Boz (he/him)

I don’t know, I think Musk might actually have an inferiority complex. He’s obsessed with himself, but he puts an awful lot of effort into trying to prove that he’s cool. But yeah, they’re both terrible, it doesn’t really matter who’s worse.

Probably the shirtless pic was a carefully calculated move to short-circuit theories about his lack of humanity, by showing that he has a navel. [/s]

…for real, though, at least the man utilizes his paid PR staff.

You’ve lost me on the precise breakdown of growth types, but I don’t think there’s any kind of growth that can be sustained indefinitely without fundamental changes to a business. If you sell widgets, you are eventually going to hit the limit to how many widgets are going to be purchased anywhere, by anyone, and then you’re going to have change something in order to grow.

And sure, I’ll accept that it could be all right to grow past the point where your business model has to change. Some businesses do spread into multiple fields and do reasonably well in all of them, although at a certain point it might start violating anti-trust laws. My point is just that “infinite growth” as a long-term strategy can go down some bad roads, regardless of how innocent the starting point is. Even a benign tumor can be life-threatening if it grows in the wrong place, and I think that can apply to growing businesses as well.

I’d say it’s mostly formatting, and what brands have to do to get them. Sponsored posts are the ones disguised as regular posts, which is easier on some platforms than others.

You mean if the stable state is to have a layer of management on top of daily operations, and the management never mixes with operations? Yeah, although to be strictly fair, someone has to do the annoying financials, and those people would not be helpful to people doing other kinds of work. I think that’s just a way of restating the problem.

I think another part of the problem is that business don’t want to have a stable state, they want to grow constantly, which becomes a problem for an increasing number of people no matter how a business is structured. It never really surprises me when ambition gets businesses in trouble, though sometimes I wonder how they manage to make the mistakes they do.

A company whose billionaire quits can usually get a millionaire replacement, without much loss of utility. CEOs get shuffled around all the time without any particular effect on the company they “run.” I think they mostly run lower executives, who run managers, who run lower/middle managers, who run supervisors who know something about what the company actually does, and run the people who do tangible work. The CEOs who get into the news for doing something dramatic to a company are the exception.

She’s not just chilling, she made a press release saying Twitter just had its most successful day (I think by user engagement, I don’t remember the metric she mentioned) right when Threads was blowing up. If she wasn’t straight up lying, she was looking at some reeeeallly well-massaged data.

…of course, there’s a market for CEOs who do that, too, but I admit, I was a little shocked. I thought she was supposed to be the Responsible Adult ™ here.

No, they’re going to start with some kind of sponsored post arrangement similar to Instagram’s, iirc, and put in ads when they get a bit bigger.

Initially, I expect you’re right, but advertisers also monitor whether users see ads, click on them, and make purchases once they click. Advertisers might not drop it as fast as users, but they will eventually go where the users go.

And, unless your Playstation is broken, less fun.

…wait, scratch, that, even if your Playstation is broken, he’s less fun.

And since Lemmy is already at, iirc, the 200,000 mark, and is only part of the greater fediverse… I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t feel lonely here.

Welcome aboard! We have beans! Also, I saw a fellow lemming giving out Lemmy lemons, so those, too. (Someone from kbin is going to have to help me out with their team’s memes…)

Yes, seriously. In the announcement, they made a point to restate the fine print that says “no refunds.”

I disagree with that definition of news. Keeping politicians accountable is certainly one of the functions of the press, but there are a lot of possible news items that don’t refer to politicians. “Winter storms hit [location]” is news, but not related to politicians unless it talks about steps local politicians are taking to prevent storm damage (which is not necessary for a good article). Or “Physicists find [particle they were looking for].” That one could be in Science rather than here, but it is definitely news, and I personally think it’s hard to shoehorn politics into a discussion of particle physics without losing track of what actually happened. Very few politicians involve themselves in that kind of research (though, to be fair, it might be news if they did).

Whether it’s possible to have a purely apolitical news forum is a different question, and I am sure it’s possible to put a political spin on almost anything if you want, but I just don’t think it’s true that news must be political to be news.