“Who in their right mind would explore space with a man who can’t keep a website running?” is a great question to ask at this juncture, but like cars and automated driving systems are safety critical systems as well. https://t.co/1OTzSo4nN3
— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) July 3, 2023
Twitter may have just had its worst weekend ever, technically speaking. In response to a series of server emergencies, Elon Musk, the Twitter owner and self-professed free-speech “absolutist,” decided to limit how many tweets people can view, and how they can view them. This was not your average fail whale. It was the social-media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 p.m.—a baffling, antithetical business decision for a platform that depends on engaging users (and showing them ads) as much as possible. It costs $44 billion to buy yourself a digital town square. Breaking it, however, is free…
… Twitter is now literally unusable if you don’t have an account, or if you do have an account and access it a lot. It is the clearest sign yet that Musk does not have his platform under control—that he cannot deliver a consistently functional experience for what was once one of the most vibrant and important social networks on the planet…
Musk’s management style at the platform has appeared equally unstrategic. After saddling the company with a mountain of debt to complete his acquisition in October, he decided to tweet baseless conspiracy theories and alienate advertisers; days before this incident, the marketing lead in charge of managing Twitter’s brand partnerships had resigned. Musk quickly unbanned Twitter’s most egregious rule breakers; fired most of the employees, including those in charge of technical duties; and bungled the rollout of Twitter’s paid-verification system. Compared with a year earlier, Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks beginning April 1 was down 59 percent…
… To date, Musk’s leadership has degraded the reliability of Twitter’s service, filled the platform with bigots and spam, and alienated many of its power users. But this weekend’s disasters are different. The decision to limit people’s ability to consume content on the platform is the rapid unscheduled disassembly of the never-ending, real-time feed of information that makes Twitter Twitter.
His supporters are confused and, perhaps, starting to feel the cracks of cognitive dissonance. “Surely someone who can figure out how to build spaceships can figure out how to distinguish scrapers from legit users,” Graham—the same one who supported Musk in November—tweeted on Saturday. What reasonable answer could there be for an advertising company to drastically limit the time that potentially hundreds of millions of users can spend on its website? (Maybe this one: On Saturday, outside developers appeared to discover an unfixed bug in Twitter’s web app that was flooding the network’s own servers with self-requests, to the point that the platform couldn’t function—a problem likely compounded by Twitter’s skeleton crew of engineers. When I reached out for clarification, the company auto-responded with an email containing a poop emoji.)
All the money and trolling can’t hide what’s obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention to his Twitter tenure: Elon Musk is bad at this. His incompetence should unravel his image as a visionary, one whose ambitions extend as far as colonizing Mars. This reputation as a genius, more than his billions, is Musk’s real fortune; it masks the impetuousness he demonstrates so frequently on Twitter. But Musk has spent this currency recklessly. Who in their right mind would explore space with a man who can’t keep a website running?
tapping the sign that just says EVEN SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DO REALLY STUPID THINGS when it comes to the 'Elon can't be this dumb' conspiracy takes
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) July 1, 2023
How’s it going on this linda https://t.co/7pBCBai5B5
— Gas Stove Prayer Warrior (@canderaid) July 2, 2023
Twitter's servers remain in great health and the elite hardcore engineers are driving all problems before them on all fronts pic.twitter.com/nwuQfFbNGR
— your himbo boyfriend (@swolecialism) July 1, 2023
Without the innovation and genius of silicon valley, it used to take way more than eight months to overpay for a company and then run it into the ground
— your himbo boyfriend (@swolecialism) July 1, 2023
does his business genius know no boundshttps://t.co/VQOvy7TOk2
— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) July 5, 2023
remember when none of this happened pic.twitter.com/AcegfqklVy
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) July 5, 2023
War for Ukraine Day 497: Ukraine Proving Grounds
HumboldtBlue
And we bitch at Cole.
Carlo Graziani
Wow, two gems in this collection: Twitter’s “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly” is irony gold. And Baghdad Bob! I wondered what happened to that guy, and now we know!
