1. #2801
    Quote Originally Posted by Belize View Post
    At the rate it's going today, it'll be under 125 by closing. Somehow I don't think Elon stepping away from being CEO at Twitter will really do much.

    Well, it's already under 125... And dropping.

    Can we make it to sub 120!
    unfortunately Tesla is tied with Musk's image his twitter antics are killing Tesla's brand image since he is attacking the people buying Tesla. There's a reason Fox News is where you find my pillow and adult diaper advertisers.

  2. #2802
    Quote Originally Posted by Draco-Onis View Post
    unfortunately Tesla is tied with Musk's image his twitter antics are killing Tesla's brand image since he is attacking the people buying Tesla. There's a reason Fox News is where you find my pillow and adult diaper advertisers.
    Good time to buy Tesla cars if you are so inclined. All Model 3 and Model Y vehicles delivered before the end of the year are discounted $7,500.

  3. #2803
    Quote Originally Posted by Rasulis View Post
    No way, he hires jackasses?!

  4. #2804
    Quote Originally Posted by Santti View Post
    "As soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job".

    I kinda doubt he is in much of a hurry to find a replacement. But who knows, maybe he just can't take the heat anymore.
    What I like is the implicit self-own in that statement.
    On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

    - H. L. Mencken

  5. #2805
    Just in time for Christmas! More layoffs at Twitter!

    https://gizmodo.com/twitter-layoffs-...usk-1849924210

  6. #2806
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    Quote Originally Posted by BrokenRavens View Post
    Just in time for Christmas! More layoffs at Twitter!
    I'm starting to wonder if there is some clause in Musk's buyout contract, in which he gets his money back if Twitter collapses. Because he really seems to be interested in Twitter collapsing.

  7. #2807
    Quote Originally Posted by Rasulis View Post
    Good time to buy Tesla cars if you are so inclined. All Model 3 and Model Y vehicles delivered before the end of the year are discounted $7,500.
    The reason for this is Tesla is actually having trouble selling cars. I know someone who had either a Y or S on order. His delivery wasn't supposed to arrive until next June.

    In the meantime, he went out and bought a fully loaded large pickup truck for half the price and has been enjoying that.

    This month, he got a call that his order was ready for pickup. When he told them he wasn't going to be able to pick it up until mid next year, when his order was supposed to be due, he was told then he loses his order and his deposit and he told them if that's how they're going to treat repeat customers, he will gladly let them keep the deposit and will never do business with them again.

  8. #2808
    Quote Originally Posted by fwc577 View Post
    The reason for this is Tesla is actually having trouble selling cars. I know someone who had either a Y or S on order. His delivery wasn't supposed to arrive until next June.

    In the meantime, he went out and bought a fully loaded large pickup truck for half the price and has been enjoying that.

    This month, he got a call that his order was ready for pickup. When he told them he wasn't going to be able to pick it up until mid next year, when his order was supposed to be due, he was told then he loses his order and his deposit and he told them if that's how they're going to treat repeat customers, he will gladly let them keep the deposit and will never do business with them again.
    Er, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves and if they don't give him the deposit back, he'll find a judge who will make them give him the deposit back. Like what the fuck mafia crime methods are you lot having as "normal business practice" over there? What the hell? Change the date on me and then get all upset when I require you to stick to WHAT YOU TOLD ME? Haha, lawyers would have a field day with that kind of bullshit.
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  9. #2809
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    Quote Originally Posted by fwc577 View Post
    When he told them he wasn't going to be able to pick it up until mid next year, when his order was supposed to be due, he was told then he loses his order and his deposit and he told them if that's how they're going to treat repeat customers, he will gladly let them keep the deposit and will never do business with them again.
    Surely there has to be some kind of contract where everything is detailed (but I assume it's probably worded so that Tesla always wins)

  10. #2810
    Quote Originally Posted by Slant View Post
    Er, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves and if they don't give him the deposit back, he'll find a judge who will make them give him the deposit back. Like what the fuck mafia crime methods are you lot having as "normal business practice" over there? What the hell? Change the date on me and then get all upset when I require you to stick to WHAT YOU TOLD ME? Haha, lawyers would have a field day with that kind of bullshit.
    I dunno, that person did allude to me a couple days later he was, for the first time ever, getting a lawyer involved in a dispute. I didn't ask but I wondered if it was over his Tesla order, lol.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by diller View Post
    Surely there has to be some kind of contract where everything is detailed (but I assume it's probably worded so that Tesla always wins)
    Yeah, no clue how that works. I'd never put a deposit down on a vehicle that wasn't 100% refundable.

