nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
The bubble take is tired. This was regulatory arbitrage: IP licensing instead of acquisition to dodge CFIUS/antitrust. The $13B premium to avoid years of hold up while enriching Chamath and giving Trump's AI Czar a Christmas present. So many other things at play here than just "AI bubble so big it will boom".
> At that time, the company was valued at $2 billion. Hello bubble. Then in maybe one of the best rug pulls of all time, in July they quietly changed their revenue projections to $500 million. A 75% cut in four months.
No, the author is just stupidly spreading misinformation. Looking through their other posts, it looks like he has an agenda to prove that we're in an AI bubble.
The writing style here is so belittling, and frankly stupid.
E.g. "billion is so big!", uh, I've heard of a billion before, and then comparing the value of a company to a single person's salary, as if that was very relevant.
Go talk to someone outside of tech this week, preferably someone working in the trades or something else that's less dependent on a computer, and ask them about their AI use. You'd be surprised how new a lot of the tech concepts in this article are to people that might have only heard of ChatGPT.
Was just walking past a construction site and heard some of their banter. Didn’t realise the common man could debate the benefits of an LPU over GPGPU so eloquently. One of them even compared SRAM vs DRAM as being like a cheetah vs an injured antelope ;)
We could just keep using "First world" vs "Third world" as above. There are also multiple NGOs that measure these things and break down the "ratings" into component parts.
On the other hand, an advocate for greatly increased corruption might claim that corruption can't be measured at all. Or, hypothetically, they might strictly use un-anchored non-metrics like "the other guy does it too", "any is too much", "omg look over there!", etc.
how exactly is different…? I give you Trump, you give me Biden. I give you Scott, you give me Pelosi. I give you Bush, you give me Clinton… it is not different but regardless of whether it is or isn’t no one is defending it. it is just a disservice to everyone to think somehow magically things are all this different now than before, same crap different toilet paper
Ok, give me biden. Where are his lists of corruption scandals[1]? His public statements about taking bribes?
I'm not quite sure how to explain this very obvious point: biden and his government was not corrupt in any meaningful sense and trump and his government is extremely corrupt and pretending that they're the same is both factually wrong and has the effect of protecting trump and his corruption.
The point isn't that anyone is above reproach, the point is that all you're doing is normalizing the increased awfulness of the republican corruption. And normalizing it means that it is more likely to continue happening and less likely to be punished.
If you're supposedly unhappy about clinton "corruption" why aren't you really mad about trump?
This whole "oh everything is the same nothing can improve" attitude is literally a favored tactic of the most corrupt governments. They want you to think that way because it means they'll never be held accountable. Any time people start talking about improving things they're met with an endless deluge of "oh it's all the same nothing can change" which is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[1] The best the fairly obvious house republican "investigation" into joe biden could manage was some vague statements about his son getting paid for having the last name biden, which may or may not be illegal, but certainly seems unethical, but more importantly, ISN'T THE SITTING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Like, it is so incredibly obvious that words fail me that the president being corrupt matters A LOT MORE than his son being corrupt. Like, a lot a lot a lot more.
> [1] The best the fairly obvious house republican "investigation" into joe biden could manage was some vague statements about his son getting paid for having the last name biden, which may or may not be illegal, but certainly seems unethical, but more importantly, ISN'T THE SITTING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Like, it is so incredibly obvious that words fail me that the president being corrupt matters A LOT MORE than his son being corrupt. Like, a lot a lot a lot more.
Biden is a 5+ decades politician, he is corrupted and has had every fiber of being sold to the highest bidder over and over again. it is you that care about “which team you are on” - not me. I have been a democrat my entire life and will continue to be so especially now that alternative barely exists but I also posses intelligence to know that democrats (especially fucking establishment ones like biden) are corrupt to the core
Since this thread has mostly been for the benefit of others reading it, let me close with this:
It's fine, good even, to be unhappy with e.g, joe biden and want someone better, however you define that. It is very much not fine to not vote or vote for trump because getting trump is 1000 times worse and there is no conceivable world where electing trump leads to a better outcome for us.
well since we don't really get to pick much you get to pick the worst of two evils. like 2am at a bar and there are two of the ugliest people sitting and waiting - you know you are taking one home so... ;)
not sure where you are getting that I am "unaware" of the corruption, just not sure where you are all getting "oh, the 'degree and magnitude' of corruption is now 'much worse' than it was before" when in fact this isn't something you can back up reasonably so it is just shooting the breeze without anything to back it up with. they are all the same mate, all the same ;)
As far as I can tell, the only way you can assert that trump is precisely no amount more corrupt than any other politician in history is if you're completely unaware of what he's been up to the last 10 years.
That, or you truly deeply believe all acts of corruption are perfectly equivalent regardless of their circumstances.
You insist neither is the case, but i see no other way to reach your conclusions
I can, in fact, back up the assertion that the corruption is much worse now. It's not even difficult. What is the point of lying about something like that?
Boy I am real tired of this frankly, well, I was going juvenile, but I'm pretty sure most kids are smarter than this, so I'll just call it what it is: an idiotic, damaging and ultimately false understanding of reality.
The world is not some kind of simple morality play and your continued lack of understanding about what has actually happened in the real world is offensive.
It's not because you're ignorant, that's just mildly annoying, it's because you're so proud of your ignorance. The complete unwillingness to grow and learn and challenge your current understanding, that is what is offensive.
