So Now Musk Doesn't Want Twitter After All

[Anderton]

 

57 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:

He took it private, so there's no stock to trade anymore. 

 

Ooops. Seemed like a good idea at the time

[KuruPrionz]

I'll be surprised if Twitter makes it at this point. 

The recent demand that everybody work their asses off for their current wages overlooks the fact that Twitter employees used to be awarded with stock in the company. 

 

If the company prospered the stock would go up. That incentive no longer exists, it was a major reason for many who worked there to try and make the company successful. 

 

When I worked at Kinko's, there was profit sharing and a "stock" benefit that was intended to go public in the foreseeable future. Then the owners sold the company to corporate marauders (Clayton, Dublier and Rice) who in turn flipped it to Fed Ex when UPS started piling up UPS Stores. CD+R made Fed Ex buy back all the "stock" at a stupid price. I did OK on that but it soon became time to run away forever. 

[Anderton]

Thinking about it some more...being self-employed, time is money. If I work 80 hours, I'll make roughly twice what I would make in 40 hours. Now, that's an incentive to get hardcore about work. But, I also have the flexibility to work 20 hours, make less, but do R&D that will be of use in future endeavors.

 

Musk is offering people nothing for something! He would have to be mind-bogglingly naive to think that's going to inspire anyone. 

[KuruPrionz]

54 minutes ago, Anderton said:

Musk is offering people nothing for something! 

That is exactly the crux of the biscuit. 

If he wants to try and run Twitter by himself, he may soon get the opportunity. 

I mentioned before in this thread that I didn't understand why he made such a point of going public about being interested in buying Twitter. 
If he'd kept his stupid mouth shut, found some people-smart advisors with actual experience in a customer oriented field of endeavor and learned from them, he could have done smart things. Humans are not blueprints for EV or rockets, those are static creations that can be changed at will. 

You can influence people in your favored direction but you'll get better results with honey than you will with habaneros. 

[David Emm]

Asperger's looks really lousy on your resume, even if you are a billionaire. 

 

I saw an intriguing, WORKING design for an all-electric, multi-seater plane that could cover nearly the same radius as current regional airlines. I also saw yet another Tesla that burned up on the highway, which makes lithium batteries look increasingly like a joke that will hit its peak within 15 years or so. They're unnervingly delicate, in a sense. If one cell is sufficiently punctured, the battery becomes a fire bomb. Yikes. 

 

So screw Twitter. Who has a reserve game plan if the country's cars go 42% electric and then start popping like kernels of corn? It also doesn't look like Elon is working on a way to recycle lithium batteries once they're spent. Recovering just part of the lithium, while doable, is nowhere near economical.

 

He's brilliant, but he also reminds me of an old line from "Roseanne:" "We're your worst nightmare: white trash with money."    

[dmitch57]

"Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 pm today." 

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-remaining-twitter-coders-engineers-email-2022-11?fbclid=IwAR3LBt0YoOfl0wqQzPaD-nI16zcersmiIAgNLc72-un3kbXK1471sdFLsBg

 

I feel sorry for the former and soon-to-be-former employees of Twitter, but this man's idiocy, blindness, and hubris are nothing short of breathtaking. He didn't think that maybe, ya know, the thousands of people he fired might be useful in keeping the place running?  
 

I'd be perfectly fine with him losing every penny of the 44 billion he spent on this mess. 

[Anderton]

3 hours ago, David Emm said:

It also doesn't look like Elon is working on a way to recycle lithium batteries once they're spent. Recovering just part of the lithium, while doable, is nowhere near economical.

 

My understanding is that lithium-sulfur batteries, though not without problems and not perfected, have great potential because of high energy density, far less reliance on precious metals, and the ability to be recycled economically. We'll see how that pans out. 

[David Emm]

19 hours ago, Anderton said:

 

My understanding is that lithium-sulfur batteries, though not without problems and not perfected, have great potential because of high energy density, far less reliance on precious metals, and the ability to be recycled economically. We'll see how that pans out. 

