Elon Musk

Its not like the dude workin' 32 1/2 hours a week at Krogers or Piggly Wiggly is buying his crappy cards.

Considering how cheap a$$ these billionares come off, they must pay their help ok as they should just bludgeon them to death or set them on fire when they go to sleep. Maybe that is why the guy works like 20 hours a day... I guess that is why some are trying to come up with obedience collars for their bunker workers.

probably not great that Elon's entire worldview can be reduced to "arbeit macht frei"

How do you say that in Afrikaans? Probably about the same, I'd guess...

As John Ganz has pointed out, there's a word in Afrikaans-- baaskap, which roughly translates to "bossism". It's an explicitly Apartheid ideology that also imlies "white people on top, white bosses on top of white people".

Always wondered if he hired a voice/accent coach - he always seems to be speaking very carefully so he comes off as your typical Cali tech brah and not a South African mine owner

probably mostly organic. a few coworkers moved to the midwest from countries with distinctive accents around the same age Musk did and there's an entire spectrum of merged accents, some that sound local with a slightly noticeable inflection on some words, others with a more noticeable tone

I don't know how many lawsuits he's up to now, but this one has some good details about all the bonkers shit with their leases and unlicensed renovations.

Six former Twitter execs and longtime employees sued Twitter and Elon Musk in US district court in Delaware on Tues, alleging they violated severance agreements. The lawsuit seems to corroborate much of our & others' reporting about the co not paying billshttps://t.co/dEkOJws1o5 pic.twitter.com/UqvHez4kHk

— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) May 18, 2023

This, just for example:

253. Killian was soon instructed to circumvent the landlord's lighting control system, which was motion- sensitive in compliance with California's Title 24 energy code, because the lights were bothering people living in the hotel rooms when their small movements at night would trigger the lights.
254. Killian submitted the service requests to the landlord, who denied them,
255. When the landlord denied Twitter's requests, Killian was instructed to disconnect the lighting himself, which was not safe and which he was not qualified to do.
256. When he objected, Hollander berated him for refusing to do the work himself.
257. She was not satisfied until he brought her in and had her look into the drop-ceiling and see what the electrical system looked like, to understand that he could not safely do the work himself
258. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Killian hired an electrician to disconnect these rooms independently, putting Twitter in violation of both the building code and their lease.
259. It got worse.
260 Killian was instructed to install space heaters in the hotel rooms in further violation of Twitter's lease.
261. Killian was also instructed to place locks on the hotel room doors, a request that betrayed the lie that these were intended to be temporary rest spaces for exhausted Tweeps.
262. California code requires locks that automatically disengage when the building's fire suppression systems are triggered.
263. Killian was repeatedly told that compliant locks were too expensive and instructed to immediately install cheaper locks that were not compliant with life safety and egress codes.
264. Again, Killian protested that no licensed tradesperson would perform work that violated the building code.
265. Killian protested that installing these locks would put lives at risk that in case of an earthquake or fire (the latter of which was made dramatically more likely by the noncompliant electrical work and the presence of the space heaters he had been instructed to install), these locks would remain locked, blocking first responders from being able to access the rooms and the Tweeps within.
266. Nobody cared.
267. On information and belief, the non-compliant locks were in fact eventually installed but not by Killian.
268. Killian quit that day.

Slumlord Billionaire

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.