Elon Musk

couldn’t they just put “do not disturb” signs on the “hotel” doors or was Elon just busting in like the Kool-Aid man and they needed locks to keep him out?

Yeah, that whole section is fucking wild

I love this:

266. Nobody cared.

It's the "Jesus wept" of Elon court filings.

Needs an Elon crying/laughing pic

why are bro’s opinions about working from home being reported on like important news? :-(

I thought Elon was sleeping in a closet at Twitter headquarters, doesn't that mean he is working from home? So he is a total hypocrite who should put his head in a toilet and let people take turns flushing it (just like old times, no doubt).

why are bro’s opinions about working from home being reported on like important news? :-(

the only opinions being reported are about the loss of 'water cooler synergy' and 'team building', we never hear the 'well, our employees enjoy living in rural montana and not driving every morning, getting more sleep, spending more time with their families and pets, not polluting by commuting, saving money on lunch, crapping in their own bathrooms etc etc etc"

Feels like a vast conspiracy to pull us back into the rat race

Feels like a vast conspiracy to pull us back into the rat race

Yes it's about control.

Someone has pointed out that not only can Twitter Blue subscribers now post files up to 8GB, there's no limit on how many they can post, making Twitter effectively a piracy machine (people are posting whole movies left, right and center) and an unlimited storage service for just $8 a month. There's no way this lasts.

someone posted shrek in its entirety a day or so ago. total mess.

never cared for it much either.

how the... how is that in any biz model, it's so dumb? do i not understand it?

I mean, he's not running it like a business. I don't know what he's running it like. Like he hates Twitter and the people who use it. Seems pathological.

I think Elon genuinely wants to make it a right wing social media site like Parler or Truth but popular. Of course, by making it explicitly RW (and being a fascist anti-Semite who wants to be King of Mars) he will drive away the people (and with them the advertisers) that made Twitter actually fun and popular and thus just turn into Gab.

I think he's mostly throwing a tantrum because it became painfully obvious that he's not universally loved and respected.

Like, if he was so upset about “free speech” why didn’t he just fuck off to Parler or Truth? Because there’s no one there to torment. Everyone thinks the same. No fun!

Because he’s an idiot, he thought for some reason he could keep all the “woke” users at Twitter and keep respectable advertisers while letting the Nazis run amok. They wanted playthings.

Feels like a vast conspiracy to pull us back into the rat race

Yes it's about control.

OT but I think there is also an element of, if people aren’t commuting, they won’t care so much about gas prices, making our elections harder for OPEC to manipulate.

So it’s about control?

It's about control. Through dominance.

I was wondering since Twitter was a tool in the Arab Spring that the Saudi money backing Musk was just as much to buy it and kill it as anything. Don't exactly quite get why the oil sheiks would want in business with the battery car guy, but between Musky's hugging up to them and the Russians it sure seems that way.

Feels like a vast conspiracy to pull us back into the rat race

See also: the monthly articles from NYT about how people want to go back into the office… which only quotes managers/supervisors/CEOs. One of the few times I read the comments, since they are almost exclusively people disputing the articles’ premise and giving it the finger.

Bosses are panicking that white collar labor in the US, for a brief shining moment in this post-union age, has some leverage.

More than a little of the forcing people back into the office thing seems like it has a lot to do with trying to justify the expensive office rental contracts and business leasing agreements, doesn’t it?

Which is especially weird in Musk’s case since he apparently refuses to pay rent for office space. You’d think he’d want people to work from home — it’s basically outsourcing real estate costs to the employees.

also, MASSIVE IGNORANT GENERALIZATION ALERT, a lot of managers don’t do shit except big their employees and talk loudly and now they don’t have anything to do

bug not big

I think every single one of my posts in the past week has had a typo

Working from home has been a big issue for cities that have large office building infrastructure and the businesses that depended on the lunch trade. Property tax revenues from office buildings had been a mainstay for DC and adjacent jurisdictions (office buildings bring in more tax revenue than cities spend in revenue to service their infrastructure). In this area, despite our best efforts at creating mixed use neighborhoods, we have some areas that are office canyons that in pre-pandemic times kind of rolled up those sidewalks at 5 pm. Businesses that depended on errands by office workers or lunch have suffered, not to mention the tax revenue such businesses raise have declined.

Objectively yr correct but the problem is that these facts are being used to justify the continued ennobling of all of the worst parts of work in late capitalism rather than, yknow, trying to figure out new ways of organizing society that would be more humane and ecologically sound.

If you let workers work from home but then you replace the worker with AI, can you make the AI work in the office?

XP I agree, table. One part of the solution will be for city planners and leaders to encourage the conversion of office buildings to much needed housing.

Apparently it is often prohibitively expensive to convert office to residential because of the different plumbing needs of the two uses and how they are normally addressed.

