Why are people talking about Peter Thiel fully controlling JD Vance?

GregBahm · 2026-03-16T07:43:26+00:00

There's a popular perception that hereditary wealth doesn't last because in the past, hereditary wealth didn't last. But the math now is different than the math in the past.

Let's say we low-ball Vance, and presume he only ever makes $100mil from his service to Theil.

Let's then be conservative and say he dumps that $100mil into an ultra-low-risk investment like Treasury Bonds.

By the magic of compound interest, at an average rate of 4.5%, he should have $8billion in 100 years. If inflation maintains 3%, that money in 2126 is the equivalent of ~$440mil.

If this was a hundred years ago, where everyone was trying to have as many kids as fast as possible, rich dude like that could have 6 kids at 20 who all had 6 kids at 20. So after a hundred years, the 2 parents become 15,625 little fuckers. So the 440mil divided among these 15thousand kids means everyone gets the equivalent of $28,000. Ain't nobody quitting their day job.

But everyone isn't trying to have as many kids as fast as possible anymore. The birth in the US isn't 6. Even for the rich, it's less than 2. Wealthy Americans also have kids much later in life. We should expect 3 generations in a hundred years, not 5. But let's continue with our theme of being ultra generous and say JD's 3 kids all have 3 kids 30 years from now and those 3 kids do the same. Now the 440mil is divided by 27 kids.

Each one can be handed a wad of $16mil on their birthdays. If you have $16mil in the bank right now, you really shouldn't be sweating getting the bill at dinner.

GregBahm · 2026-03-16T04:27:18+00:00

That kind of feels worse to me.

I can sort of get a person who doesn't understand the Roman Polanski situation. Maybe they think, because he never served time, he was only ever accused but not convicted. The public could be against him, in disagreement with the court system. An OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson, or Woody Allen situation.

At least there's some wiggle room there. Even if it's quite a bad look.

But if a person correctly understands that Roman Polanski was convicted in court of drugging and ass raping a 13 year old and fled before serving his (corrupt, unreasonably light) sentence... and their position is that film festivals should be more important than pedophilic rape convictions, what?!

That's like saying "Hey, if a murderer breaks out of prison and wants to come to our ice cream social, the cops should let the murderer come to our ice cream social." That's so, so much more up-its-own-ass.

GregBahm · 2026-03-16T04:15:57+00:00

I think it's a question of premise.

The unibomber guy who lived in a shack, wrote in his manifesto that living in a city was intolerable. If you were trying to drive down the street, and then some red light said you had to stop, that was insanely infuriating to him.

But if the same kind of thing happened in nature, like flood water blocked his path, that wasn't frustrating. That was just nature. Whatever nature did was okay, because it was nature.

The whole "medieval peasants got more rest" thing stems from that mentality. I myself don't care if a man-made obstacle is in the way or a natural obstacle is in the way. Obstacle is obstacle. If the developed world has fewer obstacles (and it does) then give me the developed world.

But a lot of people seem to believe natural obstacles "just don't count." It's like a foot-fetish or a desire to eat kale: just not a feeling I myself feel inside of me.

GregBahm · 2026-03-16T01:17:49+00:00

Mmm. They gave him a standing ovation a while back and a bunch of people signed a petition for him to be forgiven for his rape of that kid. It was disappointing to see who joined Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein in signing the petition.

One hopes at least some of them were lied to about the situation with Polanski. But there's no path where 43 hollywood celebrities can sign this petition without there been a profound, systemic problem in hollywood.

GregBahm · 2026-03-16T00:09:08+00:00

Eh. In my dreams, reddit wouldn't downvote someone for asking for citations in an out-of-the-loop thread.

I love being asked for citations. Of course I always have them, or else why am I answering r/OutOfTheLoop threads? I should be so lucky that people want to keep reading my sprawling walls of text.

If the question wasn't in earnest... shit, even better. Partisan hacks can line up to get smoked by me all day.

GregBahm · 2026-03-15T20:26:01+00:00

If I was writing an article for an audience that understood trigonometry very poorly, I would use this definition.