Mike in NC
@Carlo Graziani: Baghdad Bob became spokesman for the RNC, even though he considered it a step down.
prostratedragon
@Carlo Graziani: A.k.a. Comical Ali.
Betsy
“This reputation as a genius … is his real fortune”:
NO, it isn’t. It’s his ability to bring down hundreds of millions in government contracts for gee-whiz projects that he over-pitches and under-delivers.
like his stupid short useless tunnels for cars that don’t carry 1/100th of what real transit would.
Frankensteinbeck
Musk can’t figure out how to build spaceships. He bought a company that figures out how to build spaceships and let it do its thing while he took credit.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
I’m kind of in awe of this guy’s transcendent idiocy. It’s kind of inspiring in a way. Few people are as gifted at being incompetent and repellent as he is, or as dedicated to it.
Frankensteinbeck
@Betsy:
Musk does have two connected skills that he is fantastic at. He is a great hype man. He is great at begging the government for money. Then he made the classic, fatal con man mistake: He started believing his own lies.
SpaceUnit
Smirking edge lord now dangling from ledge. Hold on smart guy.
Betsy
Ha! Okay, I have no idea what happened there.
Bless me, maybe a front pager can remove Nos. 5 and 7.
Darkrose
@Frankensteinbeck: The phrase, “high on his own supply” seems appropriate.
West of the Rockies
A 52-year-old person thinks a poop emoji is witty, pithy, hilarious.
JaySinWA
I hope that front pagers here have an escape pod in the works for dealing with the coming implosion of Twitter embeds. I expect that much of the past twitter heavy posts are going to see an extinction event, and there is probably nothing to be done about that.
eclare
@West of the Rockies:
And his initial offer to Twitter was $54.20 per share. A pot reference! How edgy and cool.
StringOnAStick
@West of the Rockies: That the wizards on Wall street think it’s worth throwing money (most likely OPM , other people’s money) at a company that replies to emails from the press with poop emoji’s really says so much about, well, everything that is high level investing these days. And no one should ever wonder again how these whiz kids nearly crashed the world economy in the credit default swap debacle.
StringOnAStick
@JaySinWA: Excellent point. I wonder how it will affect current blog operations?
cain
At least twitter investors came out doing well. Gotta look at the bright side.
JaySinWA
@StringOnAStick: Unfortunately the old adage that “A fool and his money are soon parted” is not working well enough to stop the fool from doing a lot of damage in the process.
Alison Rose
Every time someone references this fucker’s “genius”, I’m just like, have you literally never met a smart person before or what.
Also, to quote a meme I saw floating around:
I believe it.
Brachiator
I wonder if there are other historical examples of an owner undermining a great or innovative product or company to the same extent that Musk has done with Twitter.
But Musk is not just a doofus who got rich buying a successful company. Consider how he got his start.
Musk’s great flaw is that he often wants to be the CEO of a company, a task for which he is supremely unqualified.
Chetan Murthy
@cain: Weeeellll, them that had the presence of mind to, y’know, sell their shares; the other big shareholders converted to holdings in the new company. IIRC, Alwaleed bin Talal did not sell. And for sure Jack did not sell. IIRC, a billion fucking dollars. That latter, I find hilarious!
cain
His other genius move was to move Tesla headquarters from California to Texas. A state that rejects EV cars and has a powerful network of car dealerships that will make sure that EVa don’t succeed in Texas.
ETA https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2023/05/16/texas-ev-registration-fee-abbott/70224830007/
Alison Rose
Regarding another white man who should be shipped off to Neptune, just read this in Heather Cox Richardson’s nightly email:
It also comes back to Nazis with these fucking people. GOLLY GEE, I WONDER WHY.
eclare
@Alison Rose:
ROFL
cain
@Alison Rose:
Gaslighting on the fact that this country was Christian by making the founders Christian.
Sure Benjamin Franklin would have words.
JaySinWA
@cain: He probably figures it is cheaper and easier to buy “the lege” and the guv of Texas than deal with California.
He may well be right.
eclare
@Alison Rose:
Saw that on Twitter, of all places. The Blogfather tweeted it.
