Jeff Bercovici
@jeffbercovici
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Managing editor @sfstandard. Journalist and author. Otherwise mostly dad hobbies. FAQ: burr-KOH-veh-see
Berkeley, CA
Joined July 2009
This is a complete misread of what happened. The swing away from aggressive policing of speech and truth by the platforms began well before Musk bought Twitter, mostly in response to political pressure, but also because it was costly and hard and the culture had shifted.
šŗšø JOE ROGAN: IT SEEMED LIKE THE CENSORSHIP MACHINE WAS WINNING UNTIL ELON PURCHASED X. āIt was looking pretty bleak, I would say, in terms of the direction internet censorship was headed. It seemed like the censorship machine was winning until around the time Elon purchased
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Boy youād think a country that can equip every cop like a soldier could equip every doctor like a doctor.
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An Oakland man who recorded himself getting thrown out of a Palestinian-owned cafe has been celebrated for pushing back against anti-Semitism. But a history of public outbursts raises questions about his story.
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That is some kicker quote
āHeās realizing that he could loseā: Harrisās people are confident. The Trump campaign is panicking
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Less than 24 hours after Elon pretended a swastika is an incitement to violence to make Kanye go away, Matt Taibbi is dropping the bombshell that Twitter execs make ad hoc content rulings to solve awkward political problems. Groundbreaking stuff.
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Seems like an apt moment to note it was invasion of privacy grounds that Peter Thiel, Musk's longtime colleague and increasingly his ideological ally, used to kill Gawker. That's the playbook.
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Let me get this straight: Elon Musk thought the Twitter algorithm needed to be more transparent. So now he has changed the algorithm to promote accounts that pay him while letting them hide whether or not they are paying him.
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hot take that's probably true: Peter Thiel finally relinquishing his Facebook board seat suggests he thinks Facebook's influence over politics and culture is on the wane for good.
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starting to think the olds torpedoing Bernie wasn't just about Biden's electibility
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How did Bari Weiss become a member of Elon Musk's inner circle? We'll never know.
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A bunch of VCs begged Elon Musk to let them be part of the Twitter turnaround and now they're reduced to personally hawking Twitter subscriptions like they're Mary Kay products.
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You don't see a lot of independent centrists playing the RINO card
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So sad and predictable to see the anti-tech media once again taking down hardworking crypto entrepreneurs for the ācrimeā of being successful, and money laundering.
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Getting super mad that airports give people with diabetes a place to toss their used syringes, to show I am a Serious Person
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Inflation is everywhere you look these days -- except on a can of @DrinkAriZona Iced Tea, which still advertises "Great Buy! 99Ā¢" as it has ever since 1992. How is this possible? @SamAugustDean investigates the greatest mystery in business.
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Listen up: I used to be poor like you. Then I tried. folding my arms
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Subscribe to the LA Times! We have furloughed reporters who would love to go back to endangering themselves full-time covering police brutality protests, covid-19 and way more.
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guess we know why the body panels on Teslas never quite fit together right.
i dont know what is happening here but uhhhh 3 inches is not 5 centimeters?
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Whenever a New York Times reporter describes something as a shotgun you can be like 98% certain itās a rifle
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But @sfstandard learned that Hirsch has been involved in a series of public confrontations over the past year that were captured on video. In them, he gets in shouting matches over Israel and Gaza, antisemitism and his own driving. His small children are present in several.
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A few thoughts on BAYC & Buzzfeed. The backlash isnāt surprising but it betrays deep ignorance about the function of journalism and an entitled belief that crypto must be covered on its own terms.
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@MattZeitlin "what if you did a genre story but everyone talked like Chandler Bing" was an important formal innovation.
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When Amazon went on a hiring spree in March, Harry Sentoso took a warehouse job to sock away some extra cash for retirement. He worked nine days before COVID-19 killed him. @samaugustdean has his story.
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A day after news broke that the LA Times' billionaire owner blocked publication of a presidential endorsement, the editorial page editor has resigned, @sfstandard has learned. (Reposting without link bc of throttling but see next tweet).
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Remember a few years ago when Thiel wrote a thing saying democracy was bad, and everyone was like āthatās crazy, who could be against democracy?ā And now itās the official stance of the Republican Party. You canāt say the guy doesnāt get results.
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This assertion by Marc Andreessen probably deserved a follow-up question
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There are basically 2 things normies use Twitter for: keeping up with news/sports and following celebrities. Musk is harassing the biggest news outlets (NYT, NPR, Guardian) and chivvying the biggest celebs/athletes (LeBron, Mahomes) into curtailing their activity. Genius shit.
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Facebook researchers find Instagram makes teenage girls feel bad about their bodies & contemplate suicide. Zuckerberg is briefed on the research. Senators ask Zuckerberg if Facebook has research on Instagram & teens. Zuck says research shows "positive mental health benefits."
