I see that Elon Musk has had quite the day applying his overrated (lack of) intellect to trying to solve the problem posed by Russia’s 2014 invasion and 2022 re-invasion of Ukraine. Musk is what happens when you’re raised in wealth that is all accumulated from the slave labor that resulted from apartheid in South Africa. He’s not particularly smart, he’s not particularly gifted, he’s not actually an engineer. What he is is someone who was handed an emerald mine and all of its proceeds and profits as a toddler, continually failed upwards, and can’t even get it through his head that the one thing he’s sort of good at – being a promoter of the ideas of people that actually understand the tech they’re trying to build or develop or think up – is the only thing he’s sort of good at. And the minute he opens his mouth or decides to tweet, he does damage to the one thing he’s sort of good at and reinforces that he’s really a dumbfuck asshole.
When last we checked in on Mr. Musk in regard to Ukraine, he was doing a good job convincing both his gullibly, sycophantic fans on social media and the desperate for any help Ukrainians that he was donating large numbers of Starlink terminals to Ukraine and thereby serving as a tech angel coming to help them. That was a lie!
Everyone’s favorite nutbag investor turned Internet troll, Elon Musk, has decided that in addition to trying to remake Twitter in his own image for fun and profits, especially profits, that he’d try his hand at war profiteering. From The Washington Post:
Elon Musk’s SpaceX to dispatch their Starlink terminals to the region to boost Internet access. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route,” Musk replied to broad online fanfare.
Since then, the company has cast the actions in part as a charitable gesture. “I’m proud that we were able to provide the terminals to folks in Ukraine,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said at a public event last month, later telling CNBC, “I don’t think the U.S. has given us any money to give terminals to the Ukraine.”
But according to documents obtained by The Technology 202, the U.S. federal government is in fact paying millions of dollars for a significant portion of the equipment and for the transportation costs to get it to Ukraine.
On Tuesday, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced it has purchased more than 1,330 terminals from SpaceX to send to Ukraine, while the company donated nearly 3,670 terminals and the Internet service itself.
While the agency initially called it a “private sector donation valued at roughly $10 million,” it did not specify how much it is contributing for the equipment or for the cost of transportation. Sometime after the announcement, the agency removed key details from its release. It now states that USAID “has delivered 5,000 Starlink Terminals” to Ukraine “through a public-private partnership” with SpaceX but does not specify the quantity nor value of the donations.
USAID agreed to purchase closer to 1,500 standard Starlink terminals for $1,500 apiece and to pay an additional $800,000 for transportation costs, documents show, adding up to over $3 million in taxpayer dollars paid to SpaceX for the equipment sent to Ukraine.
In a letter to SpaceX last month outlining the deal, the USAID mission director to Ukraine said the terminals would be “procured” and sent on behalf of USAID by a third-party contractor, which would “arrange for transportation and delivery of the equipment” from Los Angeles International Airport to Ukraine via Poland.
The letter said the nearly 3,670 terminals donated by SpaceX would come with three months of “unlimited data.” In addition to the more than 1,330 terminals that USAID confirmed it had purchased, the agency earlier agreed to buy a separate 175 units from SpaceX, according to the documents.
On Thursday, USAID spokesperson Rebecca Chalif said in a statement that the “delivery of Starlink terminals were made possible by a range of stakeholders, whose combined contributions valued over $15 million and facilitated the procurement, international flights, ground transportation, and satellite Internet service of 5,000 Starlink terminals.”
The agency declined to answer questions about how much USAID funding is going toward buying and transporting equipment for Ukraine, referring them to SpaceX. SpaceX did not return a request for comment on the arrangement and the specific financials of the deal.
It is also unclear whether the price the U.S. government is paying for individual Starlink units matches their typical market price.
USAID is paying $1,500 for each standard terminal and the accompanying service, documents show. According to the Starlink website, a standard terminal set costs $600, while the monthly service charge costs $110, plus an additional $100 for shipping and handling.
According to The Verge, Starlink recently unveiled a separate premium service that prices the equipment at $2,500 and the monthly Internet charge at $500, but it remains unclear whether that is what Ukraine has received. SpaceX did not return a request for comment on the pricing.
The revelations show that while SpaceX appears to have donated a significant sum to Ukraine’s cause, it has done so with public assistance.
The United States and other countries have paid to send much of the known equipment to Ukraine. The transportation costs USAID has paid to ship the 5,000 terminals exceeds $800,000, according to the documents. French officials confirmed they also helped with transportation.
Much, much more at the link!
I’m a defense and intel contractor/consultant. I understand how this all works. I have no problem with Musk donating a bunch. I have no problem with him also then turning around and selling a bunch of them when the donated number was insufficient. What pisses me off, what is absolutely waste, fraud, and abuse, is the charging the US taxpayer almost three times the price for the units compared to what would have happened if the government had just ordered them at retail!
Which @elonmusk do you like more?
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 3, 2022
The sad truth is that Elon Musk never actually supported Ukraine. Elon Musk supported using Ukraine to line his own pockets at US tax payer expense while fluffing his immense, narcissistic ego with the praise of desperate people looking for any help they might possible get.
The best thing that could happen is that Musk goes to Ukraine to do his own research about the sham referendum, his escorts take him to the Donbas, and when he’s not paying attention they leave him there to his own devices.
The only thing worse than a tankie is a tankie that is also the world’s richest man!
This is the appropriate response to anything and everything that Musk says.
Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you @elonmusk
— Andrij Melnyk (@MelnykAndrij) October 3, 2022
Moving on!
President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier this evening – video and English transcript – after the jump!
Ukrainians!
Today, I will also begin my address with a message about what happened in Türkiye.
Finally, we managed to organize a meeting of our boys, commanders from “Azovstal”, with their relatives. The meeting is in Türkiye, where our warriors stay in accordance with the agreement on their release.
They are completely safe – with the guarantees of President of Türkiye Erdoğan. They are provided with proper conditions. And now they can see their relatives.
They have not seen each other for many months. And now I thank everyone who made it possible for them to be with their families again.
And we will do everything to make such a meeting possible for the families of all Ukrainians who are still in Russian captivity one day – a meeting with their relatives.
Ukraine appreciates people. Saves people. And helps all those who need help. These are fundamental rules for our state. And it will always be so.
