Try to understand that influencers and content creators are human beings and not infallible. I don’t think Mark or Derek are the greatest people in the world, but they are trying to put educational and entertaining content out into the world, and don’t seem to be malicious in intent.

Give them a break and see where they land down the road. If they turn out to be trash, judge em all you want. As someone that doesn’t spend the time and effort to pass my experience on to others, I’ll give them a bit of wiggle room on the politics associated with operating in the public attention economy.

Well, except for locking them in a place with actual violent criminals… and violent prison guards. Jail is a pretty fucked up place, even if you get 3 hots and a cot.

Get an EV and you’ll never have to go to a gas station again. None of the chargers I’ve seen have ads on them.

So… where is the complicated part?

Guy has a 192million dollar package, gets a million and change up front, almost 100mil when they go public and pump the stock up to 25 bucks. If they can inflate it hard enough to spike at ipo, he gets the rest of the 192mil. Once it crashes, the little guys are left holding the bag while Spez walks away with all of their money.

This is why they are trying to create an atmosphere of exclusion and by selling stock internally at tiers based on user engagement until they go public.

No one is too dumb to understand that. That’s why people are declining the option to buy pre-ipo. spez has been making shit decisions and preying off user/mod labor since the inception of the company. This is where they finally try to slit the golden goose’s throat… problem is, they forgot to fatten the goose first.

To add a bit more to the national security angle: with the potential to escalate into open warfare with China, due to tensions between Taiwan and China, we really don’t want millions of drivable computers sending harvested metadata about our road systems and behavior patterns directly to enemy leadership.