Doesn’t DOGE ring any bells? He promised to make people’s lives better by finding and eliminating government waste. And it was a giant scam. Cost more money than it “saved” and just happened to selectively dismantle the parts of government responsible for overseeing and regulating his businesses.
Morally culpable? Maybe there’s an argument it doesn’t apply to other billionaires (that I don’t buy, especially the Silicon Valley set with their “effective altruism” BS), but Musk, in particular, actively chose to stick his nose in and declare his actions were in service to the public. And then shat all over that.
Perhaps. What is not debatable is that he made tens of thousands of people much poorer than they would have been without his actions in DOGE. This is not because of the amount of wealth that he has, but because (1) his wealth gives him more access than most to situtations where he can effect change, and (2) he has used that power to make things worse for other people.
A.I. overview,
A study published in The Lancet projects that abrupt cuts to USAID funding by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could result in up to 14 million excess deaths worldwide by 2030.
True. Those who argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with one person, or a small group, having most of the money, should be reminded that in our system money is power, and there is certainly a problem with one person or a small group having all the power.
Further, the high end, business tends to be a dog eat dog, nice guys finish last world, meaning that those who are at the tippy top have most likely than not sacrificed morals to get themselves there. And so are not the sort of people to whom you would want to give all the power.
Albertan separatism is a progressive cause now? That’s…certainly a take.
I can’t see it being much of a popular idea except among a few wingnuts up there (and, yes, I realize the Conservatives are split on the issue). It’s hardly shocking she would come out against something she’s already campaigned as being against.
The Ukrainian strikes on the Yandex data centers have put a serious ding in Russian bot activity. I have seen it claimed that bot activity on X has dropped literally half overnight. I cannot verify this but Musk did tweet that “Zelenskyy has gone too far” which does suggest it’s true and also is hilarious.
Apparently pro-AfD chatter across social media has also plummeted to nearly nil in the aftermath, which shouldn’t be a surprise.
Meanwhile, Elon banned a Twitter user who debunked the latest far-right conspiracy theory that James Talarico was in a mental hospital for the last two weeks.
It’s reminiscent of Musk’s self-own late last year when he had Twitter/X list location information for posts, and it turned out possibly a majority of MAGA influencers were based in other countries. He had the feature turned off almost immediately.
Of course, it’s a bit of a Catch-22. They would have to be more intelligent to understand how stupid they look being so easily manipulated.
I remember the days when he claimed he wanted to rid the platform of such bot accounts. Nobody bought it back then, either.
Interesting that Elmo’s red line is attacking data centers as opposed to say, civilians. Ok, it’s not actually interesting or even surprising, it’s just macabre.
It is just that data-centers and Elon have a lot in common: soulless, ugly, resource intensive and people don’t want either of them in their neighborhood.
There’s that but the real issue is that it reveals much of the network traffic Twitter/X gets, including at least half of his own followers, are fake bot accounts. That hits (1) his revenue and (2) pokes holes in the carefully maintained delusion of his own online popularity.
He couldn’t care less about civilian casualties. But any cracks in the paper thin facade of his self-image? He can’t handle that in the least
