Specifically since, in Friday morning’s Open Thread, a number of commentors were discussing the very recent history of misogyny in STEM fields… and we also know that ‘business leaders’ who don’t want women in their workplaces usually aren’t very friendly to PoC, either:
War for Ukraine Day 661: Another Day, Another Russian Information Warfare Operation
Baud
I’m ok with Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity.
Happy to meet Musk halfway on this.
Villago Delenda Est
DEI must die?
It would be alot easier to just chuck Elno in a wood chipper.
HumboldtBlue
Is this where we dance?
I feel a dance.
wjca
@Baud:
I expect my company might be willing, in the name of DEI, to hire Musk. At minimum wage, of course; and he’d have to give up any other employment-type activities. Although a substantial bribe might still be required — to cover the cost of isolating him from everybody else.
Certainly we have nobody like him on staff currently. We have women, PoC, immigrants, even an old white guy (me). But no schmucks like him — for which we’d be grateful, except that we knowingly discriminate against them. Still, diversity comes at a cost, I suppose.
Cathie from Canada
Recently I read about a 2007 meme, that any New Yorker cartoon caption could always be replaced by “Christ, what an asshole!”
Hey, what a useful phrase! And now I find myself muttering this quite frequently, whenever I am reading about many of today’s politicians and tech bros
Like Musk. And, of course, the Orange One…
moops
My Musk-Outrage meter has reached Empty. I got nothing left in the tank. Nothing said about anything he says or does is novel at this point. Every billionaire is an asshole and most seem to happily fly under the radar despite just as awful public statements. But if you spend all your time on former Twitter, then you are going to hear a LOT about this one specific asshole.
JPL
Nikki Haley will be on This Week, so will have a platform to denounce trump’s latest racist rant. Will she take the opportunity or is she still hoping for the white supremacy vote.
Rusty
I work for a research and development company that hires a lot of engineers. We recruit heavily on various campuses. The young engineering community is far more diverse than the older engineering cohort. Failure to support diversity would cut us off from an important slice of engineers at a time when it’s a sellers market for good talent. It’s also broader than that, because we would also be cutting ourselves off from engineers that support their friends that are in those groups. Engineers tend to trend more conservative, but young people are more liberal and so young engineers are proportionally more liberal than their older peers. They don’t want to work at places that are hostile to their friends. We hold a number of inter-company events during Pride Month. They are very well attended by more than just the LGBTQ community. People participate not just because they are in the community, but because they support the community. Importantly the company deliberately promotes these events on our social media feeds. We know potential hires will look at them when job hunting. Being supportive of diversity is advantageous when recruiting. I’m not remotely surprised Musk’s companies are struggling to hire good talent.
BellyCat
If job applicant identities were scrubbed of all personally identifiable information and replaced with a number, Elmo would concoct some cockadoodle theory that pits even numbers against odd numbers.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Why am I surprised that they’re surprised that bigotry is bad for business?
satby
@moops: the above quoted content was on Blue Sky, I believe. I read it there too.
And whether you care or not, Elmo has control of companies that disseminate information (often disinformation that affects how news is reported worldwide), companies that provide defense industry stuff like satellite communication and space exploration. Until he’s disentangled from some critical infrastructure his erratic and toxic behavior should be reported and concern us.
UncleEbeneezer
And this is what bothers people like Musk. They are just mad that the social tide is moving away from their bigotry.
Jamey
“The low, low cost and extraordinarily high ROI of shutting the fuck up…” is my new mantra.
lowtechcyclist
@Jamey:
It’s a good one! I just nominated it for a rotating tag.
Ascap_scab
…you don’t see [Tim Cook] pissing his pants at a shareholder meeting…
That guy must be gay. Oh wait, we are.
JAFD
Update from yesterday, re Bluesky ‘banner photo’: Clicked ‘Edit profile’, clicked ‘camera icon’, clicked ‘Library’, clicked on ‘picture X’.jpg’; Picture appears, on white rectangle on black background, that’s it – no ‘save’ button, only thing to do is to hit ‘back arrow’ on browser ???
Have decided problem can wait till 2024, (originally typed ‘2924’ ;-) ), along with adding alt-text to pictures. Some real life hassles to be dealt with first.
