They rolled out the fix and then realized it interferes with other popular cosmetics and rolled it back. Will they try again?

Are you really so preoccupied with the abilities of your flesh and bone prison that you felt the need the share this with us?

I think you brought this up as a *whatabout" to something I said as a rebuttal rather than an agreement so maybe check your tone. You didn’t say anything in your comment necessarily agreeing with the original comment at any point.

And we should ban them too. I love this argument. We need better user data privacy laws, and this whataboutism does not change the fact that China is a hostile foreign nation.

I can appreciate that people view Google and Meta and so on as very similar in their transgressions. But as was pointed out in the original comment, this is a cost to benefit ratio type of analysis for the federal government and they gain more by keeping Meta and Google going and can enact other measures to prevent that from hurting them (usually reactionary), so to them this is fine. It is and always has been about what the US government can to do protect itself and enrich itself. Enrichment doesn’t always come in the form of monetary value.

If you’re upset at your own government (or government adjacent tech entities) gathering this type of data from users, you should be for banning them too, not keeping tik tok.

They aren’t protecting you. They are protecting themselves from what you may give their enemies. Don’t think just because the federal government is doing something “for the people” that nominally it’s not about the government itself. National security is literally the government protecting itself by protecting its citizens.

I don’t like or trust NFT’s and honestly, I don’t think anybody else should for the most part. I feel the same about a lot of new crypto. But I don’t necessarily distrust blockchain because of that. I think it has its own set of problems, in that where the record is kept is important and therefore a target. We already have problems with leaks of PII. Any blockchain database that stores the data to ID people will be a target too.

An assumption isn’t good enough. If you want to implement this you’ll need a plan. It won’t be successful unless the community interacts with it.

How do you plan to prevent bot user comments? I think that’s an important part of how this goes. Several users (including myself) have had hit and miss success with blocking instances. Block evasion is absolutely a thing here with users too. I really do want to understand what the plan is for implementation, if the communities and instances are going to be warned, and if this instance will have admins and moderators and most importantly tools to combat some of the problems I foresee from this.

If you’ve ever tried to read something off a label in the dark and outshined what you were looking at because the light was too bright, you know why.

I’ve got bots turned off. Mostly because organic conversation can and often is stifled by bots. The lack of the karma system doesn’t change that. Over-inflated posting and downvotes still abound here and people dog pile on that even though there isn’t a karma system reward. They still get a dopamine hit from upvoting/downvoting, and they still get one from seeing upvotes etc. So in that realm it doesn’t matter that an algorithm isn’t boosting some content. Not when people can use bots to drown out other people or whole discussions.

People have posited this idea before. The community generally doesn’t seem to like this idea.

https://lemmy.eus/post/176580

https://lemmy.world/post/201879

https://lemmy.ml/post/3716169

Insider trading is illegal. Tax fraud is illegal. There’s lots of things in the business world that have been deemed illegal including the theft of ideas that are trademarked, copyrighted or patented and businessmen steal those all the time and spend a lot of time looking for loopholes. The bottom line is that I can’t say with 100% certainty that this is exactly what’s going on but I can point to articles with analysis of the entire thing and see some distinct possibilities, and you can’t say for certain that that’s not what’s going on, unless you happen to work in the field and have information that I don’t.

The other parts of the acquisition are covered by his own companies and the sale of his own stock. With the right insurance (the right contracts) he’d get a golden parachute that would make him whole without having to pay those back either. Golden parachutes are not only legal but also quite normal for CEOs. If Twitter were to end up bankrupt, he may not have to pay back the money he borrowed from Tesla or his other companies, and that leaves him having to pay back just the private parties. Depending on their agreement, that may be in stock options for all we know. Further allowing him to dump Tesla stock without selling it (which won’t effect Teslas valuation in a negative way).

A house of cards is a house of cards. Things being illegal have never stopped this man before.

Can’t rule out vestibular migraines. I didn’t even know I was having them until I got a really bad headache with the other symptoms. Doctor was able to confirm it as that but it took quite awhile.

https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/154769/musk-bought-twitter-with-13b-loans-why-is-twitter-liable-for-this-debt-rath

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140260051/planet-moneys-the-indicator-how-musk-bought-twitter-with-other-peoples-money

Twitter is responsible for that debt. Not Musk. That’s because of the way the agreement for the loan was structured. That’s why he would lose control of the company if they file for bankruptcy.