That’s true too. Apparently 1960s-70s buildings are easier to convert cause they have smaller floor plates. Our community has done a couple. The fact that office and residential buildings have very different Building codes (much more stringent regulations, understandably, for places where people sleep) make it harder to convert in some cases

Y’all are using talking points from the real estate industry.

Such conversions are expensive but can work and significantly revitalize parts of cities— the residential population of downtown Philly between 2000 and 2020 went up 54% as a result of office to residential conversions. The industry is holding out on office work coming back (it’s not) or on getting sweetheart tax abatements (like the one in place in Philly) to do the conversions. There are obvious problems with the abatements, duh, but the housing crisis perhaps justifies swallowing a nasty pill. If done ethically and with safeguards in place, it can work.

All that said, conversions wouldn’t add a significant number of units in most places.

Hey Elon tried to add much needed residential units inside the Twitter offices but the landlord and the city were all like “lease violation” and “fire trap” and “people may die.” Small-minded bureaucrats.

Well DC is starting to try tax abatements, so would be interesting to see the results.

older office buildings, despite plumbing etc, are likely easier code-wise due to the fact we made use-specific housing codes that let builders de-emphasize good general use building practices

or, as my architect friend used to lecture me (he’s moved from pure architecture to structural concerns), architects leave too much to engineering and don’t bother to work beyond the recommended minimums in code, despite whether they’d actually be the best in the building

honestly the same goes in software but idk that’s also why I moved to infrastructure

I think Elon genuinely wants to make it a right wing social media site like Parler or Truth but popular. Of course, by making it explicitly RW (and being a fascist anti-Semite who wants to be King of Mars) he will drive away the people (and with them the advertisers) that made Twitter actually fun and popular and thus just turn into Gab.

― Every post of mine is an expression of eternity (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, 20 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Don't think he can make twitter "explicitly RW", the guy cannot execute a plan.

i do think blue tick prioritisation leans heavily towards it though. you have to wade through a garbage fire of blue tick answers to any particular thread to get any sort of through line of discussion.

i’ve always been fairly relaxed about it. it’s a commercial site, and you can more or less get what you want out of it. but in the last few weeks i’ve noticed it becoming unusable, in terms of how i use it anyway - defaulting to “for you” is an absurd piece of friction to introduce. and generally as an information aggregator it’s becoming epistemically extremely degraded imv.

however, i do think a lot depends on how you use it. a lot of the issues that have driven others away were invisible to me.

My twitter mostly goes to "following".

"i do think blue tick prioritisation leans heavily towards it though. you have to wade through a garbage fire of blue tick answers to any particular thread to get any sort of through line of discussion."

I don't know if answers to a popular thread have ever yielded much, but yes you see the blue ticks mostly first in line, but some are more 'liberal' sounding people.

I think if I were to join now it might be harder to find good people. Because I have already built a good list it's still ok at the moment. As it hasn't gone in a puff of smoke I reckon death will be slow.

I don't know if answers to a popular thread have ever yielded much, but yes you see the blue ticks mostly first in line, but some are more 'liberal' sounding people.

Doesn't matter. If they've paid for a blue check, they're idiots and marks. Block or mute anyone who has one.

Don't really care to block or mute anyone. I'm a grown-up.

then you should pay 8 dollars. You can afford it pops.

the grown ups in the room social media site.

We exist #grownUps

grow up

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) May 22, 2023

I hid in the clouded warmth of the crowd
But when they said, "Come down" I threw up
Ooh, growin' up

--Elon Musk

the space degrades. and people whose voice you might value don’t feel comfortable posting - because RW libertarian voices are given precedence, because the moderation, poor as it was, is explicitly and deliberately worse, because the experience is *bad*.

lol ganz can give as good as he gets but yes, another one bites the dust.

Fizzles otm in both his posts. This isn’t hard to understand.

xxxp My gut here tells me Elon's involvement in Twitter was 1) not necessarily his choice, he was kompromatted into it (his lawsuit to get out of the sale was about to expose some interesting emails/texts and he instantly caved), and 2) ultimately to help the Saudis (who are investors) and their ilk as well as the interests of Jared Kushner (who he met with during the World Cup and has received billions of Saudi cash for "investments") and Rupert Murdoch (who Elon met with during the Super Bowl).

Him and his investors I'm guessing don't care one bit about the lost $ value of Twitter. I'm guessing they want it dismantled and diminished as it was a viable tool for the left to communicate, advocate and organize world wide (see Arab Spring and women's protests in Iran and many other countless movements and moments). It's an incredibly powerful tool in this regard, worth far more than its lost dollar value if it helps accomplish things like create fascist uprisings in Europe or help a Republican president get elected in 2024, which long term will protect and grow these oligarch and autocrats assets and influence far more. Seeing how the algorithm diminishes the reach of Ukraine posts already shows it being used as a political tool for manipulation.

This whole Elon "is losing a ton of money" thing is just a distraction.