Twitter Blue is coming back—with more colors and assurances from Musk

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John Dallman

Smack-Fu Master, in training
81
Revenue model for a Mars colony is the same as the revenue model for the Brits and their colonial holdings. Harvest their resources and use them as a dumping ground for your industrial output that no one else will buy.
Won't work. What resources are available on Mars that would repay the cost of shipping them to Earth? While SpaceX are vastly reducing the costs of space transportation, they were starting from an extremely high base cost. The cost of shipping stuff from Mars will remain orders of magnitude higher than shipping stuff by sea on Earth.

All the ores we extract metals from have been formed since the formation of Earth by plate tectonics, vulcanism or water action. These processes seem to have been rare to non-existent in the history of Mars.
 
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People made fun of Musk for paying 44B$ to buy an overvalued social media platform, but it's a cheap price to pay to meddle with US politics going forward.
The selective leaks of debatable moderation strategy by Twitter execs give Musk a lot of power in shaping the narrative and that is very dangerous. He is using the platform to gain political leverage, either by threatening current Dem administration or helping De Santis get elected in 2024.
Why would anybody (other than Musk) think that Tw#tter will continue to have the influence that it did before fumblefingers changed its character? In other words, why is Tw#tter more influential than Parler, Gab or Truth? And as Musk transforms Tw#tter into another fascist-friendly Parler, Gab, or Truth; why would that distinction not evaporate?
 
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Won't work. What resources are available on Mars that would repay the cost of shipping them to Earth? While SpaceX are vastly reducing the costs of space transportation, they were starting from an extremely high base cost. The cost of shipping stuff from Mars will remain orders of magnitude higher than shipping stuff by sea on Earth.

All the ores we extract metals from have been formed since the formation of Earth by plate tectonics, vulcanism or water action. These processes seem to have been rare to non-existent in the history of Mars.

With both Moon and Mars, Musk is building a rocket bridge to nowhere.

Same now for Twitter, bridge to nowhere at rocket speeds.
 
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9 (9 / 0)
If only Albert Einstein were still alive. Then he could take a break from figuring out how the universe works to address more important things like how to "fix" Twitter.

Even he would realize there was a natural limit to this possibility, especially with a rising rising S variable.

Then he’d walk away like the smartest least-constrained Twitter employees already have.
 
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10 (10 / 0)
Elon always wanted to be King of Memes.

There's a little black spot on the sun today
It's the same old thing as yesterday

There's a black hat caught in the high tree top
There's a flag pole rag and the wind won't stop

I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running 'round my brain

I guess I'm always hoping that he'll end his schemes
But it's his destiny to be the King of Memes
 
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Justin Credible

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
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Elon always wanted to be King of Memes.

Be careful what you wish for kids.

I'm not too sure about that. He is slowly losing it on twitter. His tweets are becoming more Trumpian-esque, and not in a stupid, buffoonish trump-toilet-tweet kind of way eather.

Screenshot 2022-12-11 101959.png
 
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Why would anybody (other than Musk) think that Tw#tter will continue to have the influence that it did before fumblefingers changed its character? In other words, why is Tw#tter more influential than Parler, Gab or Truth? And as Musk transforms Tw#tter into another fascist-friendly Parler, Gab, or Truth; why would that distinction not evaporate?
I get what yer saying, and agree, because we are rational adults. But this is not the world, and these are not the times, that we live in.

We live in a corrupted timeline, and one of the problems with this timeline is that when you ask "Why would anybody?" the answer is that just in the USA alone there were 70 million people that voted to show support for people like Trump, Musk, Putin, and all the other tyrants, dictators and neo-nazis out there.

The cult has more influence than it should, and not enough have opened their eyes to see it -- leading to this situation whereby belief drives devotion, which in turn drives influence. Twitter, Parler, Gab and Truth becoming cult megaphones has not stopped the pulpit bearers nor the proselytizing, but contrariwise it has instead fanned the bonfire.

I swear, everywhere I look, it's getting worse. The mouthpieces are getting bolder and ever more revolting. I mean, FFS, Kayne even freaked out fucking Alex on the radio show. I mean, what the ackshuallll fuck?
 
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DarthSlack

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At this point Ars' commitment to their preferred narrative and complete refusal to cover the Twitter Files is just an embarrassment. It was obvious Ars employees were all generally left leaning and happy to make that clear in their coverage and editorials, but the complete subservience of journalism to leftwing narrative was still something I didn't think would be a problem at Ars.

Probably very naive on my part, but it's still be surprising and eye opening to it so glaring and shameless over the last week of Twitter coverage that is determined to avoid the single most newsworthy bit of Twitter news during that time frame simply because it shows that Twitter was meaningfully censoring news based on political expediency and the desired cultural outcomes of their moderators.

Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About Twitter And Hunter Biden’s Laptop

 
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John Dallman

Smack-Fu Master, in training
81
But now we have iron-clad evidence that Twitter keeps all the user information of Conservatives in a database!
IN
A
DATABASE
All the user information! Of Conservatives!
Their concern about this makes a little more sense when you know that the "We need guns to defend ourselves against the government" segment of US conservatives mostly first heard of databases in the context of gun registrations. That's something they really don't like, and databases became a symbol of it.

In case any Musk fans here are unaware of it, everything you post on Ars goes into a database, as does everything you post on Facebook or Twitter, or any other website, all your credit card transactions, all your tax information, and everything else where information relating to you is processed on computers. All these examples are different databases, usually not connected to each other. Your computer and your phone each contain several databases, used to manage things like your contacts, tweets, and so on.

Databases are (mostly) how computers manage information. If you don't want to be in any databases at all, you have to live entirely off-grid, do all transactions in cash, have no computer, phone or bank account, disappear from the tax and social security systems, and otherwise live as if you were in the nineteenth century.
 
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ghostcarrot

Ars Scholae Palatinae
646
We're going to need some more time to digest the implications of The Twitter Files.

How a crazy right-wing nutjob can cherry-pick some churnalists to go through a company's internal documents, fire lawyers who try to shield the company from liability in the process, and "reveal" things that were already public information five years ago. And yet somehow people act like there are damning revelations in all of that other than "Elon Musk is maliciously stupid." That deserves its own write-up, but we're not at a point where the full story is available yet.

So please, Twitter Files-philes, be patient. Good journalism takes time.
Because you if you have a group that wants to believe Twitter was acting badly, and you give it a sexy name "Twitter Files", there will be people who believes it proves what they want to prove even if there is nothing new in there -- it has a name! Throw in a cupful of political grifters who will tell their audiences (sans evidence) that the Twitter Files proves everything in their darkest dreams because that helps push their agenda (make money), and here we are.
 
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Alfonse

Ars Legatus Legionis
12,198
Because you if you have a group that wants to believe Twitter was acting badly, and you give it a sexy name "Twitter Files", there will be people who believes it proves what they want to prove even if there is nothing new in there -- it has a name! Throw in a cupful of political grifters who will tell their audiences (sans evidence) that the Twitter Files proves everything in their darkest dreams because that helps push their agenda (make money), and here we are.

Giving it a name also allows them to talk about it more effectively. They don't have to use the cumbersome, "the stuff Musk is releasing about Old!Twitter!". It's just "The Twitter Files".
 
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Because you if you have a group that wants to believe Twitter was acting badly, and you give it a sexy name "Twitter Files", there will be people who believes it proves what they want to prove even if there is nothing new in there -- it has a name! Throw in a cupful of political grifters who will tell their audiences (sans evidence) that the Twitter Files proves everything in their darkest dreams because that helps push their agenda (make money), and here we are.
With a name like that, they don't even have to read anything within it to convince themselves it's serious.
 
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ghostcarrot

Ars Scholae Palatinae
646
Giving it a name also allows them to talk about it more effectively. They don't have to use the cumbersome, "the stuff Musk is releasing about Old!Twitter!". It's just "The Twitter Files".

It does allow for easier communication - names are important - and calling it "Musk's Twitter dump" is clunky (but more accurate).

But names do have power, and naming something makes it appear real -- Reification is a thing. Take IQ for instance. It's not a "real thing". It's a score based on certain assumptions about how intelligence works - that you can take assign vectors to the various ways in which a person can be smart and then extract a "general intelligence factor" from that. But after a century of IQ tests we have a culture convinced that Smart Is Smart, and that people who are very capable in some intellectual things must be capable of all things. Elon is a brilliant marketer and self-promoter, and he managed to convince pundits that he was Rocket Jesus. He managed to convince himself of that, and here we are.
 
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ColdWetDog

Ars Legatus Legionis
14,402
I get what yer saying, and agree, because we are rational adults. But this is not the world, and these are not the times, that we live in.

We live in a corrupted timeline, and one of the problems with this timeline is that when you ask "Why would anybody?" the answer is that just in the USA alone there were 70 million people that voted to show support for people like Trump, Musk, Putin, and all the other tyrants, dictators and neo-nazis out there.

The cult has more influence than it should, and not enough have opened their eyes to see it -- leading to this situation whereby belief drives devotion, which in turn drives influence. Twitter, Parler, Gab and Truth becoming cult megaphones has not stopped the pulpit bearers nor the proselytizing, but contrariwise it has instead fanned the bonfire.

