China bots flood Twitter with porn spam to drown protest news
- Thread starter JournalBot
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I don't think there was much of a conversion. I'm sure you know that he's from a very problematic South African family - pretty much MAGAs with a slight tan. He "worked" with Peter Thiel on PayPal.
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It will have to do at least one bankruptcy rinse of the absurd debt the buyout saddled it with. Who will own the IP and any 'assets' after that is anyone's guess. I'm betting the banks wrote in some heavy penalties for Elon using Tesla/Space-X collateral
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How long before he crashes a Cybertruck into a random pizza place?
View: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1597405399040217088
View: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1597405399040217088
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Musk could surely sell Twitter for $5 billion, walk away and go back to SpaceX and Tesla. Sure losing $39 billion would be a painful lesson. Instead he's risking losing much much more , if Tesla's stock dropped to a P/E ratio similar to Ford or Volkswagen he'd potentially end up with negative net worth. He's taken out loans against the current value of Tesla stock, I don't think we know exactly how much but its enough to put in the hole if Tesla stock crashes.
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That might be the case if it wasn't even more likely he's fired the person who could do the inside job in the first place awhile ago.
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Apple isn't going around boasting about being the Great Protector of Freeze Peach.
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Also, to be picky, no one talking about this has a physical laptop, as far as I’ve seen. They have a disk image with a bunch of Hunter’s files on it and no proof it hasn’t been tampered with. Some of the images touted as his laptop have been openly tempered with, in fact.
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The funny part, is they it's more likely to be related to Apple not getting their 30%, than the lax moderation.
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I'm very much not inclined to believe in coincidences, particularly when they involve the world's richest man and the world's largest authoritarian régime.
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Revenues are always positive or at the very least 0.
Profit is the one that can go negative.
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Caffeine free diet coke gives you no energy.
No sugar rush, and no caffeine. Hell if you account for your body processing it, it probably has a negative effect on calories, so you end with less energy available.
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I disagree. If Musk was trying to deny Apple money that they are owed, that would already be in court.
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I personally liked the guy more when he was still dreaming of going to Mars, instead of going for Twitter and -now- his own phone company...
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Drop the smugness, bozo. If it weren't for your nick, I'd smell the bullshit from your first sentence anyway, so I can still ignore the deluge of idocy. The ignore function works just finde, btw. C'est la vie, indeed.
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Probably never.
Either Twitter is taken down in a hacking attack on its infrastructure in a way the unmaintained backup system can't or won't fix (in such a chaotic environment the simplest way to do this is to sneak in a delayed payload that gets seeded into the backups and grinds the speed of the service to a halt rather than destroys things) or it goes the way of LiveJournal and MySpace.
Simple fact of the matter is regardless of Twitter's impressive user numbers in the last decade, simply not as much of the American public was using it that he hoped, it makes a pretty rotten bully pulpit when no one wants to use it anyway and it gets used to distribute malware.
The clincher will be when Elon is hit by his own right flank for porn distribution (not merely artists either) and it becomes Tumblr'd. If you can believe it the man has even less self awareness than Trump, probably from being an actual billionaire.
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Hey! Let's please keep this factual.
The first part, that this laptop ever belonged to Hunter Biden, is unproven. ALL that is proven about the laptop is that some of the emails contained on the it were real. However, that doesn't mean those emails originated on the laptop, or were unaltered from the originals. Some of the content of the emails matches other sources, but that again doesn't prove ownership of the laptop.
And then lets add on the fuckery - much of the content of the laptop has provably and definitively been altered or fabricated. Most of the non-email content can't be authenticated in any event, either in content or source. What IS known is the information on the laptop has been modified many, many times, both before, and most tellingly AFTER, the supposed story broke.
Even if there was evidence of wrongdoing on the laptop (and it turns out, there's not much of any of that), the contents are so compromised that it's useless. Since the source isn't credible, it's not news, it's gossip and slander. And the only person who has claimed he got it from Hunter Biden is a) legally blind, b) never met Mr. Biden before that day or after, c) no longer is in the computer repair business, and d) wants nothing to do with the laptop anymore.
In brief, it's misinformation at best, election dirty tricks at worst, and such crass manipulation attempts should rightfully be condemned.
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Or the bills, yep.
There is no reason to stop reading twitter. There's good reasons to stop tweeting, like if you don't want to engage with shitbirds, asshats, and fascists (but I repeat myself), but any reading of the platform only costs Muskrat money at this point.
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He probably can't keep it going indefinitely with his own money. He has a billion dollars a year to produce just in INTEREST on the debt he went into to buy it, and selling Tesla stock to generate cash has already had impacts on that company.
Musk isn't cash-rich. He controls companies with lots of assets, and that allows him to leverage himself to a huge extent. But that only works if you keep the plates spinning, and the only talent the dude has at doing that is occasionally hiring the right people (like Gwynne Shotwell) and letting them do their job. Left to his own direct devices, he's a ginormous fuckup.
