Microblog Memes

Meta screwed up health care so badly that now they'll never get their legs re-attached. /s

Could you include the link next time? (Or is it only lemmy.world that doesn't show it?)

Edit: found it, if anyone else wants it: Meta Lays Off Thousands of VR Workers as Zuckerberg's Vision Fails

Imagine if he put that amount towards affordable housing in Cali

What's really dumb is that VR could actually take off if it was done correctly, but these billionaires can't think of literally anything besides profit so they base the entire model around that and just expect people to want it. If he had dumped an iota into further development of VR tech, and invested in some actual original VR content, games, etc then people would flock to it. That and actual affordable VR since everything is still overpriced since it's considered a niche market.

I predicted this crash and burn at the exact moment I saw it for the first time.

All these dickheads steal one good idea, and they think that makes them geniuses.

For context, $77 billion is more than most nations spend on their military.

What we could have bought instead; a list of real problems that money could help significantly with, or fix entirely (generated with AI):

Universal Healthcare (Medicare for All)

• Est. cost: $3–4T per year
• $77B covers ~2–3 weeks of healthcare for the entire US
• Or ~6–7 million people for one year
• ~2% of annual national healthcare spend

High-Speed Rail and Public Transit

• Est. cost: $50–120M per mile
• $77B covers 600–1,200 miles of true HSR
• 3–5 major national corridors plus urban transit upgrades

Homelessness, Veterans, and Mental Health

• Est. cost: $150k–300k per housing unit; ~$25k/person/year care
• $77B covers 250,000–400,000 permanent housing units
• 10+ years of care for all chronically homeless
• 100% of veteran homelessness eliminated

Roads, Bridges, and Infrastructure

• Est. cost: ~$5M per bridge; ~$1M per mile of road
• $77B covers 15,000–20,000 bridge replacements
• ~100,000 miles of roadway rebuilt
• ~15–20% of all structurally deficient bridges

Domestic Semiconductor Manufacturing

• CHIPS Act: $52B total
• $77B covers 150% of CHIPS Act
• 3–5 leading-edge fabs
• Full AI, defense, and automotive supply-chain security

Fusion and Advanced Energy

• ITER reactor: ~$22B
• SPARC program: ~$4B
• $77B covers 3 ITER-class reactors
• 10+ SPARC-class fusion programs

Climate Resilience and Clean Energy

• Est. cost: ~$1B per GW renewable capacity
• $77B covers 60+ GW clean power
• Electrification of ~10 million homes
• Coastal protection and grid modernization across multiple states

Public Sector Scale Comparison

• Equals 3+ years of NASA’s budget
• Equals 10 years of US homelessness funding
• Exceeds annual defense budgets of most countries

The art direction in that screenshot seems to be "make everyone else look so weird Zuckerburg looks normal"

VR isn’t a bad idea.

…Zuckerberg is just an idiot.

That’s really what it comes down to. Facebook has some neat branches and employees, but at the end of the day, its head decision maker is chronically flakey and makes catastrophically bad financial choices, repeatedly.

He’s just so freaking rich it doesn’t even matter.

I detest everybody who posesses more than 5 million. All above is absurd greed and should be punished.

Note that this was a 10% cut. Meta has a lot of staff. They are also slightly pivoting to AR glasses, as they say Ray-Ban Display sales are much higher than anticipated. I think they see their chance of cornering the VR market as gone (probably because of android xr) (see https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-pauses-third-party-horizon-os-headsets/ ) but think they have a chance to dominate AR glasses / wearables.

Facebook is a boomer infested, depressing, idiot shithole. I'm not spending extra money for hardware so I can experience that in VR.

If I wanted to experience that, I can visit my shitty boomer mother for free in reality.