Comment Re:In other news... (Score 0) 84
And, arguably, the current crisis at Tesla is because Musk is playing President rather than being "out on the factory floor".
The "current crisis" is manufactured and amplified externally. Nobody is doxxing Tesla owners with maps using Molotov cocktails as map cursors or burning lots full of vehicles in for service in some way that is a function of whether Musk is personally present on the factory floor vs doing something else he thinks is vital to our economic survival. All of it is ginned up hate based on the politics surrounding the pruning of vast left slush funds and debt-funded waste that has to go away. That's an entire industry with vested interests, and acting against it certainly brings out the coordinated hate, attacks on stock value, media smearing, and of course thousands of people who now say he's a nazi though they can't actually articulate why they think that.
No, him being "on the factory floor" or off it doesn't precipitate some "current crisis," except in the sense that entrenched interests currently having their oxen gored by drying up things like the NGO money laundering industry are doing their best to try to wreck the company to make a point.
Comment Re:"jUsT" (Score 1) 72
It cost 3.7 million. There should be no just here. Okay that's like a tenth or less than what usually is spent but still.
So the people who made it should have been earning minimum wage, is that your point? Spread that dollar amount across five and half yeads and even modest team of people and their overhead, and they're making middle five figures after taxes. Is that a lot, to you?
Comment Re:"jUsT" (Score 1) 72
Just 3.7 million. Just. lol.
It took five and a half years to make it. So, in perhaps over-simplified terms, that's ~$670k year working on it. Let's say you had six people working on the project, and had NO overhead at all beyond their personal income while making it. That's roughly $100k per person before they paid taxes, which is either pretty good or not very good at all, depending on where you live and how. But one supposes they also had some overhead. This wasn't done on their kids' laptops at night. There was music to compose, audio to record and design, and a lot more.
So, yeah. "Just" 3.7M is a fair characterization.
Comment Re:Starlink? No thanks. (Score -1, Troll) 211
Elon Musk, defacto member of a fascist government.
No, we just voted the tyrannical little statists out of office. And the people you're now laughably calling Fascists are busy exposing and tearing down the very tools that an actual Fascist government would (and did) use. Fascists don't cut off the cash supply to money-laundering NGOs that are making their pet politicians richer and more personally powerful. Fascists don't work to shut down the mechanisms by which the government can censor your social media use. Your case of projection is pretty impressive.
You know what Fascists do? They try to hide the money movement that keeps their circle of power functioning. Our little lefty statists are busy shrieking that the lead of the executive branch shouldn't be allowed to see the records showing where the executive branch has been writing checks. Gee, what would they be hiding? Their little circle of industrial-scale grift and waste and abuse is getting exposed, and they're furious about it. And here you are having their backs. Pretty ugly. Do you live off of dubious international grant kickbacks or something?
Submission + - SPAM: Proof Trump Rigged 2024 Election 3
Submission + - Fifteen Years Later, Citizens United Defined the 2024 Election (brennancenter.org)
Comment Re:Could he be retried for one of the hit attempts (Score 1) 339
Submission + - Anti-Trump Searches Appear Hidden on TikTok (ibtimes.com)
Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Pardoned (bbc.com) 339
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!" Ulbricht was found guilty of charges including conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking. During his trial, prosecutors said Ulbricht's website, hosted on the hidden "dark web", sold more than $200 million worth of drugs anonymously.
Submission + - Trump Pardons Silk Road Founder (nypost.com)
Submission + - Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy (404media.co)
The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodon—which, to be clear, is a feature, not a bug—but also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. I’m just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.
This doesn’t mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Bluesky’s growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like it’s going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat.
Submission + - TikTok is censoring anti-Trump content (newsweek.com)
A post on X, formerly Twitter, which has received 4.5 million views at the time of reporting, claims that "TikTok is now region locking Americans from looking up things like "fascism" and "Donald Trump rigged election"."
The post includes two screenshots of the TikTok app. The screenshot is of the search page, and in both the search term is "Donald Trump rigged election." The post states that: "On the left are results from a device in America, and on the right are results from one in the UK."
The post on the left shows a results page stating "No results found," while on the left it shows two videos of the President.
Another post from the account Dustin Genereux said that, "Censorship on TikTok is at an all time high with accounts being deleted, posts going back years being flagged, people losing access to the creator fund for saying anything Anti-Trump, MAGA, Elon, etc. But free speech and all that right?"
Great Barrier Reef Hit By Its Most Widespread Coral Bleaching, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 15
Only 92 coral colonies escaped bleaching entirely and by July, when the analysis for the study ended, 193 were dead and a further 113 were still showing signs of bleaching. Prof Maria Byrne, a marine biologist at the University of Sydney and lead author of the study, has been researching and visiting the island for 35 years.
Brendan Carr is Officially in Charge of the FCC (theverge.com) 71
Carr's priorities might also be gleaned from a document you might have already heard about: Project 2025. That's because he authored the FCC chapter of the Heritage Foundation's wishlist for a Donald Trump presidency. In that chapter, Carr proposes actions including: limiting immunity for tech companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, requiring disclosures about how platforms prioritize content, requiring tech companies to pay into a program that funds broadband access in rural areas, and more, quickly approving applications to launch satellites from companies like Elon Musk's Starlink.