There's a great phrase I heard a while back, "thought terminating cliche". You just toss out these blanket statements, "all politicians are evil and corrupt" as if everyone else is supposed to just blindly believe in your assertions and stop thinking for themselves and searching for truths.
Biden did some bad things, possibly even some illegal things (mostly on the premise that every single american has done at least one illegal thing) but he's still vastly superior to trump in any metric you care to choose.
The reason this matters is because we (for now) still get a choice. Are any of the choices perfect? No, obviously not. But we can still choose the better option. We don't have to settle for the worst one.
It's different because it's all about that now. The Clintons had their scandals, the "pay to play" lists etc. We all know they are in bed with the moneymen. But it didn't define their administration, and they were pretty hush-hush about it.
Trump on the other hand is completely open about this. He even brags about making money from deals, something that was previously considered a huge conflict of interest. He appoints people based on loyalty alone, not knowledge or experience. He bullies countries into compliance with mafia tactics ("appease me or else..." tariffs or even war like venezuela and greenland). It's a huge moral shift where that is no longer unthinkable. The US used to have values. It was a country that was at least trying to be the good guy.
Also, the constitution used to be holy. Now Trump is flaunting the 1st amendment on a daily basis (limiting LGBTIQ+ speech, establishing America as a "christian country" which is explicitly forbidden). I think all these developments are very concerning. I don't live in America but considering it is still a big world power it does worry me.
I love the spirit of your comments but IMO it is misguided
The US used to have values. It was a country that was at least trying to be the good guy.
This really is all wrong. One might think this based on pitches from different times but all Empires are evil by their definition and America has always been that, always
> This really is all wrong. One might think this based on pitches from different times but all Empires are evil by their definition and America has always been that, always
Again, the problem with this train of logic is you inevitable condemn everyone and everything as evil, at which point the word completely loses its meaning. Evil is only useful as a term if there are actually things that are not evil.
America has certainly done immoral, unethical and frankly evil things. It's also done moral, beautiful and even heroic things. It's a big complicated entity made up of literally millions of people and trying to summarize it as "good or evil" is pointless.
The reason this nuance matters is that we want, need to encourage doing good and the first step to doing that is to actually be able to distinguish between good and evil.
> We estimate that over the past two decades, USAID-funded programmes have helped prevent more than 91 million deaths globally, including 30 million deaths among children.
How about that? Or are you going to come up with some excuse that somewhere, somehow, an american also benefitted from saving all these lives and therefor it doesn't count?
I mean you are making this too easy
that I can copy&paste above the fold..:
The core reason for creating USAID in 1961, under President John F. Kennedy, was to consolidate and revamp U.S. foreign aid into a single, more strategic agency to counter Soviet influence during the Cold War, promote democracy and free-market principles, and fulfill America's moral and economic role as a global leader. It aimed to separate economic aid from military assistance and make it more effective in fostering development, spreading U.S. values, and creating stable partners, distinct from the bureaucracy of the State Department.
didn’t copy and paste from wikipedia (though I can if needed) - wasn’t expecting to read USAID as american spreading goodness out of our pure hearts but here we are, have read crazier things than that for sure
At no point did the phrase "goodness of pure hearts" appear in my text.
That doesn't make usaid saving 90 million lives less great.
Also, remember how america is not a single person? It is in fact millions of people? You want to tell me with a straight face that every single employee of usaid is working entirely out of some kind of dispassionate desire to increase american foreign influence?
I don't get why it is so difficult to understand that countries (and people) and do both good and bad things over their existences and if we actually want a better future we should encourage the good things being done which means we need to actually be able to recongize good vs bad.
1 in 5 children are hungry in America right this moment, we don’t do a single fucking thing because we are “good” - can’t believe there are people (you are probably in majority) that still believe this nonsense. wild wild stuff
My point, which you keep missing, is that nobody is actually "good" or "bad". They do good and bad actions.
America actually does quite a bit for hungry children, both within and without her borders. Is it enough? Perhaps not, but that doesn't somehow make what they do bad.
just do a simple thing - ballpark how many lives of innocent people has America taken, lets just say since WWII. then lets see after you ballpark this whether you still think we are (or ever were) “good guys”
The major difference is the disappearance of shame.
However, the greatest enablement was the overblown cynicism large swaths of the american elites had towards the national proclaimed values. When you think everything is cynical even when it is not then the next step is to have governments that are completely cynical.
the echochamber is going nuts… look at this thread and see how many of you are saying “degree of corruption” and then think whether or not you are getting this fed like clowns from whatever fucking (“social”) media your brain is being poisoned and then start to question your life’s choices
nope, I am educated so I don't write silly blanket statements like this without having something to back it up with. I am not saying that it less, equal or more corruption cause this is something that you cannot measure. you can only believe crap you read (depending on your politics you will be in one or the other echochamber) and then go "oh, the 'magnitute' of corruption is now "bigger/smaller/equal" than in ____ [insert year/administrations/...]
Except you're still calling us idiots for saying corruption can happen in degrees.
The only way for the "degree of corruption" to always be the same for every person ever is for every act of corruption to be of perfectly equal magnitude and consequence.
If an act of corruption can be of greater magnitude and consequence than another, than it's perfectly reasonable to say that someone who engages in corruption of greater magnitude and consequence does so "to a greater degree" than someone else.
So which is it?
I think deep down you really prefer to pretend that it's all perfectly equivalent, otherwise your simplified world-view doesn't make any sense
Not sure where the author is getting their information from but there is seemingly little correlation between the investment rounds quoted in this post and other online sources. No mention for example of the Series E that valued Groq at $6.9bn.
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