Twitter's New "X" Logo Is Reminding Plenty Of People Around X.Org

[karolherbst]

Rich people don't just store the money, because of inflation, so they invest it in their own businesses or in other businesses.

They actually do, current numbers show it. The money companies have on their bank account increases faster than the raise in production and that for quite some time already. And they do so even though they get tax breaks "to drive investments", sorry, but reality disagrees here. They are stockpiling money.

I think you misunderstood my point. If I am poor and I suddenly get $5,000, $20,000, etc, nothing about what led me to my situation has changed.
1. Say I'm renting, I'm still renting and the prices of owning a home are still out of reach.
2. Say I've been having trouble making ends meet. I can pay off some debts (to rich people) and then continue to spend money at Walmart

multiple solutions 1. tax the rich and distribute it to the poor though social welfare 2. require a minimum wage which makes them live well enough or add price caps for renting, because it gets currently abused through price manipulation/pumping and "investments" (like driving prices by selling real estate to other companies for more money, without any wealth creation).

you see how in both cases the rich stockpiling money is the problem, aren't you?

And also, "what led me to my situation" you mean like rich folks not paying you enough?... You notice it yourself, aren't you...

3. Say my phone has been busted for a while, suddenly I can buy a new one. Guess where that money goes?

And why is that a problem if that wealth gets redistributed later on? Money is a tool to create circulation in the economy. e.g. for buying products. Money in itself is nothing.

There's plenty of people who have bad luck and end up poor, but most end up poor because everything is rigged against them like joining a game that everyone else has been playing for years:
1. They cannot afford legal battles
2. They cannot afford to start a business so they continue to work for others
4. If they set up their own business they have to work 12 hours a day, every day, just to stay afloat
[/QUOTE]

Please stop that nonesense. Not everybody wants or can become a business owner. Being a manager doesn't suite everybody and not everybody wants that. Everybody should have enough money to get by though. And it shouldn't matter if they are some financial investor or some poor folks collecting your garbage.

It's a stupid take and you know it.

3. They are competing against a global workforce. If you don't meet the exact requirements we can just bring in foreign workers or just set up workers in another country

ah yes, the neo-liberal scaring tactic... I'm sure the job of your supermarket cashier will be replaced by some even poorer folk living in 100000 miles away. Get real. Some jobs don't compete on the global market. Actually most aren't. Never underestimate how much goes into the local economy.

There's a lot of causes to all of the above, but it gets worse when you look at single-parent households and the effect that has on economic outlook.

Yes, they need to get more money and we have various solutions for that, but neo-liberalism is in the way, because "public spending is bad" or other nonsense takes.

No, it is that simple. Crime is directly proportional to local income inequality. A poor town where everyone is poor doesn't really have that much crime, but if half the city is rich and half is poor then there is more crime.

okay, but the core take away is, that if you live in a society with high income inequality you get higher crime, and you combat that by reducing that inequality. And there are multiple ways of that, some working better than others. But I guess we agree on that anyway.

That's called printing. They're printing money. Inflation is increasing the money supply and the only way to do that is to create more money.

Uhm.. no. Inflation is defined over purchasing power, usually by taking into account what common folks have to pay for each month. If the price of food increases, you have inflation. It has nothing to do with printing money.

We have to take a step back here anyway. Inflation can have multiple causes. The biggest are:

One is that employees have a strong position to request for higher wages (e.g. through high rate of Unionization, low unemployment rate, not enough humans to do the actual jobs needed, etc...). Here the theory is, that increasing the prime rate curbs it down by inflicting a recession and cooling down the economy by causing the rate of unemployment to increase. This also makes it more expensive for states to sell bonds as the central bank already gives higher interest rates risk free to banks and they don't have the need to lend money to states (or business even), turning down public spending and private sector investment through making it artificially more expensive. But that's really just an implication of how the current financial system is build. States could just hand out that money directly without going through that bank <=> central bank scheme, but here we are.

