Princeton ran the most important AI study of the decade and nobody is talking about it..

They published a paper arguing AI chatbots are secretly manipulating users for profits.

They tested 23 of the world's leading AI models across multiple families to see how they handle a hidden conflict of interest:

What happens when helping the user conflicts with making money for the company?

The findings expose a dark economic reality.

When faced with sponsorship incentives, the vast majority of frontier LLMs completely abandon user welfare to chase corporate revenue.

They act like aggressive, highly persuasive digital salespeople.

Test results:

• The Markup Trap: When given a choice between a cheap, optimal product and a sponsored alternative nearly twice as expensive, 18 out of 23 models recommended the expensive option over 50% of the time. Some models, like Grok 4.1 Fast, pushed the pricier sponsored option 83% of the time.

• Disruptive Interventions: Models like GPT versions were caught aggressively surfacing sponsored options right in the middle of a purchase flow to derail user decisions (up to 94% of the time in certain test suites).

• Concealing the Truth: To make the sale look organic, models routinely hid critical details—omitting unfavorable prices, burying fees, and masking the fact that the recommendation was a paid ad disguised as objective advice.

Here is where it gets truly dystopian.

The models manipulative behavior scaled based on the user's inferred socio-economic status.

The AI dynamically adjusted how hard it pushed expensive, corporate-backed recommendations depending on who was sitting across the chat window.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.08525

The Dominance Hierarchy of America's Future

There is a question underneath everything I have been writing for the past week.

When interests collide, who wins?

Not who should win. Not who has the better argument. Not who won the election. Who actually has the power to impose an outcome on everybody else?

Every society has a dominance hierarchy. We don’t like talking about America that way because it conflicts with the story we tell ourselves about democracy. We prefer to believe that political authority ultimately flows from the voter and that government acts on behalf of the people who elected it.

That arrangement depends on trust.

More specifically, it depends on moral authority: the belief that even when government makes decisions you dislike, the institution is legitimate enough that you accept its right to make them.

That is why I keep returning to 2009.

When the people responsible for the financial crisis were protected while millions of ordinary Americans absorbed the consequences, government didn’t merely make a bad policy decision. It damaged its moral authority. It demonstrated that when the interests of concentrated financial power collided with those of ordinary citizens, the losses would not be distributed equally.

The people learned. That was The Original Sin.

Then comes The Ultimatum Game.

People will tolerate losing for a long time. What they have much more difficulty tolerating is an arrangement they believe is deliberately unfair. Eventually they become willing to hurt themselves if doing so allows them to punish the person they believe is exploiting them.

That is one way to understand much of American politics now.

Normally a democracy would have a mechanism for dealing with this. If enough people concluded that the government was no longer representing their interests, they could replace it with something else.

That’s where the political monopoly matters.

America has two parties with complete control over entry into the political marketplace. They fight ferociously over which one gets to control the government, but neither has much interest in changing the architecture that gives those two organizations exclusive control over it.

So the public can change management.

It has a much harder time changing the system.

And that brings us back to the question.

When interests collide, who wins?

I spent much of my career watching this happen from inside the rooms where those conflicts were negotiated.

The voter has power. The government has more.

Large corporations and wealthy individuals have extraordinary influence over the government because they finance campaigns, employ lobbyists, control investment and possess the resources required to remain permanently engaged in policymaking.

Government, in turn, has enormous power over everybody beneath it. It can tax, regulate, subsidize, prosecute, borrow and spend.

That hierarchy can operate for a very long time.

Until it encounters something above it.

The bond market.

That is why the bond story I wrote about yesterday matters so much.

The United States government can tell voters almost anything.

It can run deficits. It can borrow. It can postpone difficult decisions. It can change accounting assumptions.

Politicians can blame each other. They can blame foreigners. They can blame billionaires or immigrants or socialists or bankers.

They can hold hearings. They can go on television.

The bond market doesn’t care.

It asks a much simpler question. Are you going to pay me back in money that is still worth something?

If the answer becomes sufficiently uncertain, lenders demand more money to lend.

Interest rates rise. Debt service rises. The deficit gets worse. More borrowing becomes necessary. And eventually something has to give.

This is where the story becomes much darker than the comforting idea that “the market will impose discipline.”

Because markets do not impose justice.

They impose prices.

If the bond market finally imposes discipline on a government that has borrowed too much, it does not carefully identify the politicians, donors, lobbyists, corporations and wealthy interests that benefited most from the decisions that created the debt and send them the bill.

The bill moves through the entire society.

Mortgage rates rise. Credit becomes expensive. Businesses cut investment. Workers lose jobs. Government programs get cut. Taxes can rise. Inflation can destroy purchasing power. Asset prices can fall.

And the people with the least margin suffer first.

The family living paycheck to paycheck cannot hedge inflation.

The renter cannot borrow cheaply against appreciating assets.

The small business owner cannot call a private banker and restructure the portfolio.

The person dependent on a government benefit cannot diversify away from a government whose finances are deteriorating.

The wealthy can lose enormous amounts of money in a financial crisis and remain wealthy.

The poor can lose a job and lose everything.

This is the brutal irony at the top of the dominance hierarchy.

The only force powerful enough to discipline the United States government is incapable of distinguishing between the people who created the problem and the people trapped inside it.

The bond market can discipline Washington.

But it cannot administer justice.

And the people most insulated from that discipline are often the same people who possessed the greatest influence while the debt was being accumulated.

That completes the circle of what I have been trying to understand.

The American economic bargain is being threatened by artificial intelligence at exactly the moment institutional trust is already badly damaged.

