Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Recently I posted my 1000th Tweet:

1000th Tweet: Twitter’s useful but cluttered. You have to tweet a lot to get good at it unless you’ve a weird knack. Reading others is best.

As a critique thus far, I think those 140 characters do it. I won’t recommend Twitter, but I do find some value in it. I will continue to read and post there, which is a huge surprise to me given how I began:

A little less than a year and a half ago, amidst the San Francisco Mayor’s Race, but before Interim Mayor Ed Lee was allowed to run, SF Board of Supervisors Chair David Chiu (himself a Candidate for Mayor) led the Board and the Interim Mayor to The Great Twitter Giveaway of 2011, which ended the strictest controls on corporate investment in public space in the country: SF’s city tax on companies wanting to do business here.

They shattered our City’s progressive history functionally to create a tax-break to entice Twitter to make its base in San Francisco. That was when I started my first and only Twitter account @mtksf and posted my first tweet:

Twitter doesn’t deserve the tax break on stock options. They stand to make tens of millions at IPO!”

I stand by that first tweet, there was no reason to give Twitter the taxbreak, which is being extended now to other social media and tech companies. They all want to be in SF.

The Board and Interim Mayor Lee failed to represent our city’s values and changed our city fundamentally.

Those Mayoral candidates used the tax-break to gain money and support for their campaigns from corporate interests, railroaded the Board and City into giving up millions of dollars that could have gone in the General Fund and, far worse, shat on long time businesses that have stayed in SF choosing to contribute to our bottom line when it would’ve been cheaper to leave.

I started using Twitter as a part of my Campaign for Mayor in an attempt to bring  light to these and other issues I have with contemporary SF politicians – a wholly bought-out crew of pawns for special interests.

But I continue even now to use, read and post to Twitter, which has grown on me. I use it primarily to read others and to find important links sent by intellectuals, writers, news and sports reporters,actors, producers, comedians and athletes.