 

I read that with real interest. Better energy density is where the solutions will come from. A planned recycling path like that of the German auto industry is the right idea. I often tingle over news of some engineering student having found an interesting path to a battery that betters current models by a factor of ten. Its rarely part of the flashy headline, but under the process is serious study of the required materials and the market scalability. I'm sure a few have fallen by the wayside over that part of the analysis, but I also hope for the next one that will almost behave like a magic Green Lantern ring. 🤞 

[RABid]

Lithium batteries are scary. I use them for my RC cars. It is suggested that you keep them in a fire proof box sitting on a concrete floor away from anything burnable such as wallboard or wood framing. It seems like most YouTubers dealing with RC's eventually has a "I had a fire" episode. Going to be interesting to see if lithium car batteries turn out to be just as dangerous. 

[Joe Muscara]

I had mostly managed my Twitter account pretty well. Between using lists and filters, I was mostly seeing what I wanted to see and very little else by default. I would only see the stupid replies if I looked for them (stupid me!) or if someone I followed Quote tweeted them (one of the worst features of Twitter for reasons I might get into another time).

 

Recently, I decided I was spending a little too much time on Twitter anyway and cut back a bit. And then the other day, Mr. Moosk did something that I won't mention here, but suffice it to say that's when I decided I was done with Twitter. Having started to look again at my accounts on micro.blog (a platform I really like but doesn't quite have enough traction yet), Tumblr, and Mastodon, I went there. Yet, there was still something missing.

 

Then I realized the best possible answer (outside of just practicing, of course). 

 

MPN.

 

For various reasons including social media but also some other things in my life, I've spent less time here in the past couple of years than I had before. I wanted to get back to it, but struggled to. I'm hoping and trying to use my time here rather than social media of any platform. They have some place in my life, connections with old friends I don't have elsewhere. but MPN is special. Twitter is done as far as I'm concerned. I'll use the other ones as needed, but I'd like to see myself here, mostly.

[Anderton]

8 hours ago, Joe Muscara said:

Then I realized the best possible answer (outside of just practicing, of course). 

 

MPN.

 

I'm hoping and trying to use my time here rather than social media of any platform. They have some place in my life, connections with old friends I don't have elsewhere. but MPN is special. Twitter is done as far as I'm concerned. I'll use the other ones as needed, but I'd like to see myself here, mostly.

 

Cool! Why not spend your time on a site that's going up rather than going down?  

 

Dave and I basically came to same conclusion. MPN has always strived to be a civil, positive counterweight to the negativity out there. We think that maybe the time is right for people to decide they'd rather use social media to have fun, make new friends, and learn things. 

 

Speaking of which...wait until you see the next GearLab review. It starts tomorrow.

 

And I've just started to post free, downloadable fun stuff in the downloads section. So far it's mostly been about testing it out and finding out how it works, but there's more to come. I'm hoping others will share cool presets, loops, utilities, etc.

 

Dave and I have also been cooking up an interesting interactive experience for the community. It's still in the planning stages, but we're pretty sure it will be ready in December or January.

 

We're pursuing as many avenues as possible to help make MPN be all it can be. 

[harmonizer]

MPN is a truly amazing place for me: It is SO much more positive than most web forums out there, and features contributions from many who have such wonderful expertise.

 

MPN is a well moderated forum. That does not happen by accident, but is the result of lots of work. I can recall certain troublemakers who had left stains here in years past, but I don't see them here now. I don't know how it was taken care of - someone else took care of this for me. All I can do is say "thanks". 

[analogika]

It's not just the moderators. 

 

People here are genuinely interested in being supportive. Even when there's disagreement, it's almost never antagonistic. 

[Anderton]

3 hours ago, analogika said:

Even when there's disagreement, it's almost never antagonistic. 

...and often a learning experience.

