I can't imagine being able to travel the world at my leisure eating the finest foods mankind has to offer and saving millions of lives through charitable donations and yet wasting my life, money, and time picking losing fights with governments while defending indefensible shitbags on the internet.
Must just be something about billionaires I don't understand 🤷♂️
If you want to understand billionaires, just go through this mental exercise.
You're handed a million dollars today. You have to spend it all in a day; you can't carry it forward. (And no charity donations for this mental exercise!) Easy, right? There's things you want. A fancy house. A fancy car. Pay down all your debts. Anybody could spend a million dollars in a day.
Tomorrow you get another million. You have to spend it all in a day. Still possible.
And the next day and the next day and the next day. Every day you have to spend a million dollars. You're beginning to run out of things to spend it on. Most people would run out of ideas after 30 days. You're doing stupid things now like buying an "ultra-rare" collectible that will just go into a vault with all your other "ultra-rare" collectibles never to see the light of day. You're just out of ideas.
But the money keeps coming in. Day after day. A million bucks. You have to spend it. For almost two years and nine months.
That's a billion dollars. Nearly three years of spending a million bucks daily. Spending a ludicrous amount of money daily, it still takes you almost three years to get through it all.
A billionaire is a person who thinks that isn't enough.
Does that give you some insight into what a billionaire is?
I could do it easy peasy
It's called supporting the arts. I'd just set up artist funds all over the country so that artists - visual artists, musical artists, theatrical artists, circus artists, writers, you name it - could learn, create, and share their work without struggling to get by.
But then, I'm a human and not a capitalist lizard masquerading as human, so art actually means something to me.
Someone who puts money over
customerspeople
Billionairism is a serious disease.
It's like hoarding. Surprised Elon isn't more emotionally stricken when he loses gobs of
moneyself worth score.
So hitting him in his bank account is how to get him to do your bidding? So let's impose some more embargos and demand his account be banned for lies.
Rocket Kiko is such a wimp he cares about a tiny amount like this, when he's the richest child in the world.
I think his ego is at least as much of a factor. Even before he bought Twitter, it was well known that he was probably going to lose money, because the value was inflated. But his ego made him go through with it, and of course he's lost a lot of money there.
Similarly, when users are moving to other social media, I don't think he's looking at the associated price tag. After all, he knows how to increase advertising revenue on Twitter. All he needs to do is get rid of the neo-nazis and the racists, and some of his former large advertisers might come back. But he won't do it because he doesn't want to be pushed around, and he also probably likes the neo-nazis and the racists.
There are many quiet ultra rich people who are mostly aiming at getting a lot of money and keeping it, and then there are vocal for rich people who want to show off their power along with their money. Our boy here is in the latter category.
It's pretty sad that the new users are going to Threads, when the Fediverse without Facebook control is right here.
The masses aren't ready yet. Hell, I'm a technical person and can't figure out for the life of me why the mastodon instance I'm on can see some things from another instance but not other things. To see the things I want on pixelfed I've got to have multiple accounts on multiple servers.
I obviously like the fediverse. I'm here on multiple services. But let's not pretend that any idiot can figure out which instance to sign up for and just automatically see all the things they want to see and talk to all the people they want to talk to.
It warms my calloused, embittered heart to see this.
I love how this story converges with this community's logo
But he’s a brilliant businessman. /s
You love to see it.
I'm of two minds here... On the one hand Musk can suck it - but on the other I'm dismayed at how many people are jumping to defend a nation demanding the silencing of political opponents like this just because it injures Musk.
They can both be wrong. One side doesn't need to be "right" here.
Poking around I can’t find anything talking about the election being rigged at all, only older articles talking about Bolsanaro falsely claiming that the voting machines could be hacked and rigged.
The accounts that were requested to be suspended seem to have all been in relation to their own version of Jan. 6 and were spreading conspiracy and lies about the election. That’s a pretty major national security risk, honestly, if they’re trying to incite people to respond against a fairly elected government with violence.
—
Free speech is all well and good but not everything that flaps out of someone’s gums is protected. Hate speech isn’t, defamation is a crime in most places, fraud is a real thing, etc. If these people are using their platform to heat the waters in an attempt to tear down a democratically elected government that’s no fucking bueno, my dude.
X also has a history of banning left-leaning accounts just because. He’s perfectly happy to silence political opponents for the right.
Hate speech isn’t,
In the US it is. Yes it really is - just stop it with this. At least read the wikipedia article. I'm so sick of seeing this claim as the first response to any "free speech" discussion. Do you ever wonder how the Westborough Baptist Church still exists?? Daily Stormer?? Other hate groups???
That’s a pretty major national security risk, honestly, if they’re trying to incite people to respond against a fairly elected government with violence.
Ahhh, the "national security risk" defense - always the safe haven of the totalitarian. This is how China justifies quieting dissidents to great effect. Speech that is dangerous to the government isn't always a bad thing. Imagine somebody who thinks your speech is dangerous is in power.
Letting the government decide which speech is dangerous to it or not is a very risky thing.
If these people are using their platform to heat the waters in an attempt to tear down a democratically elected government that’s no fucking bueno, my dude.
Oh you don't think so? What if that "democratically elected government" is Putin? Because guess how many votes he got in the last election.
So the X accounts belonged to legitimate political opponents, they weren't spreading disinformation?
I don't know about the judicial system in Brazil but they don't seem that corrupted...
