therealpygon

Zoomed out, it just looks like a polygonal boob.

It’s almost like Reps erode nearly every plan for oversight before it can be passed, every single time, so that their corporate donors get exactly what they want; funding without the “difficulty” of not stealing. Same thing happened with “Obamacare” when they gutted every bit of the cost savings measures that would have limited the rates, negotiated drug prices, etc. Are people really that blind to it?

Your wording needs some work there. If you're trying to say that the "pile" would reach 1/4 low earth orbit and cover half the continental US, you're absolutely incorrect. If you are saying it is a "pile of money" that "when laid out as a single layer can cover half of the continental US" or "when made into a single stack would reach 1/4 of the height of LEO", that would be mostly accurate. For perspective, 44 billion would be 44k briefcases, or 440 pallets. That's about 17 semi trailers (single high) or 9 trailers double-stacked. As a "pile" it could easily fit in a single Wal-mart parking lot and wouldn't even be that high. Still a lot of money though.
Edit: Actually, I don't even think the continental US number is accurate. A single bill is 16 in^2. Laid out as a single layer of single $1 bills, that covers ~7e11 in^2 which is about 175 square miles, not even 1/2 of Rhode Island.

I can't imagine how something like this might exist solely to boost engagement and draw additional user accounts. I'm sure that would be incredibly shocking (or just obvious as hell with user numbers being boosted by numerous bot accounts, as well as increased user time on site). "Reddit migration? What migration? Just look at how many users are coming back."

It's comically tragic how utterly gullible people are in general.

So you're saying they are going out of their way to commit fraud on a scale that would trigger an SEC investigation of a publicly traded company, rather than you just making up the way something works? You do understand how you can have such placeholders not be included in the number of active users...right?

Woosh.

Because why would a business buy a computer for $1k that they can write off by depreciating the value of, when they can not own a less useful, less powerful one that only works when there is internet for only $100 per month instead?

(E: For perspective,) Truth Social was just a mouthy startup for spreading hate, not a nearly trillion dollar company with a lengthy history of anti-competitive activity.

It will follow the EEE flow along with their normal anti-competition tactics. First, they embrace: their interest in federation is only to give them the access to content that will make their platform not look empty, allowing them to put their coffers to work on drawing the majority share of users. Then they will extend: they will make sure their platform is compatible with ingesting other server content but others will be unable to federate their content (they will become "incompatible" later, due to "features"). Then they will extinguish competition: they'll cut off what little engagement is left with those (inbound only) federated servers because they no longer need them and the majority of the remaining users will move to their platform because that is where the activity is.

Then Kbin/lemmy will be just like all the other random phpbb instances that no one really uses. Being naive won't make things any less likely, yet there will always be gullible people who argue that "of course they will embrace the technology" and that everything else is just non-sense/wouldn't have worked anyway/blah.

It doesn't take long for the largest servers to have operating costs that they will happily allow Meta to burden in exchange for nearly any concession. The main problem is that, while Kbin/Lemmy is federated, it is federated in a manner that still places content in silos and allows single servers to "own" those spaces. It hasn't really fixed the problem yet, it just spreads the problem out over a few more servers. Until spaces are universal (every server owns a slice of that community, spreading out the community instead of just the users), it will remain ripe for EEE.

This sounds both made up but factually accurate.

Society. That is how taxes work.

Being first to take what is frequently the next logical step shouldn’t be protected from competition for long enough to make the innovation obsolete. 5 years is more than enough time to establish a brand name and recoup any R&D costs. We can raise entirely new people to adulthood in less time than current patent expirations. If it can easily be undercut by a cheaper alternative, then the “innovation” is unlikely to have been that novel or costly. A more complex innovation would be harder to create and productize which should in itself help limit competition. If you aren’t capable of productizing an innovation, you patented it early just to prevent competitors who were already working on the same innovation from being able to recoup their own costs.

People far too often buy into the “R&D is incredibly expensive” narrative that republicans and big pharma like to perpetuate. R&D isn’t generally as expensive as much as if you aren’t first, you automatically lose everything you invested. Beyond that, R&D is frequently done with the assistance public funding, then snatched away by corporations to prevent competition.

If competition is healthy, and is the self-proclaimed hallmark of capitalism, why are corporations so anti-competitive? Competition IS healthy, but it means that wealth is spread across many rather than the few who control patents, and requires continual innovation if you want to maintain your status as #1 rather than just sitting on a large, frequently purchased, patent portfolio.

The current speed of innovation in AI has shown what things could have been like if less time and money was spent trying to stifle innovation in the name of protecting profits by suing over patents. Every patent is just one more ball and chain shackling society to slow progress for profit.

At least, that’s my opinion.