UnderpantsWeevil

joined 1 year ago
[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

If you can buy a ten and one works, you've saved money. Two work and you're making money. The only question is whether the tenth card really will work or not.

I've been hearing about the imminent crash for the last two years. New money keeps getting injected into the system. The bubble can't deflate while both the public and private sector have an unlimited lung capacity to keep puffing into it. FFS, bitcoin is on a tear right now, just because Trump won the election.

This bullshit isn't going away. Its only going to get forced down our throats harder and harder, until we swallow or choke on it.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance.

Why? Why wouldn't they just consume the click bait content and shameless pandering propagated by the incoming owner, just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?

For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances

You don't need 60% of instances. You need the plurality of site content. That's what the users are coming for.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 points 10 hours ago

Are they? I see the comments still full of them.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 points 10 hours ago

Stuff doesn't get cheaper, only more profitable. Trump will subsidize stock prices while the price of eggs and milk continue to climb.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Things were better before they got worse, sure.

But the problem in these systems is the trade off between centralization (consolidated control and monolithic content) and federation (poor navigation/petty administrative feuds/less quality content). Switching from Twitter to BlueSky relieves you from the current admin's fuckups, but you're still stuck in a flawed system.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

People don't like the monolith when it's over there and they don't like it when it comes over here, either

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 points 11 hours ago (4 children)

The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over.

Dorsey is just as emotionally stunted and socially reactionary as Musk. He simply isn't as wealthy.

BlueSky has thrived not because Dorsey crafted it into a purer vision, but because he's neglected it and allowed the user base to have their way.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago (6 children)

Do you think the same about lemmy?

I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We've already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.

I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy…

I'm reasonably tech savvy and even I'd struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.

There's a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can't. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that's hosted on .sh.itjust.works.

There's also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

This goes all the way back to '98, when the original slew of start-ups gobbled up investments only to flop a few years later. Web2.0 had its own bubble burst starting in 2008, taking down a host of the early social media ecosystems (MySpace, Yahoo, and Geocities, most famously). Huge upfront investments with the promise of explosive ROI that took far longer to materialize (or simply never did).

A great deal of the valuation in these firms was built on lies and bullshit - misreported user activity, overly optimistic monetization estimates, and outright accounting fraud.

2020 gave us what looked like was going to be a third Crypto bust wave (FTX being the big industry leader leading the charge). But the pivot to AI appears to have bailed a lot of the bigger investors out. We'll see how long that lasts.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China

:-/

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

I mean, this is one of the central pitches behind Web3.0/Crypto. Everything has a digital tag and its all going to be portable between platforms.

Did it come to fruition? No, of course not. Its all a pile of scams. But then so was Web2.0 and Web1.0 during their heydays.

 

You can't do that, you can't kill children on purpose knowing that you're doing that in exchange for power, freedom or happiness whatever you think you're getting in return. You can't participate in human sacrifice without consequences

 

Elon Musk's pro-Trump group does not choose the winners of its $1 million-a-day giveaway to registered voters at random, but instead picks people who would be good spokespeople for its agenda, a lawyer for the billionaire said on Monday.

...

"There is no prize to be won, instead recipients must fulfill contractual obligations to serve as a spokesperson for the PAC," Gober said in the hearing before Judge Angelo Foglietta, referring to Musk's political action committee, known as America PAC.

 

A regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing COVID-19 vaccines to residents in six counties after a narrow decision by its board.

Southwest District Health appears to be the first in the nation to be restricted from giving COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccinations are an essential function of a public health department.

While policymakers in Texas banned health departments from promoting COVID vaccinesopens in a new tab or window and Florida's surgeon generalopens in a new tab or window bucked medical consensus to recommend against the vaccine, governmental bodies across the country haven't blocked the vaccinesopens in a new tab or window outright.

 

While millions will still vote for the Republican candidate, perhaps hating immigrants more than they love reproductive rights, the only certainty at this point is that many millions more will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. In the latest ABC News/Ipsos national poll, the Democrat enjoyed a 14% advantage with women over Trump; among women with a college degree, that number rose to 23%; among women voters under 40, it rocketed to 34%.

