My highschool days. Wouldn’t change a thing either, except I wouldn’t start smoking cigarettes.

Milken’s worth is stagnant - he can’t play stocks. In the 80s Milken had what the wealthy always want, power. He doesn’t have it now. 6 billion is what he’s worth and that’s a long long way below the likes of Elon Musk. Had Milken never been convicted he would’ve kept growing like Elon did.

You’re missing my point. I’m not saying these guys are put into the same kind of financial distress the rest of us are when the car breaks down. They’re still the top 1%. And that’s fine with me, there’s always going to be a top 1%. It’s the “beyond” that concerns me, when they have enough money that it no longer matters when they lose. Milken, Madoff, they all had that much at one point and then they lost. They lost the thing they craved, the power. They might still be rich but they know better than anyone that wealth without power is just an appetizer. They want a seat at the table and getting removed from the SEC is paramount to being told they aren’t dressed well enough to eat in the restaurant.

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.

I think the deeper generational thing is in the idea that anything “just works”. Like I’m a programmer, right, so I know shortcuts. Ctrl+S saves the file, simple right?

Me when I want to save a file: Ctrl+SSSS. Why? Because I don’t trust it “just works”. Same reason I don’t trust auto save. Same reason I am stunned every time I tell windows to diagnose and fix the network problem and then it actually does.

I grew up in a time where you couldn’t trust any of that shit.

And NMS eventually got good enough to drop a few dozen hours into.

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.

I can respect the stance, kind of. Can I offer an alternative perspective on that though?

For starters, Oligarchs don’t always win. That’s defeatism, don’t do that - for your own good.

But the main thing I’m pointing out is that there’s a particularly stinky arrogance in the creation of a hypothetical “little guy helped by my words”, and I know it because when I honestly ask myself why I contributed to reddit, it’s for me, not others. I wrote because I enjoyed it. Both quality and quantity. And while many people may have been helped by my words in one way or another and I’m happy for them, I didn’t honestly write any of it for them. I did it for me. And it was me who didn’t want to see the content go off into the nether, I was the hold-up. In my view, that’s again - a particularly stinky kind of arrogance. One I recognized in myself and took action to overcome. Your comment reminded me of it is all.

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 an empty 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.

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.

so I don’t really get what this accomplishes.

It weakens reddit’s ability to use that data for their own AI models. That is the reason for the whole api kerfluffle in the first place, there’s no other way to block other AIs from crawling the data for content. OpenAI and others likely made tens if not hundreds of millions off the content in reddit in the last few years, and they paid reddit nothing for it. It’s got reddit admins and executives really pissed off.

Thing is, Reddit paid me nothing for the content too though. At the end of the day I don’t want my content propping up another fascist billionaire social media mogul with an ego problem, not even a little bit. They burned their bridge so I took my toys and left.

Honestly is it all that sad? In a way it’s beautiful.

Buddhist monks spend weeks or months constructing sand mandalas on the stone floors of a temple, only to sweep it up immediately upon finishing it. They are beautiful works of art, but their real value to the monks lies in the process of their creation. What reason is there to hold on to it? Instead, take the lessons learned and bring those with you, go forth and create new mandalas more exquisite than before.

I just deleted well over 10 million words from my comment history, many things I’ve read over and over and many I never thought about again. I’m still the same person, in fact I’m stronger for it. No need to hold on to the past.