The guy that privately owns twitter claimed to be some sort of free speech absolutist.

For once this is not someone getting confused about the first amendment but simply calling out musk’s hypocrisy.

Here’s an article from a year ago that covers the same idea and includes a bunch of direct quotes from musk about his free speech views that his fans love to idolize while his actions bear no resemblance

https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-twitter-hes-betrayed-it-again-again-opinion-1794478

I’ll save you a click with one pull quote

This time, it’s after he clashed with a BBC reporter over the prevelance of “hate speech” on Twitter. “Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don’t like to say things you don’t like,” Musk said in a clip since shared across the internet, including by mega-stars like Joe Rogan.

So musk using “free speech” to defend hate speech and then censoring this because it doesn’t align with his politics is of course legal, but hypocritical, and logically implies that hate speech does align with his political views or at least isn’t as offensive to him as this dossier.

A hacker, who has been quite active recently and goes by the alias ‘grep,’ has leaked over 12,000 (11,802) call records with audio, which they claim belong to Twilio customers.

11,802 is not, in fact, over 12,000.

The article goes on to assess this is 3.37% of all Twilio accounts because there are 350,000 accounts.

As of 2024, the company has over 350,000 active customer accounts, which means the latest alleged leak is approximately 3.37% of the total accounts.

Let’s say despite their struggle with math earlier that this 350,000 figure is correct, they seem to think that each account does exactly one phone call.

Further, the image posted makes it pretty clear that the guy hacked someone using twilio and that 3rd party that got hacked had simply recorded their own call information. So this article should be something like “person using twilio got hacked, had made ~12k phone calls with twilio service”

This articles analysis is extremely sloppy and nonsense to the point of seeming like it’s AI generated

It’s true that consultants seem to love these “extremely clever” plays. I imagine if Harris wins, you’ll see a lot more “let’s switch the candidate out and get an excitement bump like that thing that worked that one time.”

I looked for data to try to quantify the demographics of Green Party voters and couldn’t find much, if you’ve got some I’d love to see it.

I suppose the thing that stands out to me is how Republican and Democratic programming works. Both parties enforce norms and spend a lot of time programming at their constituencies. I believe that trump was able to take over the Republican Party against the wishes of the party leadership because he intuitively understood this. He sorta hijacked this programming because he knew the dog whistles and catch phrases and was willing to shamelessly iterate and say whatever would work. Here’s a fun article about him thinking “drain the swamp” was a bad line and then embracing it wholeheartedly when it worked https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/2016-trump-explains-why-he-didnt-like-the-phrase-drain-the-swamp-but-now-does/2016/10/26/4a2f257a-9be0-11e6-b552-b1f85e484086_video.html

This programming is where we get political tropes from. It’s why if you see a thumbnail about “woke dei bullshit” you can be pretty sure that’s going to be a conservative complaint video.

When I look at the Green Party messaging, if they are trying to attract republicans as much as democrats, it’s weird. The comms are full of Republican third rails like social justice, the carousel says that the Green Party is the birthplace of the green new deal, the rail against corporate power. Now this isn’t to say there wouldn’t be anyone on the right that wouldn’t be cool with these ideas, but to frame it in these terms goes against decades of Republican talking points and programming.

It’s not like support for the green new deal is something of a question on the right. They have been upset about the non-green new deal since FDR passed it, and I’ve never seen a single Republican politician or talking head have anything but disdain for the green new deal. As you point out, they didn’t promote it because they like it, but as a way to knee cap AOC which backfired.

If you start with the belief that I hold that the Green Party has no chance of winning, which seems like a reasonable starting point. Every voter that would have voted for Harris and instead votes for stein is net 1 vote for trump and every voter that would have voted for trump and instead votes for stein is net 1 vote for Harris.

I scroll around gp.org and it doesn’t have anything that looks like it’s aimed at attracting Republican voters. I do see a lot of stuff that seems like it could be aimed at attracting leftist and crunchy democratic voters. That’s not a criticism or anything, if that’s where their policy values are, that’s perfectly fine. But I just struggle to really think there are a ton of people about to vote for trump that are going to end up on that website and think “oh wow, finally a party that actually wants to work towards social justice.”