The other are external shocks (like we we with the Russo-Ukraine war and the drive in natural gas prices. Increasing the prime rate is the most stupid idea to do here, as you fight an external shock inflation by killing the economy, which already gets killed by the external shock.

The cause and nor the definition of inflation is money printing. It's a neo-liberal myth by saying "if you double the money supply, prices go up by a factor of 2", there is no evidence to back up that claim. The opposite even, the money supply got massively increased over time while still being in a low inflation economy. Some of was to balance out companies stockpiling their money and having to make sure the money is staying in circulation. Money is just a tool to make our modern economy happen.

Mostly wrong but partly true. Rich people weren't just lucky. When an idiot is lucky, they don't end up a billionaire. Elon, for instance, doesn't just get lucky multiple times. However, it is true that once someone "gets lucky" once, they can have more spins, but if someone tries and fails the first time, they usually can't try again because that was all they had.

Well.. being born into the right family, meeting the right people, getting proper education, living in the right place. What are you interests, people influencing you to have the right ones. That's all by chance. And quite frankly, Elon is quite the idiot, who got lucky. You have to talk with people who ever worked with him directly. It might change your view on Elon.

Also.. he has very undemocratic and sometimes even fascistic world views, soo.... not sure if Elon is the best example here anyway.

You can't do that without removing the global market from the equation, because you can do whatever you want locally and it's not going to mean a thing.

You sure can. Not everything is highly coupled to the global market. People need money to buy stuff in the supermarket and provide money for living wages there. If nobody has enough money to spend enough money, wages will be kept low. Of course that has limits based on the global economy, but that's not a reason to make sure your local economy is staying healthy.

You contradicted yourself twice in this so I'm just going to leave that there.

I think you missed the point. A model might apply in certain situation and might help to describe certain phenomenons, so they in itself are valid. But you can't just claim that's how it works in the bigger picture or make that even a "law". They are merely describing observations, they don't explain _why_ something is how it is. What if the reason for "Price's Law" is that people are in the wrong place? That one can make the observation of "Price's Law" doesn't mean it has to stay that way. Maybe it's describing a bug in our system we could fix. And those models also have their limitations and are never generally applicable.

It's called an analogy. You agree on the rules: "Whoever gets me the best value in food for my $10 gets the money". Play that game enough times and the people who get you the best value end up at the top.]

uhm.. not really. That Humans are always logical thinking beings is a neo-liberal myth and it's best to forget about that "humus economicus" nonsense. What matters more is _perception_ and other factors, but not thorough purely logical decision making.

However, to use that market idea to find the best competitor does sound promising and I'd generally agree that it works, but not for finding what gives the best value. I think it's best described by "something ends up on top", whatever that something is.

The problem is that this game requires money to play, so the real game is something like this:

Everyone gets $1 and challenges someone else to a coin toss. Eventually one person will end up with all the money, so there either has to be other games that can be played, or everyone has to take from that person.

Yeah well.. that's why we have a state who can redistribute from that one getting lucky and ending up with all the coins, no?

Never said everyone can make it. There's 12% of the population that are too low iq for the military. That's a lot of people.

Well.. the IQ is also just a factor of luck, no? Why should the people suffer from low IQ (if that even makes sense to put it like that), just because they got unlucky? And then "One of the only ways for people to have that is by starting their own businesses". Why is that? Why does everybody have to start their own business? Should every bus/taxi driver create their own business for now reason at all? That doesn't make a lot of sense. Some people are better at being business man, some are fine with just getting actual work done. We need them all. What we don't need is a society with just successful business owners.

Taxes have a chilling effect on whatever they are applied to. If I said "every comment anyone makes requires you to give me $1", then the result is that people will make less comments. The problem in the market is that there are things you have to spend money on and therefore, you have to pay taxes on.