A large group of our officials continues the work on providing the necessary assistance to all those released from Russian captivity. As you understand, there are a lot of issues. This is not only treatment and rehabilitation, but also a large volume of social issues, often legal. The state will certainly help solve all of them.
At the same time, everything is being done quite intensively at various levels of government to restore normal life in the areas liberated from the occupiers.
In total, these are more than 450 settlements in the Kharkiv region alone – those that were liberated thanks to the defense operation that began in September and is still ongoing.
The work of transport, post office, police, normal supply of water, gas, electricity is being restored – as much as possible. The occupiers left many mined areas, many tripwires, almost all infrastructure was destroyed. The damage is colossal.
But life is returning – it is returning wherever the occupiers were driven out. We also make social payments – pensions, salaries. In particular, to the teachers who remained loyal to Ukraine and did not switch to the curriculum of the occupiers.
This is actually very important. Russian propagandists intimidate people in the areas still under the control of the occupiers that Ukraine will allegedly consider almost everyone who remains in the occupied territory as collaborators. Absolute nonsense.
Our approach has always been and remains clear and fair. If a person did not serve the occupiers and did not betray Ukraine, then there is no reason to consider such a person a collaborator. These are elementary things. If the teacher remained a Ukrainian teacher and did not lie to the children about who is the enemy… Or if a person remained a Ukrainian employee of the Ukrainian utilities service and, for example, helped preserve the energy supply for people, then such a person cannot be blamed for anything.
Hundreds of thousands of our people were in the temporarily occupied territory. Many helped our military and special services. Many simply tried to survive and waited for the return of the Ukrainian flag.
Of course, there were those who betrayed Ukraine. But such cases are quickly established by the Security Service of Ukraine and are not massive. Russia did not meet mass support in Ukraine, and this is a fact.
Today, the offensive movement of our army and all our defenders continued. There are new liberated settlements in several regions.
Fierce fighting continues in many areas of the front. But the perspective of these hostilities remains obvious – more and more occupiers are trying to escape, more and more losses are being inflicted on the enemy army, and there is a growing understanding that Russia made a mistake by starting a war against Ukraine.
Of course, there are many fanatics out there. Those who will never admit the obvious, that this is a pointless war for Russia that Russia cannot win. Because it is impossible to defeat a nation that preserves unity and knows what they are fighting for.
The same cannot be said about the people of Russia as about the Ukrainian people. None of those who are now being sent to war after criminal mobilization will be able to explain: what is the point of this for him personally? Why should he risk his life?
Among the dead occupiers we can already see those who were taken just a week or two ago. People were not trained for combat, they have no experience to fight in such a war. But the Russian command just needs some people – any kind – to replace the dead. And when these new ones die, more people will be sent. This is how Russia fights. That’s how it will lose as well.
No sham referenda, announcements about annexations, conversations about the borders they invented and drew somewhere, will help them.
There is a clear and internationally recognized border of Ukraine. There are lives we must protect. There is security we must restore. And all this will happen. We are doing all this.
And one more thing.
Today, Russia was ultimately removed from decision-making in world aviation. There will be no more representatives of the terrorist state in the governing body – the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization. This is a crucially important world institution, a specialized agency of the UN, and this is a quite eloquent signal to all other international organizations.
A state that has violated so many norms of international law cannot be kept in any international organizations as a supposedly normal participant. Russia has no place in the global community.
I thank everyone who helps us defend freedom!
Glory to all who fight for Ukraine!
Glory to Ukraine!
The Azovstal Commanders have reunited with their loved ones in Istanbul 💔 pic.twitter.com/2HIYqer8RB
— Illia Ponomarenko 🫡 (@IAPonomarenko) October 3, 2022
Here is the British MOD’s assessment for today:
And here’s their updated map for today:
Here is former NAVDEVGRU Squadron Leader Chuck Pfarrer’s most recent assessments regarding the situations in Izium and Kherson:
IZIUM AXIS / 1320 UTC 3 OCT/ Offensive continues. UKR liberates P-79 HWY junction town at Borova. RU Lines of Communication and Supply (LOCS) are now under Ukrainian precision strike artillery, severely limiting RU reinforcement and maneuver options. pic.twitter.com/RVl6b1xcko
— Chuck Pfarrer | Indications & Warnings | (@ChuckPfarrer) October 3, 2022
KHERSON /1330 UTC 3 OCT/ The UKR breakthrough on the T-04-03 is confirmed to have reached Dudchny. RU units are now repositioning to meet this thrust. UKR will be quick to take advantage of the withdrawal of RU defenders at any point along the contact line. pic.twitter.com/5HIjTYMTEg
— Chuck Pfarrer | Indications & Warnings | (@ChuckPfarrer) October 3, 2022
Others have noted this, but it bears repeating: these offensives don't enjoy the surprise that the Kharkiv one last month did. Here, the Russians know what is coming, and the Ukrainian army is solidly defeating them day after day. Hard to see how the bleeding stops.
— Neil Hauer (@NeilPHauer) October 3, 2022
A Russian channel is saying that Ukraine has taken Dudchany, Kherson Oblast. https://t.co/v0u7cTq6TI pic.twitter.com/h2NmAKZdQr
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) October 3, 2022
Recently, in response to a note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the ambassador of Iran stated that his country has not supplied drones to russia.
Here is the Iranian drone Qods Mohajer-6, which was launched to coordinate an attack on Odesa a few days ago. pic.twitter.com/C5Ep0kj7GZ— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) October 3, 2022
And here’s more on the Iranian drone that the Ukrainians captured:
We can also see how the UAV was armed: it was still carrying at least one Iranian Ghaem-5 guided bomb with a TV Seeker and HE-AS warhead (Presumably, high-explosive anti-structure with 8.5kg of explosives).
In this condition, the UAV and PGMs attached are ripe for exploitation. pic.twitter.com/GTFYg2fo3w
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) October 3, 2022
This would’ve been very, very bad!
The russians laid 175 kg of TNT and 68 anti-tank mines next to the dam in the village of Velyki Prohody, #Kharkiv region.The total TNT equivalent is about 650kg. If an explosion had occurred,its consequences would have been catastrophic,all nearby villages would have been flooded pic.twitter.com/0jd3ztOLKY
— Iryna Voichuk🇺🇦 (@irmachep) October 2, 2022
The Russians have been caught stealing and trying to resell Ukrainian grain! AP has the details:
BEIRUT (AP) — When the bulk cargo ship Laodicea docked in Lebanon last summer, Ukrainian diplomats said the vessel was carrying grain stolen by Russia and urged Lebanese officials to impound the ship.