I swear, everywhere I look, it's getting worse. The mouthpieces are getting bolder and ever more revolting. I mean, FFS, Kayne even freaked out fucking Alex on the radio show. I mean, what the ackshuallll fuck?
Go back and look at American - and pretty much every other attempt a democratic systems' - history. This is not new. It may be more dangerous given the technology given to these idiots (Twitter is better at mass arousal compared with broadsheets) but the general hate, agitation and intolerance is traversing a well worn landscape.

Still sucks.

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” - Douglas Adams

 
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Apparently on Friday, there was Twitter Files 3: The Tribulations of Trump. It was such a nothing burger that even the right wing noise generators gave up on it.
I saw something this morning about 'Twitter Files 4'. I didn't bother to click through.
Does this mean they have given up on Benghazi?
 
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graylshaped

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Any thoughts on how the $4 upcharge on the iPhone will go down? Apple seems pretty clear that's against the ToS so will they pull the app our bend to Elon?

Apple probably knows that dictating prices outside their own store is problematic.

I discovered on my own that the "Disney bundle" price for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ was only available if you bought it through Disney. It was an Apple rep who told me why I wasn't seeing the discount after having tried to subscribe via Apple TV. He did so reluctantly, it seemed, but he did so.

Now I have to decide what their new advertising tiers might imply. I have no issue with ads on TV shows, having lived my whole life with commercials on TV, but prefer to avoid them with movies.
 
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graylshaped

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Revenue model for a Mars colony is the same as the revenue model for the Brits and their colonial holdings. Harvest their resources and use them as a dumping ground for your industrial output that no one else will buy.

Shipping costs raise their hands and say Hi!
 
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graylshaped

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I’ve been calling it “MuskSpace” for about a month now. The deafening silence from everyone else, suggests that maybe my pun is not quite as hilarious as I have convinced myself.
Nah… I’m gonna keep trying to make it happen...

MuskSpace.

Something about the mental image of MuskSpace suggests the concept of a FartCloud.
 
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Ceedave

Ars Scholae Palatinae
682
Subscriptor
Won't work. What resources are available on Mars that would repay the cost of shipping them to Earth? While SpaceX are vastly reducing the costs of space transportation, they were starting from an extremely high base cost. The cost of shipping stuff from Mars will remain orders of magnitude higher than shipping stuff by sea on Earth.

All the ores we extract metals from have been formed since the formation of Earth by plate tectonics, vulcanism or water action. These processes seem to have been rare to non-existent in the history of Mars.
Olympus Mons on Mars is the largest known volcano in the solar system.
 
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DarthSlack

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I saw something this morning about 'Twitter Files 4'. I didn't bother to click through.
Does this mean they have given up on Benghazi?

Absolutely NOT! Republicans are just waiting to take over the House so that MTG can give McCarthy his martching orders and Benghazi will be back on the menu in no time! Right alongside the investigation into voting fraud in the 2020 election, suspending the Constitution, and a thorough look around the room for McCarthy's spine.
 
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Jordan83

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
6,114
What IS the obsession with this "Twitter Files" bullshit? I've been reading all the hot takes on Fox News about it, and from what I can tell, it's proof that Twitter sometimes banned people. It's wildly speculative that they did so at the request of other people.

Okay? So what? What's the story here? For those of you demanding an article about this, here it is. Ready?

"Twitter Files show that a company (Twitter) did stuff. The company (Twitter) didn't do anything that it wasn't within their power or prerogative to do. The company (Twitter) may have been asked by any number of hundreds (in some cases, even thousands) of people to do stuff. At all times, nobody except the company (Twitter) had any authority to actually do the stuff that people were demanding. The company (Twitter) chose what stuff to do at what times. The company (Twitter) is now under new ownership, and has already decided to do different stuff, including, but not limited to, undoing some of the stuff that the previous ownership did. They are still well within their power and prerogative to do all this stuff. The end."

There's your fucking article. You're welcome.
 
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JCarnage

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"coping"? I don't think that word means what you think it means. :shakes head: I hope MUSKmELON and/or Russia is paying you a living wage but they should probably make sure you can use colloquial English correctly before they set you loose to post FUD on the wider interwebz.
There are many words whose meaning they don’t understand; actually the things they do understand wouldn’t fill a thimble.
 
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DarthSlack

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What IS the obsession with this "Twitter Files" bullshit? I've been reading all the hot takes on Fox News about it, and from what I can tell, it's proof that Twitter sometimes banned people. It's wildly speculative that they did so at the request of other people.

Okay? So what? What's the story here? For those of you demanding an article about this, here it is. Ready?

