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Go Get Another Piercing, Jack

Updated: Jul 20, 2023



Most of this video clip is garbage. ...Except for the part about Yosemite; Yosemite really is that awesome.


Our defense spending is unparalleled because we lead with the world's greatest military-- an American military that is perhaps the most influential force for good on the planet. Child morbidity? The only reason our country has such a high rate is because more infants are born in this country who wouldn’t have even made it to birth in any other country. Adults who believe in angels? That’s because our nation overwhelmingly believes in monotheism, which only a stupid HBO program would try to twist into being a bad thing.


The roots of Western civilization were the wellspring of philosophy, individual morality under God, law, civilization, art, science, and liberty. This all combined to create American civilization. This legacy is the true nature of American exceptionalism; America is the great inheritor of all the good that came before it. Its greatness will not be judged on statistics manipulated by popular culture and disseminated by Don Lemon or Tucker Carlson.


However, American greatness, though not lost, has certainly diminished. This has not happened due to changes in literacy and household income. Rather, this has happened, in the small degree that it has, due to abandoning traditional American beliefs.


So what’s really wrong with America? This guy:


The highly punchable CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey


Seriously. Despite concerns over monetizing massive amounts of debt, the United States continues to reign as the world’s greatest economy. I won’t bother to discuss my personal concerns about currency debasement because, for now, it’s only a threat to our economy, which is different than a clear and present danger. Suffice it to say, as it stands today, America is irrefutably the world’s greatest economy.


The United States continues to be the home of the three great growth industries-- finance, health care and communications technology.


Ahhh, but what about that communications technology? If we want to find something wrong with America, that’s definitely the place. Silicon Valley has spawned an oligarchy of greedy white men who now exert massive control over Americans’ personal lives, and our collective hero-worship of the self-made billionaire continues to allow them to operate unfettered.


The oligarchy, which is dominated today by social media giants Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, emerged from a place that gave us the most egotistical people in the world, people like Atari’s deeply sexist Nolan Bushnell and Apple’s disgustingly narcissistic Steve Jobs. (Just do a Google search for “Nolan Bushnell philanthropy” or “Steve Jobs philanthropy,” and see what you get. …Doughnuts.)


Let’s just review the story of the founding of Twitter, chock full as it is of the sort of juvenile backstabbing that Silicon Valley baby boomers gift wrapped for the present day.


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Ev Williams was young and wealthy. He had built Blogger, an easy-to-use web publishing tool that got acquired by Google, and he founded a company called Odeo when he left Google (post IPO) in 2004. Noah Glass had a product where you could call a phone number, and it would turn your message into an MP3 hosted on the internet. That was the technology that Noah brought that turned into Odeo, and he was Ev’s co-founder.


Suffice it to say that Odeo was a dud. Funny thing, though, Ev knew it was going to be a dud. He prematurely opened the Odeo kimono to a team at Apple in 2005, and sure enough, Apple announced just a couple of weeks later that they were going to put a podcasting platform on iTunes, thereby rendering Odeo’s technology obsolete.


The employees of ODEO, which consisted of some of the smelliest, nose-ringiest, hairiest hackers in the Valley, began to realize that Apple had just crushed them without warning, and they started working on side jobs. Noah started working with the young Jack Dorsey, and they presented the concept for Twitter to Ev in February, 2006. It was a system where you could send a text to one number and it would be broadcasted out to all of your friends. Noah even had a name for it, Twttr-- probably because this was back in the days when Flickr was cool-- and that of course quickly morphed into Twitter.


Ever the opportunist, Ev called a meeting with Odeo’s shareholders, who had invested approximately $5 million up to that point. He told them that Odeo wasn’t going to make it, that Apple had rendered their original technology useless, and that he felt badly. In fact, he felt so badly that he would personally buy back all of the shareholders’ stock.


Does it sound like Ev Williams conned the Odeo shareholders? Could Ev have known this would be the most influential technology of the young century and hid it while re-capitalizing the company? Yup.


According to the fourthTwitter co-founder, Biz Stone:


“Ev could see that we (Biz and Jack) were really into it, and so he took us

aside and was like, “You guys should keep working on this. There is something

to this mixing the web with SMS-- nobody else is doing that.”


Ev even aced out his co-founder Noah Glass at the encouragement of Jack. He bought back all of Odeo, then fired Noah and started doling out the stock as he saw fit, mostly to Biz and Jack. Noah Glass made virtually nothing from Twitter’s IPO.


Jack even became the CEO-- before Ev fired him in 2008, which was when Jack, realizing what a dagger it would be in Ev’s back, ran over to Facebook and begged them to hire him. The story just goes on and on like this, Ev screwing shareholders, Jack screwing Noah, Ev screwing Jack, Jack screwing Ev.


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These petulant children are our captains of industry, and it’s no wonder Justice Clarence Thomas lost his patience with them today.


The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lower court ruling that former President Donald Trump violated the First Amendment rights of critics he blocked on Twitter. While the decision from the high court was not altogether surprising, Justice Thomas’s concurrence in the ruling is getting quite a bit of attention in The Valley this afternoon.


"As Twitter made clear, the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms," Thomas said. He emphasized that Facebook, controlled by Mark Zuckerberg, has nearly 3 billion people who use it and that Google generated $182.5 billion of revenue last year. Thomas went on to say that the court will soon have "no choice" but to address how legal doctrines apply to "privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms."


No matter that Barron’s took the weekend to run with Facebook Stock Is a Buy—and Could Gain 20%; I currently see plenty of ways to make money and really don’t feel like I need Facebook or Twitter at all, in my portfolio or in my life. There are lots of ways to make money and still be able to live with yourself. And I’d rather be on Clarence Thomas’s side than Jack Dorsey’s.




For disclosure information please visit: https://www.rgbarinvestmentgroup.com/terms-and-conditions.

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