Not necessarily. They can have chilling effects if they are perceived to high. But they can also provide more value in return in either case. What matters is what that tax is and on what it's getting applied. VAT e.g. is a tax mostly hurting poor folks and mostly ignored by rich ones. It's a bad tax. Progressive income tax however makes sure that poor folks still get most of their money, while lucky and successful people contribute back. But people still want to earn more, even if the relative tax rate goes up, because they'll make more money no matter what. It's all in the details. And progressive taxes are generally a good tool here.

Public spending is almost always deficit spending because there is little incentive to save. Why save up only to have a future opponent promise to spend that money?

Why not taxing the rich properly then? Also public spending being a deficit only depends on how to define it. If you build streets and not ask for anything to use it. It's a deficit, but it's driving your local economy. You also can spend it on social welfare and that will go into local businesses increasing your tax revenues. Deficit spending in itself isn't a problem as long as the spending doesn't outpace your local economical activities. Again, money is merely a tool. In the end what matters is how you spend it. If you spend it on social welfare policies where people win back their trust in the system, what's bad about that? At the moment nobody trust is, because rich folks get away with everything.

But then neo-liberals come around and say nonsense like "minimum wage destroys economy" or "public spending causes inflation", none of which is actually true as long as you are responsible about those policies. Those policies have positive impact on economies, they are just not very popular as they disagree with the neo-liberal ideology, which for whatever reason a lot of people buy into, because they lie to themselves to "make it" and "become rich".

"everybody is responsible for their success" is the biggest lie of modern society. It has to stop.

They'll invest, just somewhere else. Bringing it back to the game analogy. Say you're a rich person and you're playing a game called "make more money"

Are you going to play it in the USA, or in China?

Depends on many factors, like how good is the infrastructure to do business there, how much will it cost me, how easy will it be to find labor and how much do I expect to be successful with that. What sector I'd be in, as not everything can be done in the USA or China. There is no easy answer to that question. And those countries aren't even the only options here. For some business opportunities the question of "where I'd be going to do it" doesn't even come up.

[lyamc]

I don't support restricting access to voting, because it can be used as a means of disenfranchisement. I think it'd be nice to test people for baseline knowledge of the political system and current affairs, but impractical to implement in a way that's guaranteed to be fair and impartial.

It would be good if every promise and every item that politicians promise are put into a chart that can be used for comparison with each other.

And what are they?

Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX. There's a few impossibles from each of those but yeah.

The guy goes "I want to do that" and he does it.

Competence isn't binary. Past performance does not necessarily predict future results.

Past performance is a predictor of future performance but it is not a predictor of future results. If that wasn't true then no one would care about sports performance tracking, or company performance tracking, or any other metric.

It's virtually unmoderated, which was my point. Also, I haven't been on there in over a decade, but they did have an option for people to register a username, IIRC. In some boards, this practice was looked down upon.

Anonymity and bots = not good, which was my point

He can't afford for it to be a bottomless money pit, though. Also, it turns out he's not actually a free speech absolutist. He's been quite willing to censor people and views he doesn't like. He's only for free speech when he's the one being censored.

I don't know what you're talking about.

I think the ad revenue has dropped a lot faster than the active userbase, in which case that would be wrong.

Again, doesn't matter if the operating costs dropped.

Advertisers care about their image. They don't want their brand to be associated with a site or venue where a lot of trolling, abuse, or other bad behavior happens. For instance, I'd wager a lot of advertisers would never consider placing ads on a porn site, no matter how popular it is.

Porn sites are not as popular as other social media platforms.

Not exactly. What it means is the ones abusing it will be those extremely motivated to do so. There are plenty of political, corporate-backed, or state-backed operatives more than willing to pay for the privilege of mining user data from Twitter or using it to troll and spread disinformation.

Certainly, but it decreases the number of abusers. Much easier to handle.

People tend to care only about what feels true. The impulse to look skeptically even at what you want to believe is unnatural and something that most people must be trained to do. This results in a natural tendency towards supporting demagogues.

