Can he though?

He might never have been a billionaire at any point, he’s always been leveraged to the gills and bleeding money. Plus the fraud, making up fake names to call up Forbes to be declared a billionaire, and the fact he is constantly hustling (while campaigning and terminally old) for a few more million

Most of all, there’s the fact that billionaires are only billionaires on paper. Their wealth would shrink massively if they can’t time the sell-offs at the right time, most commonly known billionaires could keep the title selling for 10 cents on the dollar, but Trump isn’t near that level no matter how you slice it

Mar a Lago is estimated at like 200-300m, his apartment is worth tens of millions, and pretty much everything else he only owns a partial stake in and is likely leveraged even if it could be cleanly sold. And who knows what other debt factors in - he’s had a lot of failed projects and a lot of unpaid invoices

None of them are proof, but altogether it doesn’t paint the picture of a billionaire - a billion dollars is a truly unthinkable amount of money, and I can’t see a showoff like him not collecting things to brag about

I don’t think he has it, or if he does it’d be a close thing

And to leave you with a final thought - Trump owns 3 guns, one of which he risked his freedom to hide away. What kind of billionaire both cares about guns enough to break parole (even if the prison risk was very unlikely), but also doesn’t have a small armory professionally decorated just to show off?

No, he should throw a bag of money at a deaf proctologist who doesn’t use social media.

If he had a say over the operation, after 3-5 years they’d end up shoving a robotic arm up there so he could tweet faster

Aside from not being Trump (which is a great trait), I know next to nothing about Harris. I know she’s a former prosecutor, and might be able to identify her if she showed up at my door

What else should I know about her (and should I be hopeful of her pushing any meaningful progressive policies)?

More than that - you’re supposed to fight it in court. Protesting doesn’t do shit, you have to use the system against itself

There’s one fact I like to drop on people before discussing my views on Gaza

The average age is roughly 18.

Just let the sink in… It doesn’t mean there’s no one older, but 1 60 year old would offset 3 infants, more than 6 10 year olds, or a whole classroom of teenagers. Humans frequently live to that age without medical care and living in terrible conditions, if you die earlier then that, there’s probably a specific cause you can point to

Nope, it’s cetirizine, the other one you mentioned doesn’t work, and Benadryl makes me sleepy. Looking at the bottle, it doesn’t even list rashes or anything - just seasonal allergies lol

Or he could do what most of the county wants, and give us meaningful change. That’s what has been drawing voters since Obama, that’s why Trump won in the first place - Hillary is the status quo incarnate

But we’ve been strung along for way too long, he needs to take a stand and make some enemies

I have allergy meds on me at all times, because sometimes I break out in hives for no reason.

One day, I’m sneezing like crazy from seasonal allergies, and my coworker asked if I tried any medicine. I suddenly realized allergy medicine works for allergies

John Oliver even did a thing on this, people don’t care about “metadata”, but ask them if they should be able to see your dick pics and people care a lot more

Well, apparently they’re seeing your dick pics

Madison, a former employee, basically described a terrible working environment. She was bait and switched on several aspects of the role, and only found out after giving up her US visa and moving to Canada. She was constantly berated, sexually harassed in many ways, made to manage an only-fans despite making her discomfort known, the expectations of releases were unreasonable and her coworkers sabotaged her by knowingly setting her up to release videos with incorrect facts. Taking any of this to HR, or even Linus himself, ended with her being laughed off or told to stop being a tattle tale

All this is alleged and there’s a lot more, but the kicker to me is the fact she cut her leg bad enough to need staples, because going to the ER was the only way she felt she could get badly needed time off.

That’s what seals it for me - either she’s a borderline nightmare, or the working situation is far beyond the pale. Add in the fact the pressure to release, inaccuracies, and public glimpses of Linus’s attitude, and I’m inclined to believe it’s more true than false

Is it really whack a mole if within minutes of federating, a simple automated tool could add them to the list with no human involvement?

I wouldn’t say so, at that point it’s a trivial technical challenge

The big deal is they didn’t admit to having accidentally auctioned it (the alternative is they knowingly did so despite requests to return it), and in the same breath talked about how they offered recompense (implying that it came before the video calling them out when it didn’t), and firing back on justified criticism as if they’re the victim

Oh, and all while claiming they own up to their mistakes even in the face of consequences.

They bulldozed a smaller company without a hint of empathy. He doesn’t consider that maybe the price could have come down or the performance (when properly used) would be worth it to a small segment of overclockers - even in the supposed mia culpa Linus takes several shots at the product he basically buried

Why? It’s easy to get a list of federated servers, in JSON no less. In an afternoon I could build a tool to block them as they come, testing included

Is it though? That amount of money is meaningless to a company, which Linus loves to talk about these days.

