Musk's real "innovation" in the category is paying shitposters for engagement, thereby outsourcing the gaslighting. He's literally paying people in developing countries to pretend to be US Americans ranting about keeping out people from developing countries.

Americans can't even go on our own frothing racist diatribes anymore, we just pay someone else to do it.

It would just be funny, and that's apparently good enough reason in Musk's view.

His Nazi bar will always be Xitter to me.

I think this may be a signal that streaming services have achieved satisfaction-parity with cable.

Both deliver mostly similar service, both endlessly churn content, raise prices and spam viewers with more ads endlessly.

There was a window when streaming was actually a better experience than piracy. But they've fixed that problem, and bittorrent is once again the least aggravating way to get your couch potato fix. It isn't about the money, it is about steadily making the service worse than it was when the subscriber agreed to pay for it.

This needs an anti-trust lawsuit.

There's zero evidence to suggest Beanie Babies are not going to continue upward. Anyone who knows the first thing about Beanie Babies already knows about the bear market. It's not a surprise. Beanie Baby investors tend to have outlooks that see farther out than the next quarter.

Given the boom and bust cycle of fads like this, you also might not want to best they will,

Absolutely agree. I wouldn't bet either way, but I might bet on the company's ability to make the right bet.

In general, there are very few collectibles that can beat an index fund for returns. Those that do tend to do so because some particular instance had some association with someone famous, which means you're not ordering it from Amazon.

It is much easier to choose an index fund than guess which detritus will sell like Paul Newman's Rolex and acquire it before someone else.

30 years ago it was Beanie Babies.

I recall seeing infomercials selling "investing guides" for which dolls you should horde.

Hint: if the value of something hinges on the fact that the factory only goes so fast, you might not want to bet the retirement on them not spinning up another factory.

Astute investors will note that Dude Bro's strategy was based on the notion that bitcoin would keep appreciating.

So if everything kept getting better forever, he would be right.

But so would everyone in an index fund. With far better performance when line go down.

Yep. When I took an advanced calculus course, my instructors idea of teaching/lecturing was to read from the book in a (highly accented) monotone.

if you go in to it thinking it is, or worse, wanting it to be, you will be very disappointed.

University sells you a bundle of services:

- Prefab peer collection - you get to pick friends/lovers/hopefully a partner from a pool of your supposed peers.

- Training to act like an adult while still adulting with training wheels.

- Somewhat related, but having time and space to explore who you want to be.

- Certification that you're capable of some professional acts that you will probably not use, but will get you in the door for some other job.

- And yes, if you want to learn, you can do that too, but many people don't. This is mainly training in how to pursue your own goals while paying lip service to someone else's. (Don't diminish the value of this - this is how most people spend most of their lives.)

So you forgot when Netflix was funding the Biden fascism machine?

Honestly, yeah, I do. When was this, and what was the pro-fascist action?

We need a right-winger billionaire to balance Soros

You've got plenty. Publicly known support from home-grown billionaires (this omits foreign actors like MBS giving billions to his family, donations to 501c3s, "partnerships", his shitcoin bribe pipeline, and any quiet bribes be haven't heard about yet):

- Richard Kurtz
- Steve Wynn
- Bernard Marcus
- Elon Musk
- Cameron Winklevoss
- Tyler Winklevoss
- Miriam Adelson
- Jimmy John Liautaud
- Geoffrey Palmer
- Don Ahern
- Roger Penske
- Robert Johnson
- Timothy Dunn
- Elizabeth Uihlein
- Richard Uihlein
- Phil Ruffin
- Linda McMahon
- Diane Hendricks
- George Bishop
- J. Joe Ricketts
- Douglas Leone
- Andrew Beal
- Larry Ellison
- Kenny Troutt
- Kelcy Warren
- Jeff Sprecher
- Kelly Loeffler
- Antonio Gracias

Netflix is, eh, what it is. But at least it isn't owned by the fine minds that brought you Oracle licensing behavior and is fully on-board with the Project Fascist America.

They also didn't start delving into DEI madness in 2010...neglecting the engineering to chase the "diversity" ghost

Microsoft famously tried to lean on Apple to kill it.

Anyone who has a temper-tantrum like this over getting fired shouldn't have been allowed near systems in the first place.

Anyone working in IT who isn't at least aware of the layers of surveillance at any reasonable sized shop is terrible at their job.

And simply as a matter of competence, anyone who does something like this without a plan ("Muneeb Akhter also allegedly asked an artificial intelligence tool for instructions on clearing system logs after deleting a database") is a fucking moron.