Moscow called the allegation “false and baseless,” and Lebanon’s prosecutor general sided with the Kremlin and declared that the 10,000 tons of barley and wheat flour wasn’t stolen and allowed the ship to unload.
But an investigation by The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” has found the Laodicea, owned by Syria, is part of a sophisticated Russian-run smuggling operation that has used falsified manifests and seaborne subterfuge to steal Ukrainian grain worth at least $530 million — cash that has helped feed President Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
AP used satellite imagery and marine radio transponder data to track three dozen ships making more than 50 voyages carrying grain from Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine to ports in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and other countries. Reporters reviewed shipping manifests, searched social media posts, and interviewed farmers, shippers and corporate officials to uncover the details of the massive smuggling operation.
The ongoing theft, which legal experts say is a potential war crime, is being carried out by wealthy businessmen and state-owned companies in Russia and Syria, some of them already facing financial sanctions from the United States and European Union.
Meanwhile, the Russian military has attacked farms, grain silos and shipping facilities still under Ukrainian control with artillery and air strikes, destroying food, driving up prices and reducing the flow of grain from a country long known as the breadbasket of Europe.
The Russians “have an absolute obligation to ensure that civilians are cared for and to not deprive them their ability of a livelihood and an ability to feed themselves,” said David Crane, a veteran prosecutor who has been involved in numerous international war crime investigations. “It’s just pure pillaging and looting, and that is also an actionable offense under international military law.”
The grain and flour carried by the 138-meter-long (453 feet) Laodicea likely started its journey in the southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol, which Russia seized in the early days of the war.
Video posted to social media on July 9 shows a train pulling up to the Melitopol Elevator, a massive grain storage facility, with green hopper cars marked with the name of the Russian company Agro-Fregat LLC in big yellow letters, along with a logo in the shape of a spike of wheat.
Russian occupation official Andrey Siguta held a news conference at the depot the following week where he said the grain would “provide food security” for Russia-controlled regions in Ukraine, and that his administration would “evaluate the harvest and determine how much will be for sale.”
As he spoke, a masked soldier armed with an assault rifle stood guard as trucks unloaded wheat at the facility to be milled. Workers loaded flour into large white bags like those delivered by the Laodicea to Lebanon three weeks later.
Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov told AP the occupiers are moving vast quantities of grain from the region by train and truck to ports in Russia and Crimea, a strategic Ukrainian peninsula that Russia has occupied since 2014. Despite Russian claims to have annexed Crimea, the United Nations ruled that land grab was also illegal.
More at the link!
Locals greet Ukrainian fighters in recently liberated Lyman.
They've been waiting for so long 💔 pic.twitter.com/07KdF2BkR0
— Saint Javelin (@saintjavelin) October 3, 2022
That’s enough for tonight.
Your daily Patron!
So many polls today. And like last week's «referendum», absolutely nothing will be legally decided with their help 🤭And even like this stick: it was nice to hang out with it, but after 5 minutes it is no longer interesting 🙃 pic.twitter.com/GY25GR73fm
— Patron (@PatronDsns) October 3, 2022
There’s no shade like Patron shade!
And finally, a new video from Patron’s official TikTok!
@patron__dsns Хотів спіймати хвоста, ледь не злетів!🌪🌪🌪 #песпатрон #патрондснс
The caption translates as:
I wanted to catch the tail, I almost flew off! 🌪🌪🌪 #PatrontheDog #PatronDSNS
Just a reminder, I’m not going to be around tomorrow – Tuesday – night, nor Wednesday as well because of Yom Kippur. The nightly updates will resume on Thursday evening. There will be a two part guest post by Carlo Graziano about trains. It may just be his summer vacation on Amtrack travelogue, but you’ll have to tune in to find out…
Open thread!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
On Musk, dude’s always been an asshole, even on Ukraine
He tweeted this back in early March. Notice the Ukraine flag
zhena gogolia
That bunny visual is great
Sebastian
Repost from downstairs:
Musk had to distract from disastrous Q3 delivery numbers released over the weekend and the terrible Bot presentation Friday evening, which sent the stock tanking 8% today.
He must keep the stock up until the quarterly filing in mid-October because he can only sell after that date.
He needs to sell a lot of his stock, and he could even end up underwater if it falls too much.
Gin & Tonic
As I wrote downstairs, Musk garnered a lot of goodwill in Ukraine with the Starlink thing (regardless of who was paying and who was profiting.) This afternoon you could watch it all burning up in real time. When the President of a country at war takes time out of his evening to troll you, I think by definition that’s “not a good day.”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Sebastian:
Damn, that’s pretty bad on a day when the US stock market as a whole jumped 2%
Gin & Tonic
@Gin & Tonic: Example 1:
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
Muskrat really ought to take full advantage of his space toys and launch himself permanently into the exosphere or whatever. Although, getting a nice spoonful of salt not just from Zelenskyy and other government officials but also a dog is a nice second option for his humiliation. (Not that he appears to have the capacity to feel humiliated.)
I was going to say it’s amazing how utter shit the russians are at this, but by this point, it’s not actually amazing anymore. You’d think eventually these guys would get tired of getting their asses handed to them all so one douchebag can continue to live out his king-of-the-world fantasies.
That russian TV journalist lady who supposedly was against the war has skedaddled from her house arrest. Is she gonna be found on the ground under an open 10th story window soon?
Thank you as always, Adam. Wishing you a meaningful holiday.
Adam L Silverman
@Sebastian: What a shame…
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Gin & Tonic:
I can hear the whining from all of his fanboys now:
“Waaaah! You wokeists hate free speech and want to arrest Daddy Warmusk! Literally 1984!”
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Gin & Tonic: I snorted.
Spanky
What’s up with that?
catclub
twitter should charge Musk $10M per tweet. It would save him money.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: He needs a good superbonking!
zhena gogolia
@Adam L Silverman: When will Tucker get his comeuppance?
catclub
@Spanky:
in South Korea all the Korean made car badges are in english.