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"I donāt want to do what the bread guys and the gas guys and everybody else are doing," Don Vultaggio, the 70-year-old, 6-foot-8 founder and chairman of AriZona said. "Consumers donāt need another price increase from a guy like me.".
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This is huge. It would appear Judd solved the mystery of how the Daily Wire is so improbably popular on Facebook and showed Facebook won't enforce its own very clear rules if it means taking on a prominent conservative whom Mark Zuckerberg has dined with.
1. How is The Daily Wire, the toxic right-wing site founded by pundit Ben Shapiro, more successful on Facebook than any other major publication?. It breaks the rules. And Facebook is going to continue to let them do it.
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AriZona keeps things lean, with a minimal marketing budget and just 1,500 employees. Don Vultaggio runs the company with his large adult sons, Wesley and Spencer. This is them.
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This is extraordinary. To threaten journalists with punishment for leaking while asking them to solicit leaks from sources is an awkward straddle. That's why serious news organizations almost never undertake them.
Scoop: The New York Times is conducting a leak investigationāa rare move for the paperāfollowing The Intercept's report on a yet-to-air episode of The Daily addressing claims of sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct 7.
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Nowhere does this story mention a major reason no one died: because the shooter was using a handgun, not an assault rifle. In other mass shootings people shot in the arms and legs have died because assault rifle bullets are so much more destructive.
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That a celebrity as big as Aaron Rodgers could say something this deranged to a CNN reporter and she sat on it for over a decade shows why the world needed something like Gawker. One can only imagine how many times she dined out on this anecdote.
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"Travel agents and industry experts say bookings for cruise sailings in 2021 are up considerably compared with pre-coronavirus data." . A few questions: .Why .Why.Why.Why.Why.Why.Why.Why.Why.Why.Why.Why.Why.What the hell.Why.
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The Bloomberg campaign broke the rules with its paid social media blitz, says Twitter. It just suspended 70 accounts, some belonging to campaign employees who were copy-pasting messages. Scoop from @suhaunah and me.
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I call major bullshit on this. @samaugustdean also found the identities of the Bored Ape founders (yeah, @katienotopoulos scooped us). It took him one hour of work. Are we to think āvery, very dangerousā criminals couldnāt have done the same?.
āReleasing their identitiesā¦was very, very dangerous for them and their families.ā @nicolemuniz, CEO of @yugalabs, the company behind @BoredApeYC speaks about anonymity and accountability after the founders' identities were revealed. Join Us:
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"Zoom did not respond to a request for comment." . When the company doesn't even try to spin it, you know it's bad.
Scoop: Zoom has closed the account of a group of prominent U.S.-based Chinese activists after they held a Zoom event commemorating the 31st anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
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The odds of being killed by a tiger in your own home are actually higher than in the jungle (if you live with a tiger)
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The author of Time's cover story about the metaverse is a venture capitalist who invests in the metaverse. That's how journalism works.
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@sfstandard Even as I tweeted out this thread @RepRoKhanna just issued his support for Hirsch.
I strongly condemn this vile act of antisemitism against Jonathan Hirsch and his son, who were refused service simply because they are Jewish. Acts of hatred and discrimination are never acceptable and are a violation of the law.
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@daweiner I Am Generally Against Killing Half The Universe, But Now I Think We Should Kill Half The Universe, by Thanos.
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Hey man, don't blame us, blame Congress. For some reason they just keep writing laws stuffing more money in the pockets of companies like ours. It's weird.
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If I were a famous writer who wanted to portray myself as a free speech martyr, Iād wait more than 10 days after quitting my job to unlock new achievements in public racism and make my former employer look impossibly indulgent.
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@sfstandard Jonathan Hirsch told @Journojoeburn he had heard "rumors" about a coffee shop that sold a drink called "Iced in Tea Fada" but didn't have any idea that was the one he was in playing chess with his son until he was asked to leave.
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Piloting tiny robots into someone's brain to attack tumors used to be a science fiction trope. An LA startup expects to be doing it in humans within 2 years, reports @SamAugustDean .
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As this was explained to me, Hollywood agencies don't care about Twitter because mostly their clients make no money there. 10% of zero is zero. Plus a client's tweets can lose them jobs.
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The job of journalists is to bring information about powerful entities and public figures into public view. Thatās it. There is no requirement that the subjects want that information made public (they often don't!) or that they be guilty of wrongdoing.
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A lawsuit filed against Snap Inc. this morning by the mother of a bullied teen who died by suicide could open a new legal front on social media companies. @SamAugustDean has the story.
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the conflicts/tensions stuff is valid but not new. this guy rode out disclosures that he hangs out with white nationalists, funds a literal slavery advocate who's also his pal, etc. - all while FB was supposedly in the thrall of woke employees. his grip on that seat was iron.
