Any news on Zuckerberg’s Metaverse venture? That seemed to be a very big gamble that did not pay off. I read recently that they were discounting their VR headsets. I’m probably showing my age but I cannot think of a greater waste of time than the Metaverse. I’m off for a walk along the local creek to enjoy a concert of our local frogs that have been reveling in our much anticipated wet California winter.
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Musk a visionary?
Well, I’d agree, I mean, Zuckerberg never had the pioneering thought to bring a sink to HQ. 
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He seems at least as well an auto-pilot Tesla crashing into a parked firetruck.
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Totally agree. This always felt like Google Glass v2.0.
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Worse than Google Glass. This is a middle aged man realizing that life is finite. What can be done to extend it in perpetuity? Bingo. Virtual parallel universe.
(There are several stealth mode, well funded biotechs that look into delaying or reversing aging. Guess who funded those? Old money bag farts. I’m not buying into the story that aging can be reversed. But maybe the will come with something useful.)
Certainly more money wasted on metaverse than Google Glass.
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Not sure why Elon has decided to pick on NPR, but then don’t understand NPR’s response either. If they really do only receive a small portion of their budget from federal funding, why not just forgo that small portion?
That said, however, NPR’s claim requires context: it receives massive donations for which the donor recieves a tax deduction on his/her tax return. Without that indirect support, NPR’s budget would take a much bigger hit.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3945829-npr-says-its-leaving-twitter/
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Why should NPR forgo any funding based on the misrepresentations and false allegations of this creep?
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Gifts to charitable organizations and churches also get you tax deductions. And yet the Salvation Army and Baptist Church are not a “state affiliated organizations” or “government funded organizations”.
Elon Musk has simply gone full right wing conspiracy theory rabbit hole mode, and seem to be having lots of fun with it (assuming losing billions of dollars isn’t totally negating the fun factor that is).
But to get back on topic, deliberately insulting and forcing content creators to leave your platform is an interesting strategy for growing a social media company. I don’t see the logic but then I’m not a visionary genius.
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NPR’s own words support Musk’s assertion:
“ Federal funding is essential to public radio’s service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.
Public radio stations receive annual grants directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that make up an important part of a diverse revenue mix that includes listener support, corporate sponsorship and grants. Stations, in turn, draw on this mix of public and privately sourced revenue to pay NPR and other public radio producers for their programming.
These station programming fees comprise a significant portion of NPR’s largest source of revenue. The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations’ ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution.”
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Twitter’s definition of government funded media:
Government-funded media is defined as outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content.
If Twitter created a new definition called “government supported media” and deleted the part about government involvement in editorial content that would be accurate.
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perhaps Twitter’s own account should be denoted as being a (Saudi) Government funded entity…
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Salvation Army and the local church does not have an official “press”
The ‘creep’s’ house, the ‘creep’s’ rules. NPR chose to leave. (good for them). But own it, don’t make weak excuses: ‘federal support is only a small part of our budget’.
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I don’t think it is an excuse. It is a factual statement.
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sure, but its also disingenuous as it ignores all the tax-deductible donations that also support their budget. If you want to be an independet press, become independent. Otherwise, don’t complain when someone calls you out for being state-supported.
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Twitter’s own policy on state-affiliated media was that the government had editorial input, which is not the case for NPR.
Basically, Musk had the label slapped on NPR without changing Twitter’s own internal definition.
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Tax-deductible donations don’t matter because as many mentioned above, that is irrelevant to being “government-funded”; all non-profits enjoy this perk.
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What is “disingenuous” is implying that any organization that receives tax deductible donations is a state controlled.
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