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Phil1111

Elon Musk Going full trump

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22 minutes ago, ryoder said:

Ever heard of Gwynne Shotwell?

From what I've read, she is the one who actually runs SpaceX, not Musk.

I miss the days when this was how involved he was. I’d forgive every bit of the Twitter acquisition bullshit if he did a starship factory tour like this today.

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10 hours ago, BIGUN said:

Frankly, I haven't seen anything he's done that's outside the official set of rules. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules

I "think" he's trying to clean it up - but time will tell and as Wendy states, it may not be the cool playground to go to in the future. 

It's abundantly clear that 'some animals are more equal than others'. 

Musk decides who the rules apply to and who they don't.

Nazis? Fine.
Hate speech? Fine.

Mocking Musk? Ban

The appeal of this place (for me) has always been the 'fair and even-handed' actions and attitudes of the mods. 

With few exceptions, the same rules applied to everyone.

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7 hours ago, gowlerk said:

I mean, the plan to send ships to Mars up daily completely ignores the fact that the window to get there efficiently comes up only for only for a few weeks every two years. But then again when you have as many fan boys as he does the rules of orbital mechanics may not apply.

Ah, right yes, that is a slight misrepresentation from the article. If you follow the 1000 starship link there’s a little video snip that clarifies it. He’s saying two separate things - one is to have Starships launching 3 times a day all year, the other is to send 1000 Starships to Mars in every biennial window.

They’re both still completely insane on their own though, so doesn’t really make much difference! 

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18 hours ago, BIGUN said:

Frankly, I haven't seen anything he's done that's outside the official set of rules. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules

Hmmm, what had Elon done that’s outside of the official rule book? Well, running a poll on whether certain accounts should be banned or not and making censorship decisions based on the result? 
 

Don’t think I read about that procedure in your link.

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Evidently according to the Elon standard of CEO leadership. His personal safety isn't that important after all. The twitter vote supersedes that and he is reinstating their access to the platform. No word yet on the @ElonJet account holder.i.e. upholding his earlier promise not to ban him.

I wonder if we held a vote for free Tesla Model S Plaid cars if he would be forthcoming.

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18 hours ago, billvon said:

So if someone on Twitter posts a picture of Greta Thunberg getting on a private jet - that would also be against the rules?

Morning, I feel like you're about to trip me up in a legal loophole. Technically, it should be, someone's going to play the public figure card, so how about I say - for a young lady also somewhere on the Asperger's Syndrome plane; it should be against the rules of decency. 

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5 minutes ago, BIGUN said:

Morning, I feel like you're about to trip me up in a legal loophole. 

I think the fact that the thing you say was happening wasn’t actually happening in the case being discussed isn’t exactly a loophole - it’s just you being flat out wrong.

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3 hours ago, BIGUN said:

Morning, I feel like you're about to trip me up in a legal loophole.

No, just trying to compare apples to apples.

What many do (and I am not saying you do this) is that they demand the removal of posts that put their favorite politician/activist/plutocrat in a bad light - but then scream about how "there's no free speech" when similar posts are removed about someone they dislike.

In this case, Musk seems to be removing posts that criticize him, then proclaiming how evil it is that posts about people he dislikes have been removed in the past.

He has a long history of this - he calls a cave diver "pedo guy," then when they sue him, claims that he has a right to say whatever he wants regardless of accuracy. He has said that he is a "free speech absolutist" which implies that he wants no limitiations whatsoever on free speech.

At the same time, he makes Tesla drivers agree to not post anything negative about the self driving software before Tesla will give the software to them.  He also regularly pursues legal tricks to hide information he is legally required to provide, like vehicle safety history, and company information required to continue receiving tax credits for his company's products.

So while I am not at all surprised by his antics at Twitter, I do find it a little funny that people are defending him.  Once again he's his own worst enemy.

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21 hours ago, SkyDekker said:

The twitter account wasn't posting people on the jet. Was simply posting movement of the jet through publicly available data which the Supreme Court has previously ruled to be protected by the first amendment.

Remember phone books? It was just like a big red assassination X on everyone's home.

Much like the open availability of soooo many databases now.

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3 minutes ago, normiss said:

Remember phone books? It was just like a big red assassination X on everyone's home.

Much like the open availability of soooo many databases now.

"The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!"

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2 hours ago, billvon said:

No, just trying to compare apples to apples....

So while I am not at all surprised by his antics at Twitter, I do find it a little funny that people are defending him.  Once again he's his own worst enemy.

Well put. Hence the title of this thread. I'm a little dumbfounded as to how Elon went to Pay-pal, to Tesla, to Space-X spewing cash like a Texas gusher.

This Twitter debacle makes one think that his sole ability is the recognition of engineering talent. Because now he is destroying shareholder value and companies......like...like... trump.

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5 hours ago, billvon said:

I do find it a little funny that people are defending him.  Once again he's his own worst enemy.

I've been watching this whole thing. Not really an active contributor on Twitter (I do like the "World of Engineering" problems). I'm taking a back seat for now and gonna see which direction it goes. Part of me hopes he changes it for the better, but I fear he will wind up like Trump - Shooting himself in the foot with Twitter thumbs on the trigger.  

