social media Archives - Orion's Cold Fire

Bring on the Geniuses. Bring on the Future.

November 1, 2022November 1, 2022 photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner A Real Conservative Party, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, social media, Twitter

Today I had to get in the asset statement for my business. The government gets to tax the assets of a business. Now if your business is selling books and photographs what are the assets of that business? I would have said my brilliant mind. There was no column on the form for that. So, I put down the computer I type the words out on and the camera and lenses that I take the pictures with.

When I brought in the form the town official who looked it over asked me how much the desk and chair cost that I sit at and on. She had me there. Those things are so old that I really didn’t know how much they cost. And by now the depreciation must have whittled them down to pennies. So, we settled on a guestimate.

The fact that I’d waited until the last day is a feature of my psychology. It’s one of the reasons I have been acclaimed as possibly the laziest man who ever lived. It is also true that it sometimes makes my life rather difficult. But having accomplished the task it renders me almost euphoric for having overcome the unimaginable gravity of sloth.

Here we are only a week out from the election. I think the pundits and readers are almost beyond caring. Fetterman, Oz? Warnock, Walker? Mastro, Laxalt? Who are these strange people haunting our waking hours and promising to be able to solve all our problems? To be fair, if the three Republicans listed are elected then suddenly Creepy Uncle Joe won’t be able to inflict anymore horrible judges on us. We won’t have to pay even more trillions of dollars to Democrat friends selling windmills and solar panels. So, I guess there is some reason to play this game. But it does seem like a carnival act we’re exposed to every two years.

I just wish we had our own party and didn’t have to depend on Mitch McConnell and the other clowns like Mitt Romney that parade around and sell us out for graft and power. But I guess we know that over time the next party will fill with rats just like the old one. But even if we don’t replace the party, we should have a “sub-party” that allows just the normal people to get together and thrash out our thoughts on what needs to be done and decide who we want and don’t want to represent us. And now that Elon Musk paid 44 billion dollars to liberate Twitter maybe he’ll be smart enough to build it into something that organizers can use to communicate with those people.

I mean if this social media is supposed to be good for anything it’s to allow tech geniuses to figure out what people want to buy and then put it in front of them to buy with the click of a mouse. So come on Elon. Sit down with your old PayPal buddy Peter Thiel and build an app that let’s non-progressives build a virtual town square where they can decide what they want in the real world and then make it happen.

I’m pretty sure we’d all pay five bucks a month for Twitter if it had some of the features of LinkedIn and Facebook. Maybe it could have a movie feature like Netflix where premium entertainment could be ala carte.

And when you get around to it add our own PayPal and GoFundMe and while you’re at it our own Amazon. We don’t care if you cheat us just a little just as long as we don’t have to hear the word “your pronouns” ever again.

The Metaverse? Really?

October 27, 2022October 27, 2022 photog Current Events Elon Musk, Facebook, internet, social media, The Metaverse, Twitter

I read today that Meta (Facebook) is tanking on Wall Street because the Metaverse (Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a virtual reality existence for his customers on the internet) is meaningless nonsense that nobody would waste his time on. So untold billions of dollars of corporate value has evaporated as supposedly one of the most valuable corporations in the world had thousands of highly paid computer scientists playing around with Oculus 3D headsets and video games.

I don’t know about anyone else but I have to wonder whether these geniuses maybe aren’t really all that bright. I’ve always suspected that the federal government has used its seemingly inexhaustible supply of fake money to make Amazon, Google and Facebook horribly rich monopolies in exchange for the data that they mine from us. Amazon was allowed to drive their brick-and-mortar competition out of business and Google strangled newspapers, television and every other advertising outlet. And Facebook was allowed to get a piece of that action, as was, to a much smaller extent, Twitter. But I think in the back of his mind Zuckerberg has always thought that eventually the jig would be up. Google takes care of all the ads. What is Facebook for?

So, he tried to answer that question by imagining a new world that was so flashy and fun that everyone would be glad to waste all their time just being CGI versions of themselves and flying around. The only thing is it turns out it’s really just boring and ridiculous. Who wants to sit around all day with a 3D headset on doing basically nothing?

Maybe the good news about all this is people are starting to wake up to the limits of living on-line. What is accomplished by staring through a headset for hours at a time. Is anything being produced? Is anyone benefited?

It’s probably time for on-line companies to concentrate on a subscription model for services that people actually want. Amazon at least sells stuff and ships it to you very quickly. What does Facebook do besides spy on you? Really, not very much. At least when they weren’t suspending and banning conservatives, they had some rationale for saying they were a social networking medium. Now they’re some kind of nanny state surveillance bureau to stop normal people from communicating with each other.

So, I’m interested to see what Elon Musk starts doing with his new domain after tomorrow. Right now, Twitter is even more pathetic than Facebook. But at least it knows it. It doesn’t make enough ad money to show a profit and mostly it doesn’t seem like there’s anyone actually there watching. Although it’s hard to tell because anyone I’d be interested in is shadow-banned by definition.