Alison Rose
@cain: They love to do it, though, don’t they? I mean, if the founders wanted this to be a “Christian nation”, the words Christian and Jesus and whatnot would be all over the founding documents.
Geminid
I remember how, after Musk made his $44 billion offer for Twitter in April of 2022, he spent the next six months trying to wriggle out of the deal. Once Musk finally made the purchase he acted like he wanted to all along.
I don’t think he really did. Musk could have eaten the substantial penalties for renewing in his offer, but his prestige was on the line.
I am reminded here of George Orwell’s story from his days as a young British colonial officer. A bull elephant “in musk” was terrorizing the neighborhood, and it was Orwell’s duty to kill him. When he finally got to the elephant though, it was peacefully grazing, its hormonal aggressiveness abated. Orwell felt he could not back down because of the scores of villagers watching him, so he shot the elephant anyway.
Musk acts like a guy who’s mad that he made himself buy Twitter. His management of the company seems passive-aggressive.
Another thing that occurs to me is that Musk is on drugs. I’m not just talking weed, although excessive cannabis use can cause what I see as personality fracturing. I’m thinking more of high-tech, designer drugs. Musk seems to have this superman thing going on, like he’s high on something that he believes greatly enhances his mental prowess.
The other thing I wonder about Musk: does he have any real friends?
Odie Hugh Manatee
I find it fucking weird that Musk loves the people who hated him for making electric cars with government money that he sells to liberals, the people he loves to shit on. Now the coal-rollers love him though they are starting to question his blowing up his blue bird that he remade just for them so they would love him.
Meanwhile, liberals keep buying his cars. Fucking nuts…
OT: The guy who blew out the rear window in our minivan will be paying $475.00 for the replacement glass and installation. Seems like a nice young guy, very apologetic about it. He told me he placed the silver salute up against the curb to try and reduce the explosion. I told him that what he did actually concentrated the blast in every other direction. I found glass all of the way to the front of the van and even a piece of gravel on the dash.
Window goes in next week. I hope everyone survived the 4th (actually this was the 3rd) without damage!
Brachiator
@cain:
This may have been a dumb move, but this doesn’t prevent him from selling the cars wherever they are more popular.
Maxim
@West of the Rockies: Move the decimal point one place to the left and you’d hit on his emotional age.
@Alison Rose: What a lying waste of protoplasm.
@Geminid:
Yes, he’s abusing ketamine.
It seems highly unlikely.
Chetan Murthy
@Maxim:
I’ve said before that if Lone Skum could just *listen* and *heed* a good therapist, he could have become one of the most well-regarded and -respected men alive. I mean, he could spend his time getting into shape, learning social graces, and meanwhile giving money away by the pocket-change-ful (for him) and in the process, making friends of all The Great And The Good everywhere in the world that it matters. Everywhere. Surely he’d have women fighting each other for the chance to be with him, if he’d done that. Instead, he’s made himself a figure of ridicule for a price far in excess of what it would have cost for the aforementioned strategy.
He’s broken somewhere inside. Really broken.
Chris
@StringOnAStick:
Wall Street reminds me of the book about con artists in the 1920s that inspired The Sting. It made the point that one of the reasons con artists were so prolific in the 1920s was that the booming economy had produced a lot of people with newfound riches and no idea what to do with them. Which led to a ton of them scouring the world for things to invest in that could grow their money pile into an even bigger money pile… and made them rich fat targets for every scam in the book.
Wall Street these days feels like that on a macro scale. There’s simply way too much money sloshing around, too few actually good business ideas to sink it into, and too many smooth-talking bullshit artists attracting it like iron to a magnet. (And, as near as I can tell, no consequences at all for the people who choose their investments badly).
eldorado
musk has already accomplished his goal, which is destroying a major media outlet that allowed left and leftish viewpoints to get traction
backseat driving about the business decisions is a category error
Frankensteinbeck
@eldorado:
If his goal was destroying Twitter, he would have shut it down and saved himself a major reputation hit and major hits on his other stock values. He would still be the richest man in the world. There is no explanation that fits how this is going except that Musk is an incompetent asshole. Plus, ‘incompetent asshole’ is well supported in his career at Tesla.