[KuruPrionz]

And, back to our regularly scheduled programming. There may be a bit of skewed bias in the article, I ignored it and just considered the bottom line - which sadly, is as I expected. Losing so many advertisers is a difficult blow to recover from, especially if it continues to escalate. Pretty hard to sell enough "blue marks" to make up for it. 

 

"Nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America published a report on Tuesday concluding that Twitter has lost half of its top advertisers since Elon Musk acquired the platform at the end of October."

 

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/half-twitters-top-advertisers-left-194800444.html

[harmonizer]

My guess is that he cares the most about turning Twitter into a mouthpiece styled exactly to his own preferences.

 

Certainly he had to realize how many skilled and experienced people were leaving the ship, mostly caused by his actions.

Maybe he wanted any employee to leave if they thought they could not stand to work at a Twitter ruled by Musk's "unique" (I'm being kind) point of view,

as a way of filtering the preferences and inclinations of those who would remain.

His thinking might be that those who would remain would surely be lined up behind him.

 

Musk may not care how many subscribers and advertisers are lost in the short term, since those are just about creating money, something he has plenty of.

[David Emm]

1 hour ago, harmonizer said:

My guess is that he cares the most about turning Twitter into a mouthpiece styled exactly to his own preferences.

 ...

Musk may not care how many subscribers and advertisers are lost in the short term, since those are just about creating money, something he has plenty of.

 

 There it is. If anyone on any other job spoke or behaved as all too many billionaires and politicians do, they'd be summarily fired as detriments to the company. They'd be even less prone to such behavior if a mega-sized wrestler appeared and slapped them out of their shoes each time they emitted another crap salvo. America: Land of either too many or too few consequences. I can readily envision another "Idiocracy" game show: "SLAP! THEM! SILLY!" That giant hand from "Jackass" could see some added use.

 

Now back to a very fine antitoxin, GX-80 patch review. Aaaaah.    

[Joe Muscara]

On 11/26/2022 at 3:23 PM, harmonizer said:

My guess is that he cares the most about turning Twitter into a mouthpiece styled exactly to his own preferences.

I think it goes back to what Craig said earlier or elsewhere. There have been times when he's moderated something political, and the liberals thought he was in favor of the conservatives, and vice-versa. I think Moosk thought, like many conservatives do/did, that Twitter was unfair to them so he might think he's balancing it out.

 

I find the whole thing another fascinating exhibit of human behavior. For some reason, many seem to think they're being persecuted, even when they're in charge.

[Stokely]

There's a big thread at arstechnica on this, split off from a larger Musk thread.  

It's bananas.  You couldn't run a company into the ground faster or more efficiently than he is doing if you wanted to.  And I doubt that is the case, considering the money he'll lose.  I work in IT, and all I can say is that anyone left there that isn't interviewing as fast as they can is crazy.  I expect most of the talent that was able left when he made that ultimatum about "commit to hardcore or you get laid off with severance."  Severance, please.

Every day it's seemingly something else, now it's "Apple is threatening me, and I don't know why."  Sure, Musk, Apple didn't tell you why they are "threatening" you, and that's assuming they even are.

I've gone from knowing little about this guy to knowing more than I care to. I started learning more when he made that "pedo guy" comment about the diver trying to save children.  My opinion of him has gone down a LOT since that comment.   I don't care one way or another about Twitter, I don't use social media anymore other than certain (well-moderated) forums,  but I know his decisions are going to impact a lot of people before it's over.

My favorites were the two memes he posted related to Trump being tempted to come back.  I think he took both down--he tweets and then deletes a lot of stuff--but the internet remembers.  The first was Lois from Family Guy looking strung out with a pill bottle in the foreground saying something like "Trump's twitter account."  That was, by far, the tame one.  The second one involved a sweating priest praying with a rosary and a naked woman on all fours with a tactically placed twitter symbol covering the naughty bits.  Yep.  That's class!

[PrairieGuy]

Apple is ticked at Musk but happily bends over for the Chinese government.

[Anderton]

51 minutes ago, PrairieGuy said:

Apple is ticked at Musk but happily bends over for the Chinese government.