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OF course he's out of the computer repair business. If we take him at his word, he's admitting to poking around inside a customers laptop. Why would anyone trust him with their computers after that ?
If he's lying, what will he lie about when someone else brings their devices in for repair ?
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if you had an upside/down hat, I'd throw a couple $$s in it. Thank you!
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I think I'm too gobsmacked and/or worn out by this to add to the conversation anymore, so I'll just say:
I sure hope someone is putting together the best jokes from this whole debacle, this is gold.
Oh wait no, I did think of something: I hope Tesla's prices corrects back down to reality. I don't want Tesla to fail, though they've long since given up the mantle of innovation. I do want them to be hungry, get out of the damn stratosphere with the valuation, and sweep a cool few billion out of Musk's pockets on the way.
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The difference is that Apple has spent the last few years actively moving out of China and has diversified its production capacity into e.g. Vietnam. As do a lot of companies who can see the writing on the wall and arent't run by Giant attention-seeking man-babies
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Tesla is also building new plants not in China, so the main difference is your last point.
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No mention of Musk's Tesla venture in China? Even if there is no direct correlation, You have to think that his main concern is not offending the Chinese government and so would feel almost no urgency to deal with this.
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Captain Trips
Smack-Fu Master, in training
And don't forget to bring along screen shots of your code. 'Cause if you aren't hard core developer, El Twitto won't want to see you.
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To your leading question (remainder of your post spoilered to focus on this), this article makes the case that moderation was Twitter's primary product and, as such, it was an essential part of their business. It wasn't that Twitter owed moderation to everybody else so much as they owed it to themselves.
We've already seen what happens when you gut the moderation team and relax rules about what can be posted: it's an unmitigated mess that a lot of people and companies want absolutely nothing to do with. (Note how this also verifies the thesis of the article).
Elon Musk's current hell is very much of his own making, and he has no one to blame but himself for the loss of advertising customers and high profile account holders. And without those, he has no route to financial viability without taking away from his other business ventures.
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$5 billion? Who is going to pay $5B for Twitter?
To buy Twitter, Musk saddled a $5 billion revenue company with $1 billion in interest payments. Since then, things have gotten worse. Musk himself has said that Twitter has had a massive revenue drop as advertisers walk away. While he didn't release any numbers, rumors are that it's in the neighborhood of $4 million/day. Or $1.4 billion/year.
So now a company with $3 billion in revenues (and likely still falling) needs to come up with $2.4 billion just to keep afloat. And given that the company has gutted its management, back office, and technical staff, there is literally nobody to reverse the course.
I guess I don't see someone paying $5 billion, or even $5 million, to buy a company that saddles them with a couple of billion in debt payments every year and the need for a top to bottom rebuild. Sinking that money into a brand new Twitter clone would be a whole lot easier.
The reality is, Twitter's bankrupt, it's just that the corpse hasn't stopped twitching yet.
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The word is “insolvent” — bankruptcy is inevitable when you’re insolvent (unless you pull a miracle) but may not happen for a while yet.
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It's still twitching because it has Musk's axe buried in its central nervous system.
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I see that he is still huffing on that really bad batch of weed that got him into this mess in the first place.
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There's a difference between building a single plant in Brandenburg, Germany and relying on China for most of your output and components vs. moving most of your production out of China in the medium term.
Cook - and in fact a lot of his indutry peers - are going on record with their intention of moving their entire production or parts of their production out of China and a whole lot of them have already set up partial replacements in Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia etc.
Apple announced the opening of their facility in Vietnam and the start of iPhone production as major milestone this year.
Don't get me wrong they're not doing this because of China's miserable human rights records or because China is a draconian authoritarian regime. It's purely because Xi's policies are jeopardizing the ability of western corporations to make money and sustain their supply chains.
What I was getting at is that yes, of course Apple is beholden to China as is basically every company that is doing business there. The difference is that most of Elon's peers don't fawn over and don't wax poetically about the benefits of China's treatment of human beings and don't publicly wish the US and EU would treat their own workers in the same way (Elon does)
The other difference is that other CEOs are now actively managing the risk and are moving at least partially out of China as a consequence of what happens there ATM.
This is because most of the other companies are run by people more grown up than Musk.
Musk's strategy seems to be to smooch up to and try to appease Xi instead of doing his job and trying to find ways to manage and alleviate risks that concern his company Tesla.
No company on earth will throw away potential business from a 1.2 billion people market. I don't expect that because I'm not naive.
Saying that "why is no one talking about how Apple is beholden to China as well" like the OP did is a pure whataboutism though. Firstly because everyone who doesn business in China is and secondly because at least the people responsible at Apple, Google, etc, are aware of that and are actively trying to manage the risks to some extent.
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How many social media platforms have quickly run into trouble because they refused to moderate ?
To worry about angering China would require Musk to have a greater understanding of human behaviour than he has demonstrated since he took over Twitter.
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