I mean, honestly, "HN voting is poorly designed and is vulnerable to coordinated action" would explain it fairly neatly; I'd totally buy that this is incompetence vs malice by the operators.
With respect, if you believe that then you likely aren't aware of the true scale of the problem. Unless they follow /active, /new, and have [showdead] on, people have very little idea just how much is getting suppressed here... And it's a lot, especially this past year, and extremely especially if it's anything Musk-related.
Another reason most people here don't know how bad it's got is because posts about the poor flagging system are explicitly disallowed. For that reason alone it's quite hard to say this is purely incompetence with no malice.
You can ask mods for permission to make a post about the flagging system - you'll be denied. People have tried making posts about all the Musk stories being flagged - flagged by moderation. Every time. Quickly.
So, no. Unfortunately, this isn't a case where I'm happy to assume incompetence. Look at where we're at - a post about the richest tech bro in the world enabling mass creep shit of the worst kind remains flagged for hours. That's absolutely vile - and far from a rare event here.
I mean, there's "this is a risky investment in rockets and stuff" and then there is "this is a risky investment in rockets and stuff which has for some reason been coupled to a CSAM generator". One is going to be more off-putting to investors than the other.
I'll actually steelman against this. For the majority of SpaceX holders, they really do not care. They did not sell their stock when SpaceX started taking NRO contracts. They didn't grow a conscience when Starlink usage was limited in occupied Ukrainian territory. They aren't protesting rocket launches that put Israeli satellites into orbit, aiding and abetting a likely genocide of civilian populations. You think fake child abuse imagery will finally burst the dam? After all of this?
Like I said; some companies revel in their bad PR. Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, all of their misdeeds are untouchable. SpaceX isn't going anywhere, and everyone holding their shares knows it.
I mean, even for the completely amoral investor, they would still have to think about whether the magic abomination generator will _make money_. I would imagine that the Venn diagram of people who think that SpaceX will make loadsa money and those who think that whatever-the-hell Twitter is now will make loadsa money is not a circle.
Making money off of the proverbial Torment Nexus is SpaceX' specialty. They do it pretty well; the US fed loves their rockets, and feeds them contracts with margins that could finance a dozen suburbs. If X can pull off a similar pivot to being a federal lapdog, it would cost SpaceX investors nothing and expand the scope of their service contracts.
FWIW, I agree that "fake CSAM isn't real risk exposure" is a pretty crazy line to steelman. But we live in crazy times. SpaceX is an antifragile asset, and anything that enhances it's risk is seen as a value-add. This is exactly what America deserves for refusing to regulate our monopolies while they play the futures trade like Candy Land.
In the US, lawyers may generally work on a contingency basis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_fee), and many lawyers and law firms also do pro bono work. That is, almost certainly no-one has paid for the lawyers, though if they manage to recover anything the lawyers may be due a cut.
They're usually not good at hair, for whatever reason. There's Hitler, of course, but also look at just about any American far-right figure these days for some _truly_ unhinged facial hair.
Offhand, the only totalitarian I can think of who seemed to put in a particular effort on hair is Stalin. But in general, stylish clothes, mad hair seems to be the rule.
Does anyone ever actually pay that for them, tho? I've got the QC Ultras; looks like they cost me 331 euro _with VAT_. Apple's RRP is usually the actual sale price, but IME the RRP for Bose stuff at least is generally pure fantasy, with actual prices being significantly lower.
EDIT: Currently they seem to be 350EUR inc VAT on Irish Amazon; Amazon is making it difficult for me to see the US price and I'm not interested enough to fight with it, but I'm guessing that there's a similar level of discount.
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