Was about 60 F yesterday in NJ. Did some volunteer work in morn, spent much of afternoon basking in sun, coat off. Was bumper-to-bumper traffic on main drag of Montclair thru afternoon, a symptom of ‘economic anxiety’, I guess.
Happy belated Beethoven’s birthday, everyone !
coin operated
@JPL:
She won’t say shit unless asked about it. Question is…will our incompetent corporate media even bother to ask?
I await the pretzel logic she’ll have to deploy to get around that question without upsetting the MAGA faithful.
NotMax
@coin operated
Quasi-obligatory?
;)
Gvg
lowtechcyclist
@JAFD:
And today is the 120th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first heavier-than-air flight.
Frankensteinbeck
Musk thinks about this constantly, in the sense that it utterly infuriates him. It’s the whole point of his Twitter purchase. He is very, very, very angry that white men get pushback for being bigots, and has been working hard to remove this pushback. Instead, the pushback hits him harder than ever. Cue feedback spiral.
Tony G
@JPL: Haley is probably still hoping to be chosen as Trump’s running mate — the probability of which is zero, of course.
lowtechcyclist
@Gvg:
The problem is the stock price and market cap. Tesla is trading for over $250 a share, which translates to a market cap of just shy of $800B, which is more than all the other major automobile companies, combined. (Ford and GM each have a market cap of slightly under $50B right now.)
So you know the market valuation of Tesla is being propped up by the adoration of Musk fanbois for their hero. If they got rid of him, they’d be able to start dealing with their organizational problems, but the stock price would crash.
That’s going to happen sooner or later, when the other car companies start putting out reliable and affordable electric cars, and there’s an infrastructure to sustain them. But nobody’s going to fire Musk before that happens on its own.
Nelle
@lowtechcyclist: My husband celebrates this every year. He is also a recipient of the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award from the FAA, awarded for fifty years of safe flying. I think he has about 9,000 hours of flying time.
Tony G
@Rusty: At least in my part of the world (The New York City Metropolitan Area) “diversity” has been the norm in I.T. for the past few decades. In my various jobs there would be some white men like me, but plenty of women and non-whites. My manager for several years was from Nigeria. The CIO was a woman. I don’t think that this was due to any deliberate DEI effort. Smart hiring managers just hired the best people.
p.a.
Begs the question: who will he name?
NotMax
@p.a.
Devin Nunes.
(half snark)
Matt McIrvin
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
The way it works is that bigotry is not always bad for business–there have been very successful businesses built on catering to the identity politics of bigots, or simply to segments of society that are also bigoted, and incidents in which they tried to soften that image and got hurt by the backlash for “going woke” or whatever the phrase was at the time.
And one of those businesses is a propaganda industry devoted to cherry-picking these incidents and touting them to the heavens, so that bigots always believe they’re the put-upon silent majority and “go woke, go broke” is the market rule.
OzarkHillbilly
@p.a.: Himself.
lowtechcyclist
@Nelle:
That’s really cool! That many hours and years of safe flying is a big deal, tell him I said congrats!
I’ve never flown a plane, but being a passenger in planes has been a routine part of my life since childhood, since I grew up in the DC area, but my mother’s family was in Kansas, and my father’s was in Los Angeles.
As a result, I was on a plane on December 17, 1963, and fully cognizant that it was the 60th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flights. I found it odd at the time that the adult world didn’t seem to pay it any notice.
RevRick
White supremacy is as American as apple pie. I’ve seen reports of studies that reveal children as young as three understand the caste structure of our society. Three! So it takes a concerted effort to undo the assumptions that permeate our society. And these assumptions afflict everyone of us. Even persons of color buy into them.
It manifests itself in a thousand different ways. The way our penal system hands down harsher punishment to black defendants than white ones for the same crimes and the way doctors prescribe less anesthesia and pain medication to black patients. The sick logic behind this is that black peoples are more brutish, animalistic and less sensitive to pain ( whereas whites are more sensitive and refined).
In systems of oppression the oppressed often turn against each other. Subject people alternately seek to curry favor with the oppressors or to fight against them. But all buy into the system, because it’s like the air we breathe— all pervasive.
Tech bros are no different from the rest of us, and may even be more prone to the white supremacist assumptions, because they were often ridiculed outcasts in their youth and thus are particularly susceptible to perceived attacks on their manhood and ability.