...

That, in turn, is causing some MAGA commentators to break from their usual posture of feigned confidence to outright panic.

“Early vote has been disproportionately female,” Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA and helping to lead the Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort, posted on social media. “If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple.”

 

The Biden administration has received nearly 500 reports alleging Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip, but it has failed to comply with its own policies requiring swift investigations of such claims, according to people familiar with the matter.

At least some of these cases presented to the State Department over the past year probably amount to violations of U.S. and international law, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

 

Election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, are not destroying mail-in ballots cast for former President Donald Trump. The Department of Defense did not issue a directive last month giving US soldiers unprecedented authority to use lethal force against Trump supporters who riot if the former president loses next week. And no, 180,000 Amish people did not register to vote in Pennsylvania—given there are only 92,600 Amish living in the state, including minors. Ron DeSantis never said that Florida would not use Dominion Voting machines in next week’s election. And municipalities in California are not allowing noncitizens to vote in this year’s presidential elections.

These are just a small sample of the flood of voting-related disinformation narratives that are being seeded and spread on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook in the build up to November 5.

 

Gizmodo filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FTC to get complaints sent to the federal agency about crypto scams that pretend to be affiliated with Musk. We obtained 247 complaints, all filed between Feb. and Oct. of this year, and they’re filled with stories of people who believed they were watching ads for authentic crypto investments sanctioned by Musk on social media.

The ads sometimes featured the names of Musk’s various companies, like SpaceX, Tesla, and X, while other times they utilized Musk’s association with neo-fascist presidential candidate Donald Trump.

...

Some people in the complaints believed they were talking directly with Musk, a sadly common story that has popped up in news reports before. But they weren’t talking with Musk, of course. They were communicating with scammers engaging in what’s called pig butchering—the name for a type of fraud popularized in the mid-2010s where scammers extract as much money as possible through flattery and promises of tremendous profits if the victim just “invests” where they’re told.

 

Reporter Yamil Berard scoured through thousands of pages of court records, documents from the National Transportation Safety Board, and videos of that tragic day in February 2021 when 130 cars, trucks and semis piled up along a stretch of the North Tarrant Express. Early morning commuters, unaware of the black ice beneath them, crashed one after another along two lanes bound by concrete barriers on both sides. The horrific scene spanned the length of three football fields.

 

In early October, some signatories received hand deliveries of $47 in cash, posing for photo-ops to tout the deal. Most, though, are expecting checks in the mail, and some have grown impatient. One issue, to judge by replies to Musk’s posts on X (formerly Twitter), is that voters have misread the terms of the America PAC offer, and think that just signing the petition will earn them money. “WHERE’S MY $47? I SIGNED ALREADY,” one Donald Trump supporter replied to Musk on Sunday. “I signed up and didn’t get $47,” another X user attempted to inform Musk earlier this month, appending a skull emoji to his message. And even those who apparently understood the referral system have complained of not receiving payments. “I signed up three people but didn’t get the $47,” another person replied to Musk this week, adding, “still glad I did it but wondering if that was a scam.”

 
 

Italy is a significant contributor to the U.N. mission known as UNIFIL.

In a phone conversation with Netanyahu, Meloni also called for the "full implementation" of the UN's Security Council Resolution 1701 on Lebanon and stressed the urgent need for a de-escalation of conflict in the region, her office said.

 

In the Rogers application, the Wage and Hour Division cited a tip from a teacher at a nearby school who reported that one of their 14-year-old students talked about working at the facility with his mother for the summer.

In the Green Forest application, a mother of middle schoolers overheard children between the ages of 11 and 13 talk about their employment at that plant on the night shift, which ran from 11 p.m. to around 7 or 8 a.m. The complainant said they were heard talking about how they did not know how to get money from their paycheck out of an ATM.

Investigators assigned in July conducted observations outside of both plants and watched workers entering and leaving. They found during the observations multiple people who appeared to be “potentially minor employees below the age of 16,” court docs said.

One of the investigators noted the children were believed to have been working in possibly hazardous conditions.

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