Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[HamsterHookah 112]

Some analysts wonder whether these cuts will challengeTesla’s competition enough that they’ll be forced to slow pricey EV pivots, or worse yet, go out of business.

“We are trying to resist,” Luca de Meo, CEO of French carmaker Renault, recently said in regard to Tesla’s cuts.

[SydneyCarton 48144]

7 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Visionary, obviously.  And this paragraph pretty much sums it up:

https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/05/micropayments-elon-musk-thinks-hes-got-a-major-win-win-for-news-publishers-with-micropayments/

 

 

 

 

 

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Even today, well into the 2020s, you can find people saying the dream is an “iTunes for news” that — as the iTunes Store did 20 years ago — allows you to buy a single song (an article) rather than the full album (a subscription). (They say this despite the fact that approximately zero people still buy MP3s that way; instead, they pay a monthly subscription fee to Spotify or Apple.)

I’ve long been a micropayments skeptic. Not because I have any philosophical issue with the idea; I’m all for publishers making money and readers consuming news. My skepticism is driven by it being a strategy that sounds appealing but works poorly in practice. Others have written about the problems with micropayments at great length, but here are, to my mind, the most significant:

Friction at the story level.

What do people do when they hit a news site’s paywall? We have some data on that question, from a Gallup/Knight Foundation survey last fall. They asked American adults: “Suppose you were trying to access a news story online and had to pay to keep reading or watching it. Which ONE of the following would you be most likely to do?”

48% said they would “try to access the information elsewhere for free from a different news outlet.” 28% would “move on to something else or to a different news story.” 7% would “try to find information about the news story on social media.” 4% would “sign up for a free trial if available.” 3% would try to “get the story through friends or family who already have access.”

A measly 1% would “pay for access to the story or outlet.”

In the overwhelming majority of cases, a person faced with the need to pay a news site money will say “no, thank you.” You can view that as an artifact of subscription models, or you can view it as evidence of how transient most news stories are in people’s information lives. It’s hard to evaluate how much an individual article is “worth” before you’ve actually consumed it — and there is always free competition available, either on the same topic or in the broader universe of “things to click on in my feed.”

Friction at the payment level.

If an individual publisher sets up their own micropayments system, getting money will require readers setting up an account, attaching a credit card, and all the usual stuff that moving money online requires. Not many people will do that to read a single news story.

So maybe they sign on to one of the many micropayment startups that want to create an industry-wide network of news sites using a common payment platform — either as part of a pan-publisher subscription or on a pay-per-article basis. Unfortunately, none of them have the scale to be appealing or the appeal to build scale. (“Just sign up with your NewzBux account!” isn’t much of a pitch to your readers if they’ve never heard of NewzBux, or InfoCents, or FactCoins, or whatever.) And the companies that might be able to start with scale (Google, Facebook) are not ones that publishers trust with their money. And whoever owns the pipes, they’ll want their 30% cut.

Most paywalls aren’t that hard.

In a digital universe where every news story is behind a hard paywall — one impenetrable to the non-paying reader — then a micropayments model might make sense. But that’s not the digital universe we live in. The number of completely paywalled sites is low and typically either hyperlocal (a county-seat weekly with no competition) or high-end (think The Information or Politico Pro). Nearly all news sites will let a random web user read a story (or two, or five) for free. It’s only after a given number of clicks that the wall goes up.

If you want to think of that as “news sites already offer micropayments for those first five articles — they’ve just set the price at $0,” be my guest. And for those times when someone really wants to read just one article, that free allotment allows all the paywall workarounds that the savvy digital news consumer knows about. (We’re all adults here; we can talk about incognito windows.) If most paywalls aren’t that hard, there’s little pressure for a paid product to get around them on a single story.

No one agrees on what micropayments are.

Is a micropayment 10 cents for one article? That was the number Elon Musk was thinking about in this video from November, when he complained that he should be able to pay 10 cents to read an especially good Philadelphia Inquirer story despite not living in Philadelphia.

If there is a sustainable price for journalism, it isn’t 10 cents an article. A large scale data analysis from Medill found that digital news subscribers don’t even visit those news sites on most days. For small local news sites, the typical subscriber visits once every three days. At larger sites, it’s once every five days. Those visits can include consuming multiple articles, of course, but the point is 10 cents an article would be a radical price reduction for most subscribers — and thus a radical revenue reduction for most publishers. Price points will have to be higher — and thus less appealing to fly-by readers.