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I wrote about Sweetgreen and the massive challenge of environmentally-friendly waste disposal. Brace for thread.
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just an independent centrist who believes Democrats should compromise and cross the aisle and Republicans should close ranks and stand their ground.
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Jonathan Hirsch was told to leave the Jersusalem Coffee House on Oct. 27 after the owner took issue with his Star of David baseball cap. Video he shot of the encounter quickly went viral.
WATCH: On Saturday, a Jewish man and his five-old-son were directed across the street to Jerusalem Coffee House in Oakland while looking for a restroom. After purchasing drinks and sitting down, the cafe owner confronted the man about the Star of David on his hat, stating it was
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also worth remembering that Thiel personally disdains social media, including Facebook. he was in it this long for the opportunity to exert influence over something that play(s/ed) a huge role in shaping culture and politics.
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Has lecturing the market about what it should want, vs. making something the market wants, ever worked in history?
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If youāre mad about Buzzfeed naming the BAYC founders, your beef is with journalism. This isnāt even a close call. If youāre OK with billionaire lists and locker-room reporting but outraged today because crypto, thatās called special pleading.
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"Doctors walk off the job" is obviously sexier framing than "Off-duty doctors do a press conference" so that's the framing that took. Everyone was so busy coming up with a take that confirmed their priors that they didn't bother to ask if it actually happened.
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POINT: "We don't have a mission to burn down Wall Street." . COUNTERPOINT: āI would buy magic beans on the street from a stranger if he said they had the potential to ruin a billionaireās life.ā .
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There are 2 possibilities here: . -Cops can't reasonably be expected to challenge a shooter with a semiautomatic rifle. -The "good guys with guns" can't be depended on to do their jobs. You can argue about which one it is, but either way the implication is an assault rifle ban.
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Delivery workers are helping us avoid coronavirus exposure, but they say the companies they work for aren't doing enough to keep them safe. Another example: Just days ago, Amazon was telling drivers to keep 3 feet of distance, not the 6 feet CDC recommends.
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Jack hearting āPfizer did this to meā guy does not inspire confidence in twitterās ability to police vaccine misinformation.
why the FUCK am I seeing this propaganda from an account I dont follow and why is ceo of Twitter liking it!!?!!?!!!
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If you've wondering why Instacart workers are mad enough to go on strike, or whether it's ethical to ask them to deliver your groceries during a pandemic, or what they really get paid, this @JMBooyah piece is an absolute must-read.
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Under Trump, the U.S. highway safety agency was largely asleep at the wheel, nowhere more so than on self-driving. Even automakers are hoping Biden's NHTSA does more, reports @russ1mitchell.
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Anecdotes like this from 2018 make me wonder to what degree Muskās hard right heel turn grew out of a psychological need to have a ready-made way to dismiss criticisms. Normal people do not find it this upsetting to be challenged.
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Hirsch has said he randomly entered the Jersusalem Coffee House with his son seeking a bathroom and was unaware the shop had received worldwide press attention for its Oct. 7 menu celebrating the leader of Hamas.
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Sad to say I'm included in this layoff, and several members of my incredible team. The talent level of those who are leaving is sky-high, please read on if you want to make LAT's loss your news org's gain.
No words really. Terrible day at the @latimes .
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Elon Musk's jokes are bad. The @latimes assembled a tiger team of humor professionals to help us understand exactly why, comicologically speaking, they suck so hard. Important work from @_B_Contreras_.
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Itās purely a coincidence that Facebook finally banned Trump the day after Democrats took full control of the government, donāt even think about that.
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Lawmakers including @AdamSchiff and @mattdorsey posted messages supporting Hirsch and decrying the incident as textbook antisemitism. Dorsey even bought the same hat.
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If there's one reason AriZona hasn't raised its price in 30 years (!), it's because the company is entirely controlled by Long Island's Vultaggio family. With a combined net worth of over $4 billion, per @Forbes, they can afford to take the hit.
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Want a record of every strange car on your block, and all your neighbors' comings and goings too? Advanced license-plate readers are now part of our paranoid suburban lifestyle, reports @SamAugustDean
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@sfstandard @Journojoeburn In our interview, Hirsch said "I have to get better" at choosing his fights. He said growing up hearing about the Holocaust primed him to argue: "I was raised with the stories about the temperature rising. I'm not the most flexible person.".
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Cristina Balan was an engineer at Tesla with glowing performance reviews. Now she's about to face off against the company's lawyers before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in what could be a landmark employment law case. @russ1mitchell has her story.
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You ever think about the fact that two of the world's three richest people are building spaceships because they think our planet's going to become uninhabitable?.
