The latest regressive Twitter idea is a tax on public safety agencies of nearly $50K per month to continue providing emergency notifications.
On Friday and throughout the weekend, multiple National Weather Service (NWS) accounts announced that Twitter had removed their API access, which would disrupt crucial potentially life-saving automated emergency updates. The move came as Twitter prepares to transition its currently free API service to a paid subscription model starting at an exorbitant $42,000 per month for Enterprise access. […] “Since 2014, NWS has used Twitter’s API service to auto-post the latest warnings for tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, and flash floods to Twitter feeds that are followed by emergency managers, the media, and people in the path of dangerous weather,” the NWS said in its statement.
With Twitter’s new limits, the NWS will be unable to tell which automated emergency alerts go through and which don’t get posted. This will make the NWS Twitter accounts unreliable during weather emergencies. “For every warning issued, seconds could make the difference between life and death,” the statement reads, explaining how the automated emergency alert posts have an advantage over the forecasters who also tweet from the accounts.
People clearly will be killed if they keep depending on the Nazi-infested cesspool of Twitter.
It is shaping up to repeat the tragic levels of death we’ve seen among those who foolishly depended on Tesla.
To put it another way, in 2013 when a Tesla crossed a double-yellow and killed an innocent cyclist, Elon Musk announced abruptly an “autopilot” feature would prevent this crash. Ten years later Teslas crash far more than ever, still crossing double yellow and still killing cyclists. The announcement has all the hallmarks of an Advanced Fee Fraud system that never delivers the things promised to gullible buyers.
It’s worth noting that Elon Musk often leverages fears in the opposite way you might expect. He seems to relish in people worrying about tragedy because he allegedly sees a bunch of suckers he can defraud by forcing them to pay high prices, hooking them with premature announcements and false hope. I wonder if Twitter officers right now are excitedly licking their chops under a diabolical plan of rent seeking on emergency services especially during disasters.
Musk views information systems as coinage, a payment mechanism where he desperately tries to remove governance that inhibits rampant exploitation. He fraudulently calls government, public power as a form of representation, nothing more than a corporation for introducing errors.
That $50K per month tax for public service accounts is thus, for lack of a better word when describing pot-smoking libertarian product ideas… high.
Building a simple replacement for Twitter costs far, far less. Put two or three safety agencies together and you’re looking at Twitter trying to impose an grossly unjustified speech tax of over a million-dollars a year… just so basic text messages can post to a website?
Twitter also has become the kind of website that fewer and fewer people will want to visit, making it a less reliable site with far fewer people that somehow thinks it should inflate cost through the roof.
Interest in joining Twitter has plunged [81%] in the six months since Elon Musk’s takeover
The obvious answer is to leave Twitter with extreme urgency and spend a fraction of Musk’s stupidly high tax on speech for much higher grade public service communications infrastructure.
NWS for example could turn to a simple and elegant Mastodon example set by other public agencies, as it’s become a literal elephant in the room.