Yes, a thousand times yes--and even though I'm not familiar with who the top execs are at Twitter, I'd be willing to wager nearly all of them should go.  This takeover should be a house cleaning, and it's pretty hard to run a company the way you want it when there are still employees (especially if they have power/influence) who are loyal to the old way of doing things.  Musk must know that, so perhaps there are more departures forthcoming.

And fuck 'em all anyway.  Twitter has become way more influential in politics than it ever should have, and the layer of censorship that leans hard left on top of their power has made them fucking dangerous to America and people who want to hold onto the tiny slivers of freedom we still enjoy.

We'll see what Musk does; it should be interesting if nothing else.

As with Lauda, there comes a point where a DT member's wrongly-given negative trust starts to outweigh all the correct ones, and when that happens there's a dilemma: Does the DT community vote with their trust inclusions/exclusions to remove that DT member (and in the process reduce the weight of all the good feedbacks) or do they just allow the DT member to continue to abuse or wrongly use the trust system?

I made the decision a while back to cast my vote against JollyGood, because it seemed like he wasn't getting the message and I don't believe in keeping a person on the DT list no matter how many good feedbacks they have if they're misusing the trust system.  Obviously I was in the minority, but I'd suggest to JollyGood that he review his trust page and delete all those feedbacks that were left because of a person's posting habits or anything not genuinely related to trustworthiness.  I had to do that when the merit system came about, and it was tedious--but I did it anyway because community standards changed.

Anyway, good for you OP.  JollyGood is at least open to rethinking things.  Many members are not.

When companies get bought out, it isn't uncommon for the buyer to pay a premium over the going share price.  In Musk's case, it doesn't surprise me that the economics seem to be playing a backseat role in this whole thing--because him buying Twitter was never about turning it into an enormously profitable enterprise.  He wouldn't need to do that, nor is he the Warren Buffett type, looking for undervalued assets.

Why would any mega-rich person want to buy a media company?  Same reason Ted Turner, WR Hearst, or any similar person in history has taken control of one: it's a power play.  If you control what people see and hear about the world, you can very effectively shape their opinions about pretty much anything.

I think that's probably the real reason behind Musk's Twitter buy.  He might be an advocate of free speech and all that, but he's got to have an ulterior motive to spend that much money on something that's likely not going to be very profitable.

Debtors' prisons haven't been legal in a long, long time (at least in the US) as far as I know.  I'm too tired to look it up or even read further to see if anyone addressed that, but if Hollywood movies are any way to gauge real life (lol), they went out of style during the Wild West days.

That makes complete sense....but if that's true, what makes DeFi lending any kind of financial breakthrough?  I mean, there's been a P2P lending section on this forum for years, so that little experiment has proven beyond a doubt that collateral is essential for any loan between strangers (unless the lender enjoys losing money).

I see no way whatsoever for any crypto wizards, no matter how brilliant they are, to get around the fact that borrowers of crypto will scam if given the slightest opportunity to.  And if they report scammers to banks, credit rating agencies, or law enforcement, why even bother?

Really?  Yeah, there's a "personal messages" option where you can add members to your PM ignore list, which is different from the better-known ignore list.

OP, I'd say you've got a case here, because nobody should be leaving negative feedback because of someone's post quality--or even if they're an idiot and did what you apparently did with the scores earlier this year.  This is why I've excluded JG from my trust list.  Well actually, I did that before I completely blanked it, but the reason was that he's had a very bad habit of leaving those types of negs. 

Hopefullly JG will reconsider it, but if not you're out of luck.

What are you looking for from bitcointalk?  You're asking about all the ways you've read about and yet somehow you're still uncertain.  That tells me that you weren't driven here out of curiosity or a passion for bitcoin, especially since it's just a bizarre question in general to be asking the community of a discussion forum when they're new.

You either come here and know what to post or else you end up like so many below-average members that you can tell by the way they write and the contents of their posts they're only here to earn some money.  That describes you to a T, right?

I swear I've read someone post something extremely similar to that before.  If anyone else is getting that feeling and can do a magical search, I'd be much obliged.

Oh snips, I missed diss heah post.  Don't know where my brain's been as of late, but if you check the bargain bin at your local dollar store and see some funky misshapen glop of goo, PM me ASAP so's I can get it back in my skull.

Congrats, Frankolala!  Pleasure to assist you in ranking up and I know I'm not the only one.  But more importantly, you made the posts that earned the merits.  If I didn't think you were writing anything worthwhile, I would likely have sent you a PM like the following:

So I wasn't giving you the bitcointalk equivalent of welfare merits and the same is true for most merit-givers I'd imagine.  My point is that you played the humble role well, so let me pump up your ego for you.  Done and done.

