I’m sick you guys. Sorry I’m going to whine a little bit. I went to a 5 year-old’s birthday party on Saturday so of course I’m blaming that as the culprit. It’s not Covid, which is good, but it’s still a nasty cold.
I hope you all are well!
Can we not?
Trump expected to announce 2024 presidential run in speech – live updates
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2022/nov/15/donald-trump-2024-announcement-president-republican-nomination-speech-live-updates
Well that’s not good.
Russian-made missile hits Poland, Warsaw says; NATO to discuss
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/15/russia-ukraine-war-g20-latest-updates/
Turn around and get out of Ohio.
Her miscarriage left her bleeding profusely. An Ohio ER sent her home to wait
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/11/15/1135882310/miscarriage-hemorrhage-abortion-law-ohio
WUT??
Deadly concert attack: Men tied to Hells Angels arrested for assaults at Chris Stapleton show at Shoreline
https://www.ktvu.com/news/deadly-concert-attack-5-men-tied-to-hells-angels-arrested-for-assaults-at-chris-stapleton-show-at-shoreline
Scary week for college kids
Four students in Moscow, Idaho, died from an edged weapon, police say
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/15/1136871897/idaho-students-moscow-killed-homicide
Awwww
Have a great day!
On my way to Cali. Covid booster, Flu Shot, fucking snow and ice, customs and throwing out my passport were just some of the obstacles for this trip.
Will still post NOTs…. Barring any phone issues.
Btw… Aren’t Hell’s Angels and concerts a bad thing?
I was still under the impression that hell, it’s “angels”, and CA were all one thing…
Enjoy!
Counter-programming: The White House released this during Trump’s incoherent ramble.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/therecord/
If I was capable of feeling pity for ocher shitstain (and I’m not) I’d almost feel some. Ivanka has turned her back on him. Fox News cut away during his babblings. The clowns he managed to assemble at Mar-a-loser were basically a gaggle of idiots and has-beens. Even my local paper printed letters from ostensible Trump voters who said they were done (yes, I assume these are liars and scumbags if they voted for him twice, so really, who knows?).
And somehow, he thinks this will ‘shield’ him from the many, many indictments he’s facing. It’s like he still believes in Santa Claus and thinks that he’s getting a visit on Christmas Day.
He is banking on a few things which aren’t crazy.
He knows the GOP state legislatures and extremist judges are not going to moderate. Any hopes of GOP pundits for a David Brooks-inspired return to GOP normalcy are as ridiculous as anything David Brooks ever writes.
The GOP’s descent into shudder inducing nuttery means their margins are so thin the oligarchs will feel they have no choice but to support him in the end. He knows the Murdoch/Kochs/corporate PACs would rather eat live eels than sit back and watch Democrats win.
He knows that other possible GOP candidates will look at the looming crazy and the prospects of a fight with him and hesitate. They may still enter, but they will play things safe and slow. He can for once be honest — he has to win this, they don’t.
He knows he will have the political press cheering him on the whole way. They would rather eat live eels than give Democrats any credit, and they are champing at the bit for a chance to discredit them and starve them of oxygen. They were furious that so much of 2020 coverage was diverted to Covid. A Trump run means endless policy free horserace coverage.
This doesn’t add up to any kind of sure thing. Maybe a GOP field this time is more capable than what they got in 2020. Maybe his legal troubles break through the smoke the political press will be blowing for him. Very possibly his negatives erode just enough — about 5-10% — for people to realize he’s always been a bad bet, the same way NBC finally had to admit The Apprentice was not going to make a comeback.
But he has nothing to lose anymore.
Obligatory….. Wait, what, Santa ain’t real? You serious Clark?
Oh, boy. Elmo doubles down on doubling down from all the other doubling-down.
Musk issues ultimatum to staff: Commit to ‘hardcore’ Twitter or take severance
Quote: In the midnight email, which was obtained by The Washington Post, Musk said Twitter “will need to be extremely hardcore” going forward. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
I’d grab that three-month severance package so fast you’d hear a sonic boom. I’m also not sure exactly what he expects employees to DO while working 22-hour days and sleeping under their desks. (Do you suppose there’s anyone walking around at Twitter HQ? At all?) Twitter isn’t exactly complicated programming, even if he’s planned some weird upgrades or something. He’s eliminated content moderation, which I would think is the biggest ongoing task. Ad sales? But you don’t need technical people for that and he personally killed most of the revenue.