 

And Musk bends over just as happily. A sampling of articles on the subject:

 

Fox

NewsMax

CNBC

TheStreet

 

And there's a reason why Musk is so eager to please the Chinese. Tesla makes a lot of money from cars, and 58% of them were made in China in Q1 2022.

 

Apple makes nice phones, most of which are assembled in China. Apple sources most of its materials from China as well.

 

Neither one wants to upset the...uh...Apple cart. Or the Tesla cart, for that matter.

 

The main interest of Apple and Musk is self-interest.

[analogika]

3 hours ago, Anderton said:

 

And Musk bends over just as happily. A sampling of articles on the subject:

 

Fox

NewsMax

CNBC

TheStreet

 

And there's a reason why Musk is so eager to please the Chinese. Tesla makes a lot of money from cars, and 58% of them were made in China in Q1 2022.

 

Apple makes nice phones, most of which are assembled in China. Apple sources most of its materials from China as well.

 

Neither one wants to upset the...uh...Apple cart. Or the Tesla cart, for that matter.

 

The main interest of Apple and Musk is self-interest.

Without this getting too political, I hope, that’s a dilemma the entire West has got themselves into; Tesla and Apple are just two highly visible examples. 
 

Everybody has been aware of the human rights issues in China for decades, but at the same time, China has invested trillions since the 1980s into becoming the world’s manufacturing center, while its economic growth has made it one of the world's largest and fastest-growing markets. 
 

The German government, for one, signed long-term lucrative trade deals in hopes that “Wandel durch Handel” — change through trade — would raise the economic standards of all Chinese and force a liberalisation and increased democratisation of the country. 
 

That really didn’t pan out, and now that Covid policy has made the whole system so volatile (even leading to real unrest), we’re all counting the money we made in the last twenty years and wondering how to get out of this mess. 
 

Apple has already begun moving factories out of China, but they’re SO much bigger than anything in the past that it’s going to take a while. 

[Anderton]

9 hours ago, analogika said:

Without this getting too political, I hope, that’s a dilemma the entire West has got themselves into; Tesla and Apple are just two highly visible examples. 

 

Exactly. And the reality is that politics aside, this situation impacts the hardware we use. 

 

To be clear, I'm not at all anti-Chinese. I've visited there several times,and would love to go again. The people were warm and friendly, the food was awesome, the club scene in Shanghai was very cool, and there was a real sense of forward motion in society because so many people had been lifted out of poverty over several decades. But I also tend to separate a country's government from its people. 

 

At one point I was at a trade show and asked a company where they expected to be in five years. The CEO said "where it says made in China, it will say made by China." I've always gotten the sense the China wanted acceptance on the world stage as being an important and influential country more than an "enemy." Human rights are of course a major issue, but contrasted to what was happening in the 60s, there has been improvement. Politicians calling attention to human rights in a public way to make them feel morally superior doesn't help, it just backs the Chinese into a corner. The question is what is the intended result? If it's political grandstanding, any efforts will fail. If countries really want to improve the human rights situation, there are subtler, and I believe more effective ways, to go about it.

 

Ultimately, we're all in this together, whether we want to be or not. I think the solution is to build on areas where the best interests of all concerned intersect, and work outward from that base to more contentious issues.

[Lady Gaia]

On 11/28/2022 at 5:07 PM, PrairieGuy said:

Apple is ticked at Musk but happily bends over for the Chinese government.

If Apple wants to operate in China at all, they are obligated to obey local law.  It's a very complicated dynamic, no question, and it's entirely unrelated to the situation with Twitter and others.

 

I sincerely doubt anyone at Apple is making the mistake of letting this become personal.  That's Elon's smokescreen.  Kicking up enough dust to make it look personal while in practice it's a pretty dispassionate application of the same rules Apple applies to everyone in their App Store.  If you're going to offer payment options in your app, they need to go through Apple's payment system.  The upside for them is obvious, but it also means you don't have a dozen different payment schemes of varying security levels on your device and you don't get used to giving yet another app your credentials only to find out that (surprise!) there's a lot of fraud online.  You don't have to offer payment options at all, and indeed some like Netflix just let you log into an account you paid for elsewhere.