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4 hours ago, Phil1111 said:

This Twitter debacle makes one think that his sole ability is the recognition of engineering talent. 

I won't pretend to be any kind of expert, but my opinion is that it's a whole lot more complicated than that. What he pulled off with SpaceX and Tesla was super-impressive and I think he may have developed a bit of a 'God Complex' from having his previous successes in such challenging areas.  The Musk of Twitter seems a dumpster fire to be certain, but I don't necessarily think that negates his past successes/contributions.

I hope he'll be able to un-jump that shark, but I sure as shit ain't holding my breath

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2 hours ago, lippy said:

I won't pretend to be any kind of expert, but my opinion is that it's a whole lot more complicated than that. What he pulled off with SpaceX and Tesla was super-impressive and I think he may have developed a bit of a 'God Complex' from having his previous successes in such challenging areas.

The arc of his journey is beginning to resemble that of Nikola Tesla.

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On 12/16/2022 at 12:38 PM, SethInMI said:

The idea is to extract fuel from the environment and use it to return to earth.

this actually reminded me of something. A friend of mine told me that a similar idea was used in his aerospace design class - to extract something from Venus's atmosphere and used it as fuel to return to Earth. This kind of ideas are not fringe anymore - I believe anything is possible at this point. SpaceX is making history.

Personally I'm a big fan of Elon for what he is doing in space. Other areas not so much

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1 hour ago, David Wang said:

A friend of mine told me that a similar idea was used in his aerospace design class - to extract something from Venus's atmosphere and used it as fuel to return to Earth.

Much harder on Venus.  For one you can't land, so you have to do all this while flying (or floating) in the atmosphere.  Plus which there's not much hydrogen.  It has plenty of CO2 so you could do something similar to what you do on Mars (i.e. bring hydrogen with you) but to get back to orbit you need many times more total fuel (compared to vehicle weight) due to the higher gravity of Venus.

One interesting thing about Venus is that if you have the right balloon, you could float at about 55km, and there the temperature would be about 80F and the pressure would be about 60% of Earth's - overall you could live outside with nothing more than an oxygen mask.

(And this is a much more interesting topic than Trump anyway.)

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1 hour ago, billvon said:

Much harder on Venus.  For one you can't land, so you have to do all this while flying (or floating) in the atmosphere.  Plus which there's not much hydrogen.  It has plenty of CO2 so you could do something similar to what you do on Mars (i.e. bring hydrogen with you) but to get back to orbit you need many times more total fuel (compared to vehicle weight) due to the higher gravity of Venus.

One interesting thing about Venus is that if you have the right balloon, you could float at about 55km, and there the temperature would be about 80F and the pressure would be about 60% of Earth's - overall you could live outside with nothing more than an oxygen mask.

(And this is a much more interesting topic than Trump anyway.)

Now that would be a fun mission. I’m assuming 55 km would be well above the sulphuric acid clouds. It sounds like you’d need a rockoon setup to be able to leave. Maybe to rendezvous with a waiting starship to get you back to earth. At least aero braking into Venus orbit should be easy enough. Musk should totally be working on this but instead he’s solving problems on earth like whatever he thinks is wrong with Twitter.

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4 hours ago, billvon said:

Plus which there's not much hydrogen.  It has plenty of CO2 so you could do something similar to what you do on Mars (i.e. bring hydrogen with you) but to get back to orbit you need many times more total fuel (compared to vehicle weight) due to the higher gravity of Venus.

And that is the main draw of Mars, it has hydrogen in the form of water - so the water could be used for human use as well as creating rocket fuel. And water is pretty heavy.

14 hours ago, Phil1111 said:

This Twitter debacle makes one think that his sole ability is the recognition of engineering talent.

When he took over Twitter he tried to measure engineers' performance by how many lines of code they write, he even asked them for printouts or screenshots of "the most salient lines of code" they've written.

This is when there are many, many engineers who are extremely productive writing few lines of code, and the very best ones even contribute negative lines of code.

SpaceX and Tesla inspired many young, innovative engineers because of the clear vision the companies had, and thousands of them were worked to burnout making the companies successful, but the conditions are quite different at Twitter. Primarily the lack of a vision, or even a coherent business plan.

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3 hours ago, olofscience said:

SpaceX and Tesla inspired many young, innovative engineers because of the clear vision the companies had, and thousands of them were worked to burnout making the companies successful, but the conditions are quite different at Twitter. Primarily the lack of a vision, or even a coherent business plan.

In the waning days of Shuttle, we had a decent number of our best and brightest who consulted significant amounts for SpaceX for software. Some of them might have moved there, but from what I saw, it sounded like Musk went looking for the best and brightest from places that had relevant skils. And these were the best and most flexible -- not the ones who were really awesome in shuttle alone.

Wendy P.

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5 hours ago, BIGUN said:

One could "opt-out" of phone books. 

 

2 hours ago, normiss said:

I was always curious why they put effort into sending us recycling material.

You could 'opt-out' of being listed in the phone book.

You could NOT opt out of getting it.

Sort of like getting Parachutist, the publishers set ad rates based on how many copies are distributed.

Phone books generated HUGE ad revenue.

Edited by wolfriverjoe

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