Tag: Twitter

Starting Trouble on X

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So, after performing all of my chores and watching another installment of “Lonesome Dove” with Camera Girl, I checked on my feed on X.  And Iowahawk was going on an anti-tariff rant.

About six rants down he posted:

 

David Burge (@iowahawkblog):

Sioux City used to have a Zenith TV assembly plant. Even if our patriotic trade war kills grain exports the farmers can get new jobs soldering Quasar circuits there after the revitalization of the American Console TV industry.

 

This was an ironical jab at our lost electronics manufacturing industry.

So, I replied:

 

Orionscoldfire:

You want to know something?  I’d trade the circa 1955 economy, technology and culture for what we’ve got now any day.  At least you could tell a man or a woman by sight.  I could do without the 80” television.

 

So, he replied:

 

David Burge @iowahawkblog:

If only I had the power to grant your wish I would give a personal time machine trip immediately

 

I thanked him for this wish.

Then there were several other opinions and replies by me.  See below:

 

 

Robert Longo @RobertL37046977

  1. a) Adjusted for inflation average household income in 1955 was $50,000, today it’s $80,000
  2. b) We live 10 years longer than in 1955.
  3. c) It’s easy to tell when a man is pretending to be a lady. A man has an Adam’s apple and a deep voice.

Orionscoldfire:

I’ve seen what those ten years look like.  A massive heart attack at eighty is my exit plan.

 

 

Econymous @EHPlimsoll1

You can do that already. No need to force everyone else to live your chosen lifestyle. Cut you income by 2/3, halve the size of your house, buy a crappy car, watch classic TV and movies, refuse any healthcare developed after 1960, and live in a conservative town.

Orionscoldfire:

Sounds promising.

 

 

RobustFeedback @FeedbackRobust

Wait until your kid was diagnosed with leukemia, and instead of a 90% chance of survival, your child had a 4% chance. Or you had no ac when it was 98 degeees, with 70% humidity.Or until you had to work substantially more hours to feed and clothe your kids.

Nostalgia is stupid.

Orionscoldfire:

“Nostalgia is stupid.”  Interesting statement.  I could think of some counterexamples but then we’d just argue.  I’ll just enjoy the thought of that console tv playing Bonanza on a Sunday evening with the family all watching together and roast beef sandwiches and pastries and coffee to come.

 

 

Alboalt @albo_alt

The post-war American economic dominance isn’t coming back unless you want to put huge chunks of the world back into communism and hoeing yam fields all day.

Orionscoldfire:

I don’t want us to dominate anyone.  I’ll settle for an economy that keeps men employed and families living comfortably.  I don’t need to drive a Mercedes I can drive a Ford.  It’s not as good but it gets you there.

 

 

Manny O’Kelly @harshm1stress:

ok so you’re a white male and you’re looking to die around 65 am I hearing you correctly?

Orionscoldfire:

Well, then I missed my mark!

Manny O’Kelly @harshm1stress

there’s a lot you missed

orionscoldfire

Nothing too important.  The important things keep you busy.  Everything else is just background.

 

 

sum_dude44 @sum_dude44

ah yes polio, nuclear annihilation, 10 hr flights to go 1000 miles, lead everywhere

orionscoldfire:

Ah, those were the days.

 

 

Totally_not_a_Bot:

sorry i used to be able to afford a time machine.. but these new tarrifs put it out of range

orionscoldfire:

I’m rooting for you.

 

 

WCB @Si3rraDrive:

That’s a pipe dream. Tariffs don’t get you there, nothing gets you there. You can choose to make that life for yourself, but society won’t be structured thusly.

orionscoldfire

Okay.

 

 

A @2006ImageMacro

You’ve posted 4000 times in 3 years.  You literally could not live in an environment that doesn’t support your internet addiction

orionscoldfire

Mercy sakes!  What can I do?

A  @2006ImageMacro

Hey I’m sorry for some reason I thought you were being snide to Dave but looking now I see that I was shitty to you for no reason, my bad!

Orionscoldfire:

I was just putting in my two cents.  No problems.  Dave’s got definite opinions.  If I get on his nerves, he can tell me to butt out.  Or ban me or something.

