Lovable Sidekick

Yeah I know, I was jokingly thinking rednecks with crappy yards could tell people they were “meadowscaping”. Like when Cartman calls hitting an animal with a stick “tough love”.

Skipping lunch is now “intermittent fasting”.

Not mowing the lawn is now “meadowscaping”

As a guy who has always believed in fix it til you can’t, I love this trend.

My graph shows 6 months, and like I said it’s slightly higher now than it was in November. It’s not “crashing”. Also note, this is a factual observation about a stock price, not a defense of Elon Musk or “taking his side” on any subject or in any sense whatsoever.

Tesla stock ballooned recently but it’s higher right now than it was 6 months ago, so whatever.

In principle that could happen, but realistically I doubt Musk is anywhere near enough in hock for market fluctuations to bother him. That would be more like a Trump thing.

Except not, cuz it’s money he doesn’t have to begin with. His net worth isn’t a pile of money, it’s a constantly fluctuating number based on what the rest of the world think the his various companies’ stock is worth. Same as if you own a house and you get a new tax assessment that says it’s worth $10,000 less than last year. Your bank account doesn’t skrink by $10,000. The max amount you are able to get a loan for might decrease a little, but other than that it’s pretty much a non-event.

Well, you said the little sum-up wasn’t the main point of the article, so I took the trouble to bring out a couple parts from the article that I felt say the same thing as the sum-up. Now all you can add is some lyrical bit about a finger pointing at the moon? Alright, have a nice day.

It’s not just the little sum up. Let’s look more…

“Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act.” Wrong - persuasion is the exact purpose. Persuading people to donate money, buy more shit, stay brand-loyal… That’s why oligarchs spend money on social media. Their alliances with each other are temporary, and meticulously defined to maximize their individual gain. Everything about their behavior says they aren’t allies.

“Everything on social media is designed to make you think [you’re the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs, from previous paragraph],” said Cross. “It’s all about you—your feed, your network, your friends.” Ahh, okay, so the reason so many people on social media think they’re the main character isn’t because they already thought that way and the anonymity lets them express themselves more freely. No no, it’s because social media is “designed” to make them feel that way. Well alrighty then, more conspiracy. Social media didn’t evolve like everything else, somebody had a grand design for it.

Gimme a break. What I feel is that I’ve spent enough time and effort on this.

When money-hungry people imitate each other’s successful tactics to get more money, it can look like a massive conspiracy to do some other thing. But oligarchs really don’t cooperate on that scale. They see each other as competitors, not allies. If one of them proposed locking the populace into an eternal doomscroll to keep them from fighting capitalism, the rest would think, “What’s in it for him? How is he trying to take market share away from me?” The vast majority of peasants don’t even want to fight capitalism, so it’s a non-problem. Some oligarchs might go along hoping to individually get something out of it, but they would think it was just alarmist bullshit that might benefit them.

The Trump Supreme Court has entered the chat.