It turns out that if you put Elon Musk on the graph, almost the entire US population is crammed into a vertical bar, one pixel wide. Each pixel is $500 million wide, illustrating that $500 million essentially rounds to zero from the perspective of the wealthiest Americans.

The histogram above shows the wealth distribution in red. Note that the visible red line is one pixel wide at the left and disappears everywhere else -- this is the important point: essentially the entire US population is in that first bar. The graph is drawn with the scale of 1 pixel = $500 million in the X axis, and 1 pixel = 1 million people in the Y axis. Away from the origin, the red line is invisible -- a tiny fraction of a pixel tall since so few people have more than 500 million dollars.

Since the median US household wealth is about $190,000, half the population would be crammed into a microscopic red line 1/2500 of a pixel wide using the scale above. (The line would be much narrower than the wavelength of light so it would be literally invisible). The very rich are so rich that you could take someone with a thousand times the median amount of money, and they would still have almost nothing compared to the richest Americans. If you increased their money by a factor of a thousand yet again, you'd be at Bezos' level, but still well short of Elon Musk.

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This dystopic scene of identical robocars clogging an entire block to carry maaaybe 1/4 of a busload of people, was posted by a waymo employee who thought it made his company look good.

Mike Sims:

Yep. The future desired by robocar people is that in a concert hall of 40,000 people, 40,000 private cars just slow-drive around the concert hall from the 7:30pm dropoff until the 11pm pickup time, blocking streets for a mile in every direction, so that they can be ready for their masters at a moment's notice. Think "world's biggest traffic jam, everywhere, all the time". The future!

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Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead "White Christian Civilization" in its fight against the "International Conspiracy" of Jewish bankers and the "hordes of Coloured people" they controlled. [...]

Before that, he'd been a leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. [...]

Scott's Technocracy Incorporated called for the destruction of all current governments on the continent, to be replaced by the "Technate of North America," a new entity to be run by engineers and scientists. In calling for the abolition of all existing government, the Technocrats advocated what they liked to call a "functional control system" modeled on the telephone network and other large corporations. The Technate would measure the total energy output of the continent and annually allot to each citizen a set number of Energy Certificates, which would replace money. "It will be impossible to go into debt and, likewise, impossible to save income for the future," one Technocracy Inc. brochure from the period says. "It would be impossible to sell anything." [...]

Scott also convinced members that they should begin referring to themselves by a number, not just a name. At one rally, a speaker was announced simply as "1x1809x56." Haldeman, for his part, became 10450-1. [...]

Joshua Haldeman had a weakness for men with fuzzy credentials and big-picture plans to turn society upside down. He believed in shadowy forces that were out to destroy civilization and that manipulated the masses into doing their bidding. He believed that a good chiropractor could cure any disease, but vaccines were a front for totalitarianism. And he believed democracy was for the few, not the many.

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When you finally left the Nazi Bar and closed your Twitter account, you probably did the big data export. Guess what, it sucks! The archive does not list the accounts you followed. Well, the data is technically there, which as we know is the best kind of there:

window.YTD.following.part0 = [ { "following" : { "accountId" : "1236452781755633665", "userLink" : "https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=1236452781755633665" } }, ...

There's no way to determine what the name of that account was. The URL just redirects to the login page, which also means that if they deleted their account, it's gone.

I have exports from 2019 and 2022 that are this same trash. My export from 2013 doesn't even have a list of follows.

Great job, everybody.

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Mike Masnick, writing for MSNBC:

Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the creeping.

Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election misinformation was a democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s success into the White House himself, and ... crickets. The silence is deafening.

There isn’t even a suggestion that Musk should have to divest from his ownership of X. No one expects that. There is no discussion of how Musk set up an entire account on his own platform for his own “Department of Government Efficiency” and gave it a “gray” check mark — denoting it as a verified government entity.

The silence or cheers from “Twitter Files” writers and boosters over this merging of private and public interests — which they deemed a threat to Western civilization, when it wasn’t even happening — is credibility-destroying. They were simply a convenient political cudgel, quickly abandoned as soon as an actual government-social media alliance benefited their side.

A man named Frank Wilhoit coined an oft-cited adage in 2018 that I find profound, particularly when it comes to the absurd hypocrisies of the Trump era in American politics: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

But it’s not just laws, although laws are where the stakes are highest. It’s everything, including conventions and norms.

Whatever it is you think the Biden administration did to nudge Twitter (and other social media platforms, but let’s stick to Twitter/X) to clamp down on what the administration perceived as “misinformation”, it pales in comparison to Musk taking ownership of the platform and turning it into a clear pro-Trump platform for this election. I’m not saying that was illegal, or should be made illegal. I’m saying that the entire argument over “The Twitter Files” was that the former leadership of Twitter put their thumb on the scale to comply with the wishes of the Biden administration. I’m with Masnick — I don’t think that even happened, really. But even if you buy into “The Twitter Files” thesis, it was about a thumb on one side of the scale. And then Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and dropped an anvil on the other side of the scale. The “Twitter Files” argument wasn’t that the wrong side of the scale was advantaged by a bias, it was that platform owners should scrupulously avoid any vague hint of a bias at all. But now here we are with Elon Musk serving as a de facto member of Trump’s 2.0 administration and none of the same critics even see a problem.

The hypocrisy is baked into their worldview. So however we counter it, it can’t be by merely pointing out their hypocrisy, because they don’t see it and they don’t care. My biggest quibble with Masnick’s piece is in the headline (which, perhaps, he didn’t write): the line between X and the incoming Trump administration hasn’t been blurred — it’s been erased.