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.

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.

Most human like thing about it yet, in fact.

He’s already overridden people blocking him. You still see his posts.

He’s just trying to make sure it stays useful as a weapon for fascists like himself is all.

The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.

There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone’s realizing they’ve been spouting their gold from firehoses for any machine to pick up, and they’re being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.

Not those of us who exclusively used the 3rd party apps. Former RiF user here, reddit for 12 years. Not doing it on their app, you couldn’t pay me to tolerate that experience. Using Jerboa right now and with a couple tiny improvements, I got no problem switching.