Major Major Major Major
Speaking of twitter. Meta’s twitterlike, Threads, is out, and uhh, I don’t know it seems like it sucks? But whatever it takes to help bankrupt musk…
yellowdog
@Chetan Murthy: Musk could remake himself into a nice guy, but then we wouldn’t be talking about him. Narcissists need the attention and bad acts draw attention.
Major Major Major Major
@Frankensteinbeck: yeah idk why some folks insist on this musk-is-a-genius-god-emperor-but-from-the-left take. He’s just an idiot.
Major Major Major Major
@Maxim: ketamine does not cause this behavior, but modafinil does.
Splitting Image
To give credit where credit is due, Melon’s monkeying around this weekend has finally fixed a problem I’ve been having with the site since I first started reading tweets.
I don’t have an account, so I only read tweets when someone directs me to an interesting thread. Twitter’s default has always been to show the tweet you searched for, up to three replies (if there are any) and then the top recommendations by the Almighty Algorithm. The trouble is that the recommendations are usually filled with whatever bigotry the cesspool dwellers have been swimming in this week. I have never been entirely successful in being able to go to Twitter to view an image or a video without also having Melon and his followers cluttering up the page.
Until now. Since they re-enabled the ability to see tweets without logging in, the entire rest of the site is still invisible. So no more Melon, no more catturd2, no more problem.
Granted, it’s gotta be an accident, but still. Credit where credit is due. I wonder how long it will last.
Alison Rose
@Major Major Major Major: There are many things they need to work on, quickly. Not being able to only see the posts (threads?) from accounts you’re following is stupid, since it shoves a whole bunch of crap at you that the algorithm thinks you’ll like. I also don’t like that the option to follow the accounts you’re following on Instagram only comes up when you’re first setting up the account. After that, if you go to the “follow and invite friends” option, it only shows invite links.
I’m hoping it gets better. I’m alisonrose711 on there if anyone is checking it out.
Jay
@Splitting Image:
I had a series of twitter accounts, ranging from The Dodo to Glastnost Gone, that I would check every day.
All gone.
No twitter for me, unless I log in, and I ain’t gonna do that.
Glasnost Gone, a significant twitter aggregator for the war in Ukraine, is gone off the bird site.
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: Given events of this weekend, soon enough I expect that Josh Marshall will be able to provide versions of his Ukraine Crisis lists on some other platform. I just hope that whichever platform it is, one will not need to login to it, to access those lists. Until then, I’m content to subsist on a more-meager diet. I tend to check ThreadReaderApp for a few folks daily, and leave it at that.
Major Major Major Major
@Alison Rose: I assume it’s that way so that it doesn’t “feel empty” to people… i hope so lol… but yeah. There’s nothing for me there right now.
Keith P.
@Darkrose: This. The poor impulse control gives it away.
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
He started believing his own lies.
fixed it for you
He started believing his own BULLSHIT.
It always works better when you use the person you are talking about’s rational usage.
sab
OT: Will anyone with contacts in publishing explain to me why every new book I want to buy and read is preordered for September. Some of them months preordered. September is going to be a busy month unless I deorder half of them, which I am tempted to do.
Ruckus
@Alison Rose:
It’s almost funny that the founders left all that out….
sab
@Alison Rose: The first Continental Congress had a kosher table. They knew who their people were.
I am an Episcopal Christian and an American. I know who my ancestors thought were on board. Pretty much everyone ( but wary of Catholics.)
dm
I suspect moving Tesla to Texas was a poke at California labor laws.
It probably also let’s him CEO in a state he doesn’t have to pay income tax when he cashes out stock.
Mai Naem mobileI
Melon’s lucky there’s a writer’s strike on right now. Colbert/Kimmel/Meyers/SNL would have been having a ball at his expense. I am not sure his fragile wittle ego could have handled the scorn.