Agreed

Humans are vulnerable to numerous logical fallacies, and many are skilled at exploiting these to mislead. If you're just relying on "the wisdom of the crowd" to find truth, then your quest is doomed.

Agreed, although, do not ignore the "wisdom of the crowd" or else you risk being trampled yourself.

Only if you're considering the communication to be mostly 1-way. Where this breaks down is that it doesn't scale up to 2-way interaction around controversial issues. One side (usually the one where the real expertise resides) will tend to be at an insurmountable disadvantage.

Twitter, and public places that matter, are not typically where you have good 2-way interaction about controversial issues either. This isn't new

That's not what I'm saying. I just think that not all views deserve to be amplified by a social media platform. There is such a thing as dangerous speech or ideas.

Who decides what can be spoken about? You see the issue it presents. I actually think that the current setup of social media to form little groups in their own little internet corner is more dangerous because the crazy people meet other crazy people and they start to believe they are the sane ones. A true "public square" includes public shaming and ridicule of those ideas.

The internet is fine, and people can use it how they want, as long as it's not to commit crimes. However, a social media site is not the internet -- it's a private platform that the owner has a right to regulate (or not).

I agree

I do support freedom of speech. Among other reasons, there is the very occasional instance of someone who revolutionizes an entire field by overturning the orthodoxy.

I agree

I don't support speech when it's definitively used to incite, harass, slander, or as part of criminal activities. I don't think ideas should be outlawed, but it's also not mandatory that someone provide you their platform to spread a given idea if they don't agree with it or consider it harmful. In a way, to force someone to use their platform to spread such ideas is effectively forcing them to speak, which the US Supreme Court has long held to be a violation of 1st Amendment rights.

I would say that if I see speech I don't support then I should use my speech to say I don't support it. I agree that forcing someone to say something (or allow speech they don't want on their platform) is worse than forcing the person to not say certain things, but I don't think Twitter is being forced to allow speech.

Twitter is not a public square. If you want a government owned & run social media platform, then lobby your member of Congress to create such a thing.

I am meaning "everyone uses it" rather than "everyone owns it" when talking about it as a public square. I know that's not quite what the term means, but literally also means figuratively now so I think I'm in the clear

If you want to reduce inequality, the first thing to do is eliminate campaign donations. Make all elections publicly-funded. Once politicians don't have a reason to cater to the interests of the wealthy, they'll be more likely to support more equitable policies.

For the USA especially, that would have a huge impact I think.

The fallacy here is that income = productivity. Income can be gained by interest from government bonds used to fund tax breaks for the wealthy. Where's the productivity in that?

Income is a marker of productivity but you are correct.

Another example: two people are selling the same thing at different prices and make the same amount of profit at the end of the day. Who was more productive?
If it were the corporate world, the person with the best profit margin is the most productive.
For the rest of society, we would view the higher numbers of sales as being most productive since they as a person they likely dealt with more people, since more sales correlates with more individual purchases.

Income can also be gained by rent-seeking behaviors: cornering the market on a prescription drug that people don't have an option not to buy, or less a nefarious example of simply bidding up real estate prices.

The prescription drugs one really really bothers me since the cost of manufacturing is so low but the people will still buy it, so they can charge that much. The real estate prices being high is really just a demand thing. Everyone wants to live in the nice area. There's only so much of the good spots.

Better tax policy could truly help, here. In general, I think capital gains should be taxed higher than wages. Of course, the wealthy tend to get most of their income from capital gains, which would make that a non-starter, politically.

As much as I like the idea, in practice I think what we'll see is people moving their investments overseas. It doesn't help that they do it anyways, but they do it because it makes them more profit.

[jamesandrews]

I think Elon Musk has a long history of naming things "X"

The company he and others founded after Zip2, before it merged and became Paypal, was X.com.

Other companies include - SpaceX, xAI. He wanted to name the holding company that would purchase Tesla from the original creators "X"

Dude literally named his kid "X AE A-XII"

[jurij]

Elon is ruining this platform