• AlternatePersonMan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I can’t fathom having the power to save our at least change millions of lives…but instead choose to leech more wealth from the people that need it most. And systematically make the world worse. It’s a sickness.

        There are no good billionaires.

        • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I would build SO much low income, homeless, and transition housing. I would also start my own line of bamboo products and packaging to replace plastic.

          • kklusz@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The most important part of what you said is that you’d build “SO much” housing. If we’d just let the free market build all the housing it wants without letting NIMBYs get in the way, we’d have largely solved the housing crisis.

            • ThatWeirdGuy1001@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Except we already have more houses than there are homeless people. The problem is the empty houses have ridiculous price tags due to corporate landlords and landlords refusing the sell and only rent (also at ridiculous prices)

              • kklusz@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Vacancy rates in the places where people actually want to live are really low. Besides, are people not allowed to have vacation homes?

                Market price is a function of supply and demand. We’ve been under building housing for years.

                • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Alright but life never promised anyone these luxuries. I don’t give a fuck if someone can’t have a vacation home because it means more people without one can have one. People act like freedom to do whatever the hell they want no matter how negatively it effects everyone else is their universal right. The Universe doesn’t give a fuck about your summer home, nature doesn’t give a fuck that you worked hard to get it. It will all be swallowed all the same if our main goal still is not perpetual survival. That may be authoritarian, but it is also the truth. We never left the game of survival we just plastered concrete and asphalt on top of it and pretended we were removed.

            • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 year ago

              I mean, one can build it NITBY, just with functioning public transport to TBY, so that it could function. There’s plenty of available space on the planet.

          • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Then you’d go bankrupt and stop supporting your “so much” housing, unless you’d gift it to those people, not give as a temporary service.

            Bamboo - a nice idea. Actually I’m not sure it’s that hard for you to do even now. I’m serious, if you know the pipeline, then try to evaluate how much a start would cost (for it to be barely profitable). You need, well, bamboo itself (grows like a virus, shouldn’t be a problem), and on the process of making stuff from bamboo I’m not sure (I think it involves making some kind of pulp and then pressure?..), but humans do this kind of thing. Should probably start with dishes and cups.

        • PrimalAnimist@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Modern billionaires are the manifestation of the rampant consumerism of the masses. Want to do your part against the billionaires? Start with consuming less. Buy less. Move toward minimal.

        • paintbucketholder@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Being a billionaire means having the means to help millions of people, and deciding to instead keep all that money for yourself.

          • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Being a billionaire means using it to acquire more money which provides more power which provides more control. Shit floats to the top.

          • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Not necessarily. It may be optimization between what you give now and what you keep for later to make more, with the total effect on others’ well-being being the criterion. I mean, theoretically.

            If you make a dime and immediately give it away randomly, you are making a worse decision than keeping it by this criterion. If you immediately give it away not randomly, but to somebody you think needs it, still possibly worse because you could try and make much more and then, say, open a pharmaceutical company.

            Say, with cattle you’d use some for meat and some to make more cattle to feed more people. You wouldn’t just slaughter the whole herd for meat. It’s worse.

      • Yendor@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        You can’t be sociopathic and psychopathic - they’re different points on the same (ASPD) spectrum. Please learn what words mean before throwing them around.

  • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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    1 year ago

    According to Hwang, the company now formerly known as Twitter did offer “an alternative handle with the history of the @x account” so that his original account, complete with its posts and followers, could live on and continue to be used.

    What short, catchy username did Musk’s company change Hwang’s handle to? @x12345678998765.

    You can’t make this shit up. God damn!

    • like47ninjas@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That is absolutely hilarious. They should’ve offered him @twitter in exchange, it would only be fair…

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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      1 year ago

      Let’s be real now. That name is temporary until he chooses his new one. Read the whole article. It’s rediculous enough without making things seem even worse.

      • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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        1 year ago

        But look at that username. It definitely not randomly generated. Someone at Twitter pick that new name. They just give someone with the shortest username possible (1 character) the longest possible username (15 characters), and they do so by pressing the number row back and forth until they hit the username characters size limit. If it’s not a mockery then I don’t know what is.

        • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          It’s not mockery, it is the logical thing to do. They don’t want to allocate a username a person would actually want, so naturally they pick the longest possible username, with arbitrary and meaningless contents. Would you have been happier if it was @xloremipsumdolo? @xtemporaryusern? Like what was the right thing for the technician who had to pick the name to do, in your mind?

          • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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            1 year ago

            I thought long and hard about this, and you’re right. If it were me, no matter what the new username is, I’m still going to be mad. But I feel like I’ll be less mad (just a little bit less) if they select a completely random username (with sensible length, like 8 characters or less), indicating it’s chosen by an impartial random number generator instead of chosen by someone who in my mind is messing with me (image of Elon Musk laughing at me coming in my mind).

  • Syringe@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Man…

    I was pretty bummed when I heard that Twitter was going to die. There are some cool moments in history that happened on Twitter. It was a hell of a ride, but the writing was on the wall well before Elon bought it. It was time to go.

    But not like this.

    It deserved a good death. Not to have it’s corpse raped on full display over and over.

    A lot of very talented people committed so much time and energy to this. When it launched, it was a novel idea and they really forged some roads in our understanding of how we communicate and receive information.

    It was clear at the end that it would never produce the kind of ROI on advertising to make investors happy, and that Nazis had clearly taken over the platform and used it to bastardize journalism further. It was time to go to pasture.

    But not like this.

    Hopefully its mutilated, humiliated and desiccated corpse will feed the growth of the federated web.

    I hope you find peace, sweet prince.

      • Iteria@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Thank you. I hate it when people say Twitter wasn’t profitable. It was profitable. It just wasn’t an infinite money printing machine like people (investors) wanted. Twitter didn’t need investor money or loans to pay all its bills unlike say Tumblr.

        Twitter was the victim of the same financial BS as Toysrus.

        • jackfrost@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I’ve had the impression for a while that Twitter upper management wanted monthly active users on the level of Facebook, Tiktok and other social media. To enrich themselves by way of ad revenue, rather than to create opportunities and experiences for the platform and its users. Then when it became apparent that such a potential opportunity had come and gone (if it was ever there in the first place), they did what was in their minds the next-best thing: They cashed out while they could still find a buyer. Elon’s idiotically freewheeling but nevertheless binding offer was basically their winning lottery ticket, so they held his feet to the fire instead of treating it like the thoughtless shitpost it was.

      • narnach@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        Wait, that sounds like a leveraged buyout. I overlooked that detail in the news. It changes everything.

        I know that some investment firms use leveraged buyouts to drain every bit of money from a company before they chop it up, sell the good bits and let the rest go bankrupt due to the massive debts left in the carcass of the old company. It’s so scummy I wonder why it’s not illegal.

      • Syringe@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m not saying it wasn’t profitable. It’s a hell of an achievement that it was.

        Just that they took on a lot of investment capital and it wasn’t the kind of return that investors were expecting.

        Ultimately, the efficacy of social media advertising on the whole is in the decline. The number and types of companies that used to advertise and run their business on Facebook is so different today than it was five years ago, and business are seeing far less return for their budget.

        Twitter was riding a knife’s edge (particularly during COVID) and would have to really scramble to stay in the red in the future.

      • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        the remaining $13bn was a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on their behalf.

        That’s truly some Hollywood-accounting-style bullshit. I couldn’t even imagine the paradoxical mathematics it took to make that happen.

        It would be like me paying you to buy a candy bar from me.

    • spiderman@ani.social
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      1 year ago

      there was a time when twitter was the place for internet sensation. if you want to see what’s going around the world, twitter was a great place to visit. movements like #metoo wouldn’t have happened if there was no twitter. sad to see that musk just plays with it like a toy and making it’s credibility to lose everyday and giving it a slow death.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        movements like #metoo wouldn’t have happened if there was no twitter.

        That’s exactly why Musk is doing what he’s doing.

  • errer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As much as this sucks, this person has no rights to their name and never did. Stop using the platform and giving it attention!