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus: he turned a “work” into a “shoot”. Kind of like the entire Republican party. [they’re wrestling terms.]
rikyrah
@sab:
Keep the books😊
sab
@rikyrah: Good sensible point. Just be calm.
ETA Support our authors.
Barney
There are now serious questions about what regulators in Michigan, Missouri and New Hampshire are doing – would you trust this guy with Other People’s Money?
Martin
@dm: Yeah, CA is suing his pants off.
But CA both wouldn’t cut him a check for the Starship construction or clear him to do rocket engine firing in the middle of the port of Long Beach, you know, the busiest port in the United States.
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
It is amazing how much you can’t get done, if you only care about getting the credit.
— Harry-ass Trumusk
Baud
@Martin:
Imagine Twitter, but with rocket fuel.
mrmoshpotato
So when does the apartheid shitstain launch himself to Mars? (Sorry Marvin and Daffy)
Nukular Biskits
Early mornin’, y’all.
Question: Do ANY of Musk’s businesses make a profit?
dmsilev
@Nukular Biskits: Tesla does. SpaceX probably does, but it’s privately held so hard to know for sure.
Matt McIrvin
@Alison Rose: I confess, I dimly recall seeing that fake Patrick Henry quote somewhere decades ago and taking it at face value. “Huh, Patrick Henry was a weird Christianist theocrat? Oh, well, plenty of them in Virginia today, I guess it figures.”
Suburban Mom
@sab: It’s sort of a seasonal business. There is a wave of releases in spring, oriented to vacation reading, and another in fall/winter, including those likely to be purchased as holiday gifts.
NotMax
@Nukular Biskits
Pace the family Bluth: “There’s always money in the banana stand.”
:)
Baud
lowtechcyclist
Yaccarino:
It WAS more or less a reality a year ago.
A lot further from that reality now.
Maybe it’s ‘their’ reality, as in, the reality that exists in their heads. But that’s all.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Wake me up when Twitter bans Elon.
Gvg
@Alison Rose: A lot of the founders were Christian. They were often grandchildren of the different kinds of Christians who temporarily lost the Christian religious wars of Europe when the corruption of the Renaissance Catholic Church caused the explosion called the Reformation. There is a reason that America has a zillion varieties of Christian Church. And we did not arrive here all tolerant either. We still tried to impose each view on the neighbors and reach each idea of the right way to be religious. The Salem witch trials are one example. Each of the colonies actually had a different official flavor of Christian religion. Not all of them as zealously enforced, and some of them got so many immigrants of a different flavor that the religion changed quickly. Florida changed hands I think 4 times. By the time this country formed out of 13 colonies, they had to promise neutrality on religion or the Christian’s would have killed each other.
it was not just to protect non Christians, it was to protect themselves. The current generation of religious intolerant are historically ignorant who don’t know how protected they have lived for generations. It is typical that they also play around with ruining the United States credit and don’t want t pay for taxes to pay for infrastructure or schools. They don’t know how anything works and think everything that came from past hard work is normal and just there like the air. It’s magic not engineering.
Sorry, faith based thinking infuriates me.
So does spoiled rich kid thinking. This country is kind of spoiled that way. It turns out even the world is in terms of vaccines.
Frankensteinbeck
@Nukular Biskits:
Tesla makes a profit, but only because of government subsidies. SpaceX requires government contracts to be profitable, but that’s a contract so it’s just business. Like I said, Musk is good at getting government money.
Musk also does not have much to do with SpaceX. He runs his mouth taking credit, but lets someone else run it. With Tesla there is apparently a layer of management whose job is to keep him from interfering, but with only mixed success. His personal projects like the cybertruck and self-driving software are clusterfucks.
Ramalama
@Alison Rose:
If they can revive old, wrong, and awful tropes, then I’m calling for a resurgence of Mike Royko and Erma Bombeck in public discourse. For starters.
Ramalama
@Barney: Does no one remember Elizabeth Holmes?