I've got no golden dog in this fight, so for your sake I hope you're right--and you probably are; I've been watching the precious metals market since the 2000s, and all of those claims (by people who want to sell you metals) that gold/silver are great inflation hedges are just blatantly false as a general rule. 

Sure, depending on when you bought in you might get lucky and gold could be acting as a hedge, but that same statement could be true of bitcoin, stocks, or anything else.  The key of course is what price you bought the asset at.  That's always the key point.

But who knows?  If people expect gold to hedge inflation, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if they start buying it.  Me?  I'm not touching it--not that I could afford it anyway.

I would add here that the above piece of data shouldn't be viewed as a slight against boomers or slackers--I'm pretty sure if you replaced "cryptocurrency" with any asset that even comes close to the volatility and risk that crypto has and asked people closer to retirement age if they'd want that in their portfolio they'd say thanks but no thanks.  There are plenty of people in those generations interested in crypto, but when it comes to retirement, it's a whole different beast.

And I know I'm not the only one here who's thinking that crypto and managed retirement accounts are super icky to say the least.  I still don't even understand why anyone would want physical precious metals in an IRA, but maybe that's just my perpetual ignorance.

Now that's just downright mean.  If I were the sort of person who cared about tut-tutting others about their treatment of others I might have called you out on that stronger than I did--fortunately for all of us I'm an extremely narrow-sighted person who can barely peep past my own needs, so you go on and wish everything to be shat upon by birds.

All kidding aside, I'm glad this thread got bumped, because I was hoping someone would once again spark up some discussion on the state of the channel.  From the very start I was wishing it nothing but success, and it certainly did look like it had some momentum behind it (or at least creators who cared about what they were making).

Here's to the channel hopefully not being dead.  But if it is, perhaps we can make a limited edition silver coin commemorating such a short-lived nugget of gold.

To be fair, what I think tranthidung was disputing was specifically your assertion here, which you didn't provide evidence for either:

And if we're talking about the "99%" statement, I would only say that if that were true the forum would be nearly identical to Yobit's cryptotalk.org back when they were paying people to post on it.  True, I don't have any hard data either, but I read that forum now and again and I would have estimated (generously) that 1 in 100 posts wasn't of zero-value; the rest were exactly what you'd expect from the worst of bitcointalk's bounty hunting shitposters.

Yeah, could be.  I'm not sure which he's most upset about though, the yet-to-be-Legendary problem or the forum quality one.  And if he's really only here to spam (which somehow I doubt, given how long he's been a member and despite the inactive periods), the quality issue wouldn't even be a blip on his radar.

Ouch, that's harsh--but I don't live there and you could be spot-on for all I know.

Is there a major counterfeiting problem in Nigeria?  One of the points mentioned in the article is that new banknotes with enhanced security features make it much harder to counterfeit.  That is actually one tangible way upgrading a country's paper money might help the economy, but if the problem isn't rampant then I wouldn't expect to see much of an effect.  And yeah, aside from that I don't see how the new notes are of any real help to Nigerians--they're not even harming them by representing a devalued currency; they're just neutral in their impact as far as I can see.

Wonder if they've got tracking devices embedded in them.  C'mon guys, we all know that's coming if not here already.

It's pointless to have created a thread like this one in the first place--you've been here long enough that surely you must know how the trust system works and that red trust is there to stay unless the giver of it decides to have mercy on you (which doesn't look like it's going to happen in JollyGood's case, and Lauda is effectively gone forever as far as any of us know).

Since you weren't banned, you fortunately have the luxury of making a new account in good faith, and nobody's going to give you shit about that unless it's discovered and it gets new negs from JollyGood or whoever else.  I think you're just going to be beating your head against a rock, hoping for something that's never going to arrive.  

I'd also point out that your account isn't ruined because of the feedback.  You might not be able to get into a signature campaign, but you can do everything else with it.

Edit: 
Ah, I take that back about JG.  But even if he removes his neg, I don't think you're going to be satisfied with a neg from Lauda (is he/she on DT still?), nor is that one going anywhere.

