About 75,000 federal workers have abandoned ship and decided to accept President Trump’s deferred buyout after a federal judge lifted a temporary freeze on the offer.
The buyout was just one of many approaches Trump and Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency have taken to dismantle bloated bureaucracies and slash a civilian workforce of 2.3 million.
Officials have been told that some agencies can see up to 70% of their staff cut.
The deferred buyout program promised employees their salaries and benefits until October if they leave immediately.
A union which represents hundreds of thousands of federal workers sued last week to stop the deal. But a Massachusetts judge ruled the unions lack standing to challenge the directive.
He also warned federal agencies to prepare for wide-ranging job cuts, and several departments have begun to lay off recent hires who lack full job security.
This is an excellent speech and I hope Vance, Trump and USA live up to it. Vance broadsides European ‘leaders’ who are trying to control AI and information in general. He warns China and others there will be serious consequences for using AI to steal or undermine USA. He promises USA will promote and protect full free speech on USA platforms. I see no other intelligent way forward but to go for it full steam and agree with how Vance has put it. ABN
Feb 10 (Reuters) – A consortium led by Elon Musk said on Monday it has offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, months after the billionaire sued the artificial intelligence startup to block it from transitioning to a for-profit firm.
Musk’s bid could ratchet up longstanding tensions with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the future of the startup at the heart of a boom in generative AI technology.
Altman promptly posted on X: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
The two are already embroiled in an ongoing lawsuit. Musk criticized a $500 billion OpenAI-led project called Stargate announced with great fanfare at the White House just after President Donald Trump returned to office, suggesting the investors involved lacked the funding for the project.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in the press release. “We will make sure that happens.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Billionaire Elon Musk and his government efficiency team have been given access to the U.S. Treasury Department’s payment system, resolving a days-long standoff, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
Musk, who chairs the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency, has been tasked by President Donald Trump to identify fraud and waste in the government and had sought access to the system Treasury uses to dole out federal funds.
His efforts were resisted by a career Treasury official, David Lebryk, who was placed on leave this week and then retired. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Musk’s team access, the Times reported.
The system sends out more than $6 trillion per year in payments on behalf of federal agencies and contains the personal information of millions of Americans who receive Social Security payments, tax refunds and other monies from the government.
DeepSeek, China’s new Ai model, is disrupting the entire world of artificial intelligence…in the blink of an eye.
If you don’t know…DeepSeek is an open sourced Ai program that anyone can use.
It’s the top app in all app stores today.
It’s free and the paid models are cheaper than competitors.
It’s also very powerful, matching or beating all the American competitors on all major benchmarks.
The reason this is significant – and the reason it’s crashing the financial markets this morning…is because they did this with OUT all the powerful US ‘hyperscalers’ or GPU Superconductors that the US has banned the export of to China.
They also don’t give the ridiculous valuations to this company like we do to our OpenAi and Meta, etc.
So China, against all our efforts and sanctions, created a cheaper, more efficient and more powerful Ai model by being creative and working around all our efforts to block their progress.
And from what I hear, DeepSeek is just the beginning. Many think it cracked AGI!
According to leaked media reports [CBS HERE] President Trump is going to unveil a private sector launch of $500 billion to create data processing centers for a national Artificial Intelligence (AI) network. The network will be known as “Stargate.”
SoftBank Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son, OpenAI head Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison are expected to be at the White House for the announcement.
The initial launch will consist of $100 billion for the first Stargate (AI processing center) in Texas. Other projects in other states will come online in the future.
The inevitable arriving more or less as predicted. Only DARPA can stop or slow technology and it can only do that by hiding it and owning all the researchers. AI is out in the open. KOBK absolutely 100% demands USA continue developing it. Not saying I like it. Just saying this is how power is wielded in this world. Altman and Ellison are both Jewish. Son is Japanese. The only defense we the plebs have is free speech and as many of us as possible being on more or less the same page. I do not believe that is near enough but it is all we have. ABN
Some powerful group doesn’t want the people to speak the truth. Some powerful group was able to get lotta Congress on board with the ban. The only people who want censorship are liars and thieves who fear exposure.