My best guess is that he’s setting up the staff as fall guys to preserve his reputation when the whole thing collapses. “As I told the board, I just couldn’t make any headway with a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, so we’re filing for bankruptcy.”
Years from now business students will learn about the “Collapse of the Techbros” in school.
…you could be right about twitter not involving complicated programming…although I guess I kind of assumed at least some of it must be
…but given this tailspin includes him literally asking random people on twitter how it works…while appearing to demonstrate a lack of understanding of what might be load-bearing…or where the load is managed
…or, come to that…what the shit he’s trying to throw out even does
…& the kicker is…that might not even be the part that sinks his little battleship
…if it didn’t seem to be playing out extremely publicly in more or less real time I honestly don’t think I’d believe anyone could be this expensively obtuse…not to mention thin-skinned
…I feel like the way the preview works kind of misses the part about why that last one has to do with the thin-skinned thing…so to clarify…it started like this
By “not complicated,” I’m not saying I could do it. But based on the numbers of competitors that sprang up during Twitter’s golden years, there’s nothing proprietary or hard for other programmers to grasp and duplicate. Even Truth Social managed to crank out a version of sorts.
And once the basic programming is done, what has to be handled on a daily basis? I have to believe that the majority of major bugs and fixes were handled years ago. Balancing server loads, maybe? Other hardware issues? Wouldn’t you outsource that anyway?
The main thing I see that’s ongoing is content moderation and advertising sales. One of those is gutted now. Expecting salespeople to work all night long is … odd. Who would they be selling too? Overseas markets? Maybe, but Elmo is in DEEP shit with the EU, as you point out.
Flogging the remaining staff is not going to produce whatever result Elmo thinks that it will. I guess my question is, what result is he expecting?
…yeah…I don’t know what he’s expecting…& I know what you mean about the (relatively) not-complicated thing…but on the other hand a lot goes on under the hood, so to speak, just to make things not only work but work “securely” (for a given value of secure) & at this point he seems to have punted most of the people who were doing moderation along with whole teams of people who did basic keep-the-wheels-on stuff both server & client-side
…one might call that a recipe for disaster…which begs the question of why he’d consider that a feature not a bug…& I guess a $44billion tax write off might sound good…but at best it’s about half that that came out of his pocket & he could chew through that pretty quick if he loses the case about how his tesla salary/benefit package is sketchy…or some of those loans he’s got stock leveraged against get called…or…yeah…that doesn’t seem like the answer
…holmes said that once you eliminate the impossible what remains (however improbable) is the truth…so…if doing the same thing over & over while expecting a different outcome is a working definition of insanity…maybe he thinks doing everything different while expecting everything to carry on just the same is what he thinks screams “totally sane”?
I think far, far too many reporters have been refusing to look at the obvious, which is that he’s just lost his grip.
If this was an everyday person who went to the bank, took out all their cash, pulled off their clothes, started handing out the cash to other customers while telling all the bank employees they were making potato chips now…
…well, a good reporter might consider the angle this was performance art or an effort to divert bank security while a tunnel went into the vault. But they’d have to lean hard into the idea that there was a brain problem or drugs involved.
But the press is locked into a mythos of the hyper-rational CEO god, and reporting like this which refuses to actively engage with the possibility that he has broken down is a massive failure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/16/technology/elon-musk-twitter-employee-deadline.html
…I dunno exactly but I recall there being a lot of discussion of why on the one hand it was wrong/unethical/partisan-hack-ish to talk about the alleged president being a sociopathic narcissist with diagnosable psychological issues if you weren’t qualified to diagnose them…& on the other that if you were qualified either you’d be contravening doctor-patient confidentiality or making an affirmative diagnosis without direct examination of the patient…which would be a different kind of unethical
…the flip side of which catch-22 being that it’s surely also unethical not to point out visible derangement in an individual who is to be entrusted with nuclear launch codes…so the result was a lot of column inches hashing over stuff we could all see but some wouldn’t accept & about which little visibly was done
…the piece you linked to didn’t actually say “the dude has lost his fucking marbles” but it did touch on a laundry list of moves which paint a picture it’s nigh impossible to see in any positive light…which might be sailing pretty close to territory that risks libel suits for no discernible gain if it added that particular strung to its bow?