I detect an overriding sense of jealousy here, apart from the legitimate complaints you have (and you do have some).  If you've been here since 2014, it's obvious why you haven't reached Legendary yet, i.e., you just didn't post enough before the merit system was implemented.  I know you know that, so I'm not sure why you brought it up--though again, I think it's jealousy and/or a feeling of being left behind because of your own inaction.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with you that there are too many Legendary members, but the prestige of that rank has definitely lost a lot of what made it such a thing to shoot for.  On the other hand, for the vast majority of newcomers it's still nearly unattainable.  It'd be nice if Theymos added at least one more rank if not several, but he doesn't seem inclined to do that, so there's not much the community can do.

The state of the forum is truly bad, but I'd say only in certain sections and only if you're not using your ignore list to alleviate some of the frustration.  But I'd also argue that (at least for me) I find it much more tolerable than it was prior to the merit system.  You remember what it was like back then, hopefully.  There were so many blatant account farmers spread out through so many sections it was unreal, and they were the lowest kind of shitposters imaginable.  Right now the quality isn't even close to being as bad as it was back then.

Yep.  I've been saying the former for years, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.  This forum is proof of it--and there have already been quite a few members who have tried to or successfully have farmed reputation to nefarious ends.  Luckily that isn't a widespread problem right now and typical members are skeptical enough to see through those attempts before they come to anything.

That's sort of what I heard as well--but that story doesn't really ring true in my ears, mainly because I've never heard of a company selling an asset just to see if (or prove that) the market for that asset is liquid.  Since this is Elon Musk we're talking about, I'm assuming there was some other reason that's not being made clear.  If it was Micheal Saylor or a CEO of some other reputable company, I'd still be skeptical, but with Musk?  Yeah, I'm not buying it.

It doesn't matter how much doge or btc he buys or sells; he knows he can move any crypto market with just a tweet--and that's a sad state of affairs IMO.

Yeah, he's a bag of shit and I tagged him--but I'm not sure how much good it's going to do, as he just registered the account and will no doubt either start over with a new one or simply ignore any negative trust.  Anyone looking to buy the services he's selling likely wouldn't care about any negs given for the nature of said service.

Still, I'll also say "good catch" to OP for finding this asshole and bringing him to the attention of the community.  His posts ought to be scrubbed from the forum if you ask me.

Ucy, I don't know if this is what you're talking about here, but I just reported two posts (this being one of them) by the same member who'd inserted links into his posts.  They're not even referral links, but I thought they were inappropriate since they had nothing to do with the thread they were in and could only be advertising.

I don't know if that's against the rules, but I don't think this forum needs any more advertising in posts.  What if that were allowed?  My guess is that new campaigns would spring up around "post links" or whatever these are called.  Anyway, if that's not what you're talking about then I apologize (but it does sound like related).

My reports were marked as "good" though obviously the posts weren't removed.  I'm not sure why that is.

Those recommendations are nothing new at all, except I've never seen the time frames broken down like that.  Usually I see that everyone should have 6 month's worth of cash set aside for emergencies, and that seems reasonable.  I'd think even dual-income households should put that much away, assuming they can afford to.

Me?  I'm not doing much of anything to prepare for a recession, but that's only because I've got so little money to work with.  But for argument's sake, if I did I'd be stocking up on non-perishable foods and other household consumables (like shampoo, soap, and the like) to hedge against inflation.  And I'd do that right now, because inflation is already getting bad.  Christ, a little thing of cream cheese is over $5, and that's outrageous!

Thanks for dropping that link.  I have my own profile bookmarked on BPIP, but I rarely browse statistics like that and I was surprised to see Lauda still way at the top (#5) long after he/she left the forum.  I guess I'd forgotten how many posts Lauda had made.  And though I don't browse the altcoin sections anymore, Amph is a name I remember well from my early days on the forum--not in a good way, either.

And not to go way off-topic, but whatever happened to gentlemand?  I imagine nobody knows, but I used to like reading his short, bitingly witty posts and he just seemed to suddenly disappear.

Lastly, it's nice that members' DT status is listed right near their usernames on that list.  Man, I should really spend more time on BPIP.  It's such an awesome site, and I'm such a neglectful retard.

I just watched a video about Zuck and the metaverse which was very critical but also very much on point in so far as it was convincing.  Apparently Meta is touting the metaverse as some kind of workplace solution, and if that's the case then I think it's so far into the overkill realm that it's ridiculous.  I don't think any businesses have been crying out for a VR solution to holding meetings or anything like that--and that's on top of the shitty quality of the graphics that have been shown so far.

This whole development process seems like it's turning into a nightmare for Meta, which pleases me greatly as I twirl my evil moustache and clap my gnarled hands together, awaiting their demise.  They are an atrocious company that deserves to fail, and the quicker the better.