Publishers don’t want to cannibalize subscribers.

It’s not at all unusual for a business to insist on their product being purchased in a particular quantity. Try to go to the grocery store and buy one peanut M&M, or one tablespoon of ice cream, or a single Corn Flake. They’ll look at you funny, because the businesses that manufacture those consumer goods have been structured around selling bags, pints, and boxes of them, respectively. Go ask the people at Tesla if you can buy a Roadster that’s only for the weekends — at 2/7ths of the price. The economics of information goods (like news) aren’t identical to those of physical goods, but they both require sustainable business models, and for most quality news sites, that requires paid subscriptions.

And that’s the root problem, from publishers’ point of view: If you sell subscriptions for $15 a month, but you sell individual articles at 15 cents each, you’re telling any subscriber who reads less than 100 articles a month they’re an idiot and should give you less money. There aren’t enough payment-willing fly-by customers to make up the difference for even a few lost subscribers. You’re encouraging your best customers to think of you as an occasional treat rather than a service you pay for — and to pause before every headline they click to estimate its worth in cash. It shouldn’t be surprising than “we’ll charge you $10 a month until you tell us to stop” is more appealing than “we’ll charge you 10 cents now and maybe you’ll come back again someday.”

As Tony Haile once smartly put it, news subscriptions are like gym memberships. Imagine a gym that charges $50 a month for a membership — but also lets anyone pop in for a single workout for two bucks. Why would anyone pay for a membership again? “If you would take the micropayments version of a gym membership, it would be like, ‘I can turn up and I can pay a couple of quid, and I can go into the gym whenever I want to use it.’ No gym works like that.”

 

All that said — these problems are not insurmountable. Smart people might come up with solutions, even if they haven’t so far. Indeed, I’ve long believed that if anyone could create a micropayment system for news that worked, there were only two real possibilities: Apple and Twitter.

With iPhones, iPads, and Macs, Apple controls the devices that most paying digital news consumers use. They have hundreds of millions of users’ credit cards already on file and attached to your identity. And with Apple Pay, they have a nearly frictionless payment platform that has already been integrated into countless apps and websites. If they decided to offer a “Read With Apple Pay” button for news sites, the technical problems of micropayments would mostly go away. (Along with 30% of publishers’ revenue, no doubt.) And Apple News+ is the closest thing to an all=news subscription that currently exists.2

Twitter, meanwhile, is the center of the digital news universe. There is no place online with more news-curious users clicking links to new-to-them news sites. And it showed interest in the subject, buying Tony Haile’s Scroll and integrating its network of ad-free news sites into Twitter Blue and teasing some sort of paywall integration on the way.

But that was the old Twitter. One of Musk’s first decisions after taking charge was killing off the remnants of Scroll — the closest thing to a foundation for a pan-publisher revenue model anyone had.

Unless you are one of the few Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter doesn’t have your credit card number. It has no ready payment platform for publishers to integrate into their sites. Twitter would likely only be interested in a payment system that goes through Twitter, not via links that go to a publisher site from Facebook, Google, or elsewhere.

But let’s be honest: The biggest problem is Elon. What mainstream publisher would trust Elon Musk with their money right now? The guy who refuses to pay the rent on his corporate HQ? The guy who has spent the past six months dumping on the media, banning reporters, declaring their work a “relentless hatestream” from “media puppet-masters” that you “cannot rely on…for truth“? This is the guy who says he has a “major win-win” for publishers? The same guy that complains “media is a click-machine, not a truth-machine” thinks the answer is tempting people to pay with a single headline?

(Not to mention that Musk has no deadline cred remaining, and saying that micropayments will “roll out” later this month could mean this summer, late 2024, or never.)

Maybe someone will figure out micropayments for news someday. I think it’s unlikely at scale — but I could be wrong! But I am quite confident the man who has spent the past half-year destroying the news media’s favorite online space won’t be the one to do it.

 

I read the replies to his tweet. Holy shit, it is ALL blue-check, right-wing bullshit. Just straight sycophancy in tweet after tweet. The image posted in this one really got me:

[DDD Dad 14346]

Okay apologies if someone has already addressed this.  My twitter feed has gotten riddled with a bunch of right wing blathering assholes of late.  I don't click on links and have only a few people of that ilk that I follow (some for humor like Nick Adams), and the majority of my follows are golf related or personal friends (very little if any political figures, and then some mainstream news sources).  What's up with all the stuff getting put into my feed that I'm not following?