 

So, this is all very silly.  David Burge (@iowahawkblog) is a favorite of mine.  Back during the Iraq war, he was a humorist that poked fun at our enemies and even into the Obama years his satirical posts always made me laugh.  Now he likes to identify antique cars from old family album photos and he talks a bit about Iowa basketball.  He definitely isn’t a fan of tariffs.

But it was just the sight of this 1955 television set that made me react.  I was just thinking that if tariffs had kept American industry in this country, we’d be 1000% better off than we are now.  Apparently, most of Mr. Burge’s readers disagree with me but apparently, I couldn’t resist the urge to put in my two cents.

 

Well, it was kind of fun.

 

Update:

Neil Dunn commented:

I want the USA to be as totally self sufficient production wise as possible. No more of China producing most of our antibiotics is my #1 example = some Pharma corporate
executive(s) looking to increase profits, America be damned. Google “how many American car dealerships are in Japan?”. My Google answer = zero. And not one word about tariffs, but lots of other reasons. I say raise the tariffs on Japanese imports until Japan lets US cars into their market. And no more of the 80 year freebee Marshall Plan that taxes the US to make things easy for Europe and the UK. I think Trump was too kind with his Tariff plan.
All barriers to entry from one country toward another country should be equal both ways.

 

With Caterwauling Like This Musk Must be Doing Something Right

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When your fired election trust and safety team leader starts bandying about terms like hate speech and misinformation it must mean that the government gatekeepers are squealing like stuck pigs.

And then there’s the sanctimony about what amounts to censoring the news.

“But free speech, the product of X that upholds democracy, is not a technology company or a physical thing. Speech is evolving, complicated, and sticky. It requires tradeoffs, flexibility, and tough decisions. It shouldn’t be dictated by an autocratic CEO with absolutist ideologies.”

“Tradeoffs, flexibility and tough decisions.”  What a pile of crap. She means hurting your enemies and helping your friends.  Another way of saying this is “some animals are more equal than others.”

Elon Musk’s immoral, dangerous, failing experiment in free speech

Repent, the End is Nigh!

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Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.  So if he tells me Twitter is doomed then it must be!

His proof:

“How long can this Twitter last? It must be a matter of months away from total collapse. Of course, I’ve been saying that for a year now, and I have no special insight into its financial matters. Now, however, things seem to be in a death spiral that is more than financial. It’s technical. While Musk tried his best to distract critics by blaming artificial intelligence companies allegedly scraping Twitter, a glitch in Twitter itself meant its computers were demanding data from its servers in an infinite loop. So Twitter was killing itself. It seems to be a mercy killing.”

Or maybe he’s just a typical Lefty that doesn’t want to pay eight bucks to get back his blue check mark on Twitter.  Waaa!  Waaa!  Waaa!

A Topical Quote for This Fourth of July

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I agree with this.  One of the few pleasant surprises of the last decade is Musk’s purchase of Twitter.  And as for the Orwell quote, the fraud is now well exposed.

 

Elon Musk Throttles the Throttlers

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The US inteligence agencies monitor hundreds of millions of tweets every day (a process known as scraping) to know who their enemies are and to use their friends at Google to throttle these voices on the internet.

Now Elon Musk has turned the tables on these mega-users.  He’s put the following limits on reading tweets:

– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day

Now notice, these bots reading Twitter probably aren’t even verified accounts paying Elon his eight bucks a month.

So they can only read 600 posts a day.  And if they open new shell accounts those accounts can only read 300.

The feds are going to have fit.

Good!

 

 

Tucker’s First Twitter Commentary

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Tucker’s first opinion piece on Twitter dropped today.  It started out talking about the media pretending that Russia blew up their own dam in Ukraine just like they pretended that Russia blew up the NordStream pipeline.  Then he used this as a jumping off point to show how the media feeds the American public the talking points that the regime wants promulgated and ignores anything that isn’t sanctioned.  As a case in point he mentioned the recent UFO story.  And to drive the point home he compared it to the way information was handled in the Soviet Union.

It was a nice coherent ten minute piece.  It goes without saying there isn’t an opinion piece on any of the cable or broadcast news shows that I would listen to for ten minutes because it would be too painful.

