https://rationallib.substack.com/
Banned from lemmy.ml/c/Palestine for constructive criticism
Well not most stocks, but Tesla is notorious for not be valued according to sales. There’s multiple stock analysts (Wedbush and Ark Invest in particular) who continuously predict that Tesla will have trillions in revenue in the future due to some sort of maga space magic and as long as enough people buy into that, current sales don’t matter.
Or vote against the one party (starts with an R) that continues to make the duopoly happen by banning RCV, and for the party (starts with a D) that’s far more likely to implement RCV.
The left is shockingly asleep about how bad this is. X still is the single most important platform for driving narratives about the news and politics. And it’s still important in part because Democrats and the left as a whole have been lethargic in leaving it. The fact that it’s blatantly being used to tilt the national political discussion in whatever direction Elon wants was probably one of many keys to getting Trump elected in 2024, and should be regarded as an ongoing emergency for Democrats and the left.
I get where you’re coming from, but in the interest of keeping my comment simple I left out that he claimed to be hiking in Dumbarton Oaks Park, which is not far (and downstream) from the picture I posted such that it wouldn’t be plausible that it would be that narrow.
But I’ll also point out the level of incredulity my comment is getting on a social media site, vs. RFK Jr.'s, which should strike anyone familiar with Rock Creek as almost certainly wrong. Yet everyone in the whole news media is either willfully ignoring this or just too lazy to look into it. And honestly it pisses me off because this lack of giving a fuck about basic facts from reporters who we falsely imagine as being employed in reporting facts shows how much we’re in a post-truth society and why we got a con artist as our president.
THIS IS NOT ROCK CREEK FFS
Everyone including major media sources is parroting what RFK Jr. said in his instagram account as if it’s gospel. Go to google maps. Look at Rock Creek. Look how big it is. This is not Rock Creek.
The country was in decline for at least a decade before Trump took office.
Well 4 years of that decade was Trump being in office, and 4 other years was the result of people being willing to vote in literally anyone who wasn’t him. So really 8 years of that decade was Trump’s fault. And the other two years? Not bad.
As for the rest, Trump is cutting funding for research like crazy. That won’t just affect things today, that’s going to make stuff shitty for decades. And that’s exactly the kind of harm that the emotion-laden American news and social media simply won’t cover. So I don’t think there will be a backlash, rather the opposite - politicians will realize bullying scientists, government agencies, immigrants, and other voiceless Trump targets is just good politics, and keep doing it.
Of course future prediction is hard, so who knows what will happen. But I’m not seeing the path for this to turn around anytime soon. The same media that created MAGA, and made it even more popular 4 years after it proved itself to be a horrific disaster is the same media we have today. Democrats will probably win the next two elections because people can see what Trump is doing in real time, but after that I have no hope for America. If I have to predict the future, I’d guess the EU becomes the new global leader, driven by relatively high democracy and pro-science policies compared to the rest of the world. This could even occur in a relatively short time frame, like 5 years.
I’m plenty open to questioning every part of copyright (has the idea ever actually been proven to be worth the enormous costs? It’s like an infinity-percent tariff on anything information related.) but the same copyright should apply to everbody. It sounds like this proposal gives a specific pass to corporations developing AI - anything these corporations can access should be accessible to the general public as well. If you can use a song to train an AI for free, a human artist should also be allowed to use it directly and turn it into a new work.
Bill Gates deserves a lot of shit for creating the original big tech monopoly. But I’ll say this about him: At least he’s not hoarding his money to build a secretive compound to hold hundreds of kids he spawned with right wing crazy women for the purpose of creating a future master race.
They were a scam to justify his self-bailout of Solarcity with Tesla funds.