For example, lately I've been getting tweets from some guy named Stew Peters who seems to be a racist POS, and then I've also started getting posts from some poster named @amuse (I've never followed or clicked on posts from this user).

Also I'm now getting unrequested tweets from Marjorie Taylor Green (although I probably have clicked on some of her tweets from time to time if someone else posts them for commentary).

Another one that has me scratching my head is some poster called @fightmate (again, never clicked on a post and definitely don't follow).

I wasn't getting any of these sort of tweets until after Elon took over, and it seems to be happening more now.

[NoName 16367]

1 minute ago, DDD Dad said:

Okay apologies if someone has already addressed this.  My twitter feed has gotten riddled with a bunch of right wing blathering assholes of late.  I don't click on links and have only a few people of that ilk that I follow (some for humor like Nick Adams), and the majority of my follows are golf related or personal friends (very little if any political figures, and then some mainstream news sources).  What's up with all the stuff getting put into my feed that I'm not following?

For example, lately I've been getting tweets from some guy named Stew Peters who seems to be a racist POS, and then I've also started getting posts from some poster named @amuse (I've never followed or clicked on posts from this user).

Also I'm now getting unrequested tweets from Marjorie Taylor Green (although I probably have clicked on some of her tweets from time to time if someone else posts them for commentary).

Another one that has me scratching my head is some poster called @fightmate (again, never clicked on a post and definitely don't follow).

I wasn't getting any of these sort of tweets until after Elon took over, and it seems to be happening more now.

they started promoting blue checks, both in replies and posts. lots of times they fill the "For You" page as a result.

[DDD Dad 14346]

2 minutes ago, NoName said:

they started promoting blue checks, both in replies and posts. lots of times they fill the "For You" page as a result.

It's frustrating with all this shit filling up my feed.  I WANT MY ECHO CHAMBER BACK!

(not really.  but I'm not interested in tweets from these users).

[Francisco 2.0 32395]

 

[atomheartbevo 89770]

1 hour ago, DDD Dad said:

It's frustrating with all this shit filling up my feed.  I WANT MY ECHO CHAMBER BACK!

(not really.  but I'm not interested in tweets from these users).

Yeah, I give no fucks about two incels arguing over fucking beer (that they probably aren't even old enough to buy) and other such bullshit.  I don't use twitter as a "town hall" or a "town commons" to see what everybody is saying about shit I don't care about, I use it as a tool to track what I'm interested in and to engage with certain people (DMs only these days), and regardless of whether I block people or not, I'm still getting their bullshit in my feeds and in my email notifications.  He really has ruined it.

But on the plus side, Substack is doing better than I expected for certain tasks that I didn't consider in the past.  I asked all of my twitter followers who were interested in my content to do  a free subscription on substance for the same stuff, and I'm piggybacking off of that group and setting up a paid subscription for deeper/longer form stuff because it was far easier than I expected. So Elon fucking up twitter is going to financially benefit me in the long run.  So yay?

[atomheartbevo 89770]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Visionary, obviously.  And this paragraph pretty much sums it up:

He always planned to introduce micro-transactions (and even banking/investments) to twitter, so not surprised.  If there weren't some regulatory hurdles, he'd probably already be using twitter as a banking/investment platform.

[Deej 76873]

20 hours ago, High Plains Drifter said:

 

 

Good gawd, I hope this is shopped

 

 

Irene Ryan is still alive?

 

[Chopper 17242]

3 hours ago, DDD Dad said:

Okay apologies if someone has already addressed this.  My twitter feed has gotten riddled with a bunch of right wing blathering assholes of late.  I don't click on links and have only a few people of that ilk that I follow (some for humor like Nick Adams), and the majority of my follows are golf related or personal friends (very little if any political figures, and then some mainstream news sources).  What's up with all the stuff getting put into my feed that I'm not following?

For example, lately I've been getting tweets from some guy named Stew Peters who seems to be a racist POS, and then I've also started getting posts from some poster named @amuse (I've never followed or clicked on posts from this user).

Also I'm now getting unrequested tweets from Marjorie Taylor Green (although I probably have clicked on some of her tweets from time to time if someone else posts them for commentary).

Another one that has me scratching my head is some poster called @fightmate (again, never clicked on a post and definitely don't follow).

