Good news, bad news, ongoing weirdness
Twitter class of 2022
If it happens, it happens on Twitter. If it happens on Twitter, yes, it can leak out and be very, very real.
Arizona landscape. Rimrock, Az. the center of the state, also known generally as the High Desert.
No one seems to understand it. Elon “Elmo” Musk, owner of Twitter is wandering around with a mallet and banging around on Twitter to see what is loose and what needs breaking. A 44 billion dollar acquisition he seems only to want to crash. An unfortunate concept for either internet or autos. The speculations aren’t wild, but the behavior seems irresponsible. Twitter People are resourceful and in many ways a bastion of democracy loving people battling Russian propaganda no matter the delivery method with truth, funny memes, snark and a bit of more serious ratf*cking.
One of Musk’s first demand/begfest that ended today was the sale of “blue checks”, the small verification seal along side “verified accounts”. For only 8 dollars a month. ($7.99) Some bought and more didn’t. The verification generally insures that an account is who it says it is, which is really important. It took a few nano seconds for a general response across the platform. One high profile problem but not the only one was Kathy Griffin “impersonating” Elon Musk. She was permanently banned (and yet back). Hard to say just how many Elon’s there were. All using his personal profile picture and a nice blue check. Maybe his name was a little misspelt or a character added. Enough FAKE Elon’s to anger someone other than his mom. Ultimately Griffin, along with so many Elon trolls, put an end to the program for now, or perhaps Elon had other reasons.
In Eli Lilly’s world, the blue check fakery had some repercussions less comedic and is the best illustration of why social media, seriously, needs controlling. If in any universe one thinks of social media as a cute pet that is always snuggling and looking for treats, the confusion that can be made online and in apps is real and has real effects. Stocks plunged after a fake Lilly account announced that insulin is free. While exciting, it was not true, coming from a faked account.
What the business direction for Musk is unclear and could it be as simple as owning the libs (not really). Could it be that owing all the hardware and software might be helpful to Musk’s business in a different way. Musk has been thought to use “pump and dump” schemes concerning crypto. But… it’s illegal and although similar to propaganda, has direct monetary results applied to companies, so, speculation must remain as such for now.
Screenshot of the official Arizona website. Note the numbers of voters in the last line.
In Arizona election news, Arizona seems to be supporting the party of Democrats. A red state, historically, Az has been going purple for a while. Thoughts are Californians fleeing stuffed highways and more affordable retirement housing are bringing their cash from the sale of their California home and their blue with them. Still awaiting counting of mail ins to be counted.
Two things jump out as oddities. One, it seems voters split the ticket on votes. Mark Kelly is leading Edwards for the US Senate seat by a far greater margin that Hobbs is leading Lake for the Governorship. The other is the voter registration and the horrid less than 50% turnout of registered voters. This, is apparently what people are talking about when they say voters historically stay home in non presidential years. So, this also means that a whole lot of people likely received ballots and simply filed to fill them out and drop them in a box or in the US Post.
It’s a radically changing world and we should be looking for new solutions to all problems. Realistically, unless there is some kind of new blood introduced into the political situation, we are pointing towards a 2024 with Biden and DeSantis going head to head and Trump as an independent. No joke. Olberman lays it out in his podcast and there’s little room to think, “This can’t happen'!” We need to think of new directions and be willing to trudge through some new mud to get there.