Adam L Silverman
Spanky
@catclub: South Korea is an ally and trading partner of the US. Iran, not so much.
zhena gogolia
@Adam L Silverman: I do not understand what Medvedev is getting at.
Adam L Silverman
@Spanky: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/02/why-are-the-iranian-bombs-marked-in-english.html
Gin & Tonic
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): That photo is an inside joke. It is Musk’s head photoshopped onto an actual photo of Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch and traitor, who was captured by Ukrainian security services shortly after the beginning of this phase of war. He ended up being traded to russia as part of the recent exchange of (mostly) Azovstal defenders. That photo of him in cuffs is well-known to every Ukrainian.
Anyway, the phrase “Khrushchev’s mistake” is not one that would be known by Musk – it is purely a Kremlin term for Crimea. He is channeling the russian government – some analysts are saying this is a direct threat from Putin.
Adam L Silverman
@zhena gogolia: Hopefully when he’s running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Adam L Silverman: The hell does that one from Medvedev even mean? Is that just a terrible machine translation or is he on drugs?
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Adam L Silverman: why do you want to make me cry, Adam
Adam L Silverman
@zhena gogolia: Medvedev is trying to say that Musk is a Russian “illegal”/not officially covered intelligence operative and he’s now blown his cover.
Adam L Silverman
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: Combination of bad Russian to English translation and what I explained in comment 24.
Adam L Silverman
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: All part of the atoning process.
PsiFighter37
The main conclusion to take away is that most super-rich people are extreme narcissists who don’t think about broader context or how their remarks will be perceived by a wider audience when they say shit because they are so used to having their asses kissed by a small group of circle-jerkers.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Gin & Tonic:
Oh wow! He completely destroyed any goodwill he built up.
Are those analysts saying that Musk is getting his cues/in direct communication with the Kremlin?
zhena gogolia
@Adam L Silverman: For real?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
he’s still doing this
with a mushroom cloud graphic
oldster
Technical question for Adam or anyone who understands these things:
how do anti-drone guns work? Purely electronic? Or hot lead, too?
I sometimes see photos of people shouldering these comical-looking machines that look more like a Nerf-gun than a real weapon. Big bulgy nose. It appears that they need to be aimed at the drone in order to work.
So, do they simply send out radio waves that scramble the poor things 8-bit brain? Or is there the equivalent of a shotgun shell sent up with the radio-waves?
This one is labeled a “drone-jammer,” so I assumed it’s just radio:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle#/media/File:Italian_Army_-_17th_Anti-aircraft_Artillery_Regiment_%22Sforzesca%22_troops_with_CPM-Drone_Jammer.jpg
But that seems funny to me that you’d need a line-of-sight on a radio wave. I suppose it’s a directed energy beam? So it’s not just a spherical wave from a point-source?
Once we get up to the big UAVs, like the new Iranian-made Gerans, then they seem to be intercepted in the old-fashioned way, with a shell or a rocket. And if their reports are to be believed, Ukraine has gotten a *lot* better at finding them and bringing them down. That’s bad news for Iran and good news for Ukraine, US, Israel, etc.
Okay, but back to my main question about the weird Nerf-gun looking things. How do they work?
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Adam L Silverman: OH HEY THAT’S COOL NOT UNSETTLING AT ALL. Fucking yikes.
zhena gogolia
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@zhena gogolia: I cannot figure out what Rupert’s (or Lachlan’s) angle is here
Another Scott
@zhena gogolia: I assume it’s a bad attempt at snark. Anyone who says anything that russia likes must be a VVP stooge, so he’s blown his cover. Or something.
Kinda pathetic attempt.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
zhena gogolia
So if Khrushchev made such a big mistake, they had several decades to correct it.
zhena gogolia
@Another Scott: Yeah, I guess that’s it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
This is fucking blatant pro-Russian propaganda. Would this guy be trying to blame the Biden administration for similar shit if this was the ROC and the PRC?
Gin & Tonic
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: What’s curious is, if the US/allies did this, why is russia continuing to send gas through the pipelines, making investigation of the rupture points impossible?
Another Scott
@oldster:
This seems to be the gizmo in the picture:
So, it’s all radio energy, in various frequency bands.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Gin & Tonic
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Snarki, child of Loki
Hey, just remember that philosophical conundrum:
The Self-driving Trolley Problem.
The solution?
Shoot Elon Musk twice.
Okay, maybe I’m mixing it up with “Hitler, Stalin, a lawyer, and you with a gun loaded with two bullets in a liferaft”, but the problems are isomorphic, y’know?
oldster
@Another Scott:
Thanks so much! That’s pretty funny — somehow it reminds me of wizards trying to knock each other from their brooms by intoning spells.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@zhena gogolia:
Good god, Greenwald. Did he not see that deranged Putin speech where he explicitly shit on LGBTQ people?
MomSense
OT GA Senate race just got interesting. Christian Walker is blasting his dad Herschel. Airing the family grievances publicly via tweets.
YY_Sima Qian
I mean, what Elon Must tweeted might not have been out there immediately post-2014. However, after what Putin has done in 2022, & between 2014 – 2022, it’s just asking to be slapped.
MomSense
@zhena gogolia:
And Tulsi is out with videos about US funded bio labs in Ukraine.
MobiusKlein
@Spanky: Why English? It’s a common language all your customers may be trained in.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Gin & Tonic:
Had no idea about his Kremlin connections. Fuck that traitor
Martin
I’m struck at the similarity of the Iranian, Russian, and Republican arguments against the west – embracing rights for transgender individuals, women, minorities, etc. and a lot of it seems to really boil down to US internet/social media dominance (and by extension, being the basis for moderation of social media).
And on that, I kind of get it. The US is exporting its culture more effectively than any nation has done in history, and additionally, doing it from an inherently liberal base – either being California, or the young people that generate most of the content, or the historically repressed people suddenly having an outlet they won’t be censored on (by virtue of who they are) and jumping in with both feet.
But that’s really no excuse for losing your shit like this. I guess I never really internalized how threatening multiculturalism is to most people.
sanjeevs
@Adam L Silverman: Every couple of months I drop by Pat Lang’s old blogsite to see if the penny has dropped.
He actually called out Tucker Carlson as a Russian asset the other day. Didn’t go down with most of that crowd who are far, far down the rabbithole.