Well done Tucker.  Keep it coming.  And well done Elon.  Without you there would be no place this could be seen.

Observations on Twitter Traffic

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So I’ve been somewhat active on my Twitter account for a few months now.  I currently follow 28 accounts and have 10 “followers.”  My posts get extremely low numbers of impressions.  Typically double digits or possibly low triple digits.  But yesterday I replied to a tweet by Matt Walsh asking opinions on his documentary.  My reply garnered 36,803 impressions, 1,000 likes, forty “retweets” and twenty replies.

So what does this tell me?  I guess not much of anything.  This little blip of viral attention will have no impact on my Twitter visibility.  All it tells me is that Twitter is a megaphone and when it wants to amplify something it has enormous reach and when it doesn’t care one way or another you might as well be talking to a wall.

And maybe that’s reality.  We all live in our own little bubbles and the next bubble over is completely insulated from yours by the impervious medium we float in.  There are all kinds of experts in marketing that supposedly know how to get something noticed.  I wonder if any of it is real.  Well anyway I thought this might be interesting.

 

Podcast Musings on a Friday Morning

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So, I started my Friday as I usually do, listening to the mellifluous tones of the ZMan Power Hour podcast while I exercise.  And as luck would have it, today’s show was made up of several segments about things in the news.  I like this kind of show because he puts his slant on these topics and it gives him a chance to be amusing at the expense of the clowns involved.

For instance, he commented on the recent Banking Sub-Committee meeting that featured Senator John Fetterman.  After a few clips of Fetterman attempting to articulate complete sentences about the recent bank failures ZMan opined that the real takeaway was that the Democrats want Fetterman there because having a brain damaged hobo in the Senate further disrupts the norms of our society.  After all, if the most powerful deliberative body in the world can include a man who can no longer master the use of the definite article, “the” in his sentences then why shouldn’t the country go for decades without negotiating a budget for the federal government.

And I get his point.  But the reward for me is listening to someone who can interlard his speech with a description like “brain-damaged hobo.”  There’s an eloquence, a style there.  We have to enjoy our lives and having someone as witty as that provides the opportunity.  And he has a number of these witticisms.  Some he borrows from impeccable sources.  He has taken Oscar Wilde’s phrase, “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at …” and used it to very good effect on a number of occasions.  He invented that excellent trope “Xirl Science” where he reads from the published papers of mostly female practitioners of usually social sciences like “gender studies.”  The contents are sometimes hilarious in their use of pseudoscientific jargon and obvious lack of rigor or even coherence.  But my all-time favorite ZMan-ism was when he called David French an obsequious rumpswab.  It doesn’t get better than that.

I don’t always agree with all of the ZMan’s conclusions.  But his analysis of what’s going on is usually very insightful.  And his podcast is extremely well done.  The audio quality is good.  His thought process is clear and well enunciated and there is enough humor with the often-distressing message about our times to keep us from gagging on the medicine.

So, he did a segment on Tucker Carlson’s banishment from Fox News and their replacing him.  And while discussing this he made the point that eliminating Tucker Carlson may have also been a business decision based on the reality of cable news economics.  Not enough people are getting their news from cable channels to make it a lucrative business.  The highest rated news channels get one or two million viewers.  There are YouTube channels that get ten times that.  If Fox News pays Tucker Carlson millions of dollars a year, then there isn’t that much left for their bottom line.  And they would prefer to pay chump change to some kid to read off the teleprompter instead.  And I think he’s right.  They’ll be “retiring” all the high salary pundits and hiring kids who just want a job.

And that makes sense.  If a place like Twitter will give a megaphone to independent contractors like Tucker Carlson it may not be long before cable news is a thing of the past.  And that’s good.  The news channels have been shown to be a racket with their sham objectivity and their willingness to lie for the powers that be.  In a sense what I do is no different from what the pundits perform.  The only difference is the economics.  And honestly, that seems to be shifting too.

The ZMan provides a quality product.  The value proposition he provides is very equitable.  He provides entertainment and valuable information.  That’s much more than you get from many cable news shows.  So, it was a good lesson I took away.

Now to figure out a way to make it pay!