Tony G
“The poop emoji.” I’ve read about Twitter responding with a “poop emoji” when asked for comment in other contexts over the past few months. Elon Musk is certainly incompetent — but this goes way beyond ineptitude. My sons (now adults) were not this immature when they were five years old. It would take an army of psychiatrists to figure out Elon Musk, but it’s obvious to me that the “man” is mentally ill. The fact that he still has armies of fan-boys is an indication of how sick our culture it.
MomSense
@Alison Rose:
I saw that this morning. The Republicans are NAZIs. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore.
Princess
@Barney: You’d have to be insane to give Twitter any financial information. I have no faith Musk would bother to keep it secure.
Barney
@Ramalama: She’s just a simple mom whose side-hustle was sadly misunderstood, isn’t she? That’s what the NYT told me, anyway.
satby
As soon as I share this, I bet the morning thread will post, but Cheryl Rofer made an appearance in Heather Cox Richardson’s latest column.
trnc
I can’t help but think of congressional republicans, budget bills that become law and the debt limit.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It sure feels like these two are executive toys to keep Emmo from getting bored and wandering around the factory floor looking to improve things.
That’s likely Twitter’s problem, Emmo is such a Twitter addict there is no way to distract him from interfering with the daily operation.
Ramalama
@Barney: “side-hustle.” Yesssssss.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@sab: Weirdly, publishing does seem to take the summer off.
It may be related to sales. There’s probably a build up to Christmas.
Dorothy A. Winsor
In the meantime, a judge finds that the federal government can’t even ask a platform to remove disinformation about dangerous drugs, but the state of Montana is banning TikTok.
MomSense
Was there ever a golden age of the internet? I remember thinking it would be great and it sometimes can be, but corporate greed and assholes seem determined to take all the good out of it.
I listened to Lawrence O’Donnell’s podcast version of his show this morning and he was discussing his crisis of faith about SCOTUS and I realized that it is a perfect description of what I’ve been feeling about so many things. I think I’m stuck in a sort of mourning for what could have been for our planet, for the way we treat each other.
I’m not going to stop trying or being active politically but I am profoundly sad.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@MomSense: I hear you. Also, by turns, incredulous, helpless, and furious. Then, when I get tired enough, sad.
As you imply, it does help to actively resist, even on the days it feels futile. It’s like a demonstration of faith.
sdhays
@Frankensteinbeck: Isn’t he also responsible for insisting on the sub-standard launchpad that was completely destroyed in the Starship test flop? I forget the details, but there were a bunch of things that they have at Cape Canaveral but SpaceX neglected to (pay to) build in Texas, so (according to my recollection):
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@MomSense: I get it. I felt a profound sense of loss when it finally sank in for me that everything I’d been taught to believe in school about the American Dream was basically a pack of lies. For me, there’s a bit of a sense of: can we take these aspirational lies and make them become true for the future?
The other side has its own bunch of lies they’re trying to make come true as well, but those seem to be based on exclusion and hatemongering, from what I can see.
O. Felix Culpa
@satby: Cool! Cheryl’s full article is worth a read too. It’s cross-posted at her site, Nuclear Diner, and LGM.
boatboy_srq
Well, the US did [s]elect a pResident who couldn’t keep a casino running…
Nelle
What the Iowa guv, Kim Reynolds, lacks in intelligence (a lot), she makes up for in zealotry (a lot). She lost in court on her attempt to get a six week guard rail against abortion recently, so she has called her legislature back into session to do it legislatively. It is her legislature – she campaigned against Republicans who didn’t do exactly as she wished on the school voucher bill (probably with the help of a lot of dark money) in the last election, got them ousted and replaced by ditto-heads. The first thing that her acolytes did last January was pass an even more generous school voucher program that sucks money from taxpayers and public schools and funnel it to private schools (at least 80% goes to Catholic schools. My people left Catholicism in the 1500’s and have always advocated for church/state separation – Anabaptist Menonites.). We also have the highest property taxes here of any place we’ve ever lived (seven states).