If he files for bankruptcy. Did you read the articles?

Okay, this is a lot in a very small window, but we know a couple of things. The first is that Musk’s wealth is mostly tied to Tesla stock which is tied directly to the vastly over-inflated valuation of Tesla at 800Bn.

We also know that to get access to liquidity of funds he had to borrow money or sell Tesla stock. We know that when he sells Tesla stock, he ends up causing that stock price to fall significantly and that it’s only a matter of time before investors actually pull the plug on that because it costs them money/devalues their stake.

We also know that most of his outside lenders for the buy-up of twitter are from countries that want to deliberately stop the flow of new ideas and information. There’s no reason to assume that degrading Twitter the way he has been doesn’t give them what they want. Therefore I based my assumption simply on the idea that if they are receiving something quid pro for their help, they may not call in the debt, nor care about the overall health of the platform on a business or user level. In fact, that’s one of the only ways that the deal even makes sense given what we have seen.

Musk does care though because he took on the company’s debt when he bought the company. Meaning if it crashes and burns and is considered insolvent he won’t be responsible for the debt he took on when he bought it (not debt owed to outside lenders, but the debt he was required to take on through banks/finace brokers).

"The exodus of advertisers, partially due to Elon Musk’s controversial behavior, has left X with a growing revenue gap.

The main reason Twitter has a revenue gap is that Musk saddled it with $13bn of debt with his leveraged buyout. The business isn’t just failing because of Musk’s management since then, it’s failing because that was the purpose derived from the purchase."

The thing is as the company and CEO continue to make bad decisions that cost revenue, it will be better to not have to pay back lenders where he can. And you’ll note that while he’s been dodging payments to almost everyone else, he’s been paying back that 13Bn like clockwork. The thing is, if the business shutters he no longer has to pay back that 13Bn, nor will he likely have to pay back a fair amount of the other debts. (This is similar to the plot of The Producers here. Make a product so bad that it doesn’t make any money and the investors don’t get the dividends because no money was made).

When you consider how little of the money is borrowed from outside interests (7Bn approximately) verses from his own other companies you realize that this is literally a house of cards he’s built. One of the few ways to get out from under a house of cards kind of scenario is to file for bankruptcy.

One of the few downfalls of filing for bankruptcy is that he’d lose control of Twitter, and that it would be a very public dent in the armor of his supposed high profile businessman persona.

But if he wanted to devalue it to make it not worth what he paid for it, it’s a double win of making it useless in the event that it’s no longer in his control, and not having to pay back a lot of the debts.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/how-will-elon-musk-pay-twitter-2022-10-07/

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happens-if-twitter-files-for-bankruptcy-elon-musk-2022-12

Send it and report back. I am interested in subscribing to their newsletter. you’ll let them know, right?

If I take out a loan to buy a home, I don’t own the home outright. The creditor owns the home until I pay off the debt. I’m likening the situations because I want to make it clear that he didn’t put in his own money to buy it.

The more you scroll, the more ads they can serve on one page. So if you scroll to the bottom, don’t see the results you want, you’re likely to try to reword what you were searching for which will bring up new results and more ads. When you think about the fact that 4-5 of the first results are ads generally (if not more) and you have to scroll past those to get a result that isn’t an ad, you recognize that they are maximizing time spent looking at ads because that’s what they are selling to their real customers (the ad services for whom they aggregate).

This scenario makes it more likely that you will click on a sponsored result, backtrack, scroll some more, not see what you’re looking for, re-word your search query, click on maybe another sponsored result, backtrack etc.

My guess is that it’s used predominantly by people who own budget smart phones. Having lit versions of apps be available to people who don’t use thousand dollar flagships I think is kind of important. However, I intended the post to be informational.

Part of the problem is that Google now defaults to “All” (web, shopping, news, video, etc) instead of defaulting to Web only and allowing you to select if you want video, or shopping or news etc. That’s a lot of what I see complained about most.

This is first and foremost because Google is an ad aggregation company and they literally want to keep you on the page longer to serve you more ads.

The second problem is that the SEO for Google is so abused at this point that it’s laughable. Search engine optimisation was useful until companies and people started trying to hack it in order to have their results show up before competitors. Because large competitors also have money, it’s no longer enough to just pay to play.