With AI—that robotic plagiarist mechanical pseudologia fantastica—coming on hard and fast, we all have to get real used to the truth about our realities and be able to discuss any topicopenly without interference from government, which should be protecting the inalienable rights of US citizens.
If for no other reason, we humans must have full freedom of discussion to protect ourselves from AI mesmerism or control. And there are many more reasons than that. But that is a big one. The only database and voice that can compete with AI is we humans. Censorship will destroy us. Wide-open, deep, unbridled and profound freedom of speech with zero fear of consequences is an absolute must as the world moves ineluctably into massive technological advances. AI is just the beginning. ABN
Following a well-documented act of journalistic manipulation by CBS where they edited an interview with Kamala Harris to fabricate her response to a question, President Trump sued CBS for $10 billion alleging ‘election interference and demonstrable bias.’
The editorial manipulation by CBS is not debatable, even Trump critics stood jaw-agape at how stunningly obvious the fabrication within the broadcast 60-minutes interview was. CBS didn’t even attempt to defend itself on the matter. {Background Link}
CBS parent company Paramount Global is currently in an acquisition/merger effort with Skydance Media. The FCC is currently reviewing the possibility of the deal. Here’s where it gets interesting.
Skydance Media is run by David Ellison, the son of billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is the background money behind Twitter, behind Elon Musk and deeply enmeshed with the Tech Bros motives and intents for gains in the new administration. Larry Ellison has a good relationship with Trump supporting his election.
According to the Wall Street Journal, CBS/Paramount are now considering a lawsuit settlement with Donald Trump that would support a more friendly relationship for their merger interests with David Ellison and Skydance Media. It’s a billionaire “big club” analytical decision.
The CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) has partnered with the CIA-linked Palantir to cement the public-private model of invasive surveillance in “public health,” all while pushing the U.S. national security state and Silicon Valley even closer together.
The Pentagon and Silicon Valley are in the midst of cultivating an even closer relationship as the Department of Defense (DoD) and Big Tech companies seek to jointly transform the American healthcare system into one that is “artificial intelligence (AI)-driven.” The alleged advantages of such a system, espoused by the Army itself, Big Tech and Pharma executives as well as intelligence officers, would be unleashed by the rapidly developing power of so-called “predictive medicine,” or “a branch of medicine that aims to identify patients at risk of developing a disease, thereby enabling either prevention or early treatment of that disease.”
This will apparently be achieved via mass interagency data sharing between the DoD, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the private sector. In other words, the military and intelligence communities, as well as the public and private sector elements of the US healthcare system, are working closely with Big Tech to “predict” diseases and treat them before they occur (and even before symptoms are felt) for the purported purpose of improving civilian and military healthcare.
This cross-sector team plans to deliver this transformation of the healthcare system by first utilizing and sharing the DoD’s healthcare dataset, which is the most “comprehensive…in the world.” It seems, however, based on the programs that already utilize this predictive approach and the necessity for “machine learning” in the development of AI technology, that this partnership would also massively expand the breadth of this healthcare dataset through an array of technologies, methods and sources.
Yet, if the actors and institutions involved in lobbying for and implementing this system indicate anything, it appears that another—if not primary—purpose of this push towards a predictive AI-healthcare infrastructure is the resurrection of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-managed and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-supported program that Congress officially “shelved” decades ago. That program, Total Information Awareness (TIA), was a post 9/11 “pre-crime” operation which sought to use mass surveillance to stop terrorists before they committed any crimes through collaborative data mining efforts between the public and private sector.
This is very good and well-worth the time. Pretty much what your basic American thinks or feels put very well. The parts on Indians ring true. It’s the same story for Jews but with different scenery. Simplicity that actually cuts to the core is always good. But you have to take it for that and not spin off into ‘fuck your own face’ or whatever Musk said. I hope Elon turns this episode around. People will hate you for what you do but will forgive you for what you did if your really reform. That happens to be basic (based?) Buddhism. It’s all transient. Or to say it better, all bullshit is transient but ethical, moral, generous, compassionate deeds and intentions are not. ABN
American Buddhist Net 