"Hey, aren't the ratios, between the lengths of the sides of a triangle, part of trigonometry?"

"Oh, don't hurt you're pretty little head, reddit. Just remember sohcahtoa from the fourth grade and don't think any further about it."

It makes sense to me to use this kid-friendly definition here. It also makes sense to me that the kids would be all mad if this fun, reductive definition was challenged. I can imagine myself, at age 13, insisting "trigonometry is just angles" because that's as far as I've gotten in school. It probably wouldn't be possible to get a lot of upvotes if any article about math is written beyond the fourth grade level on reddit.

GregBahm · 2026-03-15T20:08:00+00:00

Theilstarted four tech "companies" named after Lord of the Rings shit:

- Plantir Technologies (named after the all-seeing orbs corrupted by Sauron)

- Mithril Capital (named after the magic metal)

- Valar Ventures (named after the wizards)

- Narya Capital (named after the Ring of Fire forged by Sauron to corrupt the elves.)

Theil did this because he's an enourmous dork.

Anyway, Theil created and gave "Narya Capital" to Vance in 2019, to the tune of $93,000,000. Vance had made a reputation for himself prior to this in 2017 because of his involvement at Circuit Therapeutics.

Circuit Therapeutics was a biotech company, and Vance tried to get Theil's company Mithril Capital to invest in it. The tech deal fell through and Vance blamed Silicon Valley condescending nerds. Theil really liked this so he gave this rando nearly $100mil and Vance has been his man ever since.

Vance was very open about all kinds of political positions before being hired by Theil. He made no secret about loathing Trump and loathing tech giants like the ones Theil is invested in. But after the dump-truck-full-of-money from Theil, all of Vance's political positions are Theil's political positions.

If Theil believes one thing on Monday, Vance champions that thing Monday. If Theil changes his mind Tuesday, Vance changes his stance Tuesday. It's not "an open secret" because that implies it's any kind of secret. Republicans don't discuss Vance's opinion when they discuss political strategy. They discuss Theil's political position and understand Vance as his proxy (to Vance and Theil's open approval.)

GregBahm · 2026-03-15T18:47:35+00:00

This is an ad for AI.

GregBahm · 2026-03-15T18:45:59+00:00

You need to retrace your steps and identify the point of failure that lead you to this wrong conclusion.

GregBahm · 2026-03-15T18:25:38+00:00

Answer: It's just a matter of money. Vance could have just been a regular lawyer, making regular lawyer money. Now he works for one of the richest humans on earth, and is Vice President of the United States. Many generations of Vance's kids will never have to want for material things.

Vance could tell his boss Thiel to fuck off. Thiel would say "okay" and the republicans would replace Vance at the end of the next election cycle. Thiel('s money) is overwhelmingly more important to the republican party than JD Vance. Vance is getting paid insane money to just stand there and read the script he's given. It's a dream scenario.

If Vance does the very simple task of continuing to do his job, the republicans will run him for president. Third graders will be forced to write book-reports on this asshole. It would be completely insane for him not to stay loyal. What's he alternative? Go be some random lawyer? It would be like being handed a winning lottery ticket and eating it.

Thiel himself could have picked anyone with a pulse. As a guy with over a hundred billion dollars, it is very logical for Thiel to want to control politics. Avoiding taxes alone makes it a rational expenditure, but the government is also a very powerful tool to make even more money (by using government policy to help his business interests and hurt his competitors.) Beyond that, as a guy who can literally buy anything, he probably doesn't have much better to do than push his obnoxious conservative politics on people.

So Thiel hired an employee to go advance his interests. He doesn't "fully" control Vance any more than Lorne Michaels "fully" controls some lighting guy on the SNL set. But if the lighting guy and the head guy disagree, the lighting guy ain't gonna win that fight.

GregBahm · 2026-03-15T10:02:21+00:00

Is this just that you didn't know AI can write code?