As someone that is left of the Democratic Party I recognize a lot of the things on this website, it’s a lot of the things the democrats have been promising and failing to deliver for a long time. Perhaps because so many of the talking points and policies are so familiar and feel so comfortable to me as someone who is disappointed in the democratic party’s failure to deliver on these things I find it hard to believe that republicans are looking at this site and thinking “I’ve found my people”

If the republicans thought that the Green Party was going to be an attractive option for their voters in 2000 they certainly adopted an odd strategy

https://web.archive.org/web/20050912163938/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20001027/aponline115918_000.htm

Hoping to boost Ralph Nader in states where he is threatening to hurt Al Gore, a Republican group is launching TV ads featuring Nader attacking the vice president.

The ads by the Republican Leadership Council will begin airing Monday in Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington, all states that are part of Gore’s base and where Nader is polling well. The group plans to spend more than $100,000 at first and hopes to raise more over the weekend.

It’s not some crazy conspiracy either, the Republican Leadership Council explained the ad buys in this way

The Republican Leadership Council, a centrist GOP group, has been helpful to Bush before, airing ads during the Republican primaries critical of challenger Steve Forbes. Several members of the RLC board were early Bush supporters.

The RLC ads will run initially in four markets: Eugene and Portland, Ore.; Madison, Wis., and Seattle.

Mark Miller, the group’s executive director, said the ads are partly a response to commercials being run by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, which argue that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.

“Ralph Nader doesn’t believe that,” Miller said. “Ralph Nader and his supporters are not backing down because they believe Al Gore has had numerous broken promises.”

Miller added that some of Nader’s supporters have bragged that Nader has never had help from “soft money,” the unrestricted donations used by parties and interest groups.

“We’ll put an end to that,” Miller said.

You might notice how the answer doesn’t really make any sense, a pro Bush Republican PAC wanted to run ads in Gore strongholds promoting Nader with the argument that Gore broke numerous promises. Why? Because groups said that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. It sounds like they are trying to counter this but then their actions fully support that idea.

Maybe some republicans could be persuaded to join the greens, but I pay attention to how people spend their money because talk is cheap. If republicans spend money to promote Nader in states they want to win, they obviously think they’ll poach more gore voters than Bush voters, it just doesn’t make sense otherwise.

I actually agree that the Green Party is staking out policy positions that both parties have abandoned, but I still think the abandoned policies they’ve picked up to champion are still more attractive to left leaning people than right leaning people.

Unless the WSJ has been taken over by liberals, owned by famous liberal Rupert Murdoch, they seem to be following a similar path now https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/jill-stein-republican-support-harris-voters-5a194ebf

So while I imagine some of these policy positions might be attractive to some disaffected republicans, republicans seem to think it will be useful to promote them. The only way that makes any kind of sense is if they think it will attract more potential Democratic Party voters than republican.

I thought we were just casting aspersions for fun 🤣

It’s a nice straw man you’ve erected and if I did any of those things you might have some kind of point.

I didn’t attack anyone, I pointed out that this alternative plan is unlikely to bring about any substantive change either.

So you keep telling people to sit at home and I’ll wait for the glorious revolution, maybe if you shout down people and tell them to read more theory that’ll help. The American people are super into reading political theory.

So if you look at the policy positions of a Green Party, it tends to align more closely with voters who would traditionally vote Democratic.

Here’s their own blurb from their website

We are grassroots activists, environmentalists, advocates for social justice, nonviolent resisters and regular citizens who’ve had enough of corporate-dominated politics. Government must be part of the solution, but when it’s controlled by the 1%, it’s part of the problem. The longer we wait for change, the harder it gets. Don’t stay home on election day. Vote Green!

Considering that the Republican Party uses the phrase “social justice warrior” as an insult and to this day field candidates that reject climate change, the idea that Republican voters might choose to vote for this party over their own seems less likely to me.

The Green Party is politically left of center, so it seems reasonable to me that the people that would vote for them would be more likely to come from the group of voters more likely to cast a ballot for Harris than trump.

The most poetic death for trump would be to suffer a stroke at one of his rallies. The stroke hits and he begins to mix up words and blather nonsense. He can sense something is wrong but his bigly words are not working, he tries to tell his faithful what’s happening.

The meschia and windmilths are shooo shlaaaaad

He slurs out, those weren’t the words he wanted, but with neurons misfiring the most used pathways are trying to help. He spends minutes, all recorded for history, dying in front of his bored onlookers unable to ask for help. His years of word salad and lies have finally achieved an awful goal, no one can tell his brain is broken. For this boy that cried wolf a million times, finally the fangs of an enemy he can’t bully or bribe have sunk in deep, years of kfc fried chicken grease now blocking bloodflow to his brain.

