Tim P gone to Toot

Cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and the Interweb thingy. Loves: music, cooking, running, hiking, diving. and @[email protected]

[Tim P gone to Toot @jalalski]

@dhh A climate disaster is what you get when you base a global financial system on the petrodollar - supported by literally pumping carbon into the environment. We can do better and that is Bitcoin on sustainable energy.

[George Monbiot @GeorgeMonbiot]

This is my farewell post. I am not deleting this account, as I don’t want to lose the archive, and I don’t want my name taken by imposters. But, for as long as Musk owns the platform, I’ll no longer use it. I’m now posting at https://t.co/0iVBaQEKGy.

Since Elon Musk bought this site, he has transformed it from one on which millions could converse as equals into his personal megaphone. Now the world’s richest man uses it to wage his class war, transferring blame for the ills of capitalism onto vulnerable minorities, boosting the grimmest and most antisocial accounts while suppressing the humane voices with whom he disagrees.

He has used X not only to subvert the election for the US presidency, but to create a role for himself in US politics which, though he has never stood for election and would not be eligible, grants him immense power over the citizens of that nation. This site has been used as a tool to help replace democracy with oligarchy.

Musk claimed, on purchasing the platform, to be a “free speech absolutist”. He is in fact a prolific censor, suspending dissenting accounts and using lawsuits to shut down free speech, while employing an algorithm to increase the reach of his own posts 1,000-fold. He cannot abide a level playing field.

He has permitted or encouraged the growth of a ghost army of bots and trolls to degrade the experience of all who disagree with him. Their task is not just to abuse opponents but, perhaps more importantly, to drown intelligent conversation with a tsunami of stupidity. They respond to data with denial, expertise with execration, insight with insult, humour with hatred and thinking with thuggery. They suck the meaning out of everything. The stupidity trends in one direction: in the service of economic power. It is a weapon used to suppress the possibility of a better world.

Many years ago, when I lived in Brazil, I learnt that the military dictatorship had actively sought to suppress educational levels in schools, as it saw a well-informed population as a political threat. A confused, distracted and ignorant population is easy to manipulate. Now this counter-educational model is being rolled out worldwide, and Elon Musk is its primary sponsor.

I stayed here long after I first considered leaving, as I believed it was wrong to cede the ground to an oligarch and his minions. But I came to see that those of us who do not subscribe to Musk’s grim project are being used as groundbait: stimulating the feeding frenzy of 15-minute, 24-hour hate that now powers this platform. We can no longer build anything of value here. Brute force – the unmediated power of money – has beaten humanity, intelligence, humour and democracy.

On Bluesky I can be the person I want to be, a better person than I am on X, where it is almost impossible not to get dragged into the mud. I feel I can be understood because I am not confronting a deliberate effort to misunderstand me. So I can speak more quietly.

There is no guarantee that Bluesky will not also one day be monetised by its owners or captured by self-serving billionaires. But for now it remains a place in which interesting and enjoyable conversations can be had, kindness can be shown to strangers and a better world can be imagined. I hope to see you there.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Devastating takedown of the financial illiteracy of Guardian’s ‘plan’ to offload the Observer to Tortoise by @olivershah, one of most respected business journalists in UK. ‘Tortoise is a thinly capitalised vanity project in search of a commercial model.’

https://t.co/fjSRHzxP5K

[Arsh Molu @arshmolu]

It’s the complete opposite here at @AfroBitcoinOrg

I’m having fun playing with my bitcoins around the city using @tando_me

[Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar]

Syrians have the right to celebrate the fall of the House of Assad without being lectured by non-Syrians about the reality of their future.

Maybe some of you need a reminder, but Assad wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill dictator. Not only did he run a police state of a frightening degree, but he also burned down his country to stay in power, destroying entire cities and killing hundreds of thousands of Syrians to keep his regime in place.

Let people who have had family members murdered, tortured, and imprisoned by the state have a moment of relief and celebration.

It doesn’t mean they’re naive about Syria’s future.

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

"And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent."

Location: Parliament Square, London (sound on)

[Ian Dunt @IanDunt]

Fuck this place, and its owner. On BlueSky you can read what people say without having to scroll down a long line of blue tick Nazis. See you there. https://t.co/YTxUPwtlBJ

[Tim P gone to Toot @jalalski]

This is an absolutely excellent assessment of the current bitcoin pump. I understand why everyone is cheering it on, but I think that this is a crunch time for bitcoin. Can it hold it together or will it go to the dark side?

[Bitcoin Isn't About You @brian_trollz]

Well you probably knew it was coming, but here I am to piss on everyone's parade: https://t.co/yIldtP9trO

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

How Musk broke Twitter and helped elect Trump
(Location: Tesla European HQ, Amsterdam)

[Bitcoin Isn't About You @brian_trollz]

A reality check for everyone cheerleading Trump as the hero of Bitcoin. https://t.co/uqsv9aFcjl

[Tim P gone to Toot @jalalski]

@PeterMcCormack Amerika is so fucked...

[Tim P gone to Toot @jalalski]

@hodlonaut Yup, already signed up for my first Russian course 😉

[Arnold Schwarzenegger @Schwarzenegger]

I don’t really do endorsements. I’m not shy about sharing my views, but I hate politics and don’t trust most politicians.