Reynolds calls anti-abortion bills the most important human rights issue there is, while she strips rights from trans, etc
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2023/07/05/kim-reynolds-calls-legislature-special-session-july-10-new-iowa-abortion-law-restrictions/70378574007/?utm_source=desmoinesregister-dailybriefing-strada&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailybriefing-headline-stack&utm_term=hero&utm_content=pdem-desmoines-nletter65
Chief Oshkosh
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
It is fucking nuts. That said, I know of at least 3 liberals who recently bought non-Telsa EVs solely because of Musk being Musk. Here’s hoping that that becomes a thing.
boatboy_srq
@eldorado:
Seems “backseat driving” could describe most of Musk’s endeavours. Perhaps Tesla most of all.
sdhays
@Nelle: I grew up less than an hour’s drive from Iowa and would sometimes watch Iowa Public Television when the signal was good. I’m stunned and sick at the hard-right turn that state has made in the last decade.
I call it “East Dakota” now.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
Liberals also keep the NYT afloat.
That said, I don’t know whoa buying Tesla’s these days.
Nelle
@sdhays: After the court decision, we figured that my husband wouldn’t be getting calls from Elevated Access (private pilots flying women for reproductive health needs). If they do this, I told him, we’ll need to buy our own plane (ha…would need some $$$ for that.).
Ken
Eddie Lampert at Sears. Some might quibble whether Sears still qualified as a “great” company when he took over, but it was at least a non-bankrupt, profitable one.
His management failures have some similarities to Musk’s, including firing a bunch of people to reduce expenses, without considering the effect on customers.
boatboy_srq
@Baud: Tesla buyers – at least in metro DC – seem to be the ones actually looking to drive badly, and who buy Teslas to obtain license to do just that. DC/MD/NoVA Tesla drivers are the most unmannered on the roads. One wonders whether, when they get in accidents, they already planned to blame the car for some self-driving misstep rather than admit their own malicious ineptitude.
sdhays
@Ken: Oh, yeah. Musk reminds me of that asshole a lot.
Ken
Not a problem. Just hire a couple of guys with a road grader to scrape the site more-or-less level, then get a few truckloads of asphalt and a roller out there, and it’s done.
“People say you can’t do it this way, but it’s innovative.”
boatboy_srq
@Ken: Check out any and every leveraged buyout Bain Capital engaged in over the last 40 years.
sdhays
@boatboy_srq: I haven’t noticed Tesla drivers being worse than Audi drivers. Maybe people with the money to buy these cars are just bad drivers in general.
artem1s
@Frankensteinbeck:
I disagree. He was in the right place at the right time. The folks at Planetary Science sold him to NASA as a great visionary who would save human space travel. They were panicked at the NASA budget cuts, losing the shuttle, and the GOP congress demand to privatize everything in sight and make space pay for itself. The whole reason Space X got their contracts (and not Virgin) was because their proposals were based on building tech for asteroid mining. Bill Nye and the old school astronaut worshipers wanted a talking head to appease the Know Nothings in Congress who don’t understand the benefit non-human space programs give us (and frankly don’t like the programs that were proving climate change was real). They needed a mandate a la JFK ‘man to moon in this century’ and a Carl Sagan to sell the science. An idea everyone at Planetary Science knew was a good century of research away. But they decided on an upwardly failing billionaire Apartheid failson instead because he could sell the idea of human space travel to upwardly failing millionaire venture capitalist failsons who thought they were getting their own planet to live on away from the unter menschen.
Congress and NASA was high on ‘greed is good’ and killing the government in a bathtub and spinning the lie that inventing artificial competition for human space travel would bring back public interest and support equal to the old Space Race days and make them all rich to boot. Putin even provided another Cold War for them so the DoD could get into the act with the SpaceForce and then waste some real money. Spend $$$,$$$,$$$,$$$ + big shiny rockets that go boom + underpants gnomes = Prof$t!
Another Scott
@satby: My workplace blocks substack but lets this place through.
There’s probably a parable in there somewhere…
Cheers,
Scott.
Ken
@boatboy_srq: I read Brachiator as asking for examples where the owner’s incompetence destroyed the company. Bain always set out with that goal. Murder* versus negligent homicide, as it were.
