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Is Elon Musk the greatest visionary or the greatest snake oil salesman of our age?

BigMoaner said:
have to confess, i thought he was some hyper talented engineer, some STEM king. so when he was on rogan etc, i thought here was an interview with someone exceptionally talented and clever (although i don't place huge amounts of value on STEM stuff - i get fan boy like with the humanities: philosophers, artists, etc), but he was still interesting in that regard.

But what a sham, right? A grift! Just a rich kid with the power to invest and buy and hire.

Actually thinking about it, it's incredibly deceptive if he is not stating the fact. He should have gone on Rogan etc and at some point said "look joe, i am just a money man, this stuff is not my expertise".
Click to expand...

I thought at least that he was a competent businessman. But that was before he started acting out in public, paying twice the value for a brand before destroying it in front of everyone mere months later. It's not a new thing either; if you read the story about how Musk got kicked out of PayPal, you'll see he's always been a mixture of arrogance and Dunning-Kruger.

teuchter said:
The past few pages have shown how smart the folks of urban are. I've been really impressed how well they've dealt with an obvious wind-up. It's genius central here - Elon Musk wouldn't have a chance in this pool of wisdom and insight.
Click to expand...

The troll speaks.
 
Storm Fox said:
They are not available in the UK yet afaict. Here is the Tesla website. https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/cybertruck
Click to expand...

Going down a vague rabbit hole from that, I see Musk sent this out to Tesla employees:

“Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb.

“All parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy.”
Click to expand...

That's just fucking thick. Like really fucking thick. The coding stuff went over my head, but this, this really puts the man in context for me. He has no idea what he's talking about.
 
Cid said:
Going down a vague rabbit hole from that, I see Musk sent this out to Tesla employees:



That's just fucking thick. Like really fucking thick. The coding stuff went over my head, but this, this really puts the man in context for me. He has no idea what he's talking about.
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OK I knew 10 microns is small, but not quite how to put it into context. I Googled the thickness of human hair.
It's 80 microns.

It seems Jet Engine turbine blades have a 40 Micron tolerance range:
1696772916340.png
From https://intapi.sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/fas-2020-0009

Cid am I correct with this?
 
Storm Fox said:
OK I knew 10 microns is small, but not quite how to put it into context. I Googled the thickness of human hair.
It's 80 microns.

It seems Jet Engine turbine blades have a 40 Micron tolerance range:
View attachment 394724
From https://intapi.sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/fas-2020-0009

Cid am I correct with this?
Click to expand...

Not an engineer... Just have done some engineering work. You certainly can work to sub 10 micron tolerances, but that would usually be for particular components. And it is expensive and requires specialist metrology for evaluation. It also just can't work with stuff like car body panels. The thermal expansion alone is going to be far greater than 10 micron. <checks> A one meter panel of stainless steel will change by 0.16mm (i.e 160 microns) with just 10c in temperature variation. Fuck, it's not even within tolerance for steel gauges (i.e the thickness of sheet steel will generally vary by a fair bit more than 10 microns). I doubt you can bend sheet with that kind of accuracy either. Then tooling for this kind of precision is going to be more expensive, and need replacing more often. And finally bear in mind here that existing Teslas have always been notorious for bad panel gaps. So their track record at the moment is that they find mm tolerances difficult to achieve. It is basically a) a ludicrous goal and b) totally unachievable by a company that operates like Tesla does.

e2a: and obviously once it meets the real world of car mechanics, body shops etc... it... just isn't happening.
 
And the panel is the correct thing to be judging this on; "Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb"

You can't do it. Just driving the damn thing will have an effect.
 
X has become the worst sewer of misinformation and hate since the latest Gaza conflict:

Don’t look to Elon Musk’s X for reliable information on Israel or Palestine | X (formerly known as Twitter) | The Guardian

Twitter’s accelerating demise is not among the worst atrocities of the past week. But, at a crucial time, it has managed to add to the world’s misery
amp.theguardian.com amp.theguardian.com

On the plus side, looks like the EU are gearing up to batter them:

apnews.com

EU asks Musk's X for information on hate speech and 'illegal content' related to Israel-Hamas war

The European Commission has made a formal, legally binding request for information from Elon Musk’s social media platform X over its handling of hate speech, misinformation and violent terrorist content related to the Israel-Hamas war.
apnews.com apnews.com
 