I wasn't getting any of these sort of tweets until after Elon took over, and it seems to be happening more now.

It's not a coincidence and it has nothing to do with you. It's an intentional result of an incel wingtard purchasing twitter.

The thing about micropayments for reading news articles is, as Post.news has shown, the publishers whose material is the least valuable (Reuters, USA Today) are happy to take micropayments. The substackers - not so much. They want subscribers. The NYT, WaPo, the LAT, nope, they want subscribers. Anyone of substance wants subscribers.

[Chopper 17242]

3 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

from pcmag

Good Luck Tagging Your Specific Location on Twitter Anymore

Twitter’s sense of place is getting fuzzier: At the end of last week, the service appears to have dropped a location-tagging feature it added in 2015, leaving users unable to mark a tweet at a spot more precise than a neighborhood.

This option, based on the location-data firm Foursquare’s platform, let people geotag a tweet with a specific venue in Foursquare’s vast database by tapping the pushpin icon below a tweet. Now, tapping that button offers much less specific identifiers—“Midtown South” in Manhattan(Opens in a new window) instead of a particular coffee shop there, for example....

“Locations are markedly harder to select now, you have to search and know what you are searching for, which makes our Twitter user flow pretty bad,” Logan wrote in an email.

[Chopper 17242]

I haven't seen anything good come from twitter's API changes. Here's another bad one. The software developer whose product is used on almost half of all websites world wide is dropping support to automatically allow its users to share their work on twitter. Yet another unforced error by elmo.

[bolverk 29705]

This is fucked up.

Elon Musk threatens to re-assign @NPR on Twitter to 'another company'

Elon Musk has threatened to reassign NPR's Twitter account to "another company."

In a series of emails sent to this reporter, Musk suggested he would transfer the network's main account on Twitter, under the @NPR handle, to another organization or person. The idea shocked even longtime observers of Musk's spur-of-the-moment and erratic leadership style.

Handing over established accounts to third parties poses a serious risk of impersonation and could imperil a company's reputation, said social media experts.

cont'd: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173422311/elon-musk-npr-twitter-reassign

[atomheartbevo 89770]

47 minutes ago, bolverk said:

This is fucked up.

Elon Musk threatens to re-assign @NPR on Twitter to 'another company'

Elon Musk has threatened to reassign NPR's Twitter account to "another company."

In a series of emails sent to this reporter, Musk suggested he would transfer the network's main account on Twitter, under the @NPR handle, to another organization or person. The idea shocked even longtime observers of Musk's spur-of-the-moment and erratic leadership style.

Handing over established accounts to third parties poses a serious risk of impersonation and could imperil a company's reputation, said social media experts.

cont'd: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173422311/elon-musk-npr-twitter-reassign

Holy shit, he really is trying to destroy twitter.  That's potentially the single dumbest fucking thing he's talked about doing at twitter.  I mean, letting the white supremacists back on, driving away advertisers, those were fucking stupid, but those were just kind of scattershot things.

But something like this.

Laughing at the WordPress stuff - I have my issues with Automattic, but Musk was trying to up their bill into the millions of dollars with little to no warning. I bet he doesn't understand it's going to hurt twitter.

[mchookem 16346]

[Dennis Taylor 18849]

1 hour ago, Chopper said:

It's not a coincidence and it has nothing to do with you. It's an intentional result of an incel wingtard purchasing twitter.

An incel with 10 kids? Interesting 

[Sawbonz 27580]

13 hours ago, Celery Man said:

Probably Phil.

I need to work “perchance” into my daily interactions. 

6 minutes ago, Dennis Taylor said:

An incel with 10 kids? Interesting 

They’re from artificial insemination 

[Goredho 17413]

6 hours ago, DDD Dad said:

What's up with all the stuff getting put into my feed that I'm not following?

The root of your problem is that you are using Twitter.  What it was or should or could be is irrelevant.  It was taken over by a right wing blathering asshole who is reworking it into a platform to amplify the voices of right wing blathering assholes.  It’s not electric car brain implant rocket science.

[Captain Ron 12889]

When I finally get on Bluesky I’m done with Twitter. I get that it has problems, so what? It’s not Twitter. 

[Chopper 17242]

1 hour ago, Sawbonz said:

They’re from artificial insemination 

also friends with incels, hangs out with incels, follows incels, talks to incels...all the things an actual incel would do. Isn't that...interesting?