The problem is, he shit all over a startup company, failed to return the prototype after multiple requests, then when called out on it offered to pay for it and phrased his response to make it seem like he hadn’t spent months ghosting them until another YouTuber brought attention to the issue.

Shitting on it - fine, he’s extremely harsh every time it’s brought up, but he can have his own opinion. I think it’s a bad take, he doesn’t even entertain the idea that they might lower the price, improve it to work on multiple models, or maybe this fits a high end niche for PC ricing - it sounds impractical now, but maybe a few sales would be enough for them to make a more practical version

But whatever, I can get over that. The fact that he didn’t say “we had some miscommunication in my team, this is our bad, we’re having growing pains and I never would have sold it if I knew they wanted it back. We reached out to them to make them whole, but we’ll do better” is pretty incriminating.

That’s not owning up to their mistakes - either they knowingly ignored requests to give it back, which is fucked up, or someone made a mistake and he made excuses instead of owning up to it, and tried to quietly bury the problem and fire back on the guy who called them out

You have a point, but it’s kind of like people who resist all gun control due to the second amendment despite the shootings going on

Yeah, if life continues on as-is, the argument has little merit. On the other hand, in the case of the second amendment, we have fascists making a credible move for control.

In the case of archiving DRM content, if we have a cataclysm (which seems increasingly likely), then having drm-free, ideally unencrypted, content sitting on random hard drives might end up making an enormous difference in a lot of lives

Or even without a cataclysm, just general enshittification might end up destroying the gaming and media industries - passed around old games might be the seed for the next generation of tech-heads. I started my path by jailbreaking my PSP so I could use custom web browsers and homebrew - spreading these after the Internet is locked down by efforts like kosa and WEI (and whatever comes next) might be the spark that motivates the next generation

To your point, they published a method that could be replicated in less than a week in basically any college or lab in the country.

Fraud makes little sense here - this screams exuberance to me

It’s not just content though, essentially it’s bots.

The problem with bots isn’t just spam, a social network is defined by the interaction among the community…I think that’s a fair call.

I might be up for having unscripted LLMs on the network, but repost bots are like a weird smell… It’s not that big a deal individually, but it’ll make the community noticably worse

I think this is incredibly important, in some ways this instance in particular, but no one can ask for more from you

Nothing to apologize for - you’re not leaving everyone high and dry, you’re hanging in there and working through what sounds like a personally difficult transition.

So I’ll just say this: thank you for taking the responsibility thrust on you with due seriousness. Most people don’t understand the importance of community, and what we owe to it.

When you hand it over, do it knowing your part is done, fully and completely.

And if you need to step away, step away - do the exchange from a distance, and if things fall through and no one you trust is there to take it, that’s okay too.

I think there’s a certain amount of responsibility when you find yourself at the center of something, but that responsibility only goes so far - if you need to step down and the community won’t step up, that’s not on you

New leamurs, if you’re looking around and feeling lost or disappointed, don’t give up on Lemmy just yet.

Numbers are growing fast, apps are getting better by the day, and the fediverse is even more diverse than Reddit

If you’re looking for a starting place…

1. <Lemmy.world> is the biggest and most neutral server. It’s got lots of content, although discussion about the future is dominating the conversation, so you’re going to see the same posts at the top if you don’t change the sorting algorithm. People are up for a friendly debate, but it stays civil. Moderation is good, occasionally you’ll see removed comments but you’re not likely to run into it unless you’re being an ass

2. <Sh.itjust.works> is big and full of shitposts. They’re trying out direct democracy… In theory (not a week in and the admin called for a second vote against defederating exploding.heads…i think being very conservative with defederating is good, but it doesn’t show a ton of commitment to the idea). It’s pretty wild over there, but not in a bad way

3. <Pawbs.social> furries are always a big presence among early adopters, and they’re really welcoming. They don’t care if you’re a furry so long as you don’t judge them, and I’ve always found them welcoming

4. <Beehaw.org> is what I’d describe as a safe space. Highly moderated, strict codes of conduct…I can see the value in it, but that kind of vibe makes me uncomfortable. It makes me feel like everyone is on edge, waiting for the next fight. A lot of little like it though, more power to them I guess

And obviously we know why we’re here.

Despite what people say about it not mattering where you go, it definitely does matter. Account switching is the one feature every app prioritized - I’d use it until you find a home. Personally, I’m going to start looking for a smaller instance, I think it’s important for the fediverse to grow, but I like the feel of the Internet back in high school when it was just getting big, when you made an effort to connect because there were so few people on any given social media

No matter what it is you’re looking for, you can find it or build it here - and because of the structure of it, no one can take it from us as long as the dream stays alive