It's not just Twitter, it looks like social media in general might be on the way out:

www.businessinsider.com

Great news — social media is falling apart

I don't know where to post: there are too many social platforms, and the old giants are dying. The age of social media is splintering.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

Archive link

Good riddance. Out of the three major social media platforms I've used, I stopped using Facebook and then Twitter because they both felt like they were destroying my mental health. Reddit has got noticeably worse since the API changes, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is a braindead Musk fanboy, so worse changes are most likely down the line. I can see myself abandoning Reddit in the not-too-distant future.
 
The frustrating aspect of Facebook and Instagram is you just have less and less control over what you see. I'm finding myself reading posts from three days ago and finding out events have already psssed, or if I refresh the page I'll never see the same post again unless I'm lucky enough to remember who posted it.
 
NoXion said:
It's not just Twitter, it looks like social media in general might be on the way out:

www.businessinsider.com

Great news — social media is falling apart

I don't know where to post: there are too many social platforms, and the old giants are dying. The age of social media is splintering.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

Archive link

Good riddance. Out of the three major social media platforms I've used, I stopped using Facebook and then Twitter because they both felt like they were destroying my mental health. Reddit has got noticeably worse since the API changes, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is a braindead Musk fanboy, so worse changes are most likely down the line. I can see myself abandoning Reddit in the not-too-distant future.
Click to expand...
I was about to delete Reddit too, not sure why but I feel like sub-reddits have became way more echo-chambery than before. The r/europe subreddit is swarming with Islamophobic far-right now, pretty sure it used to be more of a mix. Not sure if the API changes have anything to do with it.

Edit- I googled this question and apparently the answer is yes. You could previously use external sites to view deleted comments so it was easier to highlight moderator abuse. This means that people with agendas can more easily take control of popular subreddits and mould them to their desire.
 
A theory about Musk's depravity:

Many observers are puzzled by Musk’s apparent determination to destroy his expensive new toy. How could an ostensibly intelligent multibillionaire be so stupid, they ask? But maybe that’s the wrong question. What if Musk knows what he’s doing – that he sees a viable business in encouraging shitposting and mining the resultant ordure? That, at any rate, is the interesting hypothesis advanced in an entrancing essay by Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell, one of the sharpest dudes around.

Its underlying metaphor is that of the mushroom, a fungus that thrives on being kept in the dark under a pile of manure. Farrell’s point is that “some people are quite happy to be kept in the dark, well fertilised with horseshit. And that is the foundation for a business model. Not a rapidly expanding one of the kind that could allow Twitter’s massive debt burden to ever be paid off. But it can keep on producing its cash crop, year in, year out.”

It’s basically the business model that enabled the infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to become a multimillionaire – at least until he came a cropper in the US courts. But for Musk to pull it off, he first has to ensure that all the users on the platform are mushrooms. After all, it’s much cheaper to run a social media company when you don’t have to employ moderators to keep it clean and legal. But for that to happen, he needs to drive off all the earnest idiots who labour under the pathetic delusion that being on X is somehow essential for the wellbeing or profitability of their organisations.
Click to expand...

www.theguardian.com

Musk’s plan X: keep users in the dark, feed them dung and watch sales mushroom | John Naughton

The social network owner’s business model appears to include a slurry of unmoderated toxicity, such as footage of a murder
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
there's so many clips of musk on youtube shorts where he warbles on about some bit of tech, one of his cars, etc, and the comments are "the mans an utter genius", "what a god of tech" etc

weird, init. no questioning about the nature of his projects, who designs them, how much of a hand he has in it. just "genius" "god". there's somethign unnervingly deceptive about it all.
 
NoXion said:
It's not just Twitter, it looks like social media in general might be on the way out:

www.businessinsider.com

Great news — social media is falling apart

I don't know where to post: there are too many social platforms, and the old giants are dying. The age of social media is splintering.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

Archive link

Good riddance. Out of the three major social media platforms I've used, I stopped using Facebook and then Twitter because they both felt like they were destroying my mental health. Reddit has got noticeably worse since the API changes, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is a braindead Musk fanboy, so worse changes are most likely down the line. I can see myself abandoning Reddit in the not-too-distant future.
Click to expand...


the way these platforms are structured i believe are anithema to mental health. the psyche is so delicate, so interdependant on everything else. i cannot see how staring at that stuff for hours upon hours, day after day, year after year, is a net good for the "individual", mental health or otherwise. jesus, we have one life! having past 40 i am not sure i want to waste time spending hours and hours on some billionaires platform!
 