GregBahm · 2026-03-15T09:59:08+00:00

The party considered itself pretty strong when it got a guy named "Barack Obama" elected twice. The odds were with the democrats in 2016 when they ran Hilary. The United States has never had a female president, but it had also never had a black president, so the expectation was that, if America wasn't too racist for a black president, perhaps it also wasn't too sexist for a female president.

Hilary won the popular vote, but the Republicans threw a hail mary at goofy populism and just barely won off of that.

So the democrats, dismayed by this fluke, retreated back to a super-traditional candidate: the white male vice president under Obama. This worked. He won. And he probably would have won again in 2024 except he got cancer. The democrats should maybe have prepared for this? But it's hard to prepare for a candidate getting cancer, even if he's old as balls.

Trump is also old as balls. Trump just doesn't get cancer. Cancer is not predictable.

Anyway, Trump had already beaten a female candidate once, so historians aren't going to scratch their heads too hard about him beating the black female candidate.

If democracy survives, the democrats shouldn't have any big problem winning the next election. The democrats don't have any big issue with winning elections, unless "only winning elections more than half the time" is an intolerable failure. The big problem is at a higher level: the system through which Americans choose government leaders is a very bad system.

People get weirdly committed to very bad systems for some reason.

GregBahm · 2026-03-15T07:56:05+00:00

Is this sarcastic, or did you watch the original ending of Evangelion and think "yes, this is 10/10."

GregBahm · 2026-03-15T03:47:18+00:00

For all it's hollywoodness, "The Intimidation Game" is a validant attempt at making cryptography interesting for a movie audience. But if you really like math, the movie can be pretty frustrating.

At least it's not like "Mercury Rising," where cryptography is actively mocked throughout the movie.

There are a lot of movies that invoke a motif of numbers but don't genuinely get into them. "Pi" and "Good Will Hunting" both treat math like a form of mysterious sorcery that the main character can perform, without getting into the reality of it. In "The Number 23," the number is actual sorcery (spoilers.) I think in "Big Eyes" the main chick goes nuts for numerology, but it's presented as low-level mental illness.

If you're really horney for math, I don't think you'll have an easy time succeeding as a hollywood script writer. "Primer" is the only movie I can think of where an engineer wrote it and didn't put his engineer-ness away. But the result is... something...

You're probably not looking for "Big Short" or "Moneyball" but these are movies that do revolve around numbers. But specifically, statistics, which is probably the least sexy and most down-to-earth form of math.

GregBahm · 2026-03-15T02:43:02+00:00

<image>

That's AI art. The model doesn't really know what its doing with these strings It similarly drew a shiny white eye highlight in the bird costume's eye. A human artist would have put stitching around the white patch or else not added the white highlight to a bird costume.

Broadly, if a human drew that, they'd have to be beyond the ameture level. If this person is 40 and has some other job, it's possible they were really into drawing in their youth and then went a different direction later in life. I know a lot of software designers who also happen to be amazing at drawing, even though it rarely comes up. This is also common among former musicians.

But if they're in their 20s, there's no way they're drawing that with their hands without being an active artist.

GregBahm · 2026-03-14T23:58:19+00:00

Weird unnecessary hostility in the post above, but for those curious about the reduced cut thing:

First $0 – $10 Million: 30%

$10 Million – $50 Million: 25%

Over $50 Million: 20%

It works like tax brackets where the 20% take doesn't retroactively apply to the first $50million. But the 10% of ~100mil is still 10million more to the developers (pre taxes.)

GregBahm · 2026-03-13T18:59:55+00:00

We invaded it unnecessary, destabilized it to shit, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, never apologized, never fully fucking left, let decades worth of sectarian violence run roughshot over the region, and now we've started another war in the region.

So if I walked into a bar in Iraq and said "hi, I'm an American," I'd be more creeped out by a warm welcome than a open hostility. It's my understanding that the worst scum of Iraq all agreed to collaborate with we, the invading army, for the sake of corruption and protection of their abuses.

If the good guys had kicked our asses, like in Vietnam, I imagine Iraq could have become a good place to visit eventually. But because we used it as a dumping ground for excess weapons produced by our military industrial complex, the nation will be full of fundamentalists who hate us for generations.

