I blame the 70ish million who decided the whole voting scene just wasn’t for them.

(And the misogyny. Holy shit the misogyny)

Removed by mod

Can’t have shit in Detroit. Not even actual pics of Detroit in Detroit memes.

Start at 100% and work down from there?

1. Tax them enough that they don’t have the cash to just up and build their own personal-use nuclear powered, nation spanning infrastructure.

2. Use those taxes to build a nation spanning nuclear infrastructure that everyone can use.

Because then the fraudsters end up with all the money, buy an e-news paper, or get a game show, and end up running for president. It’s not an excellent idea to let fraud run rampant on your society.

Technically it’s a centrist, since it’s in between a left and right wing.

Yeah, in a capitalist system the difference between a smart person with a good idea and a successful person is capital.

With enough capital you don’t need to be smart or have any good ideas. You don’t even need to be a person.

Chargebacks are a huge pain in the ass and everyone involved hates doing them. The chargeback fees are supposed to be a disincentive to curb the behavior. It’s mostly automated now, but there’s a whole “accusation/response/appeal” process that businesses need to actively participate in or risk just getting money clawed back Everytime a chargeback happens, regardless of reason. This causes friction between merchants and payment processors that sometimes leads to one dropping the other. Being in a business where chargebacks happen a lot requires a commensurate amount of work. They suck. (Yes, I’ve worked in this realm. Even when it’s all automated and works well, it still sucks).

I completely agree with you. I’m not defending Elon here, but I want to expand on your conclusion.

Electric car companies from the last 20ish years:

Polestar Fiskar Faraday Karma Rivian Tesla Canoo

Only Tesla is profitable. The others are defunct, funded by private equity and operating at a loss, owned or partly owned by a different company, or are basically stillborn (not dead, but not doing much of anything). Even if his only contribution is throwing money at Tesla, that seemed to be enough to keep them going until they could stand on their own. Keep in mind, all these other companies had money thrown at them too.

I think the same goes for space x. I’ll give the bastard credit where it’s due: he didn’t stop throwing money at Tesla and SpaceX even after all logic and reason said he should stop, and now they’re successful. Maybe he had vision, maybe he got deep into a K-hole and had a vision, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else would have kept them afloat by any means possible. If anything, legacy auto, Boeing, etc were waiting for Tesla and Space X to fail so they could buy them cheap and absorb their talent and tech.

So no, he didn’t found these companies, and I don’t believe a single word of his claims that he contributed in any meaningful way to their engineering or tech, but I don’t think they’d exist in their current successful state without his money.

To put this another way, he deserves recognition for his stubborn insistence that these companies should continue to exist.

Along the same line of thinking, Twitter’s current state is 100% his doing. He was very public about exactly what he was doing after he was forced to carry through on his lies and buy it. He very publicly killed that company, and is using his money to fuel the necromancy keeping it going.

I can only hope that SpaceX and Tesla eventually find themselves out from under his influence.

They mostly hate them because people tend to do chargebacks when other people find out they made those purchases.

Or they do chargebacks in the wake of post nut clarity when they regret giving money to an OF.

American conservatism killed passenger rail. The only places you see functional passenger rail are large, non conservative cities.

Arguably twitch should do some kind of Twitch+ that’s basically OF. Given how much money it brings in though, it might be easier to convince them to do a “TwitchKids” and leave “Twitch” as the OF.

It’s not so much the lack of profits, more like the lack of kickbacks.

Worse punishments. For far less.

Whelp, that’s gonna live in my heart rent free forever. Thank you.

Nope. If you want control over what’s getting done to your software, you’ve got to take ownership of it, or you might get changes in your fixes you’re not happy with.

Not a lot of options there. You either go with an old pre-computer car or get an open source car (which isn’t really an option).

I’m not talking about the infotainment system, just to be clear. I’m talking about the software that controls the functions of the drive and safety systems. If you want an infotainment system that you have complete control over, I’d suggest putting an open source tablet on your dash

https://itsfoss.com/linux-tablets/

Sadly, it looks like most of the FOSS car infotainment projects died a few years ago.