Again, it takes concerted effort to make oneself aware of the assumptions and biases that govern our society, and then take steps to counter them. And for many tech bros, DEI is the enemy, because it hits them at their point of greatest vulnerability. While they wield great power, internally they are quite weak. They may boast about how they’re the true leaders of the pack, but they sense that really they’d be the easy pickings for the lions or wolves, and the pack would breath a sigh of relief at their expense.
Taken together, the pressure both externally and internally to boast about how special they are, how superior they are, how much better they are means that assholeness exponentially grows among them. And DEI punctures that emotional balloon.
Frankensteinbeck
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
It’s baked into the concept of bigotry. They are the definition of ‘normal’, the only people who matter. People have a strong tendency to believe that everyone thinks the way they do anyway, and for bigots it’s much stronger. So, yeah, they tend to think that surely if the market, if people’s choices were allowed to decide, diversity would be an utterly failure.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@lowtechcyclist: Have you ever read Tom Crouch’s The Bishop’s Boys? It’s a bio of the Wright brothers that’s extremely well written. I read it years ago and I still recall bits of Crouch’s description of the photo of the first flight. Something about “there’s Wilbur in the foreground.” As I recall, Crouch said Wilbur was a natural-born engineer
Nelle
@lowtechcyclist: Where in Kansas? I’m from Wichita but left upon high school graduation. Lived all over (KS,NE, WA, AK, IL, MD, MT, IA, and New Zealand) but spent about 20 years in Lawrence, KS.
Dorothy A. Winsor
From the Smithsonian, here’s a cool annotation of the photo of that first flight.
Kay
@moops:
I think as Twitter slowly fails you’l hear less and less about Musk. You’ll hear less and less about how DEI and “wokeness” are the most important threat to society, too. Anti wokeness was a big flop politically – the public doesn’t care about it near as much as the NYTimes and Elon Musk do.
Twitter was bad for journalists and media- it made them more cliquish and lemming-like and out of touch than they already were. We’ll see less of a herd effect with a set of platforms rather than one.
Musk isnt going to be able to compete with serious car companies run by real managers (rather than social media gadflys) here shortly – then the (ridiculously) over-valued Tesla will drop and he’ll be just another bitter, middle aged white guy with a string of failed relationships with women who is pissed that the world changed. There’s a ton of them – they’re Trump’s base.
Kay
Good story about how young, progressive women are using TikTok as a campaign tool:
pajaro
@Nelle:
Hi, Kansan. I spent a bit over 30 years in Lawrence. I thought it was a great town.
Barry
@p.a.: Trump will name somebody he trusts not to pull a Pence.
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue:
And now on Sprockets…
artem1s
@lowtechcyclist:
it depends on who other the major holders are at Tesla and how much Elmo’s crappy ideas are responsible for forcing the R&D to focus on self-driving nonsense instead of building reliable cars that don’t kill your customers. I imagine there are a lot of holders who are waiting for the price to tank so they can buy more. If the company returns to focusing on getting the charging station problem solved, and drop the self driving crap, it could survive a stock dump. Best case scenario for stock holders would be hostile take over by one of the Big 3 or Apple. Tesla’s likely to end up as a wholly owned subsidiary of some company that wants their patents. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are major holders and board members already working on it.
We already know there is a concerted effort to keeping Elmo away from the real work at SpaceX so he doesn’t fuck their brand up too badly. I suspect his DEI outrage is more aimed at federal regs he has to follow for the SpaceX contracts. SpaceX interference with Starlink has got to have even the most anti woke assholes in Congress, NASA, and the DoD concerned over national security. If his VC investors at SpaceX are giving him grief and/or walking away because he’s putting contracts at risk that spells real trouble for him. It’s far more likely SpaceX will force him out first and then Tesla will go next. SpaceX will thrive if they can’t keep their worser VC angels from tanking the government contracts.
lowtechcyclist
@Nelle:
Arkansas City. We’d go out there every Christmas, so I was quite familiar with the Wichita airport.
sab
@pajaro: I visited my sister there one summer when she had a temporary teaching job. Midwestern summers are really really hot.
