Can't we make a very similar point about voting at the ballot box?

If you organize a national boycott with participation levels similar to elections then maybe this is a reasonable comparison

Organizing a national boycott would be a reasonable comparison to running for office.

In a capitalist system, most people primarily influence the expenditure of their dollars. In a democratic system, most people have their vote. In general the average person exerts an average-person-sized influence over the world.

Participating in a national boycott is similar to voting in an election, but someone has to set it up in the first place.

Individual boycotts are like writing in a candidate for president

no, because that's free. Anyone can show up. In America, one party specifically works to prevent people from voting.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

If you want to take the weirdness a step further, just look at the plural for "woman". When you write "women" you only change the second vowel, but when you pronounce that same word you only change the first.

Franklin was talking about freedom of the local government to tax, as in "those who surrender their right to decide who gets taxed, merely to obtain some money for immediate defence, risk losing both their political independence and their security."

Funny how a defence of representative government's authority is turned into a warning against government exercising that authority in the wrong way. :)

Things can mean more than their original context. Franklin, in fact, was full of bangers in that regard.

Can we have some of those bangers?

You may. Go to Google, or your search engine of choice, and look up the following "wisdom aphorisms Benjamin Franklin".

You may then take the contents within and whittle away the hours delving into them and connecting to the present.

But here's a little sample.

"Security without liberty--is prison."

Also, Poor Richard's Almanac may be worth a perusal. Have fun!

That is quite an angle you are describing, forcing you to roll your thumb under your palm exactly like Apple says you shouldn't do in its Mac Ergonomics document.

Resting your pinky naturally on control is quite easy because as it turns out, your fingers are not of equal length. So if you put your hand down on the keyboard in its most relaxed, natural position, most of your fingers may end up on the middle row and a shift. From there you only need to slide your relaxed hand downwards to get it in the perfect position for a ctrl-c/v action: Pinky on control, index finger on the x/c/v.

Your thumb doesn’t roll under your palm, it just moves a quarter inch from Space to Command.

And then you have to reach the x/c/v which is right of the command key. Your thumb would move to the left, your index finger moves over it to the right, and thereby your thumb indeed gets rolled under your palm.

You may want to point your ire at the right parties, because that is not a GDPR demand.

I would also question the reliability of the sources. Who said so? Are they comparing the right numbers?

For example, in 2021 Twitter didn't report monthly users, but "monetisable daily active users", a metric that Musk did not understand.

I think that 650 million of X comes from a report of the SEC, but it also includes just users of Grok, not just the social media section.

So it's a different type of user, over a different time period, for a different service.

More to the point, MAUs are a measure of reach and not revenue or business health.

Looking at this from an investment standpoint (as if, e.g., I were establishing funding requirements for a pension fund or an annuity or some other such financial vehicle), MAUs are a nice to have because they can establish a counterfactual[0] for volume, but I'd be looking at the performance of X's products relative to the financial performance of X's customers buying those products (e.g., for advertisers, things like conversion and customer acquisition cost come to mind), legal exposure (because of, e.g., CSAM distribution) and other tail risks, and also whether there's an existential risk to the liberal democratic order that enables the financial vehicle I'm working with to operate at all, among other portfolio-level risks.

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0: Well, kinda. The counterfactual actually comes in when we ask questions like, "If the reach changes, what happens to the economic performance?" Relying on MAUs as a baseline measure of the reachable population based on observation enables us to establish these kinds of counterfactuals.

If you think that something extremely basic seems something that is hard to grasp for other people, it's usually because you're misunderstanding the situation, not because other people are failing to grasp the extremely basic thing.

Nice axiom. Not true. Proof: the sibling comment.

Please elaborate, because sibling comment explained exactly what you have missed.

Macs are model of PCs of a specific brand that closes their PCs down. Continuing to treat Macs as different from other PCs is exactly what lifts scrutiny if they decide to implement notarisation on MacOS. "After all, it's not like it's a PC."