I wonder if he will ever figure it out about Trumpov.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Gin & Tonic: LOL. “Elon Musk: For when you’ve run out of all other options”
Geminid
@oldster: I think they are radio jammers. I saw pictures of them early in the war, when Ukraine’s army was mainly worried about Russia’s unarmed spotter drones. I read that Russia lagged in developing armed drones because they figured their warplanes, missiles and artillery were suffiecient. Instead they deployed a lot of surveillance drones.
Iran on the other hand saw drones as a way to get around its inability to purchase or produce warplanes. They started developing armed drones in the 1990’s. Iran is a large nation of 85 million people with a decent industrial base and plenty of good engineers, and they evidently can produce capable drones in quantity. They also produce a lot of short range ballistic missiles, many of which end up in south Lebanon.
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yeah, he saw it, and it scares him. Maybe if he’s nice to Putin he’ll be spared.
That’s always how it works. Nobody wonders how many Jews voter for Hitler, and I bet it was more than anyone wants to believe or accept.
It’s hard to stand up to the bully. Takes courage. Not everyone has it in them.
Martin
@oldster: Purely electronic. Basically their job is to overpower the controller and the sensors like GPS so that those signals can’t get through. Imagine you and your wife are having a nice conversation and I show up screaming full volume in your ear. Are you still having a conversation?
These jammers can be countered in the design of the drone by removing the dependency on that signal – adding autonomy, or failsafes, or in the case of something like a Switchblade drone, the opposite of a failsafe – it *will* blow up the target it can visually see unless an override is sent. Jamming the signal makes it more like you get blown up, not less.
Geminid
@Martin: I would take that bet.
oldster
@Martin:
What dd you say? I can’t hear you!
Okay, thanks for more info (and a high signal-to-noise ratio).
YY_Sima Qian
Putin’s international position is actually very weak right now. Just look at his delicate treatment of Erdogan. Türkiye has been selling/shipping Ukraine all kinds of arms that have proven useful to its efforts to defeat the Russian invasion, killing Russian troops & destroying Russian equipment, of which the Bayraktar-2 is merely the most well known. However, that does not stop Putin from relying on Erdogan to facilitate deals (prisoner exchanges, grains export, etc.), & having to mostly follow through on those deals. Just look at the photo pf Erdogan holding court like an Ottoman Sultan on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Tashkent, w/ Putin sitting among the other SCO leaders, grinning like fool. (& I find Erdogan a loathsome character, whose Pan-Turkic fever dream not unlike that of Putinist imperialism for Russia.)
Both China & India are more than happy to take advantage of Putin’s weakened position to buy energy on the cheap, but neither is willing to incur any real cost (other than some reputational cost w/ the West) to actually help him out.
Martin
@sanjeevs: They’ll never figure it out until the cause is fully lost. Nobody believes in God because of the evidence. They believe because they need the world to possess a certain order, and God provides for that order. Their faith in Trump is no different.
Nobody thinks the election was stolen because of the evidence. They believe because the alternative is that they’re in the minority, and that’s incomprehensible.
dexwood
P. T. Barnum of the 21st century, that’s Muskrat.
gwangung
@MomSense: Maybe. Maybe not. I recall Arizona’s Gosar was repudiated by his family, but he still get elected.
Adam L Silverman
@zhena gogolia: I think Medvedev is trolling or trying to. Think of it as provitskaya.
Bill Arnold
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
It’s blatant anti-American propaganda. Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson is an enemy of the United States of America. Treat him as such.
oldster
@Martin:
Here’s another aspect of the cultural dominance of the West, even in Russia.
I saw a list of the basic military kit that conscripts are now expected to provide for themselves. It was posted on twitter today in the original Russian, and with an English translation.
I don’t know Russian — I don’t even know the alphabet — but with the two parallel texts I could piece together bits of the Russian. And there was a *lot* of transliterated English in it.
“Myltityl” (alternative to a knife); “Poverbank” (for your phone); “Ruksak” (though that’s originally German); “Costum Gurka kamophladj” for a gillie suit; and on and on. There was a lot more English in that Russian than there would be Russian in a list of kit for an Anglo-speaking conscript.
Jay
Adam L Silverman
@oldster: This is outside my area of expertise.
Tony G
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t know. I took Psychology 101 back in 1973, but I still can’t figure out Elon Musk. He has so much money that he couldn’t spend it all in 200 lifetimes, yet he chooses to spend his life deliberately attracting ridicule and hatred. Some kind of sexual fetish? Musk really needs to calm the hell down and switch to decaf. I also have no idea why he’s “worth” so much money. I almost never see people driving Teslas (not in my neighborhood, anyway) and his other projects (“Space X”, “The Boring Company”, etc.) just seem like elaborate pranks by a bored rich boy. Something is going on with this idiot, but I don’t know what.
Adam L Silverman
@sanjeevs: I don’t know. I miss my mentor and I know I’m never getting that version of him back.
SiubhanDuinne
Christian Walker’s full comments (quoted from his Twitter account, which I can’t link, by the Daily Beast, which I think I can):
Jay
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@SiubhanDuinne: Erick Erickson has gone from “it’s old news” to “oh well, we tried” in a matter of hours
sanjeevs
@Adam L Silverman: I find it bizarre that someone who has been presumably professionally trained to evaluate his sources takes his news and views from Fox.
Another Scott
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Good, good.
Forward!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Oh come now, Ewick, son of Ewick! He’s not perfect, just forgiven! Didn’t you get the memo!?!?!?!11!
Jay
Tony G
@YY_Sima Qian: With rare exceptions, people believe whatever makes them feel good (or whatever allows them to avoid feeling bad). People who develop beliefs on the basis of facts and logic are pretty rare.
@Martin:
Matt McIrvin
@Tony G: Teslas are fairly popular cars everywhere you see tech people with some money. I see them on the highway pretty often around here. I’m not fond of them, don’t like that silly dashboard design that replaces all the controls with a TV, but they get bought.
SpaceX did remarkably well making rockets and spacecraft that they could sell to NASA to get astronauts to the Space Station. Once they get away from that mission things start to get weird, and I think maybe that’s because that’s where Musk is personally influencing what they do. I’m still feeling really skeptical about the program to adapt their big-ass Starship rocket into a lunar landing vehicle.
zhena gogolia
@SiubhanDuinne:
His other tweets are rather disturbing. e.g.
oldster
@Adam L Silverman:
Not a problem. Several other jackals volunteered to speculate, and that’s all I needed.