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just called a farm that's doing a pumpkin patch to see if they're doing pony rides this weekend and was told they're undecided because "we've gotten really negative feedback on the woman who was doing the pony rides and that's all I can say".
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SOME!.PERSONAL!.NEWS!. I've been blown away by how quickly @sfstandard has become a force in local news, in a market where that often means national news. So psyched for the opportunity to help build it into my beloved Bay Area's best and most sustainable news source.
Excited to share that @jeffbercovici will be joining our fabulous @sfstandard team in March as our managing editor. Welcome! We also have some new reporting and editing job postings up at
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As a journalist Iām pro-leak but thereās no way to understand Elon Muskās decision to amplify the leak of his future employeesā internal communications except as an act of retaliation for criticizing him
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This by @russ1mitchell is one of the most important stories I've worked on at @latimes. Distracted driving is an epidemic that kills thousands per year. Yet automakers keep finding new ways to encourage drivers to interact with technology behind the wheel.
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Itās kind of funny that Peter Thiel thought Gawker had to die in large part because it was too mean to his peers in tech, and then he killed it, and within a year journalistic scrutiny of the tech industry increased by 10x.
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@JMBooyah The Tenderloin isn't some far-flung neighborhood. It's adjacent to SF's busiest business and tourist districts. The only thing that makes it different from them is the extreme poverty and related social ills of its residents.
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SpaceX's giant rocket blasted concrete bits over a 13-mile radius of protected wetlands because the steel launchpad it was developing "wasn't ready in time," said Elon Musk. "In time" meant to launch on 4/20, a weed joke.
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Economists say prices ending in a 9 tend to be more rigid in the face of inflation. Don Vultaggio has his own explanation for why it's so sticky: "Itās been like that since cavemen, the 99-cent price point was exciting then, and itās exciting today.".
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I'm sure these guys value their privacy and don't like having their names out there. Being a public figure is hard sometimes. But saying Buzzfeed's reporting put them in danger is a flat out lie. It makes me think this company needs more scrutiny, not less.
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writer: hey I have this story I want to do but it's kind of a conflict of interest in a way that might destroy our credibility. editor: is it also a complete mess that creepily overidentifies with some kids and sexualizes others? . writer: yep. editor: let's rock.
update on the canceled teen: turns out the writer's kid went to the same school
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this story contains maybe my all-time favorite work faux pas anecdote, about a junior ad exec who had to do a pitch in VR, to an audience that included a centaur.
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@oneunderscore__ @JeffThorpe7 perhaps more urgently, why would someone with 27 followers and no pfp pay for twitter blue?.
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@bcmerchant What if we made a gas station where, instead of having to bother with a pump, they just sprayed a jet of gas at the gas tank hole? I bet eventually a lot of it would get into the tank.
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If I ever murder someone the decor in this Airbnb is why
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Balan was working on Tesla's interior fittings team when she tried to alert Elon Musk about concerns she had about sketchy contracts and unsafe floor mats. Just a few weeks earlier, Musk had urged employees to come to him with concerns if they saw fit.
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Amazing true fact: "If you could run your car on cans of AriZona Green Tea with Ginseng and Honey" -- and let me say here it's a goddamn crime you can't -- "it would be cheaper than L.A. gas by nearly 40 cents a gallon.".
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TikTok's fate gets all the attention, but Trump's WeChat ban could be far more disruptive to the lives of the Chinese-Americans and Chinese nationals living in the U.S. who use it for basically everything. Great reporting by @suhaunah and Taylor Avery.
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@Bernstein what I see now over and over is shows that feel like they were written by writers whose primary experience of life is watching other TV shows. so many writing choices made because that's what would happen next on a TV show. Americans never did that.
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Everyone's wielding this walkout as a club to hammer their own agenda. Ron DeSantis is a monster! No, doctors are heartless elites!. The problem is, there was no walkout. No one walked off their jobs. There was just a press conference. My father-in-law was one of the doctors.
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@Jason People of good faith can disagree about whether something is a doxxing. Happens all the time. Elonās claim was he would use the 1st Amendment/the law to adjudicate such disagreements. This is very, very far from that.
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One thing this story underscores is what a huge, history-making deal it is that Facebookās top policy person is a Republican. So many of its key decisions come down to Joel Kaplan going to bat for his team.
"As Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees."
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There is a straight line from Peter Thiel calling Valleywag/Gawker a terrorist organization rather than a newsroom and Musk doing what heās doing.
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this one's not wrong per se but there are only a handful of news orgs in a position to shoulder new expenses and they already have credibility and reach to spare. certainly more than Twitter can offer. your market timing sucks, bub.
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@BrandyLJensen it was an amazing time for writers who had seen lots of movies but never read a book.
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It's good to see Bari Weiss's guest essays (this one by an a16z partner) are as rigorously edited as the stuff she does under her own byline.
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