My highschool days. Wouldn’t change a thing either, except I wouldn’t start smoking cigarettes.

Milken’s worth is stagnant - he can’t play stocks. In the 80s Milken had what the wealthy always want, power. He doesn’t have it now. 6 billion is what he’s worth and that’s a long long way below the likes of Elon Musk. Had Milken never been convicted he would’ve kept growing like Elon did.

You’re missing my point. I’m not saying these guys are put into the same kind of financial distress the rest of us are when the car breaks down. They’re still the top 1%. And that’s fine with me, there’s always going to be a top 1%. It’s the “beyond” that concerns me, when they have enough money that it no longer matters when they lose. Milken, Madoff, they all had that much at one point and then they lost. They lost the thing they craved, the power. They might still be rich but they know better than anyone that wealth without power is just an appetizer. They want a seat at the table and getting removed from the SEC is paramount to being told they aren’t dressed well enough to eat in the restaurant.

Removing his ability to play stocks at all is removing his ability to earn money. His investors will leave him and the interest on his loans will liquidate him. We’ve seen more than a few of his type flash up and fade away. Milken. Pickens. Belfort. And of course, Madoff. Just to name a few we know by a single name.

He would still be wealthier than 99.99% of people but then so are a lot of folks on the planet. That’s 80 million people left over in that .01%. That’s not all that powerful at all. It’s removing him from the .00001% thats the goal. And killing his stock market abilities would do that over-night. It’s why he bought Twitter, he had to because this was the alternative.

Kinda… depends on how things got him there. The thing Elon can’t lose without really going off the rails is his ability to play the markets. Once the SEC kicks him out you’ll see him legitimately calling for open revolt.

I think the deeper generational thing is in the idea that anything “just works”. Like I’m a programmer, right, so I know shortcuts. Ctrl+S saves the file, simple right?

Me when I want to save a file: Ctrl+SSSS. Why? Because I don’t trust it “just works”. Same reason I don’t trust auto save. Same reason I am stunned every time I tell windows to diagnose and fix the network problem and then it actually does.

I grew up in a time where you couldn’t trust any of that shit.

Twitter was purchased at 44 billion in late 2022. It did not cost Twitter 44 billion to run for the years prior. That is very much profit for those shareholders considering especially that 44 billion was a significant percentage higher than the value at the time. It cost less than half a billion to keep Twitter’s lights on every quarter. They started in 2006. So assuming from the get go it cost half a billion a quarter (and you know it didn’t right?) … that’s 32 billion to run Twitter the years it was open. And they sold for 44 billion, meaning 12 billion in profit in a windfall.

Still following?

And for a social media company’s primary shareholders, selling that company is the ultimate goal and only way to realize true profits. That’s the social media scam. Zuckerberg right? You think he wants to run Facebook? He has to, he’s an employee at this rate. Well compensated sure but he doesn’t pull the strings.

What’s hilarious is Elon didn’t understand all that. He bought Twitter for cash money. There is no way on God’s green earth he manages to turn a profit with it because no social media company has been able to either - not with an entire board and public stock, so certainly not with a private company either. All the profit mechanisms they had before were contingent on the stock market, on speculation. That’s all gone now. It’s private. There is no public stock price to affect.

Twitter made 44 billion dollars. Pretty sure it didn’t cost that much to run. Ergo Twitter made money.

That’s the big hurdle. That’s the big catch. Social media companies are contingent on speculation to drive profits. Facebook isn’t worth what it is without speculative buying in the markets. Twitter, same story. That’s where reddit is at, they want a payday and to move on. The funny thing is this same reasoning exposes just how awful a businessman Elon Musk is. Twitter is going to literally drive him from the top ten richest in the world list all on its own. Give it time.

The funnier thing is Steve Huffman is such a loser he is looking up to Elon in this past week. The guy wants so desperately to be able to buy popularity like Elon did.

And NMS eventually got good enough to drop a few dozen hours into.

TIL Voat shut down. Shocker.

The thing is that corporations already can’t sell that data … unless you give them permission to … which you do just that explicitly when you agree to the EULAs.

That’s the legal basis. No one absolutely must use these platforms, legally. Practically they must in many cases but that’s the catch 22. The platforms literally came up on intelligence community funding. Facebook was propped up by’em for this exact reason.

And you can’t make an inalienable right to privacy such that companies can’t ever sell personal data but still allow people themselves to do so, and you can’t stop me from selling my data myself. That would be a much bigger breach of the contract of regulatory power that defends citizens.

Privacy isn’t something anyone can reasonably force you to keep. I can’t go showing my dick to everyone and then scold them for checking out my package, and still maintain my honesty. If I didn’t want people looking at my wangstick, I wouldn’t show it to them.

I mean why couldn’t there be a dedicated service that indexes everything? Whoever makes it and gets it working in a user friendly manner is going to have a significant level of control on the content that is shown in the results. If you don’t want it, it isn’t indexed. I don’t have to stretch the imagination to think of parties that have good reason to want to be first to do that across Activity Pub as a whole. Mastodon is already a big frontrunner in that regard.

Reminder that even TOR was an NSA / Naval intelligence project.

Yeah people who say shit like that have never been to jail or prison. Cause you wouldn’t. Isolation is fantastic when you’re home and you can lounge and play video games. Not so great in an empty 6 ft box.

Thing is the next guy can’t actually invigorate them because it’s DeSantis. Or Ted Cruz, whom I suspect will actually end up with the nomination. DeSantis is a shitbag but he’s entirely lacking in the crowd pleasing department. MAGA diehards are all that’s left and they hate him already. Then there’s Cruz, who will be a direct opposite to that brand - trying to sell himself as a moderate. Real hard to get people excited about that, and they’ve spent a decade or more undercutting that exact platform. Plus he’s Ted Cruz. Dude is a total loser to every side.

The brand of ego maniac that creates a Trump isn’t common enough for Republicans to just spin up a new one. We’ve watched them try time and again the last 8 years and it’s laughable how badly it goes for them. I disdain Trump but I can recognize that aspect clearly. The guy was massively and mainstream popular for decades prior to his presidency across multiple, huge platforms. He was already a household name, no one had to ask who he was. That’s what it took.

Republicans know it too, it’s why they’ve still been backing him and not going on the direct offensive - yet.

It’s okay, they shamelessly stole it from Twitter where it originated. [Deep breath] the circle of liiiiifffffeeeeeeee…

If I have to sit in the room for long enough I’m not watching TV anyway, I’m on my laptop or steam deck. Otherwise if I’m in a hotel room I’m somewhere I’d rather be out and about doing things anyway. Besides, as much as society’s reality is skewed by the inundation of commercials, so to is mine by not experiencing it like everyone else. So I try to, from time to time. See what the other side is seeing.

What we outside fail to realize is these people live in a wholly different reality.

I haven’t watched television with any ads in years. So when I go to a hotel and I’m lounging watching cable and seeing commercials it is jarring just what a different world it is from what I remember before. And for people who never left it, it isn’t jarring at all. It’s their normal.

Now imagine you only watched Fox or OANN. It’s your very reality that’s twisted all askew. It’s hard to hold that against many of the MAGA crowd and speaks to just how influential misinformation campaigns can be.

1 9 90 rule applies quite well, only a limited number of users ever interact with anything at all, and no one interacts with everything.

mugshot will not be made public

But it will be made. Wonder who gets that honor.

Fun fact! COVID gave us a huge dataset of faces with masks on. Facial recognition software beats masks now with 99% accuracy.

Mask up seditionists, you’ll be fine! Trust me!