It’s only been a few minutes, the crowd awaits some applause or laugh line, but for trump the time feels like an eternity. The pain is increasing, the fear all consuming, he collapses and dies there.

A fitting end to the man whose greatest fear was that people would realize his weird incoherent ramblings were a con.

They banned single use a decade ago. My family switched to reusable bags. A lot of stores realized that they could sell “reusable” plastic bags, thicker single use bags, and get around the law.

So the rollout went like this, stores gives you free plastic bags your entire life, about a week where people were told “no plastic bags, you gotta bring your own,” then the plastic bags were back but a bit different and the store would sometimes charge you a bag fee (although a lot of places effectively waived the fee). This meant that no one adapted and they continued doing what people had always done with their plastic bags, sone reuse, mostly discard.

People always complain about unintended consequences of laws, I’ve always gotten the impression from those people they would prefer we don’t make the laws. I would love it though if we could iterate on our laws faster than, pass the law, every company finds a loophole a week later, close loophole after a decade of unintended consequences.

And yea, having reusable bags is not difficult.

That’s not how evaluating a plan works.

Here, I’ve got a cure for cancer, shove pinecones up your ass.

You can determine that this plan is bad without having to have a cure for cancer.

I don’t know, if Iceland were doing something that would impact me, I don’t know if I have a good enough grasp on Icelands political system to make good strategic decisions.

The idea that because someone is hurt by something they would automatically know the best course of action is sorta nonsense. If a bear attacks me and a biologist that studies bears shouts advice at me, going “you fucking chauvinist colonialist asshole, the bear isn’t even attacking you, stay in your lane!” is probably a bad course of action.

America, one of the most powerful nations on earth, has one of the weirdest compromise ass backwards electoral systems on earth. I imagine a lot of Palestinians trying to survive right now aren’t having a ton of free time to brush up on the mechanics of the electoral college and the nuances of electoral politics. When the people they trust to do that in their name tell them “adopt a strategy that means your voice will be completely silenced” it might be a good time to assess whether or not they got that one right.

No you see they have a plan.

1. Convince people likely to vote for Harris to throw away their votes by voting 3rd party or staying home
2. Suppress democratic turnout while leaving Republican turnout untouched.
3. Spoil the election while haughtily going “oh not voting is a vote for trump somehow” and snorting to themselves. Completely blind to context.
4. Have the things they claim to really super duper care about like genocide in Palestine continue under trump
5. Also have vulnerable groups in America, like legal Haitian migrants, be the target of Republican vitriol.
6. (step missing)
7. Glorious proletariat revolution against the most powerful military and militarized police force to ever exist

Its brilliance is in its simplicity!

I’m sure some reporters talked to him. There are some pretty amusing clips of him just sorta standing around awkwardly.

There is a non-zero chance that some reporter told him about the Taylor Swift endorsement. I truly hope he responded with the grace and elegance he had on display all night 😂

He’s currently standing awkwardly in the spin room hoping that people will talk to him.

Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.

Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

Dogs instinctively recoil and begin snarling at MAGA supporters so the idea that a strange dog would willingly come up to them for pets is unthinkable.

All six of his supporters await the news

That’s a shitty way to treat someone, sorry that happened to you.

If you have storage space though and look for good deals, ironically a Costco membership could help with your finances, and you could have cheap hotdogs again.

The trick to Costco is that, while everything they sell is normally of very good quality, only some of it is a good deal. I’ve yet to encounter particularly bad deals at Costco, something where I feel like I’ve been ripped off. That said, some things are a better bargain than others.

If you happen to have storage space, which isn’t the case for everyone, you might find that by purchasing some items in bulk and storing them that you end up saving more than the membership costs.

Some items that I find Costco normally has stable good pricing on that you can easily calculate out if it would make the membership worthwhile

• eggs
• milk
• toilet paper
• paper towels
• soda
• beer (depending on brand, there’s normally something that’s a good deal but it might change month to month)
• fruit
• meat (depending on cut, ground beef is normally a pretty good deal if you have freezer space for a few pounds)

Although if your bad experience with the food court person put you off that’s reasonable too. Anyways, just thought I’d share what I’ve found having a Costco membership for like a decade, I didn’t really want to pay upfront to go to a store but when I sat down and ran the numbers I came out ahead. But I have enough budget flexibility and storage space to make that viable and so I’m in a privileged position in that way so your mileage may vary.

Anyways still sucks that the person decided to belittle you, no one deserves to be treated like that. Hope your days ahead are filled with nicer people.

This is nowhere near the average price

https://gasprices.aaa.com/?state=CA