…the man is in the middle of a law suit about the principle thing his enormous on-paper net worth rests on & simultaneously acting out his own version of a blend of fresh-out-of-buisness-school “consultants” & the office (carell>gervais) in the most insanely public fashion imaginable
…the fact that he’s hanging out in people’s replies on twitter talking to randoms about shit that he could have asked in-house experts about if he hadn’t just fired them suggests a lot of this time he’s selflessly devoting to trying to un-sink twitter looks a lot like when regular folks are goofing off instead of working…which does sound like the actions of a for-real lunatic given his personal context
…but a lot of the appeal of twitter to musk as a user was/has been that an absurd number of accounts seem to treat sycophancy towards him as a full-time occupation to the point that he’s literally used to being able to show his whole ass on that app & have legitimate criticism functionally buried under a mountain of caping & harassment…so…I think it may well be true that he’s lost the plot…but I think claiming he’s lost his grip is overly charitable
…pick your metaphor…whether it’s a puppy à la mice & men…which probably ought to be a bird, thematically-speaking…or water…which I reckon works at a stretch along the lines of the proverbial storm in a teacup…it’s that grip that’s the problem…& thinking the answer is to squeeze harder is just making it worse in a self-fulfilling kind of a way?
Mental illness would definitely explain a lot of his behavior. Kanye gets all the news coverage for acting crazy, but he’s not really doing much that’s crazier than Elmo, when you think about it.
This one, down in the weeds of one of those original tweets about Elon’s dumbassery made me giggle, ‘cuz it’s just too damn believable😉😆😂🤣
Oh dear, @MegMegMcGee, I am sure that you are correct regarding the germ enthusiast. I still remember getting the grade school grippe thanks to the kiddo every fall, every winter, and every new school/classroom. Feel better soon!
The NY Times leadership and political reporters are garbage, but sometimes the rest of the paper turns out good stuff despite it all.
This is an interesting bit on how unready Tesla’s full auto driving is for the real world.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/14/technology/tesla-self-driving-flaws.html
One big issue the article covers is that it struggles to handle edge cases that come up with test drivers.
What the article doesn’t address though, is some even bigger context. One is that people drive a huge amount all over, and the number of edge cases overall is fantastic. Test drivers can only scratch the surface.
Second is that the cost of failure is catastrophic — paralysis or death, including for innocent people.
Third is what happens when regular drivers encounter robots in greater numbers. Does this start causing regular drivers to create edge cases with catastrophic results?
And then there is the issue of switching from auto control to driver control. This test driver is always ready to jump in. Most drivers will check out. How do you get people to stay engaged?
Auto driving may well make sense for things like airport parking lot shuttle buses. But the aticle is right that it needs a type of AI that simply doesn’t exist now. But tech companies are trying to con people into thinking it does.
…the thing is…tesla’s self-driving software has never been ready for primetime…these kind of write ups have been around since the outset, even…here’s a piece from forbes back in ’17 that cites the trolley problem as well as a class action law suit against tesla from 2016
…& plenty of other vehicle manufacturers have made “driver assist” stuff that’s functionally pretty hard to tell apart from autonomous car territory…between being able to maintain lane discipline, match velocity, maintain distance from the car in front & handle the brakes & steering the way they’ve been handling the clutch & gears for a good long while…the fact a merc requires you to keep a finger in contact with the steering wheel while it “assists” you along the freeway seems more like a legal nicety than a meaningful difference from being driven
…but the man who seemingly never met a piece of vaporware he wouldn’t try to milk has been all in on trying to make “level 5” autonomous driving by an “AI” autopilot a USP for tesla for so long that the fact it might be a problem so non-trivial that the only way to solve it is to alter the context (if you changed the underlying infrastructure you could conceivably have a network of roads on which vehicles could run autonomously without some or even all of the problems that plague tesla’s efforts) is just another thing he’s in denial about…& inclined to blame on engineers rather than see as potentially not amenable to engineering your way out of
…there’s a common denominator at work between those issues & twitter’s apparent nosedive…but apparently musk skipped the relevant math lesson & keeps thinking his ability to get 5 by adding 2+2 means he’s gifted rather than a moron?