Tony G
@YY_Sima Qian: And the history of economic relations between the US and China over the past 40 shows that Americans will happily buy whatever China manufactures regardless of the loathsome behavior of the Chinese regime.
Adam L Silverman
@sanjeevs: I don’t have any better understanding of what happened with him than you do.
Chetan Murthy
@zhena gogolia: I’ll give him this: he’s 23. I was pretty stupid at age 23. Maybe he’ll grow up into a more-decent man.
dmsilev
@Matt McIrvin:
The only way that works is if they can refuel the thing once it’s made Earth orbit (by flying up dedicated tanker ships). Of course, nobody has done bulk transfer of cryogenic fluids in zero g before, so there’s ..a bit of development work needed. Since SpaceX ostensibly has the goal of sending these things to Mars, they’ll have to do that dev work at some point, but it’s definitely a challenge.
Tony G
@Matt McIrvin: Probably true. Not a lot of wealthy tech bros where I live, so I just don’t see Teslas cruising around. But still … a net worth for that clown of almost $250 billion seems way out of line for what are (to me anyway) niche products. (Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, on the other hand, had companies that sold widely used stuff.). But, as usual, what do I know?
Chetan Murthy
@Tony G: Neither Bezos nor Gates were the sort of
grifterexcellent salesman that Musk so obviously is.Carlo Graziani
@Martin:
I believe that there are many historical parallels, such as the episode of Catholic conservative revanchism in France in the late 1890’s that led to the Affaire Dreyfus. “Cultural anxiety of an elite that feels its grip on society slipping resullts in ugly repressive measures” is an unfortunate recurring theme of modernity.
Dan B
@Tony G: Musk has stated that he is on the spectrum. He doesn’t seem to comprehend human interaction except for some basic ones.
Jay
zhena gogolia
@Chetan Murthy: Oh, for a minute I thought you were talking about Tucker Carlson!
Jay
SiubhanDuinne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Until an hour or so ago, I had a l m o s t forgotten the very existence of Ewick Son of Ewick — and I live in Georgia. Had certainly never heard of Christian Walker before tonight.
kalakal
@Carlo Graziani:
That’s a very good example. I believe Brexit to be another, the culmination of decades of an elites fear of being superseded
Matt McIrvin
@YY_Sima Qian: Yeah, Ukraine getting this chummy with Erdogan is… not great, but I guess you take what help you can; I would too.
Jay
Matt McIrvin
@dmsilev: Yeah, that’s the idea. And they’re going to need a LOT of orbital refueling to happen.
sdhays
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I really don’t understand how this works for people since the fact that he’s a brain-dead piece of shit is, indeed, “old news” and he’s still been polling disgustingly close to Warnock. And we’re a month out from the election, so anyone who was going to vote for Walker before but is now balking has 4 weeks to get over it, which many will.
I’m team optimist, so I believe Warnock will win, but after Trump’s Access Hollywood scandal disappearing in the same amount of time, I don’t believe in scandals having a lasting impact on Republicans unless there’s evidence. Those voters are just nihilist shitbags.
Very happy to be wrong here. Anything breaking through the cult’s walls would be a very good development.
Anonymous At Work
Cough cough for the train-enthusiast, tomorrow, can you focus on the alternate routes around all Ukraine that Russian forces would use to reach the eastern border and the Kerch crossing? I’ve got no sense of how badly cutting Luhansk front off from the north would be for Russia vs. other directed pushes.
SiubhanDuinne
@zhena gogolia:
I never heard of Christian Walker before this story broke tonight, so have not been aware of what he has previously tweeted. So thanks for that. I’m interested in this story only insofar as it shapes the election — does it have legs, or will it fizzle out and be forgotten in the wake of the next shiny toy?
Jay
Tony G
@Gin & Tonic: Musk must get some kind of weird pleasure from people hating him. If not, his behavior makes no sense at all.
YY_Sima Qian
@Tony G: You have pretty much described the history of economic relations in total.
Lyrebird
Thanks as always for adding knowledge here!
When I saw that tweet on DKos, even to my eye that looked overly specific, like when my students try to copy-paste something. I know politicians use the text that lobbyists provide to them, but yeah why is Musk promoting Putin’s lobby?
Anonymous At Work
Adam, late to the game but what’s the meanest, most-trolly thing Ukraine could do with those Iranian drones? Ask teh CIA for help figuring out where they came from? Post the targeting software online for people to play with? Deny reality and find out.
Chetan Murthy
@Tony G: It has been written about TFG, that he understood that all publicity is good publicity. So the guy who wrote _The Art of the Deal_ for him, got chosen b/c he’d written some *scathing* articles about TFG prior to that. Maybe Musk has the same understanding about publicity. He *is* a talented grifter after all.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@sdhays: @SiubhanDuinne: (dragging up a post from below)
I’ll add two things:
I had seen Christian Walker trolling Biden and Dems and liberals a few times, I assume on his father’s behalf, so I don’t know what’s going on. Glenn Greenwald is a fan.
Jay
Tony G
@YY_Sima Qian: Very true. American companies (including my former employer, IBM) made plenty of money doing business with Germany in the 1930’s.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Jay: Oh, the poor dears. This is for them.
sdhays
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: To temper my skepticism, it only needs to turn off a few thousand people for Warnock to win outright on the first ballot, so here’s hoping! Georgia deserves a full term from their awesome Senator!
Tony G
@Dan B: I hadn’t known that. That makes sense, though. (Yet this guy with negative charisma has all these fan boys. I remain baffled.)
CaseyL
@SiubhanDuinne:
@zhena gogolia:
@SiubhanDuinne:
The kid is a RW Christian, anti-woke and all. He’s not turning against his father for making a minstrel show of himself for GOPers who couldn’t care less about him as a human being. He’s just pissed off that Dad’s dirty laundry has come to light.
Tony G
@Chetan Murthy: Yeah, makes sense. (After all these years, I remain astonished that ANYBODY has positive feelings about Trump. I guess I’m the one who doesn’t understand humans!)