"Twitter Files show that a company (Twitter) did stuff. The company (Twitter) didn't do anything that it wasn't within their power or prerogative to do. The company (Twitter) may have been asked by any number of hundreds (in some cases, even thousands) of people to do stuff. At all times, nobody except the company (Twitter) had any authority to actually do the stuff that people were demanding. The company (Twitter) chose what stuff to do at what times. The company (Twitter) is now under new ownership, and has already decided to do different stuff, including, but not limited to, undoing some of the stuff that the previous ownership did. They are still well within their power and prerogative to do all this stuff. The end."

There's your fucking article. You're welcome.

The right is all butthurt because of the Great Red Shart of 2022 and are looking to deflect (as usual) by lying about everything (as usual) and hoping that they can somehow do through smears and innuendo what they utterly and completely failed to do at the ballot box.

By the way, your' post is a very nice and concise summary of the Techdirt article on the whole nothingburger.
 
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Alfonse

Ars Legatus Legionis
12,198
What IS the obsession with this "Twitter Files" bullshit? I've been reading all the hot takes on Fox News about it, and from what I can tell, it's proof that Twitter sometimes banned people. It's wildly speculative that they did so at the request of other people.

Okay? So what? What's the story here?

The story is the "wildly speculative" part. They are trying to further the narrative of "right-wing censorship by Twitter and other social media companies".

That's all it is. Musk is furthering that narrative for the purpose of helping to turn Twitter into a right-wing echochamber (ie: to justify silencing anything on the left).
 
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mpfaff

Ars Praefectus
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What IS the obsession with this "Twitter Files" bullshit? I've been reading all the hot takes on Fox News about it, and from what I can tell, it's proof that Twitter sometimes banned people. It's wildly speculative that they did so at the request of other people.

Okay? So what? What's the story here? For those of you demanding an article about this, here it is. Ready?

"Twitter Files show that a company (Twitter) did stuff. The company (Twitter) didn't do anything that it wasn't within their power or prerogative to do. The company (Twitter) may have been asked by any number of hundreds (in some cases, even thousands) of people to do stuff. At all times, nobody except the company (Twitter) had any authority to actually do the stuff that people were demanding. The company (Twitter) chose what stuff to do at what times. The company (Twitter) is now under new ownership, and has already decided to do different stuff, including, but not limited to, undoing some of the stuff that the previous ownership did. They are still well within their power and prerogative to do all this stuff. The end."

There's your fucking article. You're welcome.

There is this chunk of the right out there that is convinced that someone would have given a shit about Hunter Biden if only they'd been able to shitpost about it constantly in 2020. That the news about Hunter Biden being kind of buried was why Donald Trump lost, not that the country just kind of hated Donald Trump, but that Hunter being coked up poon hound not being news was what sunk Trump.

The Hunter Biden thing may have been more of a story if Trump himself wasn't a crooked amoral shitsack. A guy who gave inner circle government jobs to his daughter who previously had her name stitched into scarves from China and son in law whose previous job was being a landlord, while funneling piles of taxpayer dollars into his underperforming resorts.

Since they can't get anyone to care about the actual story they're trying to make the new story some kind of cover-up, turns out nobody really cares about that either, so they stamp their little feet in anger still.
 
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Justin Credible

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
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I’ve been calling it “MuskSpace” for about a month now. The deafening silence from everyone else, suggests that maybe my pun is not quite as hilarious as I have convinced myself.
Nah… I’m gonna keep trying to make it happen...

MuskSpace.

MuskSpace and the Muskateers!

Shit, I think we really have something here! It would be one FUBAR tv show, but FOX would buy it right up!
 
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There is this chunk of the right out there that is convinced that someone would have given a shit about Hunter Biden if only they'd been able to shitpost about it constantly in 2020. That the news about Hunter Biden being kind of buried was why Donald Trump lost, not that the country just kind of hated Donald Trump, but that Hunter being coked up poon hound not being news was what sunk Trump.

The Hunter Biden thing may have been more of a story if Trump himself wasn't a crooked amoral shitsack. A guy who gave inner circle government jobs to his daughter who previously had her name stitched into scarves from China and son in law whose previous job was being a landlord, while funneling piles of taxpayer dollars into his underperforming resorts.

Since they can't get anyone to care about the actual story they're trying to make the new story some kind of cover-up, turns out nobody really cares about that either, so they stamp their little feet in anger still.

Right-wing wakadoodle take on The Twitter Files:

The FIRST Twitter Files Newsdrop: Reactions and Discussion

The SECOND Twitter Revelations Newsdrop: More Reactions and Further Discussion
 
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