    Especially right now, depending on the estimated time of delivery, there are just some really friggen cool shit coming out with new vehicles.

    I really wanted a Rav4 Hybrid but due to the long delivery times, there are some other great options that are already orderable for 2023 now.

  11. #2811
    https://www.nationalreview.com/news/...gned-accounts/

    Y'all, conservatives are losing their mind that Twitter...patriotically worked with the DoD in their intelligence efforts.

    What is reality anymore?

  12. #2812
    Quote Originally Posted by Edge- View Post
    https://www.nationalreview.com/news/...gned-accounts/

    Y'all, conservatives are losing their mind that Twitter...patriotically worked with the DoD in their intelligence efforts.

    What is reality anymore?
    Reality is that you're sourcing a website that can't even get its basic design right. The top bar with some bullshit articles is covering the first line of the headline. I don't think they are credible.
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  13. #2813
    Quote Originally Posted by Slant View Post
    Reality is that you're sourcing a website that can't even get its basic design right. The top bar with some bullshit articles is covering the first line of the headline. I don't think they are credible.
    It’s the National Review and it appears to be their site.
    Now while it is a conservative publication, and recently that has become a source for concern for credible reporting, they still do hold some shred of weight in the credibility department.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Review

    Now maybe that is a site trying really hard to mimic that publication. It’s not a site I normally visit, but so far I see nothing that says it’s not them.

  14. #2814
    Quote Originally Posted by Rasulis View Post
    Good time to buy Tesla cars if you are so inclined. All Model 3 and Model Y vehicles delivered before the end of the year are discounted $7,500.
    I predict further discounts especially in 2023 it seem inventory is building up for a lot of car manufacturers.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by BrokenRavens View Post
    Just in time for Christmas! More layoffs at Twitter!

    https://gizmodo.com/twitter-layoffs-...usk-1849924210
    At the end it will be just Elon and he will fire himself.

  15. #2815
    Hey people has Lisa Barlow told you about Wendy's?



    So last night or other night I believe I was spammed by this personal account and telling my to try Wendy's. Idk how or who she is (I guess a Housewife) and thanks twitter for now personal accounts being able to spam my timeline with shit ads. The oh btw I blocked her and I can't remember this but many said as soon as she was blocked some Housewives ad popped up immediately.

    Thanks Twitter for the ad spam to me and other people who now promote/spam personal accounts. Working well!
    "Buh dah DEMS"

  16. #2816
    https://www.reuters.com/technology/e...ay-2022-12-23/

    Yeah at this point I wish this man harm. Let's remove a feature that guides people to seek help when they need it the most. What's the reason? Probably for the giggles. This just sounds evil. Someone should make sure no cats, dogs or bunnies walk in front of Musk or he might kick them.
    Last edited by Nymrohd; 2022-12-23 at 10:35 PM.

  17. #2817
    Quote Originally Posted by Nymrohd View Post
    https://www.reuters.com/technology/e...ay-2022-12-23/

    Yeah at this point I wish this man harm. Let's remove a feature that guides people to seek help when they need it the most. What's the reason? Probably for the giggles. This just sounds evil. Someone should make sure no cats, dogs or bunnies walk in front of Musk or he might kick them.
    I was just coming here to post this. I mean seriously, what is going on in his brain?

  18. #2818
    Quote Originally Posted by Nymrohd View Post
    https://www.reuters.com/technology/e...ay-2022-12-23/

    Yeah at this point I wish this man harm. Let's remove a feature that guides people to seek help when they need it the most. What's the reason? Probably for the giggles. This just sounds evil. Someone should make sure no cats, dogs or bunnies walk in front of Musk or he might kick them.
    Seems like Musk is claiming he's successfully ended suicide as justification? In the same manner as the Texas Gov claimed he ended rape when he made it illegal for people to have an abortion when they have been raped. Or maybe I'm reading it wrong?