Carlo Graziani
@Tony G: The trouble is, in a restricted sense he is not an idiot. He has had some success, even arguably deserved. It’s just that some people don’t have the intellectual modesty to understand that success in leading, say, an effort to create a battery-electric automobile market (which he indisputably did), or a profitable, non cost-plus-government-subsidized space launch business (which he also did) does not automatically qualify one as a pre-eminent authority on every other subject matter under the sun, despite the evident adoration by one’s minions.
This lack of intellectual modesty is actually a common failing of rather a lot of extremely smart people that I’ve known. As an example, I’ve met a few theoretical physicists who believed, on the slenderest of evidence, that the fact that they completely understood quantum mechanics meant that there was no field of human endeavor that they could not plunge into and improve in a few weeks if they chose to, including inner-city K-12 STEM education. The results were generally dismal, not that any of them recognized that fact.
I do not suffer from false modesty — people who read what I write have probably sensed this. I do, however, recommend intellectual modesty — the constant suspicion of one’s own beliefs, and the requirement that those beliefs continue to harmonize with quality evidence — as the beginning of wisdom. This type of honesty is hard, and on occasion I’ve failed that standard due to a blindness or a weakness. But the standard matters, and that standard is what those of us who revile bullshit are talking about when we talk about “truth”.
In the end, Musk has given up caring about “truth” in this sense. He’s just a bullshit artist.
YY_Sima Qian
@Tony G:
@Chetan Murthy:
I never understood how “all publicity is good publicity”, but it definitely seems to be true in entertainment & politics (wasn’t always the case in politics). Working for Corporate America this is definitely not true! Doesn’t say much about humanity or the current state of politics…
Carlo Graziani
@Anonymous At Work: Cough, cough. There will be maps.
Bill Arnold
@Chetan Murthy:
Musk has some talent for market manipulation, and obviously enjoys those games. He’s also a believer in some optimistic futurist stuff(, which could turn out to be useful, though with spotty taste in science fiction. [1]
(He’s also manipulable, though it requires an accurate mental model of him; not entirely fun.)
[1] If I wanted to deeply insult him, I’d compare him to the Joiler Veppers character in Iain M. Banks’s excellent “Surface Detail”. (It would be a genuinely harsh comparison.)
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
You almost sound — sincere?
No, that’s not it.
Sorry?
No….
Happy?
Possibly….
Ecstatic!
There it is!
Eolirin
@Carlo Graziani: He didn’t do any of those things, companies he bought his way into did. Despite, not because of, his “leadership”.
Mike in NC
World’s biggest asshole after Putin and Trump.
The Moar You Know
@Adam L Silverman: I don’t know the man, but I read him constantly back in the day, and he was one of a not inconsiderable number of people who I think just lost their shit when Obama got elected. Before that he was on my must-read list. Smart, insightful guy. It all went out the window in a few months. If he’d been a friend or mentor of mine, I’d have been heartbroken. If somehow it wasn’t a political/racial thing, and it may well have not been, that’s even sadder.
Bill Arnold
@Tony G:
As mentioned above, he is not neurotypical.
Frankensteinbeck
@Eolirin:
He IS fantastically good at getting government money that those companies would fail without.
Ksmiami
@Matt McIrvin: Don’t forget Turkish grudges against Russia…. Those wounds run deep
The Moar You Know
@Tony G: Not niche. Tesla is a fraction of that net worth. SpaceX will be a trillion dollar company in a few more years. Not through his management but in spite of it. The demand to get stuff even to LEO is limitless and he is the only game in town.
Last year he put more tonnage into orbit than every other nation and launch company combined, by a very wide margin. This year will be even better for them.
He should sell Tesla. It’s a drag on him and his real business at this point.
Bill Arnold
@Anonymous At Work:
This would be temptingly interesting to a lot of reverse-engineers.
Most (almost all) software has vulnerabilities that haven’t been found,yet.
sdhays
@Carlo Graziani:
I’ve had people say the same thing to me about Trump, and it just wasn’t true. When you’re born with an emerald mine shoved up your ass, you can make a lot of mistakes that no one remembers and a couple big bets (the opportunity for which presented themselves to you because of your inherited intestinal cash stash) that are wildly successful and make you look like a genius.
I totally agree with your point on intellectual modesty. Lots of smart people are convinced that because they understand one thing very, very well, they can then become experts at something else with a bit of light reading. It’s so much easier, you see, to be your own expert rather than having to listen to what real experts might advise you. If you’re also incredibly wealthy, you are pretty insulated from being proved wrong.
Unless you tank the stock price of the company which holds a majority of your assets while being forced to overpay for a non-profitable company you troll-bought and then tried to back out of after signing a binding contract waving due diligence. That might cut through. Maybe.
SiubhanDuinne
Nothing whatever to do with Ukraine, or Vladimir Putin, or Elon Musk, or Herschel Walker — in other words, O/T as can be — but if you are old enough, you’ll remember Sacheen Littlefeather, a young Native American activist, throwing the Academy Awards ceremony into turmoil when she refused to accept Marlon Brando’s Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather.
Sacheen Littlefeather passed away Monday at age 75. She brought Native grievances to a nationwide live television audience in 1973. She was a brave and exceptional woman, then and throughout her life.
May she rest in power. Here’s a gift link to the NYT obituary.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: Musk lies about just about everything. Why wouldn’t he lie about having “Asperger’s”? (He wasn’t the first Autistic host on SNL.)
(I note that that “Asperger’s” is not a term of art (and hasn’t been for many years), probably not least because of Dr. Asperger’s history:
)
Dunno.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jackie
Oh, the irony! From the NY Post:
”Scores of Venezuelan migrants in New York City are hopping on vans to head down to Florida for Hurricane Ian clean-up, they told The Post.
The migrants had scant information about whom they would be working for, but they still piled into vans in Queens that they said were headed to the Sunshine State over the weekend.
“They want us for hurricane cleanup, we’d get paid $15 an hour, overtime and $15 for food daily, I think,” said Javier Moreno, 37, noting that a woman named Camila “from an organization” approached him with a flier.“
https://nypost.com/2022/10/02/nyc-migrants-pile-into-vans-they-say-are-headed-to-florida-for-hurricane-ian-cleanup/
SiubhanDuinne
@Jackie:
Ummm.…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jackie: I hope that reporter got a picture of the license plates on those vans
also, how many times in that article does one of the immigrants say they’re all about finding work? Perla lured her victims with the promise of work. They’re coming here to work.