Nelle
@pajaro: KU? Is so, what department?
lowtechcyclist
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Aeronautics is definitely NOT my field, so do I understand correctly that the reason they were flying into the ~25 mph wind was to get enough airspeed over the wings to generate lift?
evodevo
@sab: Yeah…that expression 110 in the shade wasn’t coined for nothing lol
stinger
@lowtechcyclist:
Probably because the world was still reeling after the assassination of a President.
And now THAT is 60 years in the past. Wow.
RepubAnon
@p.a.: Pig f**kr Tucker?
Another Scott
@Kay: OTOH, “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
Yeah, the market value of TSLA is nuts. Speculators notice – short interest is high.
I think about Dean Kamen and his Segway thing occasionally. Ground-breaking technology, very well done (with occasional headline stories about people falling/crashing on them), lots of buzz for a while.
A Chinese company with a backer with big pockets bought the company in 2015.
Years ago, Melon made a big splash by saying anyone could use Tesla’s patents. (And they seemed to dramatically drop their patent filings not long after that.) So, I’m not sure what the value is long-term in their technology – but I haven’t really checked. The name means something, but so did “Segway” at one point. As it stands now, their market cap is too high for someone to buy them. But I also remember when Porsche had higher profits than sales (from the way the stock market was going nuts and their trading antics) and there was talk of them buying VW, and low-and-behold a few years later VW had to buy them out to keep them from going under.
Nobody knows the future…
Cheers,
Scott.
kalakal
@lowtechcyclist: Yep
Uncle Cosmo
More than likely. Same reason that aircraft carriers turn into the wind to launch planes, to add the unaided speed of the wind to the forward motion of the carrier crossing the wings to increase the lift. IIUC that part of aerodynamics was pretty well understood before 1903.
Faster the airspeed over the wings, lower the air pressure; “lift” is the difference in air pressure between the lower surface of the wings and the upper. (The reason the upper part of wings is curved is to force the air to travel farther, & therefore move faster, to catch up with the air that’s traveling more or less in a straight line on the bottom.)
Tony G
@stinger: That’s weird to think about. When Kennedy was assassinated there were a good number of people who had adult memories of reading the news about the Wright Brothers flight.
Tony G
@Kay: That’s true. But even if Musk loses 99% of his money, he’ll still be a billionaire. That’s meritocracy!
Glidwrith
@Kay: You’ve brought something into focus for me, to paraphrase “bitter middle-aged white guys with a string of failed relationships with women, pissed that the world has changed, those are Trump’s base”.
We’ve seen repeatedly the pedophilia, child abuse, rape and abuse of women at home and the workplace, especially in more closed communities.
Expand that stifling patriarchy back out to the US as a whole before WW2, before Civil Rights, before women’s rights. All that abuse was running rampant and unremarked, because it was “normal”.
Those continuing failures of relationships with women would have never happened, because people like them were free to rape and beat children and women to their hearts content, because they could never get away from their abusers.
That’s Trump’s base.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony G: And there were plenty of people who witnessed the whole span from the first heavier-than-air powered flights to supersonic travel and people walking on the Moon.
It’s not hard to figure out where the “Mars colonies, spaceliners and flying cars” futurism that led to such bitter disappointment among science-fiction fans came from. The modern science-fiction genre arose during a period when transportation was in a Moore’s Law-like exponential explosion phase, and it was natural to think that would continue indefinitely. So the trappings of science fiction were often about vehicles, speed and flight.
In fact the explosion tailed off around the 1970s and progress has been at a more linear and plodding rate since then, to the degree that it’s happened at all. Jet airliners even go a little slower now than they did then, on average, though they are much more efficient.
PatrickG
@Nelle:
talk about grade inflation! 9000 hours is only just over one year!
/s
stinger
@Tony G: Some of the same people may have lived to see humans walking on the Moon!
ETA: Matt McIrvin got there before me. Curse you, Matt!
Villago Delenda Est
@lowtechcyclist:
And they got lost in a holding pattern over Kitty Hawk.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Scott: The Segway was supposed to be idiot proof, but then George W. Bush disproved that notion.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott:
I recall seeing Kamen give a talk at the Boston Science Museum when it was a new product. He rolled up to the microphone on his Segway and gave the whole talk standing on it. Had all these weird ideas about how it would revolutionize transportation and cities would be redesigned around them, and I never quite saw how that was supposed to work.