  19. #2819
    The Unstoppable Force Belize's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by BrokenRavens View Post
    I was just coming here to post this. I mean seriously, what is going on in his brain?
    Not much, unfortunately.

  20. #2820
    The billionaire vibe shift

    It was the year that billionaires showed who they really are.

    At first, 2022 looked like it would be another celebratory year for the extremely rich. In early January, Tesla stock was trading at well over $300 per share. Its CEO, Elon Musk, had recently been named Time’s 2021 Person of the Year. He was Earth’s richest person, an exemplar of capitalism gone right, a visionary building companies that would benefit humanity and not just line his own pockets. He was so intelligent that he purportedly taught himself rocket science, so ambitious that he made the electric car sexy in an effort to stem the climate crisis.

    As 2022 comes to a close, the awe Musk enjoyed has turned into shock and jeers. Fans have defected. Tesla investors are growing mutinous (at publication time, Tesla stock was languishing around $150). Musk was even recently booed by the audience at Dave Chappelle’s comedy show. In a Twitter poll he posted over the weekend, Musk asked whether he should step down as head of Twitter, saying he would “abide by the results of this poll.” Nearly 60 percent of respondents answered yes.

    A similar riches-to-rags story unwound Sam Bankman-Fried, the erstwhile crypto billionaire who told the public he was using the gangbuster profits from a flashy but risky industry to change the world for good — making him a media darling who graced the cover of Fortune magazine in September. Other billionaires soaked in excess, buying private jets and superyachts; he was sleeping on bean bag chairs at his office and thinking of how to donate what he earned. Then, almost as suddenly as he had established himself as an altruistic public figure, his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, imploded, his billions vanished, and he was arrested on charges of fraud and money laundering, among other crimes. It turned out that his monkish pose wasn’t quite true.

    And consider Ye, once a critically acclaimed superstar often called a genius. For many years he exhibited insulting, toxic behavior, but it wasn’t until late 2022, when he made a series of escalating antisemitic rants that ended with posting a swastika on Twitter, that it solidified into a definitive reckoning. High-fashion institutions cut ties with him, and Adidas ended its collaboration with him on the fashion line Yeezy, leaving Ye no longer a billionaire, according to Forbes.

    They and plenty of other billionaires, such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have long been viewed by the public and policymakers as thought leaders, geniuses, benevolent stewards of society. The ultrarich often have intimate access to Washington power players and are lavished with positive attention in the press. But polls show that distrust and skepticism of billionaires have been building in recent years; in a Vox/Data for Progress poll last year, 72 percent of likely voters surveyed said that it was unfair that billionaires had become richer during the pandemic.

    It was against this backdrop that this year’s billionaire controversies unfurled, setting off a public reappraisal of the richest in society. It was the end of the “billionaire genius” myth, and the notion that wealthy elites should be taken at their word. 2022 marked the peak of what can best be described as a billionaire vibe shift.

    Part of the public’s captivation with billionaires in 2022 is the schadenfreude of watching the powerful tumble. This year also drove home that the ultrarich aren’t privy to greater wisdom or savvier than the rest of us, said Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Musk’s baffling, impetuous decisions and reversals at Twitter, for example, have yanked back the curtain on how Musk leads his companies. He “just revealed billionaires are not smarter than you,” Giridharadas told Vox. “They are people who happen to have a billion dollars or more.”

    The revelation that billionaires are not an exceptional group of people except for the size of their net worth marks a schism from the idea that the wealthy are demigods. Silicon Valley’s many billionaires insist that technology will transform and save the world. The infamous robber barons, like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, often remade their image, after a career of exploiting their workers, as magnanimous philanthropists.

    “I think [billionaires] internalize, ‘Look, I’m a billionaire, therefore I’m not only good at amassing wealth — I’m good, period,’” said Peter Goodman, a New York Times economics journalist and author of Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World. “Because we all want to believe that our society is fair and rewards the right thing.”