Eolirin
@Jackie: Please tell me we’re not taking anything the NY Post says seriously without corroborating reporting from even a semi legitimate outfit.
Andrya
Adam: Yom tov. You totally deserve a reflective break. See you Thursday night.
way2blue
@Gin & Tonic: Can ‘they’ dump loads of concrete on the leaks to seal them? I assume they’re massive ruptures given the size of the explosions, but only one end would need to be sealed. For each leak of course… Hopefully, the neighboring EU countries have UUV or ROV submersibles which can video the pipelines.
Jackie
@Eolirin: The original source was the Daily Beast linking to the NYPost. So…🤷🏼♀️
https://www.thedailybeast.com/irony-meter-explodes-as-migrants-lured-to-florida-for-hurricane-ian-cleanup?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Jay
kalakal
@YY_Sima Qian: absolutely true. At the end of WW1 Vickers owed ( or rather the British govt) and paid, a vast sum of money to Krupps in royalty payments for artillery fuzes they’d built under licence. The same artillery that had torn countless 1,000s of German to shreds. In their turn Krupps owed Vickers a vast some of money for armor plate that…
Milo Minderbinder was not fictional
Shalimar
@The Moar You Know: Roughly (reading from search results, not doing the math for myself at 3am) current valuation of Tesla is $831 billion. SpaceX is $127 billion. So vastly over-valued Tesla stock is actually still most of Musk’s net worth.
Tesla should not be worth more than every other world automaker combined. That’s just insane. Market share for Tesla will decline as the major automakers bring better electric vehicles to market. It may not even exist a few decades from now.
I agree with you that SpaceX is where the majority of his wealth will be in 10 years.
YY_Sima Qian
@kalakal: I was not aware of that. Crazy! I doubt these terms would be honored in a modern conflict.
patrick II
@sdhays:
@Jay:
They should be thankful to wake up from their slumber regardless of their accommodations.
Geminid
@Shalimar: Tesla stock’s 8% drop yesterday made its Price to Earnings Ratio only a little less extreme. Now it’s at 82. By contrast, Toyota’s P/E is 9.6.
My knowledge base in this area is not so large, but it seems to me that Tesla’s stock is still way overpriced, especially considering how larger vehicle companies have only begun to enter the the EV market. Perhaps the stock price is held up by Musk’s prestige. That could prove to be a flimsy foundation.
patrick II
@Shalimar:
A commentator here explained to me that much of it is on’s wealth came from bitcoin bitcoin type dealings I wonder how big Of a loss he has taken on that
Shalimar
@patrick II: Musk has been playing in the markets for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like etherium for a few years now. At one point, Tesla made a big deal of buying $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, which has since lost 1/3rd of that value.
Notice his major splash wasn’t with his own money. He likes playing around in cryptocurrencies, hawking them and influencing the market, but I doubt he has even 1% of his net worth invested in them. It’s just a cheap way of being a big shot to the kind of assholes he wants as followers.
Frankensteinbeck
@Geminid: and @Shalimar:
Thank you for the confirmation of my impression. Musk does have talents. He’s great at getting government money. He is fantastic at stock manipulation.
It’s a con man skill. To people who want to think wealth is related to merit, who think that world-changing technology is around the corner, Musk looks like a genius. If you are at all skeptical and look twice, you discover he’s a dipshit high on his own hype.
But the people who fall most centrally into that easily duped category are rich. They’re the money-insulated CEOs that are pouring a trillion dollars into Metaverse because all their buddies think it’s genius. The people who chase every meaningless buzzword fall hook, line, and sinker for Musk’s Robot Servants In Ten Years bullshit. And the merely 1% tech bros are the second biggest rube demographic for that pitch. People who buy stocks impulsively.
Musk has these people stampeding you buy his overpriced stock because they think he’s a god. If the bubble bursts, his wealth is going to plummet.
And the feedback loop has done what it does to natural salesmen. He’s addicted to the validation. The attention. The adulation. More and more he lets his freak flag fly, trolls for laughs, gets pissy and tries to silence critics, makes impulsive buys that even someone as rich as him regrets, convinces himself he can build a colony on Mars, displays garbage products that I his head are science fiction made real, and so on.
zhena gogolia
I just started watching Zelenskyy’s old show Sluga naroda. I thought it was kind of blasphemous to watch it before the war was over, but Netflix offered it to me this morning so I started. He’s a very funny actor.
Chief Oshkosh
@Martin:
I think most people actually wish everyone well and just want to not be bothered and get on with their lives. However, there are a relative handful of people who know how to push some very negative buttons in order to gain power, knowing that a reliable 27% will absolutely go off, and drag along another ~27% out of relational inertia (e.g., family members, coworkers, friends).
Tony G
@Carlo Graziani: Yes, that sounds about right. During my “career” in IT I met a number of people who were extremely intelligent (and were therefore successful) in a limited aspect of technology. Most of them were pleasant human beings with a realistic sense of their limitations, but there were always a few who seemed to believe that their expertise in one area made them experts at everything. Musk seems to be in that latter category.
Tony G
@kalakal: That’s right. I’ve long believed that Catch-22 is a technical manual that explains most aspects of the world. I’m too lazy to look up the reference right now, but a few years ago I read an interesting history of World War 1 (no, I don’t remember the title or author now). Among other things, the book described an interesting. event that, for obvious reasons, was not publicized at the time. Apparently in 1915 (at a time when British and German soldiers were slaughtering each other on the western front) the governments of Britain and Germany made a deal. In a remote area of Switzerland, British trucks full of raw rubber were exchanged for a German truck full of precision optical devices (binoculars, range finders, etc.). Each side got the commodities that they needed to continue the war effort, and the slaughter was able to continue for more than three more years. Milo Minderbinder would have been proud.
Tony G
@Frankensteinbeck: Conning people is a real, and rare skill. (If it was easy to do a lot more people would do it.). In the real world, the people who have expertise in conning people are the ones who make the most money, while people who actually produce something useful get a few crumbs. The real world is an ugly place, that’s why there’s a whole entertainment industry (with its own skilled con men) who sell fantasy worlds to people.