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

The true inhabitation of a fictional world acts to increase empathy. It’s all about experiencing situations through the eyes of the other, and learning to accept the validity of that perspective. All things that are considered useless by techbro CEOs.
 
The gym, yoga, meditation, therapy, counting steps, exhausting diets, hyper vigilance, gains, anti aging, and books on 5x speed.
 
Just winding myself up by imagining people listening to Beowulf so quickly they miss the HWAET!
BigMoaner said:
I’m re reading a lot of Stephen king at the moment which in itself can probably be classed as literary junk, but boy does it feel so nice to escape, I’m hardly there at all when I truly get into it. The Institute is my current one. It’s flawed but the story is so well told it’s barely noticed.
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The last thing I read from him and the most modern. After a long absence. Real sense of comfort and de ja vu at the familiarity of the style I hadn't read for so long. He aint lost it.
 
DotCommunist said:
Just winding myself up by imagining people listening to Beowulf so quickly they miss the HWAET!

The last thing I read from him and the most modern. After a long absence. Real sense of comfort and de ja vu at the familiarity of the style I hadn't read for so long. He aint lost it.
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The opening with the “night knocker” burnt out cop in the small backwater town will stay with me for a long time. Half way through and really enjoying it
 
two sheds said:


:eek:
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Stop Spreading Dumb Lies About the X Shareholder List
Jacob Silverman said:
Now, the viral story became that Elon Musk bought Twitter with the direct financial help of two Russian oligarchs who are close to Putin. It wasn’t true, but it quickly spread, helped along by an EU official, pro-Ukraine accounts, and accounts once linked to Anonymous, the hacktivist group. It also seemed to spread widely among Dutch-language accounts.

As I wrote over the weekend, there’s a lot that’s worthy of concern and deeper investigation in the X shareholders list, and there’s still a lot we don’t know. I am combing the list and searching for information about the names listed. Again, this is one of the core benefits of the list: we now have the official names of legal entities, which potentially appear in databases and public filings around the world. So far, there are many familiar and previously reported names, but no sign of Russian financing. If we are going oligarch hunting — and why not — we can easily find billionaires from dictatorships like Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.
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Fair play. Also from that article:

And there are American oligarchs, like the founders of Andreessen Horowitz, whose multi-billion-dollar venture funds receive huge amounts of cash from Saudi Arabia, providing yet another Saudi financing vehicle for Musk and X. As I’ve tried to emphasize (and will have more on in my next book), the Saudi-Twitter/X connection is particularly complex and disturbing. The ascendant tech reactionaries see dictatorships like Saudi Arabia as good partners for business. “Saudi has a founder,” Ben Horowitz said at a 2023 conference. “You don’t call him a founder. You call him his royal highness.”

As important as Saudi Arabia is, there was a reason why I chose the below photo to headline the article. It’s a photo of Elon Musk, a bunch of Qataris (on whom he’s financially dependent), and the creepy specter of Jared Kushner, who’s pocketed billions in funding from Saudi Arabia. This isn’t just about one or two oligarchs. It’s about how American tech oligarchs, with Musk at the top of the shaky pyramid, have made financial and political alliances with dictatorships, illiberal regimes, and authoritarian billionaires all over the world. That, I hope, is one of the lessons of this shareholder list being unsealed.
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BigMoaner said:
I’m re reading a lot of Stephen king at the moment which in itself can probably be classed as literary junk, but boy does it feel so nice to escape, I’m hardly there at all when I truly get into it. The Institute is my current one. It’s flawed but the story is so well told it’s barely noticed.
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Stephen King has written a lot of books, so even if his output is usually great, it's a statistical inevitability that a few of them are going to be stinkers, relatively speaking at least. At least in my opinion, King has earned himself a place of note that more snooty literary types are typically loath to extend to writers of genre fiction.

