GM
Article
GM is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 23, 2023 and September 13, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “GM. had hired a team of private investigators to dig up dirt on him”; “many employees also talked about their past jobs at Boeing or GM or wherever”. It most often appears alongside 1965, 1968 Summer Olympics, 2000 election.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: June 23, 2023
- Last seen: September 13, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 1965 (1 shared issues)
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- 1968 Summer Olympics (1 shared issues)
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- 2000 election (1 shared issues)
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- 2023 book review contest (1 shared issues)
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- Abe Lincoln (1 shared issues)
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- AI alignment movement (1 shared issues)
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- Ambras (1 shared issues)
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- American Capitalism (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Beal (1 shared issues)
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- Android (1 shared issues)
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- Antarctic (1 shared issues)
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- anti-apartheid party (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Unsafe at Any Speed was a modest success, but it didn’t make too much of a stir—until, that is, it came out that in their zeal to discredit Nader, GM. had hired a team of private investigators to dig up dirt on him, even enlisting a few young women to seduce him in an attempted entrapment8. Thanks to Nader’s ascetic lifestyle and complete lack of any interests outside of work, they failed spectacularly at getting anything compromising on him. But their clumsy attempts at subterfuge did manage to make Nader famous and his book a best-seller. Less than a year later, LBJ signed the Traffic Safety and Highway Safety Acts, largely due to Nader’s advocacy.
Inline links: 8
The cliche answer - that they believe in the mission - is mostly true. But many employees also talked about their past jobs at Boeing or GM or wherever. They would have some cool idea, and tell it to their boss, and their boss would say they weren’t in the cool idea business and were already getting plenty of government contracts. If they pushed, they would get told to file it with the Vice President of Employee Feedback, who might hold a meeting to determine a process to summon an exploratory committee to add it to the queue of things to consider for the 2030 version of the product.