Elon Musk

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.

otoh it is quite hard to find stuff like this anywhere else

what a rothko painting is in color and form, a song by the necks is in sound and time

— Toby (@tobyshorin) May 22, 2023

Does Elon Musk really strike you as the type of person who would sacrifice personal gain for ideological gain? Doesn’t it seem more likely he assumed he could just do whatever the fuck he wanted and Twitter would continue to make money because he believes himself to be magic and infallible?

never ever underestimate the ability of a coddled human being to be a 100% ego baby

DJP - Given his motives and the evidence exposed during his suit to get out of the sale, he already knew he was sacrificing personal gain from the get go. Perhaps it's a little bit from column A and B. Given his visible meetings with hard right oligarchs, autocrats et al (which can't be dismissed), at the very least he's being used. I tend to avoid underestimating the ruling class, especially Elon types.

i'm sorry for you that you avoid underestimating the ruling class, seems exhausting.

try overmisunderestimating them

"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)."

The movements and protests that failed. Ok.

the Left can only win with pamphlets

Hey maybe I'm overly paranoid, but we underestimated Trump and Russia's impact on social media and its affects on democracy. But yeah perhaps I'll stick to the basketball and music threads here.

Post where you want. But I might ask a question or two. I mean, I thought Facebook took a bigger 'credit' for those uprisings. So why not shut it down as well?

If Musk was blackmailed into buying Twitter (with significant Saudi funding public), why would they let him try to get out of it?

xp Facebook is a reliable medium for disinformation.

I mean, so is every person on the planet earth, ime

Literally nothing about Musk's behavior at any point in this debacle suggests any kind of plan, on his part or anyone else's. I do think he was reacting to and agreed with right-wing troll critiques of Twitter and its "censorship," as he's repeatedly demonstrated he's simpatico with the 4chan view of the world. The Saudis obviously have some self-interest in influencing a potentially powerful communications medium, and that would make sense as a reason for them to buy in. But nothing about it seems organized or orchestrated, Musk seems like he's just been running on incoherent instinct and lazy contempt.

Don't forget the potential value in all the DMs and communications that could be shared to said "investors" as well.

Nobody’s pushing valuable state secrets on Twitter; that’s Discord territory

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-presidential-bid-campaign-elon-musk-rcna85288

?

oh thank god - he's not running for president

needed a guy with even less charisma as a wingman