[Stilicho 1397]

10 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

I read the replies to his tweet. Holy shit, it is ALL blue-check, right-wing bullshit. Just straight sycophancy in tweet after tweet. The image posted in this one really got me:

Serious question: how much difference is there between the Twitter experience and the Truth Social experience right now?

[atomheartbevo 89770]

34 minutes ago, Stilicho said:

Serious question: how much difference is there between the Twitter experience and the Truth Social experience right now?

There are still plenty of people on twitter who would have been kicked off of Truth Social long ago for CR reasons.

But if Elon fucks around and gives @npr away to another person or company, I think that will be the start of the mass exodus. There are many people weathering the white supremacist shit, the incel shit, the advertiser exodus, the blue check bullshit, etc., because there's a mistaken belief that he will get his shit together and tone things down to get the advertisers back now that the blue check thing has failed to raise any decent amount of money.  But taking a handle away from a company because he doesn't like that they write/broadcast for a different crowd than he runs with, and giving it to somebody else...that's the Titanic band striking up "Nearer, my God, to thee".  

That's a bunch of people jokingly posting "I DO NOT GIVE ELON MUSK PERMISSION TO USE MY POSTS AND HE PERPETUATES STEREOTYPES ABOUT ESKIMOS AND ALCOHOLISM" while some dude is just randomly posting a gif everywhere of a guy on a skateboard (scatboard?) shitting as he's rolling along the street.

Because the thing is, if he went through with the NPR thing, he'd get a shit-ton of virtual high fives from his intel internet bros, which means he wouldn't stop with NPR.

[Francisco 2.0 32395]

4 hours ago, Stilicho said:

Serious question: how much difference is there between the Twitter experience and the Truth Social experience right now?

 

 

 

Honestly, Twitter still has major reporters from sports, news, whatnot.  That's probably the only difference at this point.  I suspect once there is a safe landing space for (example) John Hollinger of The Athletic, then he will take his efforts elsewhere.  

 

 

 

 

[Captain Ron 12889]

11 hours ago, bolverk said:

This is fucked up.

Elon Musk threatens to re-assign @NPR on Twitter to 'another company'

Elon Musk has threatened to reassign NPR's Twitter account to "another company."

In a series of emails sent to this reporter, Musk suggested he would transfer the network's main account on Twitter, under the @NPR handle, to another organization or person. The idea shocked even longtime observers of Musk's spur-of-the-moment and erratic leadership style.

Handing over established accounts to third parties poses a serious risk of impersonation and could imperil a company's reputation, said social media experts.

cont'd: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173422311/elon-musk-npr-twitter-reassign

I think what blows me away about this is that Elon doesn’t realized he is the one making the losing move here. He thinks he’s the genius here.

This move will push normal people to realize just how off his rocker he is. I think it starts the real mass exodus. And I think it likely drives off the advertisers big time. 

[Captainant 27711]

It's amazing watching Elmo kill Twitter with a thousand cost cuts. An idiot business owner, coming into an existing project and completely fucking it up for no reason but blind ego? It's a classic story of American capitalism!

It seems like the pattern of social media sites on the internet is: build a better website, people keep using the old one despite it's limitations, old one makes a fuckup that drives away users, new one takes over and the users finally migrate.

Friendster to Myspace to Facebook, StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit, etc etc. 

[South Austin 52528]

5 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Friendster to Myspace to Facebook, StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit, etc etc. 

Hornfans to Shaggy to Surly.

[Captain Ron 12889]

We had the discussions about Musk:Ford - where you seem to see a lot of similar traits of hatred shared between them.

However, Ford's antisemitism seems to be forgotten by many. I wonder what caused this? Was it:

1. Ford's contributions to society meant that his bad was overlooked because of his good

2. Ford's time in history was one where much of that writing didn't proliferate through society the same way as social media now. FF him 100 years he is likely all over FB etc and making a public ass of himself all over social media in a way that everyone can see. Plus now news is much wider spread. Even making an ass of himself in the news would result in that being publicized widely.

 

Given the similarities, it will be interesting to see how this shift in Musk is viewed by future generations. Will a new era bring this to greater light and allow it to be seen by more result it in being much more widely known?

[atomheartbevo 89770]

26 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

We had the discussions about Musk:Ford - where you seem to see a lot of similar traits of hatred shared between them.