I also understand that people want to hear from me because I am not just a celebrity, I am a former Republican Governor.

My time as Governor taught me to love policy and ignore politics. I’m proud of the work I did to help clean up our air, create jobs, balance the budget, make the biggest infrastructure investment in state history, and take power from the politicians and give it back to the people when it comes to our redistricting process and our primaries in California.

That’s policy. It requires working with the other side, not insulting them to win your next election, and I know it isn’t sexy to most people, but I love it when I can help make people’s lives better with policies, like I still do through my institute at USC, where we fight for clean air and stripping the power from the politicians who rig the system against the people.

Let me be honest with you: I don’t like either party right now. My Republicans have forgotten the beauty of the free market, driven up deficits, and rejected election results. Democrats aren’t any better at dealing with deficits, and I worry about their local policies hurting our cities with increased crime.

It is probably not a surprise that I hate politics more than ever, which, if you are a normal person who isn’t addicted to this crap, you probably understand.

I want to tune out.

But I can’t. Because rejecting the results of an election is as un-American as it gets. To someone like me who talks to people all over the world and still knows America is the shining city on a hill, calling America is a trash can for the world is so unpatriotic, it makes me furious.

And I will always be an American before I am a Republican.

That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

I’m sharing it with all of you because I think there are a lot of you who feel like I do. You don’t recognize our country. And you are right to be furious.

For decades, we’ve talked about the national debt. For decades, we’ve talked about comprehensive immigration reform that secures the border while fixing our broken immigration system. And Washington does nothing.

The problems just keep rolling, and we all keep getting angrier, because the only people that benefit from problems aren’t you, the people. The only people that benefit from this crap are the politicians who prefer having talking points to win elections to the public service that will make Americans’ lives better.

It is a just game to them. But it is life for my fellow Americans. We should be pissed!

But a candidate who won’t respect your vote unless it is for him, a candidate who will send his followers to storm the Capitol while he watches with a Diet Coke, a candidate who has shown no ability to work to pass any policy besides a tax cut that helped his donors and other rich people like me but helped no one else else, a candidate who thinks Americans who disagree with him are the bigger enemies than China, Russia, or North Korea - that won’t solve our problems.

It will just be four more years of bullshit with no results that makes us angrier and angrier, more divided, and more hateful.

We need to close the door on this chapter of American history, and I know that former President Trump won’t do that. He will divide, he will insult, he will find new ways to be more un-American than he already has been, and we, the people, will get nothing but more anger.

That’s enough reason for me to share my vote with all of you. I want to move forward as a country, and even though I have plenty of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz.

Vote this week. Turn the page and put this junk behind us.

And even if you disagree with me, vote, because that’s what we do as Americans. https://t.co/eHFZ723I4H

[klos @klos]

So, @ProtonMail is holding my business emails hostage for another day. Support apologizes:

> Our developers are investigating this issue internally.

TL;DR: They're migrating the payment system, and there are side effects.

Can they unlock my account until it's fixed? Nah.

[Supertanskiii @supertanskiii]

The police? Riddled with rapists. The most prolific rapist in Britain was a senior copper.

Rape convictions are so low it’s essentially decriminalised.

Our fucking LEGISLATORS, elected MPs, accused of sexual crimes only for them to be dropped or ignored.

It is EVERYWHERE.

[Moxie Marlinspike @moxie]

Telegram messages aren't e2e encrypted. It is also a "cloud messenger," meaning that all messages live on Telegram's servers rather than the user's device.

With one query, the Russian Telegram team can get every message the French president has ever sent or received to his contacts, every message those contacts have ever sent or received to their contacts, every message those contacts' contacts have ever sent or received, etc.

It's just plaintext, there are no limits to what they can do, like use an LLM to help go through all that material and pull out the dirt, map the relationships, figure out who's keeping secrets from who, etc.

For the French politicians and cabinet members, it is kind of too late to do anything. Even if they try to delete all their messages now, the Telegram team can just mark the messages as "deleted" so that they no longer display to the user -- but not actually delete the data they retain access to.

This could get really wild.

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

Walthamstow tonight.

Will you retweet @elonmusk?

You know - just to provide your 193 million followers with a rounded picture of national sentiment in the U.K.

[Imran Mahmood @imranmahmood777]

4/- forever just come and go. And that’s sad but not intolerable. Racism is like disease. It’s always going to be there. And there’s no vaccine that will wipe it out completely. All we can hope is that when it strikes it doesn’t kill too many people.

[Tim P gone to Toot @jalalski]

‘We are not the far-right’ insist protesters setting fire to libraries and migrant hotels https://t.co/GB9r1sqavF via @newsthump

[Tim P gone to Toot @jalalski]

RT @lopp: You doxxed an open source developer who was quite clear about desiring to protect his privacy you shameless fucks @BusinessInside…

[Meredith Whittaker @mer__edith]

To be clear--we will stay to the end. We stand with the people in Europe & their right to privacy, whatever the Commission does

But we won't comply with any mandate to undermine our privacy guarantees. And noncompliance would result in our being barred from the market.