This week, our top comments on the insightful side both come in response to Elon Musk’s plans to turn X into a financial app, and the question of whether you’d trust him with your money. In first place, it’s an anonymous comment:
Given how well that Elon complies with consent decrees, I suspect his compliance with banking regulation will give his financial service ambition a lifetime of about 5 minutes.
In second place, it’s Harold Koenigsaecker with a detailed rejection of the idea:
As a retired banker, I do not trust any app, bank, or computer with all of my financial information. My finances are scattered, ie: I have no banking app on any phone or portable device, it is only on my home computer behind a firewall and password protected. I have 3 banks, all isolated from each other. This in case the bank fails or is hacked. Almost all purchases are done by credit card, not a debit card as there is a federal law that says the credit card company must reimburse fraud transactions. An ATM debit, even if fraud, gets an “oh well” from the deposit bank. Musk will guarantee nothing and any loss you take will be your loss without any support from Twitter.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Somewhat Less Anonymous Coward on our post about how community notes are great, but not a replacement for trust and safety:
Somehow i get the feeling that the fundamental shortcoming of the community notes – that it’s a voting system that cares little (or possibly not at all) about actual authority on any subject – is exactly why it’s pushed by Musk as an end all be all solution. The chaos that he and those he allies with are creating is essentially a mob rule, one they hope to be leading. This system is exactly that – a large enough crowd can drown anything, regardless of how truthful is is.
Next, it’s an anonymous comment correcting the common misconception that DMCA notices are entirely issued under penalty of perjury:
Quoting the third link: “The ‘penalty of perjury’ language appears to only apply to the question of whether or not the person filing the takedown actually represents the party they claim to represent — and not whether the file is infringing at all, or even whether or not the file’s copyright is held by the party being represented.”
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is another comment from Somewhat Less Anonymous Coward, this time passing on someone else’s joke about Twitter’s precipitous decline in value:
I wish i could take credit for this one, but it’s from Ars Technica forums: “Like the dipshit in charge, that valuation seems high and untrustworthy”.
In second place, it’s Pixelation with another comment about X as a financial app, and specifically Musk’s claim that it will be so powerful “you won’t need a bank account”:
Because there will be nothing left to put in it.
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ll close things out with a one-two punch from that same post, again directly addressing the question of whether you’d trust Musk with your money. First, it’s Toom1275 with an answer:
I wouldn’t trust him with my car.
…which prompted Stephen T. Stone to offer up a rejoinder:
I wouldn’t trust him with his car.
That’s all for this week, folks!