However, Ford's antisemitism seems to be forgotten by many. I wonder what caused this? Was it:

1. Ford's contributions to society meant that his bad was overlooked because of his good

2. Ford's time in history was one where much of that writing didn't proliferate through society the same way as social media now. FF him 100 years he is likely all over FB etc and making a public ass of himself all over social media in a way that everyone can see. Plus now news is much wider spread. Even making an ass of himself in the news would result in that being publicized widely.

A little of this, and a little of that...and his stuff did proliferate - we had 106 million people in the US when he started it up, and there were around 700,000 readers of his paper.

Quote

A year and a half later, Ford began publishing a series of articles in the paper under his own name, claiming a vast Jewish conspiracy was affecting America.[77] The series ran in 91 issues. Every Ford dealership nationwide was required to carry the paper and distribute it to its customers. Ford later bound the articles into four volumes entitled The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, which was translated into multiple languages and distributed widely across the US and Europe.[78][79] The International Jew blamed nearly all the troubles it saw in American society on Jews.[77] The Independent ran for eight years, from 1920 until 1927. With around 700,000 readers of his newspaper, Ford emerged as a "spokesman for right-wing extremism and religious prejudice."

Quote

 Mrs. Stanley Ruddiman, a Ford family intimate, remarked that "I don't think Mr. Cameron ever wrote anything for publication without Mr. Ford's approval."[93] According to Spencer Blakeslee, "[t]he ADL mobilized prominent Jews and non-Jews to publicly oppose Ford's message. They formed a coalition of Jewish groups for the same purpose and raised constant objections in the Detroit press. Before leaving his presidency early in 1921, Woodrow Wilson joined other leading Americans in a statement that rebuked Ford and others for their antisemitic campaign.

Quote

A boycott against Ford products by Jews and liberal Christians also had an impact, and Ford shut down the paper in 1927, recanting his views in a public letter to Sigmund Livingston, president of the ADL."[94] Wallace also found that Ford's apology was likely, or at least partly, motivated by a business that was slumping as a result of his antisemitism, repelling potential buyers of Ford cars.[44] Up until the apology, a considerable number of dealers, who had been required to make sure that buyers of Ford cars received the Independent, bought up and destroyed copies of the newspaper rather than alienate customers.[44]

Quote

Ford's 1927 apology was well received. "Four-fifths of the hundreds of letters addressed to Ford in July 1927 were from Jews, and almost without exception they praised the industrialist..."[95] In January 1937, a Ford statement to The Detroit Jewish Chronicle disavowed "any connection whatsoever with the publication in Germany of a book known as the International Jew".[95] Ford, however, allegedly never signed the retraction and apology, which were written by others—rather, his signature was forged by Harry Bennett—and Ford never actually recanted his antisemitic views, stating in 1940: "I hope to republish The International Jew again some time."

Interesting  how it ended, he was faced with some of the consequences of his actions.

Quote

On January 7, 1942, Ford wrote another letter to Sigmund Livingston disclaiming direct or indirect support of "any agitation which would promote antagonism toward my Jewish fellow citizens". He concluded the letter with, "My sincere hope that now in this country and throughout the world when the war is finished, hatred of the Jews and hatred against any other racial or religious groups shall cease for all time."[99]

Quote

The distribution of The International Jew was halted in 1942 through legal action by Ford, despite complications from a lack of copyright.[95] It is still banned in Germany. Extremist groups often recycle the material; it still appears on antisemitic and neo-Nazi websites. Testifying at Nuremberg, convicted Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach who, in his role as Gauleiter of Vienna, deported 65,000 Jews to camps in Poland, stated: "The decisive anti-Semitic book I was reading and the book that influenced my comrades was ... that book by Henry Ford, The International Jew. I read it and became anti-Semitic. The book made a great influence on myself and my friends because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success and also the representative of a progressive social policy."[100]

Quote

Robert Lacey wrote in Ford: The Men and the Machines that a close Willow Run associate of Ford reported that when he was shown newsreel footage of the Nazi concentration camps, he "was confronted with the atrocities which finally and unanswerably laid bare the bestiality of the prejudice to which he contributed, he collapsed with a stroke – his last and most serious."[101] Ford had suffered previous strokes and his final cerebral hemorrhage occurred in 1947 at age 83.[

 

[C-Man 27239]

1 hour ago, Captain Ron said:

We had the discussions about Musk:Ford - where you seem to see a lot of similar traits of hatred shared between them.