    The American preoccupation with the genius savior dovetails with the American distrust of government and other public institutions; the conventional neoliberal wisdom is that institutions would be better, more efficient, if they were all run like businesses. Yet even trust in business appears to be changing. Data from both Pew and Gallup shows declining trust in most institutions, and notably, that now includes businesses too. The Pew results showed that 60 percent of those surveyed in 2021 said they had little or no confidence in business leaders, and according to Gallup’s 2022 survey, the public’s trust in big business hit a new low since the polling firm first measured the metric in 1973.

    That’s not exactly surprising. US wages haven’t grown much since the late 1970s, and over the years, and particularly through the pandemic, increasing wealth concentration at the top has intensified conversations around excess corporate profits, labor exploitation, and the general miasma of financial precarity that most Americans exist in.

    In recent history, there has been growing public awareness of the mechanics behind billionaire wealth creation, too, and a broader “recognition that nobody becomes a billionaire without engaging in some kind of manipulation of the system,” Goodman said. “There’s lobbying, there’s a perversion of the tax code, there’s probably exploitation of labor — there’s an undermining of the labor movement. There’s a perversion of democracy.” Since Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a 2010 Supreme Court decision allowing corporations and outside spending groups to contribute unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns, an increasing amount of dark money from the ultrarich has also poured into American politics.

    People were not connecting these pain points in their lives to what the group of people called billionaires was doing,” Giridharadas said. Now, the connections are more readily drawn: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos adding $75 billion to his net worth in the first year of the pandemic is seen as directly related to the unsafe working conditions and low pay of Amazon employees in that same period.

    It’s hard to adequately emphasize the acceleration of wealth concentration in the past few years: more than $5 trillion was added to billionaires’ net worth worldwide between March 2020 and November 2021, according to an Oxfam report. That was more than the world’s billionaires had accumulated in the previous 14 years put together. Tech billionaires were the undisputed winners of the early pandemic years, raking in so much money that their huge losses in the 2022 downturn have failed to wipe out the gains. These companies’ founders and CEOs are doing fine; over a hundred thousand employees in the tech sector, however — including 10,000 at Amazon — have lost their jobs this year.

    "We're seeing more examples of how wealth comes at the expense of the vulnerable,” said Goodman.

    Take the recent labor fight rail workers waged to win better working conditions. They were poised to go on strike if their demands — which included such basic benefits as seven paid sick days per year — weren’t met. A strike would have had a sweeping impact across the entire US economy, but Congress took that leverage away from rail workers, taking a vote that forced them to agree to a tentative agreement sans sick leave. Essential workers, not the rail companies, were asked to bend the knee to avoid a catastrophic strike. BNSF Railway, one of the companies employing workers involved in the labor dispute, is owned by Warren Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway; BNSF earned $6 billion in profits last year and has been accused of holding up the contract negotiations with the union this year. In September, Sen. Bernie Sanders called on Buffett to help broker a deal, but the renowned philanthropist — who has committed to giving away 99 percent of his wealth — did not publicly comment on the dispute.

    Despite the evidence that their incredible riches are amassed at the expense of economic hardship for others, the wealthy elite rarely acknowledge their power and social position. Goodman pointed to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s declaration last year that CEOs stepped up as heroes of the pandemic. “[Billionaires] spend a lot of time telling you that not only am I not the problem, I’m the solution to the problem,” he said.

    As that narrative becomes less credible to the public, calls for change — like levying higher taxes on the rich — grow louder. In turn, billionaires have been airing their grievances, fixating on victimhood. Even Jeff Bezos, who typically has not waded into political debates, sniped at President Biden on Twitter this year over his statement that wealthy corporations should be taxed more.

    What this year has made vivid is that billionaires are as mundane as the rest of us, with some virtues but also plenty of vices, sometimes inspiring and often disappointing — except that they have billions of dollars at their disposal. And that power allows them to make stunningly bad decisions that impact millions of people.

    Giridharadas joked that he would like to thank the billionaires. “At some level, it’s valuable when these people make it so explicit. I feel like it’s a big sacrifice to educate people about the real nature of the system.”


    ---------------

    Of course libertarians are deaf, blind, and mute to any of this.

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