I’m pretty sure I saw that headline, with X = Obama or Elizabeth Warren or someone. Then it got shot down because… Idunno, they probably would have blown it all on rent and food and car repairs instead of Job Creation.

“I don’t get it, dad. What’s a check?”

Also known as the Wal-Mart business model.

Could you do a better job than him

“I could’ve not drunk-bought Twitter, thereby saving $44 billion.”

Step 3: Profit!

I can say that some websites don’t work on Firefox

threads.net comes to mind. That annoyed me until I opened the console and saw that it was because of an infinite number of cross-site origin violations, at which point I lost interest in Threads.

Oh, just for contrast: imagine someone who graduates from med school, immediately gets a job as a neurosurgeon making $200,000/year — No, let’s say she really works hard, and is very good at her job, and spends wisely, and actually manages to save $200,000/year. Let’s say she manages to keep this up every year for 50 years. How much does she have when she retires? $20 million, less than if Elon Musk lost 99% of everything, and then lost 99% again.

“Pravda” is Russian for “Truth”. I find it ironic that TFG named his social media site after a newspaper that’s synonymous with "shameless propaganda’.

But he’s not. He’ll be fine. He’ll always be fine.

It’s hard to comprehend just how vastly, mind-bogglingly rich the ultra rich are, so consider: according to Wikipedia, Musk’s net worth in July 2023 was about $239 billion. That means that he could lose 99% of everything he owns, and then lose 99% of what was left, and be left with over $20 million, more money than most of us will see in a lifetime.

He’s not going to be applying for EBT any time soon. Hell, he’s not going to be selling off the spare Lamborghini any time soon.

Step 3: Profit!

Who would have thought actively courting Nazis would make risk averse corporations stop using your ads!

Nobody could have foreseen this! Nobody! Unless by some miracle they happened to look up who’s advertising on far-right platforms like Gab or Pravda Social.

BURNINATED!

I remember a friend telling me, “I’m going vegetarian: I’m switching to only corn-fed beef.”

I splurged for my birthdays a few years ago and got a Waterman Expert, and then a Carène. Combine that with a Clairefontaine notebook, and it’s completely frictionless, like writing on room-temperature ice.

What I really want is the corporate phone numbers so I can call the fucking jackass CEO at home and direct my fuming fucking self-righteous anger right under his stupid worthless ass. Because I’m well aware that they record calls and don’t give one flying fuck about our complaints.

For that matter, I want to see the productivity data on the top executives. AIUI, companies like Amazon monitor and push employees to get maximum productivity. Okay, so if Bob the warehouse worker takes an extra five minutes on his bathroom break and misses his last delivery of the day, that’ll piss off the customer and cost Amazon, say, $100 in sales. But by the same logic, if Andy Jassy takes an extra five minutes on his bathroom break and doesn’t finish everything on his daily to-do list, that might cost the company $1M. So all the more reason to monitor his movements to make sure he’s not slacking off.

I do appreciate that recent versions of Android (and iOS, I think?) allow granular control over permissions, so you can gleefully shout “fuck you” as you fail to grant notification permission to some game.

You can just tape a maxi-pad under each armpit.

AIUI (but IANAL), the bit on bills that says “Legal tender for all debts, public and private” means that if you owe someone $5, and you hand them a $5 bill, then you have discharged your obligation. If the other person doesn’t accept cash, too bad; you tried to pay what you owe, and if they don’t like cash, they can’t demand that you pay by check, or in Euros, or whatever.

What it doesn’t mean, though, is that a business can refuse to deal in cash. If a shop wants to be paid before they make you a latte, that’s not a debt, and they can demand that you pay electronically or not at all.

So while AFAIK (again, IANAL) cashless businesses are legal in the US, I personally don’t like them because that’s a form of discrimination against poor and homeless people. Plus, cash is more private.

I prefer the feel of a fountain pen, myself.

The algorithm decides what you read and how you engage, even if it’s negative content or something bad for your mental health.

This may be the wrong place to post this, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. “Algorithm” isn’t a dirty word. And in fact, IMHO Mastodon could benefit from a few alternatives to its most-recent-first algorithm.

For instance, I might want to see posts by emergency services in my area first, followed by posts by friends, and posts by a bot that posts a cat picture every minute further down. Or someone might be going off on a rant, and I’d like to turn their firehose of posts down to a trickle for a few hours. Or maybe I’d like Mastodon to just stop showing me anything after a few hours of activity, to encourage me to take a break.

The reason Twitter’s, Facebook’s, algorithms are evil is that they encourage you to do things you wouldn’t want to do, and because they show you content you don’t want. Not because they’re algorithms.

In a perfect world, every user on every instance would be able to choose how posts are presented. But that may be too computationally expensive, especially for large instances, especially when you start trying to figure out things like the mood of a post. But maybe each instance could decide which algorithm it wants to use, and user can migrate from one instance to another, depending whether they like how things are presented.