However, Ford's antisemitism seems to be forgotten by many. I wonder what caused this? Was it:

1. Ford's contributions to society meant that his bad was overlooked because of his good

2. Ford's time in history was one where much of that writing didn't proliferate through society the same way as social media now. FF him 100 years he is likely all over FB etc and making a public ass of himself all over social media in a way that everyone can see. Plus now news is much wider spread. Even making an ass of himself in the news would result in that being publicized widely.

 

Given the similarities, it will be interesting to see how this shift in Musk is viewed by future generations. Will a new era bring this to greater light and allow it to be seen by more result it in being much more widely known?

 

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

A little of this, and a little of that...and his stuff did proliferate - we had 106 million people in the US when he started it up, and there were around 700,000 readers of his paper.

Interesting  how it ended, he was faced with some of the consequences of his actions.

 

That and a greater majority of people in the country held the same beliefs as Ford too.

[Lurch 5931]

I think what blows me away about this is that Elon doesn’t realized he is the one making the losing move here. He thinks he’s the genius here.
This move will push normal people to realize just how off his rocker he is. I think it starts the real mass exodus. And I think it likely drives off the advertisers big time. 

Do you know how many prior events we described the same way? On Mastadon, you can see new user spikes with each event, and there have been like a dozen so far. The vast majority of his base just keeps their head down and hope he targets someone other than their group with his next insane decision.

It’s fucking Stockholm Syndrome in digital form. His users keep justifying why they stay (ROI! Audience!) as he beats the living shit out of them. Fascinating

[atomheartbevo 89770]

3 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

I think what blows me away about this is that Elon doesn’t realized he is the one making the losing move here. He thinks he’s the genius here.

This move will push normal people to realize just how off his rocker he is. I think it starts the real mass exodus. And I think it likely drives off the advertisers big time. 

I don't know that it will make normal people realize it, but I think it'll cause an exodus among certain groups simply because if he follows through, a whole lot of news and other organizations (and personalities) will absolutely bail on twitter - they would all (rightfully) assume that he will come for them when they piss off his incel buddies at some point.  You start getting those organizations bailing for another service, and then you get the bigger/mass exodus from people following them.

26 minutes ago, Lurch said:

The vast majority of his base just keeps their head down and hope he targets someone other than their group with his next insane decision.

See above - if he pulls off the NPR stunt (I don't think he has the balls to do that, I actually think he wants the media to like him even if he doesn't consciously realize it), I think it's a last straw for a lot of folks - at that point, there's every reason to suspect that he'll start coming for other organizations he doesn't like.

Edited May 3, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[atomheartbevo 89770]

He's definitely giving off vibes of an early 90s teenage BBS SysOp who is fucking with users he doesn't like (or whom he suspects his girlfriend or would-be girlfriend of cheating with), and just like many a 1990s BBS that collapsed due to the SysOp not understanding the medium or being too jealous or too possessive of their BBS, it'll be the same for twitter.

[C-Man 27239]

1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

He's definitely giving off vibes of an early 90s teenage BBS SysOp who is fucking with users he doesn't like (or whom he suspects his girlfriend or would-be girlfriend of cheating with), and just like many a 1990s BBS that collapsed due to the SysOp not understanding the medium or being too jealous or too possessive of their BBS, it'll be the same for twitter.

He's going to institute the blinking envelope warning icon

[Surly Bevo 25098]

3 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

I think what blows me away about this is that Elon doesn’t realized he is the one making the losing move here. He thinks he’s the genius here.

This move will push normal people to realize just how off his rocker he is. I think it starts the real mass exodus. And I think it likely drives off the advertisers big time. 

While I tend to agree if the last 10 years have taught us anything....a lot of people just can't be normal.  

[wildcat09 29361]

Quote

Robert Lacey wrote in Ford: The Men and the Machines that a close Willow Run associate of Ford reported that when he was shown newsreel footage of the Nazi concentration camps, he "was confronted with the atrocities which finally and unanswerably laid bare the bestiality of the prejudice to which he contributed, he collapsed with a stroke – his last and most serious."

This owns so hard.

[956 Worldwide 34742]

Can we shift to the less serious topic of how long tweets suck? The limit was key to Twitter’s fun and value, it forced intelligent thinkers to be terse, direct, and creative. And it kept stupid-Os mercifully brief. Even tweet threads forced some discipline if you wanted people to keep going.

