@cstross some guesstimation puts the number of people employed in "Intelligence" in the USA north of 1.5 mil people, potentially way bigger.
So I would put the ballpark ratio for a somewhat fascist empire at 1:100 people work on INT. If there are fewer external threats, more will be looking inward. Spanish inquisitions hunting the Spanglish Inquisition which was set up as a sting operation by another department of the SI...

@jwz *chef's kiss*

Need to cook up some or my own that say things along the line of "if I ever had respect for you, that has past", or "you having goven me carte blance to rant about AI at you for 30 minutes straight", or "you sound gullible, and if you don't think AI is a bubble, I have some tulip bulb futures to srll you"

@TheOneDoc @zzt i disagree. The big contributors want access to steering and influence in big picture changes. There is little reason for them to care if they allow whatever flavor of AI is their (dead) horse atm.
The worst that could happen to MS, G, and AMZN is if Linux were to tighten license conditions on the kernel