I always thought the IBOT wheelchair that the tech had been developed for (a wheelchair that can climb stairs and “stand up”!) was the real killer app… but they had a lot of trouble getting insurance companies to accept it as a thing they should pay for, and I also think a lot of paraplegics and amputees don’t really want a heavy power chair like that if they can use something simpler.
I had a coworker who was always keen on messing around with the latest buzzword technology and he actually commuted to work on his Segway for a while, had fun rolling it around in the office. He’s the only one I ever knew. He’s been playing with LLMs a lot lately.
Matt McIrvin
@Uncle Cosmo:
That was the standard explanation I was taught too but it turns out it’s not true–there’s nothing that forces the air on the top of the wing to catch up with the air on the bottom. The compression forced by the curvature does speed it up to some degree though.
To my mind, the most intuitive explanation for lift is that the wing is shaped to have a net effect of forcing air downward (through a combination of its curvature, its angle of attack, and any flaps and slats if they’re extended), and that inevitably pushes back up on the wing. But precisely how that happens is complicated. It does depend on laminar flow, which is why if the airflow separates from the upper surface and becomes turbulent, the plane loses lift (a stall).
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: Excellent points.
I remember being crushed by the UNFAIRNESS of gas tripling in price in the 1970s, just in time for me to get my license and graduate HS and not being able to afford to drive anywhere… I was bellyaching to my dad once about it and he said, yeah, but at least you didn’t have to worry about being Drafted… Good point! ;-)
We grew up being taught that cheap personal transportation was Freedom. Not going ever faster, ever cheaper, in ever newer amazing vehicles, starting in the 1970s was a big shock.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: Because they have so many more options for socializing through electronic communication, kids today don’t have quite the same association between cars and freedom, which makes them much less eager to get their driver’s licenses (though I can testify that a teenager asking to be ferried around everywhere is still very much a thing). My daughter already had an online social life going through Discord, texting and video chats before COVID hit.
When we were young, the only real option there was sharing the whole family’s landline phone, with very little privacy.
wjca
Pretty sure she knows that zero probability as well as anybody. I think she’s actually trying to position herself as the one to pick up the pieces after a Republican disaster in 2024. Obviously she can’t say that aloud, but it would make sense.
wjca
Actually, it is true, albeit badly phrased.
The air on top doesn’t have to “catch up” because it isn’t really going anywhere (except up and down as the wing passes thru). To goes faster relative to the wing surface because it’s going further. And the faster air (actually any fluid) move past/along a surface, the less pressure it exerts againt that surface.
Tony G
@Kay: I hope that you’re correct that “we’ll hear less and less about how DEI and “wokeness” are the most important threat to society” but I suspect that that won’t be the case. Maybe “woke” will be replaced by some other word, in the same way that “woke” replaced “politically correct” as the insult of choice. All of this nonsense is part of the more-than-half-century-long freakout by straight white men who are angry about the fact the\at blacks, women and gays got some rights in the sixties and early seventies. The underlying sense of grievance by many white guys has never gone away, so the “culture war” nonsense will continue.
Tony G
@Kay:
Tony G
@Tony G:
Timill
@wjca: The horizontal component of its velocity is unchanged; the vertical component is increased, so the magnitude of its velocity increases, and that’s its speed.
Marc
He was right in a sense, but wrong about the level of tech required. Note the numbers of electric kick-scooters (who’d have thought that would happen?), electric skateboards, and electric bikes now running around major cities.
JAFD
@Tony G: And ‘politically correct’ replaced ‘commie’ which replaced ‘n##### lover’ (and methinks ‘social justice warrior’ (which I thot was actually pretty cool …) was in the mix somewhere too.)
JAFD
@Matt McIrvin: Back in the late ’70’s I was living on the fringe between black North Philadelphia and the ‘bohemian’ ‘Parkway’ area. On summer afternoons peddlers came by selling fruits and veggies from horse-drawn wagons. Thinking of it, those were probably the last ‘working horses’ around – all of the equines around now are in one form of recreation or another…
Tony G
@JAFD: That’s right. New words are rolled out every decade or so, but the same whiny grievances remain.
Chris T.
@wjca:
At first the wings rode pretty bare:
With an angle they struck down the air.
Then a guy named Bernoulli
Came along with his roulei
And now there’s an airfoil there!