Elon Musk is working hard to get us to read books instead of mindlessly scrolling social media. That’s commendable but it’s truly a strange business model that seeks to prevent people from engaging with the platform.
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Clarissa's Blog 
This is to prevent robots from harvesting all of Twitter’s data for free.
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No, it’s to prevent people from sharing information once Russia blows up a nuclear plant in Ukraine.
Marx was wrong. Profit motivates people a lot less than ideology does.
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Even Musk isn’t deluded enough to think he can cover up a nuclear disaster.
Rich people have been buying media platforms to push their narrative for a long time, but they don’t stay rich by giving their stuff away for free.
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He won’t cover it up completely but he’ll help slow the spread of information which will cause more deaths.
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Just curious, but why do you believe that? Musk’s Starlink system has played a very critical role in keeping Ukraine online.
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At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Musk was clearly on our side, and many thanks to him for that.
Bug he’s been moving in a scary direction since then. At first, I thought it was simply him enhancing his personal brand as a contrarian. But it’s gotten too intense and obsessive to ignore. I think we now have a Soros of the right on our hands.
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“Musk was clearly on our side … he’s been moving in a scary direction ”
Supposedly this has to do with his contacts with russian shills like David Sacks… as Galeev once implied, those without a background in the humanities tend to be suckers for pseudo-science and a whole bunch of rightwing conspiracy theories are basically pseudo-science (similar to Dianetics…. whereas leftwing pseudo-science is more like a new version of lysenkoism)
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This is the excuse, but it’s a very poor excuse. Data harvesting is nothing new and companies have managed just fine. You don’t see Instagram, Facebook, etc. doing the same.
The likeliest explanation is Elon failing to pay the bills for cloud services and firing a lot of critical infrastructure people. That’s his way more likely than this lame excuse that is to prevent data harvesting.
Also, if a billionaire who is known to repeatedly lie tells you something, take that with a huge grain of salt.
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Semi OT: It maybe an unpopular sentiment but he is my favorite tech billionaire. Really into exploratory technology, amazingly creative and self-taught, and gets extra brownie points for surviving SA bullying.
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I think he represents a lot of what is wrong with society today where this new clique of tech billionaires are using their vast wealth and resources to become our new lords.
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Equating rich to being evil is an oversimplified view I don’t subscribe to. Indeed the automatic power and influence wealth endows is nothing to be balked at; nonetheless, ascribing ulterior motives just because someone has influence is ridiculous. Crucially, the means to accrue wealth matters — Musk did not accrue his fortune by being some inane and corrupt social media mogul like Zuckerberg or Dorsey. He cannot be accused of subverting the political process like Koch Brothers or Gates. In fact, he was also the first one to openly acknowledge and criticize arbitrary restrictions in California during the COVID-19 pandemic along with backbreaking cost of living for average workers, and moved Tesla’s base to TX.
In addition, his technocratic vision that reflects in his companies Tesla and SpaceX is reflective of genuine creativity and trying to break new ground (and not being daunted by repeated failures as evidenced by his Falcon rockets).
As for his personal life or morality (like rotating between multiple girlfriends on almost monthly basis) , that is immaterial and not germane to his actions as a technocrat (much like Einstein being a terrible husband has nothing to do with validity of general theory of relativity).
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Not evil. But so disconnected from the practicalities of life that most of us deal wtih, as to make his thought processes and motivations alien. Any alignment of his goals with what benefits regular people is temporary coincidence.
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Many of the original billionaires like Gates are retired. They aren’t leaving their companies to their children, so it seems likely that they will end up controlled by Wall Street.
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Musk bought Twitter to put a stop to the censorship they were doing. He is in certain ways very antic tech lord. He also said that the World Economic Forum is increasingly becoming an unelected global government that the people never asked for and do not want.
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There has been extensive documentation of Elon Musk being a deadbeat and not paying his bills. Apparently he did not pay for the Google Cloud servers and this is causing problems. His excuse that this is AI companies data scrapping is clearly BS; you don’t need to do a system-wide restriction to address data scrapping.
I really do not understand this deadbeat mentality from billionaires. Donald Trump was famous for not paying contractors, and now Elon is following in those foot steps. How these dead beats don’t get serious reputational damage is crazy to me. Are they just trying to show they are above paying bills?
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It’s possible they can’t pay because they don’t have any money. Most of Trump’s wealth is in property, which can’t be accessed without actually selling the buildings.
Musk’s fortune is mostly in inflated stock market valuations. In order to access it, he would need to sell and therefore lose control of his companies.
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You’re really saying “Must doesn’t have any money” just because his wealth is mostly in stocks? How did he pay for Twitter in the first place then?
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He sold Tesla stock and borrowed from the banks. Now he needs to find a way to pay back his loans.
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Exactly. He can sell quite a bit more. He also has a gold mine in SpaceX.
Therefore this is not about being unable to pay, it’s more about making a terrible decision and now not owning up to it. He had no business buying Twitter other than to pat his gigantic ego and gain influence.
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I’m just saying he doesn’t have actual cash money lying around to pay his bills. I’m sure he would prefer to avoid selling off his other companies, which would indicate that his decisions were more likely business related than because he wanted to suppress information about Ukrainian nuclear power plants.
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Why shouldn’t he have bought Twitter? They were engaging repeatedly in blatant censorship. The issue was he decided to buy it and some people observed that he didn’t seem to understand how the mergers and acquisitions process works. He didn’t seem to have researched such at all and so ended up overpaying (an experienced deal maker like Donald Trump probably would have gotten the price down). When he realized he was overpaying, he tried to pull out of it, but the Twitter executives sued to force the deal.
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In the context of Twitter what does “read” mean? Does scrolling past a post in my feed count as reading? Or do I have to click on it to count?
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It’s just scrolling past, including the stuff we haven’t chosen to see.
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That is lame. I guess I could unfollow a bunch of people so I don’t see stupid shit in my feed.
Could that be one of the points of this stupidity?
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As ed put it “billionaire who is known to repeatedly lie ”
The limits were pure nonsense if you think about it for three seconds (I did not come up with this on my own but it became clear as soon as it was pointed out).
It’s textbook gaslighting… meant to make the user feel like they’ve gone over some limit that they should feel guilty about.
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I’m not sure. Twitter is in a dire financial situation. Musk can’t bail it out indefinitely. This could just as well be desperate efforts to turn it into a viable business.
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” desperate efforts to turn it into a viable business”
by encouraging people to not engage with the site?
only 200 more view if you pony up 8 bucks a month?
pull the other one….
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I said desperate.
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Isn’t It 6000 vs 600?
That’s 5400 more views
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“5400 more views”
It was all just made up numbers to disguise what was really happening… either technical glitches or elon not payin’ his bills….
His big platform was fuzzing out and breaking down, so he changed the conversation to something else (about how many tweets users can see) until the problem gets fixed….
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