Ngl, regarding the stories (and the lawsuit!) about Tesla’s autopilot (or whatever it’s called) feature…
There is a part of me, that wonders if ‘ol ElontheIdiot isn’t trying to pull a Trumpty-dumpty and just “flood the field with bullshit” so that *everyone* is talking more about his immolation of Twitter, rather than the regular fuckups he inflicts on Tesla…
I can’t quite figure out if his narcissistic traits are too strong for him to be doing the immolation on purpose, or not!🙃
I kiiiiinda lean toward the “asshat with his head shoved so far up his own rectum, that he hasn’t managed to breathe clean air for *years*!” over “mega-brain, playing 4-dimensional chess!”, tbh…🤔
…I’m sort of morbidly fascinated by the whole thing tbh…on balance I think there’s too many moving parts for him to have been able to time the point at which the deal went through on twitter accurately enough to have steered into nosediving it as deliberate distraction…but I would find it easy to believe that aspect of things is one of the very few scraps of silver lining he might have to cling to around about now?
…my guess is that he’s been high on his own supply for the duration…he styles himself the chief engineer for space X as though the rockets only work because of him…a good bit of the tesla case he was in the dock about turns on how integral to tesla’s value/success he was because it’s about whether the board gave him overly generous remuneration because he had them over a barrel…so the defense is pitching for “he was cheap at the price – he’s a visionary rocket/computer scientist & engineering prodigy who’ll save humanity by taking us to mars in a spaceship controlled & powered by his peerless mind” type testimony…I think he genuinely believed he “got” twitter in a way the people running it didn’t…& that he could treat the business side with the same scant regard for regulatory practice as he had with his other companies & throw money at lawyers & get away with it while having a grand old time being lord of twitter with an army of acolytes at his beck & call…when he was high & it was all hypothetical & it seemed billions-of-bucks-worth of funny to add a weed joke to the price as a fuck you to the people who put him on CEO-probation for making a weed joke about tesla stock…on twitter
…then reality set in…& he scrambled but good to get out of the thing…only to find out that in his overweening arrogance he’d let twitter’s lawyers firmly tie him down to putting his money where his mouth was…before he’d used it to badmouth & devalue the very thing he’d contracted to purchase…a thing that is literally all about the world & his dog having an opinion about the answer to the question “how’s that working out for you, chief?”
…I could be persuaded that there are those who ponied up to make this possible who…at a remove or two from the metaphorical coalface…maybe even think it was money well spent to get what they have out of it…but I think for elon himself we’re looking at the product of months (or possibly longer) of what douglas adams called “the long dark teatime of the soul”…all in all…if he doesn’t break twitter or otherwise tank the company he’ll be convinced it was because of rather than despite him…& if he does that it was because others failed to appreciate his genius
…& I think that’s the part that leaves me with zero sympathy for the man…& a whole mess of concerns about the goals & motivations of the people who both put him up to it & ponied up for it?
The U of Idaho thing is pretty much all the news here. It’s horrible.
The boy from WA in that murder was one of triplets! I saw an interview with his parents last night, that is insane!
MAGAGA makes me gag!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-magaga-2024_n_6374b3b6e4b0afce04694b20
He’s breaking the law? Not this guy…
https://crooksandliars.com/2022/11/again-shifting-campaign-dollars-benefit
I wonder why the Georgia election was so fucked up?
https://www.gregpalast.com/mail-in-ballots-in-georgia-plunged-by-1-million-2/
Yeah, there’s hardcore voter suppression going on there. That’s why I thought Biden should be tackling that with federal legislation from the jump. It’s certain the Supreme Taliban won’t be stepping in to help.