* Slight steal from Steven Colbert, who riffed “If corporations are people too, Mitt Romney is a serial killer.”
Glidwrith
@Chris: And to add on to your statement: there’s way too much money sloshing around because the oligarchs have starved everyone downstream of them of the wages their productivity has earned them.
Another Scott
@sdhays: Heh.
My signifier is the license plate, not the auto brand. Maryland tags? WATCH OUT!!
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Shalimar
@Tony G: Poop seems crude. I always say now that I need to go take an elon. Everyone knows what i mean.
Miss Bianca
@Chris: Ooh, what book was The Sting based on? (That was my favorite movie ever when I was a kid. Still up there in my top 10.)
boatboy_srq
@Ken: Are we sure Musk isn’t tanking Twitter intentionally? I have serious doubts about that. Seems he’s very effectively destroying one of the few platforms poised to take on the RWNM.
boatboy_srq
You do realize you’re describing Mormonism there.
boatboy_srq
@sdhays: (speaking as a former Audi driver): everyone is rude on the roads in NoVA. Handheld cellphone use is rampant, and I blame that first. But for driving skill or lack thereof, the most recent Tesla drivers seem higher in the run-the-red-light, left-turn-from-right-lane (and vice versa), pass-into-people categories. It’s like they’re their own Aggressive Mode and Assertive mode and don’t need Autopilot to do that for them.
Chris
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
“You believe that all men are created equal?”
“It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence. It’s what we fight for.”
“But that Declaration was written by slave owners and Indian killers.”
“So they were hypocrites. So what? Doesn’t mean the sentiment isn’t noble, worth fighting for. Worth dying for.”
Chris
@Miss Bianca:
The Big Con: The Story Of The Confidence Man, by David Maurer https://www.amazon.com/Big-Story-Confidence-Man/dp/0385495382.
It’s one of my favorite movies, too. Never knew about it as a kid, but it’s one of a couple things that jump-started my love of the heist genre when I discovered it; didn’t hurt that this was at the height of the Great Recession.
Chief Oshkosh
@MomSense:
Yes, mid-to-late 90s, right after Mosaic 0.3 provided a way to display color images (and shortly after, movies) on a webpage with surrounding text.
Timill
@MomSense: August 1993, just before Eternal September started.
sdhays
@Another Scott: Not all Audi drivers, of course.
different-church-lady
@Chetan Murthy: But that would take work.
Ruckus
@Mike in NC:
Isn’t it?
Bill Arnold
@Major Major Major Major:
There are a bunch of exotic nootropics. Modafinil is consistent with the shifts in his mindset, but so are a bunch of others.
Self-messing with them, without a high level of self-awareness continuously monitoring one’s self, usually goes bad.
Miss Bianca
@Chris: Ooh, thanks – looks like my local library system doesn’t have it, may have to check out ThriftBooks.
fancycwabs
I tried Threads this morning and friends, it sucks so badly.
First time I logged on it was just people asking if tits were allowed and Zuckerberg yelling about how many people had signed up.
Second time I logged on it was Moms for Liberty asking people to narc on their schools.
Third time I logged on was to suspend my account and delete the app.
Bill Arnold
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Be ruthless about it. Betty Cracker: “But I suppose it’s no dumber than rebranding a car company that sells high-end EVs to environmentally conscious liberals in such a way as to transform said vehicles into rolling $100K MAGA hats.”
Sebastian
@Geminid:
No, Musk couldn’t have taken the $1bn penalty. He was about to be sentenced to specific performance by Chancellor McCormick and he agreed to buy to avoid the humiliation.
Tony G
@Shalimar: “Elon” as a synonym for “shit”. That sounds about right.
karen marie
@Frankensteinbeck: Musk’s contribution was to nix a proper launch pad.
“But this could turn out to be a mistake,” he said.
Shana
@Alison Rose: I may be off base here but I assume these asshats are hoping their followers mix up the Puritans from the Mayflower and the actual founding fathers. As if there wasn’t over 100 years and multiple other colonies with their own religious issues in between.