Also, a book doesn't have to be "literature" in order to be worth reading. I think there's a place on one's bookshelf for stuff that is pulpy or fringe.
 
spitfire said:
I don’t think this has been posted yet. Came across it on Bluesky. :thumbs: :D

It’s a humorous analysis of how fucked Xitter is now.

www.unchartedblue.com

How to kill your tech company (Elon Musk edition)

Musk's Twitter takeover is a fascinating case study in how to destroy a company from the inside out.
www.unchartedblue.com www.unchartedblue.com
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I liked this line:

The grand X-periment is already dead, dead, dead, and if a thousand weird white supremacists are teeming over the corpse like ants it may look like the thing's still moving but it ain't.
 
spitfire said:
I don’t think this has been posted yet. Came across it on Bluesky. :thumbs: :D

It’s a humorous analysis of how fucked Xitter is now.

www.unchartedblue.com

How to kill your tech company (Elon Musk edition)

Musk's Twitter takeover is a fascinating case study in how to destroy a company from the inside out.
www.unchartedblue.com www.unchartedblue.com
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A neat summary para in case anyone doesn’t have time to read the whole thing

Want to kill your tech company? Announce that from now on you'll be appealing to a possibly entirely imaginary new customer base and that your existing customers are obstacles that need to be ignored and/or overcome. And have fun with that.
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I wonder how it would pan out if Elon decided (or was somehow forced by the investors) to cut his losses and announced tomorrow X had been sold, would now be called Twitter again and he would be using Truth Social to make all his pronouncements henceforth.

I mean would, could Twitter recover from the current position if you just took Elon away? Or is it too terminally fucked? Given people don’t tend to delete their accounts but leave them just as ghost accounts, I could forsee a mass influx of returning users and advertisers and it would be funny to watch tbh. Final confirmation of the toxicity of the Elon effect.
 
MrCurry said:
I wonder how it would pan out if Elon decided (or was somehow forced by the investors) to cut his losses and announced tomorrow X had been sold, would now be called Twitter again and he would be using Truth Social to make all his pronouncements henceforth.

I mean would, could Twitter recover from the current position if you just took Elon away? Or is it too terminally fucked? Given people don’t tend to delete their accounts but leave them just as ghost accounts, I could forsee a mass influx of returning users and advertisers and it would be funny to watch tbh. Final confirmation of the toxicity of the Elon effect.
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It would be amusing if that happened, but I wonder how many people are like me who used to use it regularly (but not post anything), but just moved away and didn't miss it at all, so aren't likely to to go back?

I did create an account on bluesky but don't use that either.
 
NoXion said:
Won't somebody think of the poor besmirched Russian oligarchs?

Fine, it's just the Gulf-flavoured oligarchs we have the evidence to pin this Twitter shit on. Thanks Jacob.
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If there's one lesson we can take from Musk and Twitter it's that conspiracy theories never did any harm and we should probably spread more of them.
 
MrCurry said:
A neat summary para in case anyone doesn’t have time to read the whole thing



I wonder how it would pan out if Elon decided (or was somehow forced by the investors) to cut his losses and announced tomorrow X had been sold, would now be called Twitter again and he would be using Truth Social to make all his pronouncements henceforth.

I mean would, could Twitter recover from the current position if you just took Elon away? Or is it too terminally fucked? Given people don’t tend to delete their accounts but leave them just as ghost accounts, I could forsee a mass influx of returning users and advertisers and it would be funny to watch tbh. Final confirmation of the toxicity of the Elon effect.
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A great number of the low-impact (not posting 10x daily) users moved on to... nothing. The people who desperately need something like this in their lives have moved to Mastodon and BlueSky, but the majority of the users who produce the ad views (meaning not the posters) have moved to finding better things to do with their lives.

I suspect this means they'd be more amenable to moving back into Twitter, as it's a comfortable old jacket that just got too much cigarette smoke into it and now it's properly aired out again. However, the content creators, having got used to other things, may not flood back as much. There's also a time limit for long you've got before Twitter just becomes a "Oh that 2022 thing. How quaint." That being said, Facebook is at that point already but still manages a profit.
 
Lol Brazil's also frozen Starlink assets on the grounds it's all part of the same entity - Musk and co are now throwing a fit arguing that SpaceX and the company he specifically renamed X are completely unrelated. Funniest shit this week watching these idiots try and bully a supreme court via online pile-on. Alexandre de Moraes just sitting there watching them blather on about free speech like:

1724953320138.png
 
Chz said:
I liked it, but sometimes... Sometimes being an asshole is just being an asshole and not mental illness. I think it remains to be proven one way or the other.
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I've already decided he's mentally ill. I reckon he's only a matter of months from a complete meltdown.
 
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