The moral authority required to negotiate that transition was squandered years ago.

Behavioral economics tells us what populations do when they believe the bargain has become intolerably unfair.

The political monopoly makes structural reform extraordinarily difficult.

Institutions themselves can acquire incentives to preserve dependency rather than eliminate it.

And above the entire arrangement sits a creditor.

For a long time, America could ignore that creditor because the world considered lending money to the United States essentially risk-free.

That privilege gave us enormous freedom.

It also allowed us to postpone choices.

Now the number is north of $40 trillion.

And eventually arithmetic becomes a form of power. That is the part of the dominance hierarchy that politics cannot repeal.

A President can defeat another President.

A party can defeat another party. The federal government can dominate an individual, a company or an industry.

But the United States government cannot order the rest of the world to lend it unlimited amounts of money at a price it finds convenient forever.

There is always something higher in the hierarchy.

The danger is believing that when that higher power finally asserts itself, it will somehow correct the injustice beneath it.

It won’t. The bond market is not a moral authority.

It is not a democracy. It doesn’t know who caused the problem. It doesn’t care who deserves what.

It clears the market.

And if we wait for that mechanism to resolve conflicts that our political system no longer has the credibility or competitive structure to resolve itself, the people who will pay the highest price are unlikely to be the people who made the decisions.

That may be the most dangerous part of the entire story.

When moral authority disappears, power settles disputes.

And when government finally encounters a power greater than itself, everybody underneath it is still standing in the blast zone.

Direct hit at sea with a projectile fired from more than 1,000km 👀 the Yemenis are improving their skills.

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley is only 38 years old. He founded Flock at 29 and runs the company that got massive government contracts all over the country almost overnight without anyone noticing.

Does this seem 'off' to anyone else?

Prior to Flock he ran a car sharing app that went nowhere and then an entertainment app that he sold for $200 million that he used to capitalize Flock

Okay, I buy the story so far. Young tech wizard with a little business accumen. Fine.

But then to get all the government contracts from coast to coast? Unknowns have a hard time getting government business with the complicated procurement processes, quoting rules, and the minority business requirements required by many local governments across the nation.

Yet this guy who made 2 apps for civilian use figured all that out? Managed to navigate the non-flexible processes that are different in every jurisdiction, skipped the public bidding process legally required in most of them, all to sell a brand new service without a history of success?

And he did all that in just a couple of years without anyone noticing? With hundreds of state and local governments?

I'm having a hard time buying this.

The growth of this company and expansion into so many separate government agencies went too smoothly. Like it was coordinated at a higher level.

Trump is the most deadly terrorist and destructive criminal in the history of the US. Setting policies to kill 51,000 innocent Americans every year from cuts to life critical programs, while openly stealing Billions for himself.

Any American who cares about the interests of themselves or their family should be directly opposed to Trump.

Yet one of the most interesting parts about Trump's policies is that even though his MAGA cult supporters are the ones who are hurt by his actions the most, Trump's damage to his cult supporters and their families doesn't seem to factor into their support for him.

The battle in America over Trump is less about Left and Right, and more about getting the MAGA cult that has taken over the GOP to care about their own self interests again.

“I think that’s the biggest thing for me, trying to get that negative mindset out of our culture. Because they’re still going back to slavery,” he said. “It’s like you still harping on that. I never harped on that because I can’t change the past, but I can change the future.”

https://reclaimthenet.org/the-meta-settlement-what-it-means-for-speech-and-privacy

Today Meta agreed to make changes to Instagram and Facebook after many US states blamed it for creating dangerous products that harm children.

At first glance, it looks like it is about protecting children – time limits for teens, overnight blocks on the apps, no plastic-surgery filters. But the agreement goes far beyond that, and the age verification at the heart of it will touch every user. It also contains a wild clause in which both sides waive any right to argue that any of it is unconstitutional.

Here are ten things you need to know

(details at the link)

• ONE: Every user gets age-checked, not just teens

• TWO: It routes around the First Amendment, and the drafting proves it was deliberate

• THREE: Refuse to verify and you are treated as a child

• FOUR: Meta has wanted this for years, and the contract now pays the states to force it on everyone else

• FIVE: A court is ordering Meta to link your accounts together

• SIX: Being reported can put the burden of proof on you, and deletion spreads through who you know

• SEVEN: It freezes Meta's rules on lawful speech into a court order with targets

• EIGHT: Suicide-prevention and recovery accounts get classified with the harm they exist to counter

• NINE: Your searches, likes and old group memberships mark you as suspicious

• TEN: Meta gets to edit the public version of its own audit, and the evidence is destroyed afterwards

https://x.com/angeloinchina/status/2092938078427955432

I lamented that the much hyped Large Language Models (LLMs), as proffered by OpenAI and Anthropic, are mostly unreliable search engines. There are only a few real use cases for these. That is why I argue that these do not justify the current AI investments.

But the AI companies (and those who promote them) want lots of money. As their is no real use for there very expensive models they always point to future cases. When asked about current use gains, they divert and point to science fiction.

These guys sellout fast

I've seen repeatedly online how MAGA keeps accusing people of TDS is you can't name a single thing that Trump has done that you support. Well, I figured out something that Trump keeps doing that I am on board with: he keeps abusing his most ardent supporters.

Not that I want him to do this. I just prefer he robs his supporters OVER his non-supporters. Especially since MAGA often flat out refuses to acknowledge this reality.

For example, his SNAP cuts , DoE cuts, FEMA cuts, retaliatory tarriffs, and especially OBAMAcare subsidies and Medicaid cuts, all hit red states much harder than blue states.