I’m hoping Musk starts out by unbanning everyone and eliminating the algorithmic bias against normal people. Just starting with that might cause some interesting things to happen. It might not make any people on our side suddenly stars but it might turn off the spotlight that currently shines on the Left. I’d enjoy that.

But long term we might find out whether someone smart could make money running a town square for real and without a big government subsidy to pay the bills. Somehow, I’m still hopeful that the idea of on-line communities can have some value. Maybe all that’s needed is an honest broker allowing likeminded folks to form communities that can benefit each other. Or maybe that’s a mirage and only government money keeps these things like YouTube afloat. But it’s time to find out.

One thing I know for sure is that the Metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg imagines it, as some kind of free floating Holo-deck on the cheap isn’t an actual thing that millions of people will pay to inhabit. And the idea that people will pay money to purchase virtual land in this absurd dreamscape is beyond ludicrous. To me this exposes the juvenile sensibilities of the people running these companies. The industry is deeply in need of adult supervision. Maybe Musk will show himself to be in that category.

Twitter Cries Out!

October 26, 2022October 26, 2022 photog Current Events alternative platforms, Elon Musk, social media, Twitter

Supposedly Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter on Friday. I don’t know if he is. Things seem to go back and forth on the sale so often it’s hard to say for sure. But I was interested in an article that quoted an open letter that some Twitter employees have released. It addresses a rumor that Musk is going to lay off 75% of the employees of the company.

Now that caught my attention. What a marvelous idea! Reducing Twitter’s payroll to two thousand employees sounded like a brilliant way to focus the attention of those remaining employees on doing their jobs instead of practicing social justice.

But apparently not everyone views this situation the same. The employees who wrote this open letter to Musk are not as thrilled as I am. Here are some excerpts:

We, the undersigned Twitter workers, believe the public conversation is in jeopardy.

Elon Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation. A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation…….

We demand of current and future leadership:

Respect: We demand leadership to respect the platform and the workers who maintain it by committing to preserving the current headcount.

Safety: We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. We also demand safety for workers on visas, who will be forced to leave the country they work in if they are laid off.

Protection: We demand Elon Musk explicitly commit to preserve our benefits, those both listed in the merger agreement and not (e.g. remote work). We demand leadership to establish and ensure fair severance policies for all workers before and after any change in ownership.

Dignity: We demand transparent, prompt and thoughtful communication around our working conditions. We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires.

You know, that’s a lot of demanding going on there. I have to assume they are speaking from a position of great strength. Otherwise, it might seem that they are painting bullseyes on their backs with respect to the new boss firing them.

Now the interesting thing is that they released this letter but refuse to release the identity of the signatories until some critical mass is reached. My guess is that will be never.

So, what will Musk do? Well, I can’t tell the richest man on Earth what to do. But if I could I’d tell him to change it to 80%. I’m on Twitter and as far as I can tell the algorithms are so rigged in favor of the wokesters that getting rid of almost everybody working there would be an enormous improvement.

I think the real challenge is to find the real bottom number for employment there. After all isn’t the whole point of automation and artificial intelligence that you leverage machines to do the work. Maybe the real number is one thousand or a hundred or even fifty. I think that’s where Elon should invest his time. He should figure out just how small a company is needed to run Twitter and that may tell him whether the whole thing even makes sense at all. Maybe he needs to change the “business model” for Twitter altogether and build in something more useful than just a message board for random humans.

And I think that’s what he intends to do. My guess is he thinks he can do better than Meta, YouTube and even Amazon. Maybe we’re about to find out if he’s right.

Trump Gives Google and Amazon a Thumb in the Eye

March 8, 2020March 8, 2020 photog Current Events, On-Line Article Reviews, Reviews, Trump Amazon, Anti-Trust, Google, monopoly, silicon valley, social media, technology, Trump

It’s just a drop in the bucket but it shows that these are the two tech giants that most offend the President. Hopefully it’s only the beginning of a process to rein them in. The author of the article says breaking up Amazon and Google is a bad idea. I totally disagree. Breaking them into a thousand pieces is a wonderful idea.

More Trouble for Google

August 14, 2019August 14, 2019 photog Current Events, On-Line Article Reviews, Reviews anti-right bias, Google, James O'Keefe, Project Veritas, Sara Carter, social media, technology, Vox Day

Hat tip to Vox Day for excerpting an exciting article by Sara Carter. It seems another Google insider has handed over almost a thousand pages of documents to the DOJ exposing how the company’s algorithms discriminate against conservative entities. This directly contradicts testimony made in front of Congress by Google upper management. Apparently Project Veritas is going to reveal the former insider’s identity today. Things are definitely moving in the right direction. I wonder if there is any limit on the size of the fine that can be levied against Google. ONE TRILLION DOLLARS !!!!! sounds about right. Full disclosure, I was holding my pinky at the corner of my mouth as I typed that. Eat your heart out Dr. Evil.

Seriously, it doesn’t appear that the DOJ is going to need much more evidence to move forward. It’s a matter of whether they have the will. We shall see.

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