"All models are wrong, but some are useful." -George Box
But it's so much easier if you just start with a conclusion instead of all the way back at observation. You don't have to do any work for soundness at all, just ignore facts that disagree with what you want to believe.
It's also not one or two billion, it's multiple hundreds of billion owned by one person. I don't think you can overstress the difference in scale between millions, hundred millions, billions, and hundred billions.
There used to be taxes assessed by total asset valuation that focused more on wealthy individuals because they don't earn as much from income it's mostly assets increasing in value like property or ownership shares, that was stopped when they introduced the income tax that mostly targets low and middle class people who almost exclusively earn by income.
Loopholes like offshore accounts used to dodge income taxes by higher earners should be illegal, but the whole system is backwards forcing the least prosperous to shoulder the largest tax burden instead of the wealthiest who benefit from society the most.
Anyone who feels the freedom to fuck with our elections or disenfranchise voters should have the book thrown at them, maximum penalties under the statutes.
No need to guess, just look at how Trump's confederates treat BLM protestors and their executioners: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/04/14/daniel-perry-racist-comments-texas-shooting-austin-protester/
Abbott made good on his promise and pardoned Perry last week for the murder a jury found him guilty of committing.
Governments banning social media based on who can use it to spy on who, instead of creating privacy regulations and enforcing them to create and regulate markets, which is kinda what they should do, to make it so it doesn't matter who owns which app. Taking an opportunity and shitting all over it for some childish standoff should be beneath us.
Based on a completely superficial review there are three almost guaranteed ways to become unhinged; studying infinities, refactoring legacy code, and working with timezones.
Between a corpo job only using teams and email and international folks all using WhatsApp I kinda want to just go back to irc and stay there forever. Everything that came after it has just been worse.
What could have been done to increase the valuation higher and maintain goodwill with the community:
- Cut CEO pay by 90%
- Pay mods as employees, think of the GM/guide structure of early mmos where you start as a volunteer for a free sub but can work your way up
- Subscriptions to remove ads
- Push ads in API for third party apps to host your ads, remove for subscribed users
- Profit sharing from ads and subs with top content creators
Fascists look like idiots when interviewed until they get violent. They have no definitions or reasonable arguments for their position because bigotry isn't a reasonable position and to them anyone who challenges them is an other, an outsider who deserves to be dehumanized. As long as they can convince people to be scared and angry they are safe to exploit hate. The more people collaborate, work together towards shared values, participate in local school and city board meetings, the less power these idiots can steal.
There's a little trick my parents passed down to me whenever I asked them what a word meant or how to do something when I was a kid, "look it up yourself". Look up the word in the dictionary, learn how to learn how to do things, and then when you get stuck ask for help graciously. Self reliance isn't something that just happens, it takes effort and often failure.
400-700 for a single article of clothing with no mention of what facial recognition software this affects, how effective it is and what is the failure rate, error bounds, etc. Sounds like a scam.