 

Apple also requires that all apps with any form of user-generated content be able to demonstrate that they have appropriate moderation practices.  They don't want unsuspecting users exposed to sex trafficking, porn, or heaven knows what else if they can possibly avoid it.  If you want your social network in the App Store, you live up to their standards.  You don't have to, but then you don't get a dedicated app discoverable in the store with its attendant benefits over a simple web site.

 

Elon doesn't like these rules, because despite the fact that they apply to everyone else, he's not used to being treated like everyone else.  Somehow he's special.  There are any number of laws he seems to believe don't apply to him as well, and we'll see how long and how far he can push that theory.

 

Full disclosure: I've worked for Apple, though I don't these days.  I've also worked for several of their competitors and I own two Teslas purchased before Elon went off the deep end.  They're great vehicles, but I deeply regret the association these days.

[Stokely]

On 11/29/2022 at 12:12 PM, Anderton said:

Ultimately, we're all in this together, whether we want to be or not. I think the solution is to build on areas where the best interests of all concerned intersect, and work outward from that base to more contentious issues.

I couldn't agree more.  It's reality.  It's a global economy and global ecology.  We'd better all "come together" and soon...

My wife just got a Tesla, though I tried to talk her out of it.  Better Evs (rated at least) out there these days with more coming, and without the nonsense.  If those other companies have crazy CEOs, they've managed to hide it better.

I drive so little these days working from home that I figure that's the best way to cut down emissions, if you can manage it!

[Anderton]

54 minutes ago, Stokely said:

I drive so little these days working from home that I figure that's the best way to cut down emissions, if you can manage it!

 

I'm holding out for an eBeetle. I've only owned two cars in my life, a 1966 VW Beetle and a 2000 VW New Beetle. Both cars have performed very well and economically. The 1966 refused to die, it just became impossible to get spare parts!

 

VW just made an $800 million dollar investment in Tennessee to make EVs, so it all seems to be coming together. Furthermore, after VW got caught faking stats, they've been squeaky clean. 

[Stokely]

The vw electric vans look pretty exciting.  I don't get too excited over any car until I do the "forehead bashing" test.  Open the back, lean in and test whether I'll bonk my forehead.  I've proven I'm utterly incapable of avoiding it.  Never was Gandalf in the Fellowship of the Ring movie so I'm not the only dolt!

I'd like a little big larger car to load/unload my stuff. I miss our old Odyssey van, that was super easy to use for gigs.  (Well other than the 50 concussions and several bleeding wounds I got, see above.)  It's not that my stuff doesn't fit in my current small suv, it just takes more work and thought to load it than I'd like  

VWs have tended to be expensive to work on but I'm not sure if that's still the case.   

The car I've got my eye on is the Kia Telluride, it gets great reviews.  Electric version (EV9) should be out next year, but I'm a bit averse to buying the first model of anything.

[Anderton]

So now there's an Elon Musk poll on Twitter about whether he should step down as CEO. Within two hours, more than 5.8 million users had voted, with 57.8% voting yes and 42.2% voting no. 

 

This all just keeps getting stranger and stranger...

[KuruPrionz]

4 minutes ago, Anderton said:

So now there's an Elon Musk poll on Twitter about whether he should step down as CEO. Within two hours, more than 5.8 million users had voted, with 57.8% voting yes and 42.2% voting no. 

 

This all just keeps getting stranger and stranger...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-news-live-twitter-045853650.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

On Sunday night, Mr Musk tweeted the poll and asked users: “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.”

The poll attracted more than 17 million voters in just 12 hours, with 57.5 per cent voting ‘Yes’.

 

I guess we'll see what happens. 

[KenElevenShadows]