BigMoaner said:
the way these platforms are structured i believe are anithema to mental health. the psyche is so delicate, so interdependant on everything else. i cannot see how staring at that stuff for hours upon hours, day after day, year after year, is a net good for the "individual", mental health or otherwise. jesus, we have one life! having past 40 i am not sure i want to waste time spending hours and hours on some billionaires platform!
Click to expand...

I don't think it's about the psyche being "delicate". Humans can't really be that mentally fragile, otherwise the stress of living in an uncaring universe would have rendered us extinct a long time ago. It's more about the design of corporate social media serving the purposes of data harvesting and farming "engagement" to the detriment of everything else. I think there needs to be a balance struck between recognising how said design can be harmful and result in people wasting their time, without going too far and thinking of people as being akin to hothouse flowers who wither and crumble under the slightest stress. That seems a bit condescending to me.

I think it's fair to say that most people have some degree of mental resilience. Where social media fucks things up is by having such a massive audience of potential participants who are each then funnelled down their algorithmically personalised rabbit holes. From there it's a statistical inevitability that out of millions some people will end up digging too deep. Both general stressors and the engagement machine can contribute to a synergistic perpetuation of harmful online activity. But I think it's a mistake to frame the negative outcomes of such processes as having to do with some sort of inherent human weakness. That's a fundamentally disempowering view to take.
 
NoXion said:
I don't think it's about the psyche being "delicate". Humans can't really be that mentally fragile, otherwise the stress of living in an uncaring universe would have rendered us extinct a long time ago. It's more about the design of corporate social media serving the purposes of data harvesting and farming "engagement" to the detriment of everything else. I think there needs to be a balance struck between recognising how said design can be harmful and result in people wasting their time, without going too far and thinking of people as being akin to hothouse flowers who wither and crumble under the slightest stress. That seems a bit condescending to me.

I think it's fair to say that most people have some degree of mental resilience. Where social media fucks things up is by having such a massive audience of potential participants who are each then funnelled down their algorithmically personalised rabbit holes. From there it's a statistical inevitability that out of millions some people will end up digging too deep. Both general stressors and the engagement machine can contribute to a synergistic perpetuation of harmful online activity. But I think it's a mistake to frame the negative outcomes of such processes as having to do with some sort of inherent human weakness. That's a fundamentally disempowering view to take.
Click to expand...
I don’t disagree. I would say consciousness though is fragile. We spend an enormous amount of energy trying to keep some kind of stasis, which suggest beneath it all is something fragile, something a little frightening and unsettlingly unknowable. Another way of looking at it is that consciousness is sacred, and should never be taken for granted. Then what one does with it becomes somewhat important. How it’s being manipulated becomes important. People know this intuitively and I think many are disheartened by the idea of spending hours each day on it
 
I am projecting my own relationship with this stuff on to others, I’m sure. Jeez Reddit was like crack for me when I was on it, checking all the time, posting. Twitter the same. I realise I should not apply my experience to everyone, and that many if not most have a comfortable relationship with it. But that’s not going into the effect on democracy, radicalisation, isolation, data farming, depression, etc etc. this is our world now, social media in a way is more real than the the real world. No going back now. It’s so interwoven that it’s almost impossible to place absolute value judgements on it, but it’s not for me. WhatsApp and urban and I think I’ve found my baseline
 
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features including the ability to tweet, reply, quote, repost, like, bookmark, and create list, according to a source familiar with the matter


$1 a year for Twitter? I might take Musk up on this offer as long as I can pay by throwing pennies at him
 
Yossarian said:
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features including the ability to tweet, reply, quote, repost, like, bookmark, and create list, according to a source familiar with the matter


$1 a year for Twitter? I might take Musk up on this offer as long as I can pay by throwing pennies at him
Click to expand...
There’s no way in hell I’m giving him money or my financial data!
 
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