    • li10@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, it’s not like they ever bought that name from Twitter so there’s no real argument that they actually own it, even if they’d ever bought the checkmark BS.

      Money and a rename would have been a goodwill gesture, and expecting any goodwill from this version of twitter is insanity.

    • Terevos@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think anyone is saying they are owed money. But just taking the handle with nothing in return is really not nice.

      They could at least give the guy like Twitter Blue for life or whatever the heck premium is called now.

      • grandkaiser@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Is that not what the title says? Like, i’m new to Lemmy so maybe i’m confused? Didn’t OP write “He got no money from it :(” in the title?

    • anteaters@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Haha, me calling it dumb to think they’d be owed money is getting people super angry.

      • girlfreddy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Being downvoted is not indicative of voters’ anger. It’s simply showing they don’t agree with you.

        Pulling the victim card is revealing a shit-ton about you tho.

        • Pika@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I see why people use downvoting this way, especially since that was the norm on reddit which a good portion of the base fled from, I find the same issue I had with downvotes on reddit to apply here as well though. I try to advocate down votes to be not out of personal opinion, but a reflection that the content is either useless or harmful to the existing conversation. This allows posts that are actually useful and contribute to the discussion to exist even if they are unpopular to peoples opinion. Just because you don’t like the post, doesn’t mean the post isn’t true or useful, which is why I find that form of downvoting ideology to be harmful overall.

          That being said, I would find the parent comment you replied to as constructive to the conversation…Up until they started egging people on with “is getting people super angry” I wouldn’t call this being downvoted for not agreeing, I would call it being downvoted for not being constructive to the post at hand(as there’s no need to actively try to get people to rage at you with a post like that)

        • anteaters@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          So what do users not agree to in my post but do with in this?

          Also, what a fucking Reddit thing to do.

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I hate to say it because Fuck Elon, but this is just one of those things you sign away when you agree to the terms of service.

  • ChamrsDeluxe@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Well I went ahead and did a mastadon. No clue what I am doing, but… Woohoo?

    I’m chamrsdeluxe@mastadon.social there too I guess. Idk

    • pjhenry1216@kbin.social
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      You’d want to include your instance as part of your handle. I know, it’s not as intuitive as a centralized service, but it is a requirement, especially when sharing the name elsewhere. So, your Lemmy account is chamrsdeluxe@lemmy.world. Folks on lemmy.world don’t need that, but folks on another instance (like me) would. I can get it from clicking your username, but there’s no way to figure it out for a different platform from here.

        • neutron@thelemmy.club
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          1 year ago

          If I’m reading this right there are two ways to indicate a user including its instance:

          • /u/username@example.com
          • @username@example.com

          Which one is the recommended one?

        • pjhenry1216@kbin.social
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          Yes, but this doesn’t have anything to do with mastodon which was my point. You need to include the instance in your mastodon handle. Which I see you’ve gone back and edited now, but that was my whole point. I didn’t need a lesson on something I literally just demonstrated I know about.

        • pjhenry1216@kbin.social
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          That’s all well and good, but I was telling them to include the instance for their mastodon handle, which they’ve gone back and edited to include it now.

  • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What short, catchy username did Musk’s company change Hwang’s handle to? @x12345678998765.

    That’s some really !funnyandsad material…

    • ziggurat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Sounds like someone trying to type a random number on the keyboard, looking at it, and thinking, what ever

      • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s not even random, it’s counting 1 to 9 and then down again to 5. Seems like even less effort lol. It’s either patronising in a show off kind of way or just dumb. Either way… just wow.

  • PrimalAnimist@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    To be fair, no user “owns” their account. Everything about your Twitter account, from the user name to the data you tweet belongs to Twitter. I hesitate to call it a dick move. It’s more of an Elon move.

  • FatherOfHoodoo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Imagine how amazing the PR would have been if the title had been: “User gets spectator seating for a SpaceX launch in return for lost handle”

  • nunya@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I can hear his theme song now…

    X gon’ take it from ya (uh), he gon’ take it from ya X gon’ take it from ya, he gon’ take it from ya

    First we gonna rock, then we gonna roll Then we let it pop, go, let it go