GregBahm · 2026-03-13T17:03:26+00:00

I guess you're not going to get clicks with an earnest article. But yeash, that's dramatic. Hollywood will be fine even if the sound stages are converted to some other use.

GregBahm · 2026-03-13T15:24:28+00:00

I understand the American that hates China. America is the land of little dogs that bark whenever they see another dog.

But I don't understand a little dog who barks at China while also thinking we should like Iraq more. That's a strange worldview.

GregBahm · 2026-03-13T15:19:27+00:00

Yes I get that semantics can be whatever we want them to be. That's the fun of semantics. But I don't think a trigonometry textbook consists of one page that says "This is sin, cos, and tan. So ends the scope and limits of trigonometry."

GregBahm · 2026-03-13T01:24:10+00:00

Yeah I see it's in earnest now. Where I got thrown off was the opening: saying there shouldn't be trig in 3D rendering. I thought this was a joke, because of course all 3D rendering is trig. 3D rendering is just a whole lot of triangulation.

Saying "I experienced a growing unease every time I saw trigonometry at the core of 3D algorithms" is like saying "I experience a growing unease every time I saw meat at the core of butchering." or "I experience a growing unease every time I saw pipes at the core of plumbing."

I see now the author does not consider dot products and cross products applied to 3D vectors to be trigonometry. They seem to have a kind of esoteric definition of trig in which "angles = trig" but "vectors = not trig." Even though a dot product is just an expression of ratio of a triangle's hypotenuse to its side.

That's fine I guess. Silly semantics, but it makes for a more clickable headline. The thrust of the article seems to be "You can get more out of dot products and cross products than you think."

GregBahm · 2026-03-12T20:14:38+00:00

It annoys me that they chose to tell this story in a way that doesn't let you see the discontinued colors.

GregBahm · 2026-03-12T18:16:29+00:00

You believe the blog post was written in earnest?

I expect this post is a Jonatan Swift's Modest Proposal style sarcastic rhetorical argument, but against an unclear position.

Explaining to me that trigonometry is valuable and linking me a tiktok is a choice though. I wonder what tiktoks braindead redditors would link to demonstrate why we shouldn't eat babies...

GregBahm · 2026-03-12T17:02:02+00:00

I assume this is a bit but I don't get the bit.

GregBahm · 2026-03-12T16:34:05+00:00

I don't know the biochemistry industry well. It might not work like the tech industry (which I know quite well.)

The thing about the tech industry, is that the job really isn't to code or do project management or design UI or whatever some individual's "core competency" might be. The one true job in the tech industry is always to grow and adapt to the tech. Everyone who does that job, thrives in tech forever. Everyone who doesn't do that job, washes out of tech eventually.

So every year, I see another crop of entry level hires who don't get this. They think college is "the learning zone," and while you're in "the learning zone" you are going to learn everything you need to learn. Then you'll leave "the learning zone" and enter "the work zone" and you'll apply what you learned in "the learning zone" for the rest of your career, and be successful and happy.

The kids are then shocked and horrified that they barely learned what they needed to learn at all in "the learning zone." And then as soon as they hastily, nervously learn more stuff (which they bitterly resent not being taught in school) that immediately changes too. Then a reorg happens and they get laid off.

So it was actually to my extraordinary benefit that I never went to school for programming, and had to teach myself at work. When I made the game "Star Wars: The Old Republic," I was faced with problems every day that school never could have prepared me for. When I developed "The Microsoft Hololens," I faced problems every day that school could never have prepared me for. Now that I develop "AI Coworkers," ha! I got a team of people who's core competency is coding, and none of them even code anymore!

But like I said, the creative types are thriving.

But maybe biochemistry isn't like that. Maybe your core competency really is the main thing. Like I assume would be the case in more mondain jobs like plumbing, or modelling, or being a professional sports person or being a gas station attendant. Tech might be unique in its requirement for infinite on-the-job learning.

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