Removing his ability to play stocks at all is removing his ability to earn money. His investors will leave him and the interest on his loans will liquidate him. We’ve seen more than a few of his type flash up and fade away. Milken. Pickens. Belfort. And of course, Madoff. Just to name a few we know by a single name.

He would still be wealthier than 99.99% of people but then so are a lot of folks on the planet. That’s 80 million people left over in that .01%. That’s not all that powerful at all. It’s removing him from the .00001% thats the goal. And killing his stock market abilities would do that over-night. It’s why he bought Twitter, he had to because this was the alternative.

Kinda… depends on how things got him there. The thing Elon can’t lose without really going off the rails is his ability to play the markets. Once the SEC kicks him out you’ll see him legitimately calling for open revolt.

TIL Voat shut down. Shocker.

The thing is that corporations already can’t sell that data … unless you give them permission to … which you do just that explicitly when you agree to the EULAs.

That’s the legal basis. No one absolutely must use these platforms, legally. Practically they must in many cases but that’s the catch 22. The platforms literally came up on intelligence community funding. Facebook was propped up by’em for this exact reason.

And you can’t make an inalienable right to privacy such that companies can’t ever sell personal data but still allow people themselves to do so, and you can’t stop me from selling my data myself. That would be a much bigger breach of the contract of regulatory power that defends citizens.

Privacy isn’t something anyone can reasonably force you to keep. I can’t go showing my dick to everyone and then scold them for checking out my package, and still maintain my honesty. If I didn’t want people looking at my wangstick, I wouldn’t show it to them.

Yeah people who say shit like that have never been to jail or prison. Cause you wouldn’t. Isolation is fantastic when you’re home and you can lounge and play video games. Not so great in a 6 ft box.

Thing is the next guy can’t actually invigorate them because it’s DeSantis. Or Ted Cruz, whom I suspect will actually end up with the nomination. DeSantis is a shitbag but he’s entirely lacking in the crowd pleasing department. MAGA diehards are all that’s left and they hate him already. Then there’s Cruz, who will be a direct opposite to that brand - trying to sell himself as a moderate. Real hard to get people excited about that, and they’ve spent a decade or more undercutting that exact platform. Plus he’s Ted Cruz. Dude is a total loser to every side.

The brand of ego maniac that creates a Trump isn’t common enough for Republicans to just spin up a new one. We’ve watched them try time and again the last 8 years and it’s laughable how badly it goes for them. I disdain Trump but I can recognize that aspect clearly. The guy was massively and mainstream popular for decades prior to his presidency across multiple, huge platforms. He was already a household name, no one had to ask who he was. That’s what it took.

Republicans know it too, it’s why they’ve still been backing him and not going on the direct offensive - yet.

It’s okay, they shamelessly stole it from Twitter where it originated. [Deep breath] the circle of liiiiifffffeeeeeeee…

If I have to sit in the room for long enough I’m not watching TV anyway, I’m on my laptop or steam deck. Otherwise if I’m in a hotel room I’m somewhere I’d rather be out and about doing things anyway. Besides, as much as society’s reality is skewed by the inundation of commercials, so too is mine by not experiencing it like everyone else. So I try to, from time to time. See what the other side is seeing.

What we outside fail to realize is these people live in a wholly different reality.

I haven’t watched television with any ads in years. So when I go to a hotel and I’m lounging watching cable and seeing commercials it is jarring just what a different world it is from what I remember before. And for people who never left it, it isn’t jarring at all. It’s their normal.

Now imagine you only watched Fox or OANN. It’s your very reality that’s twisted all askew. It’s hard to hold that against many of the MAGA crowd and speaks to just how influential misinformation campaigns can be.

1 9 90 rule applies quite well, only a limited number of users ever interact with anything at all, and no one interacts with everything.

mugshot will not be made public

But it will be made. Wonder who gets that honor.

Fun fact! COVID gave us a huge dataset of faces with masks on. Facial recognition software beats masks now with 99% accuracy.

Mask up seditionists, you’ll be fine! Trust me!

I think at this stage removing it would be equivalent to tattooing “assassinate me” on his forehead.

Look I hate the guy too and he doesn’t deserve his freedom, but there’s a large number of people in this world who would love to merc a former POTUS regardless of who that POTUS is or what they did. And frankly Trump is more dangerous as a martyr than he is alive and alone on house arrest for the rest of his life.

Edit, dead he can’t speak for himself anymore, alive all he does is bury himself further every time he opens his mouth. Let him. Let him babble incoherently into obscurity. My father in law was full on MAGA and just last week he called Trump “fucking retarded” off-handedly. My wife and I both felt relief instantly. The dude is losing all but the extreme fringe.

Most human like thing about it yet, in fact.

He’s already overridden people blocking him. You still see his posts.

He’s just trying to make sure it stays useful as a weapon for fascists like himself is all.

That’s the sub they’re referring to but it isn’t true. Spez is a shit but that’s deliberate misinformation.

Reddit history time - back then you could make someone a mod of a subreddit and it would accept that “request” automatically. So you could make Barack Obama a moderator of your sub and it would list him. This was a very popular and silly thing done all over without any malicious intent.

Well the guy who ran jailbait, violentacrez, did this to spez with the jailbait sub. He then shared that spez was a mod there and many users “confirmed” it, until the mounting pressure got brought to his attention and he removed himself. Shortly after you had to accept moderator positions when they were offered, it was no longer automatic, and I’m pretty sure around the same time is when the sub finally got banned.

The folks in dankmemes are old edgelords who probably frequented jailbait, they’re bringing up an old joke they pulled on spez since he’s in the hot seat. Don’t repeat their tripe, instead point out how Huffman once implied he expects he will be able to buy slaves in the near future and looks forward to such a day with anxious anticipation.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

The thing you’re describing about smugness is kind of an overarching problem with tech literate people in general. Reddit began with a large portion of the users being those tech folks. They were also libertarians. This narrated the early culture, which led to the latter devolution. Keep in mind even today on reddit there were folks fondly remembering subs like jailbait, which was a top sub for years. They got downvotes but they were still there because they used to have a home there.

The federated system got its first big migration during Elon’s initial takeover of Twitter. That drove a certain left-wing element here early on, which hopefully will help establish a different culture going forward.

The other thing is that it’s inevitable with any community that a critical mass of shit happens. The bots, the cyber soldiers, the propaganda, the spam and the sex workers show up at a certain threshold. Whether the fediverse can effectively manage that remains to be seen.

The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.

There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone’s realizing they’ve been spouting their gold from firehoses for any machine to pick up, and they’re being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.

Not those of us who exclusively used the 3rd party apps. Former RiF user here, reddit for 12 years. Not doing it on their app, you couldn’t pay me to tolerate that experience. Using Jerboa right now and with a couple tiny improvements, I got no problem switching.

Check out Jerboa.

Signed, former RiF user