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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 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.






  • Nah there’s no wizardry here. The game itself is actually very simple in terms of processing. You only see maybe a dozen enemies at once, if that, ever, and whenever you do its in a locked arena area. A tiny arena even.

    As FPS games go, Doom is wildly simplistic, which makes it that much more impressive that it’s as fun and repayable as it is. I personally thought the narrative actually managed to carry a lot of that weight (i loved the story) but it was also the gameplay itself - they did a superb job making the player actually learn the guns and why you’d use each one, rather than just letting them have a favorite.

    Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t mean to belittle them. Doom is a chefs egg. Every cook can make an egg, but making a perfect egg every time is something that takes the mastery of a chef. Id is very much the chef in the analogy.


  • 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.






  • 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 can respect the stance, kind of. Can I offer an alternative perspective on that though?

    For starters, Oligarchs don’t always win. That’s defeatism, don’t do that - for your own good.

    But the main thing I’m pointing out is that there’s a particularly stinky arrogance in the creation of a hypothetical “little guy helped by my words”, and I know it because when I honestly ask myself why I contributed to reddit, it’s for me, not others. I wrote because I enjoyed it. Both quality and quantity. And while many people may have been helped by my words in one way or another and I’m happy for them, I didn’t honestly write any of it for them. I did it for me. And it was me who didn’t want to see the content go off into the nether, I was the hold-up. In my view, that’s again - a particularly stinky kind of arrogance. One I recognized in myself and took action to overcome. Your comment reminded me of it is all.