The demo Musk introduced last October at a splashy presentation was a glass-tile solar roof, much different from the metal prototype he’d seen before. How did he pull off this transformation in just weeks? More to the point, who executed the idea and when? Leaders at Tesla and SolarCity, including Lyndon and Peter Rive, gave a variety of different answers on the timeline of its origin and development. At first, the companies said Solar Roof was a Tesla product, and then, later, a SolarCity product. Public statements are similarly contradictory. Some involved with the product’s development suggest that the mixed messages are a result of the combined companies’ wish not to appear as if they rushed out the glass-tile prototype in order to be able announce a high-profile product before the shareholder vote on the acquisition, which some critics viewed as Tesla bailing out SolarCity.
…
No matter how the Solar Roof came to be, it seems to have worked: Three weeks after Musk’s presentation, 85% of shareholders approved the Tesla-SolarCity merger.
The Tesla Solar Roof tiles are still alive, but the product is on the back burner at Tesla as it failed to achieve its promises.
This was a pretty interesting read: https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948
There was a point where many peace activists saw zionism as a good thing, but then the zionists chose a fascist leader. To be fair in the 1940s it might not have been clear yet that religious nationalism is bad and tends to lead to fascism. What’s odd is that many still haven’t figured this out yet.
This of course applies to Hamas as well, which is why there’s not going to be peace in the middle east until there’s a secular group in charge of things on at least one of the sides.
Later this year: “I was right, but I actually meant to say ‘into’ instead of ‘to’ and ‘someone’s’ instead of ‘your’”
A little late but OpenTaxSolver - free desktop tax software that gives you a printout of tax forms that you can mail in. And it includes a few states too. Way easier than the annoying corporate sites that constantly log you out and charge a fee for every little thing.
Edit: To my non-American friends, you don’t need to worry about this
It’s not all him, several other people invested in both. According to some article Elon owns 79% of X, and only 54% of xAI (barely enough to control it). Since the valuation of X in the deal is about $20 billion more what others have estimated ($12.3 billion), it definitely seems like it’s a corrupt bailout 46% funded with other xAI investors’ money, basically netting Elon $8 billion overnight.
That being said, the other investors in xAI are easy marks like Marc Andressen (famous for funding Adam Neumann’s project that came after WeWork) and various Saudi Royals who possibly were convinced that this is ok.
There’s a million things you could do with that. The musk of kleptocracy? I dunno.
Or you could do a bunch of other Elon refences - Don’t buy from klepto-guy, gimme a Model FU, Elon owes a horse by now, etc.
Elon’s blaming DDOS. You know I heard that the people who bulit Twitter did a great job figuring out how to handle those. Gosh, I wonder what ever happened them?
Everyone drives a car with one fucking seat.
It would be highly immoral to do any actual vandalism because that would give them sympathy and therefore would further the goals of Elon and others who want their bootlickers to be seen as some sort of rebels against wokeness.
But mocking them by writing dust or adding your own bumper stickers without doing any serious permanent damage is at least defensible.
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Well that would eliminate the whole point of corporations, which is to make it easy to raise money.
Let’s start with an understanding of why corporations suck in the first place. The root of all good and evil in a corporation is limited lability. This allows investors to not have to worry that they’re going to lose more than their investment, so they don’t need to think too hard before putting their money in some company they just heard of. This is great for investors and for the corporation.
But this comes with a cost to everyone else. There’s the direct cost that if the corporation ends up owing people money through excessive debt, negligence, or illegal activities, they can declare bankruptcy and the investors don’t have to worry any paying for those (other than their losses on the stock). But I suspect the more pernicious effect is that the investors’ lack of concern over their investment as anything but a vehicle of profit basically leads them to pick sociopathic CEOs and demand profit maximizing behavior at the cost of social good and even long term stability. And since all this sociopathic activity is really great at amassing money, it’s kind of a big power boost for sociopathy overall.
However, the ease of investing can be a good thing for society too - basically it allows a lot of people to retire at some point, and allows for rapid funding of new ideas. So is there a way to get corporations back under control without throwing out the baby? I tend to think we should tax corporations higher if nothing else, as it is we do the opposite thanks to Trump’s last tax cut plan.