Category: Editorial

let twitter die — please!

whbeebe1 Comment

So Elon Musk has decided to back out of a US$44 billion bid for Twitter, the MySpace of the 2020s. I am no fan of the Muskrat, especially in this instance. He went charging in like he really knew what he was dealing with in regards to Twitter. It turns out he never did, and he never will.

Twitter is long past redemption, having become a cesspool of toxic trolling and millions of bots, in spite of what Twitter leadership has said in the past, and continues to say. I find their assertion that they delete a million fake accounts per day on the platform as eye wateringly unbelievable. One million per day. Left unsaid is how many actually get through. No, I don’t believe that it’s only 5%.

While I still have a very small Twitter account, I’ve stopped checking on a regular basis (regular being once/week or so for me) because Twitter decided to send me a notification every time any of the accounts I followed sent out a tweet. I got flooded with those damn notifications. I tried in vain to slow it down with checking not interested, not interested… But it seemed to do no good. Now it looks like I’m no longer getting those notifications, which means that either the “training” finally worked, or somebody finally said turn off that feature. Another feature that drove me up the wall was when they wanted to become more Facebook-like by having the stories in my feed show up based on how popular they were, not in chronological order. Yes, I could set it back to chronological if I looked for the tiny little stars on the right corner of my feed (so logical!), except that when I went back it was reset to most popular. After a period of time it looked like it finally stuck to chronological.

Both of those changes were meant to “enhance engagement,” which was a way to try to hook you ever deeper into Twitter. There were other changes such as having suggestions of who else to follow pop up in my timeline. No thanks, those suggestions are based not on relevance so much as how controversial, which is just another way to stir up the masses. Every time one of those pops up I always click “not interested.” If I want to follow someone on Twitter I’ll go find them myself.

So let Twitter die. It absolutely should. As for the Muskrat, let him take the absolute maximum monetary hit legally possible. He also needs to eat as much crow as possible. Let his failure to follow through purchasing Twitter be an absolute feast of Twitter crow.

friday funnies

whbeebe

It goes without saying that the January 6 committee has finally, devastatingly, and with small enough words that even the Magats can understand, shown without doubt Trump was responsible, and more damningly, he knew every step of the way he was lying. As a side note, Liz Cheney is a Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney. Like her daddy she has a steel backbone and knows no fear. And like her daddy, you mess with her and you get a face full of (metaphorical) buckshot.

Cryptocurrencies are the latest Ponzi scheme. In case you haven’t paid attention this week, the value (in US dollars!) have plunged dramatically and still continue to drop and drop… Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows failed to meet its margin calls. That triggered Finblox to impose a US$1,500/month withdrawal limit. And the biggest and latest failure is Celsius, a major crypto financial services company, blocked all withdrawals from crypto funds. Celsius is for big “institutional” investors, which has attracted the unwanted attention of state security regulators in Alabama, Kentucky, New Jersey, Texas and Washington. Which should be of concern for those 401(k) funds that “diversified” into crytocurrencies.

We all raised a big stink with the Trump administration when journalist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally assassinated at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman inside the Saudi consulate in Instanbul in 2018. The Biden administration pretty much pushed him and Saudi Arabia off to the side when he came into office. Until now. The rising cost of gasoline due to the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine has put the entire oil market into chaos, and if there’s anything that oil market investors love, it’s chaos because the price of oil always goes up. I suppose Biden is trying to get the Saudis to increase production to help bring down the cost of crude, but I don’t think the Saudis have excess production, and if they did, why should they? They benefit from these high prices as well. I hope Biden comes away with something positive from this trip, but at this point, all this trip does is show him (and America) as weak. Just remember, we got here because of four years of Trumpism.