Long tweets are such a gotdam beating, it’s really just Boomer Facebook on a new platform. 

[SydneyCarton 48144]

1 hour ago, C-Man said:

 

That and a greater majority of people in the country held the same beliefs as Ford too.

I'm sorry, you're using past tense here?

[C-Man 27239]

13 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

I'm sorry, you're using past tense here?

I think as a nation we have far more people who believe in racial/gender/LGBTQ+ equality and progressive ideas than we did in the first half of the 20th century. Yes, there's a minority section of the population that is loud AF and spurred on by DOTARD's white nationalism but, yes, I think we are further along than we were back in Ford's time, (which makes it kind of hard to believe that we're oh-so-close to theocratic fascism taking root).

Edited May 3, 2023 by C-Man

[Post Oak 20254]

14 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Holy shit, he really is trying to destroy twitter.  That's potentially the single dumbest fucking thing he's talked about doing at twitter.  I mean, letting the white supremacists back on, driving away advertisers, those were fucking stupid, but those were just kind of scattershot things.

But something like this.

Laughing at the WordPress stuff - I have my issues with Automattic, but Musk was trying to up their bill into the millions of dollars with little to no warning. I bet he doesn't understand it's going to hurt twitter.

 

[royiv 9333]

43 minutes ago, Post Oak said:

 

He's pissed that people will donate $100 for a tote bag, but not $8 for a little blue check.

[NoName 16367]

16 hours ago, bolverk said:

This is fucked up.

Elon Musk threatens to re-assign @NPR on Twitter to 'another company'

Elon Musk has threatened to reassign NPR's Twitter account to "another company."

In a series of emails sent to this reporter, Musk suggested he would transfer the network's main account on Twitter, under the @NPR handle, to another organization or person. The idea shocked even longtime observers of Musk's spur-of-the-moment and erratic leadership style.

Handing over established accounts to third parties poses a serious risk of impersonation and could imperil a company's reputation, said social media experts.

cont'd: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173422311/elon-musk-npr-twitter-reassign

yes, this will be what brings NPR back. threatening to take away their 16 year old account, even though they are keeping to existing twitter policy around account activity.

does he think this is going to win back...any...advertisers?

[Captain Ron 12889]

56 minutes ago, NoName said:

yes, this will be what brings NPR back. threatening to take away their 16 year old account, even though they are keeping to existing twitter policy around account activity.

does he think this is going to win back...any...advertisers?

He clearly thinks he can make no changes to twitter, add no value and then charge for the same thing we got for free before, because ... Elon.

 

58 minutes ago, royiv said:

He's pissed that people will donate $100 for a tote bag, but not $8 for a little blue check.

Probably. And it's because he has not understanding of economics. You pay for things that give you value. People dentate to NPR because they get something in return. The tote bag is nice, but in the end, we understand the value of the content provided by NPR. $8 for a blue check that, because of Musk's own actions, means nothing doesn't give anyone anything of value. 

[Pescado_Rojo 19427]

8 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

He clearly thinks he can make no changes to twitter, add no value and then charge for the same thing we got for free before, because ... Elon.

 

Probably. And it's because he has not understanding of economics. You pay for things that give you value. People dentate to NPR because they get something in return. The tote bag is nice, but in the end, we understand the value of the content provided by NPR. $8 for a blue check that, because of Musk's own actions, means nothing doesn't give anyone anything of value. 

[Elon] So you're saying you want a tote bag? Got it! [Musk]

[NoName 16367]

remember y'all

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1521574200183566338

 

[NoName 16367]

the guy just can't help himself when it comes to saying just absolutely dumb shit.

he expected it to blow up?

https://archive.ph/Uhoel

 

Quote

 

Crystal Ball

Thought the scene that was SpaceX blowing up its own Starship rocket mid-flight looked a little, uh, unplanned? Well, CEO Elon Musk says he knew that the rocket would explode, actually. Joke's on you! The unfortunate explosion, which went down on April 20, was "roughly what I expected," Musk said in — what else — a Twitter Spaces session on Saturday, as The Washington Post reports. Sure. It's a bold thing to say, considering that the explosion, which lit a significant portion of a protected national park on fire and coated the surrounding area in rocket debris, has since launched a fairly serious FAA investigation into SpaceX. But then again, Musk's attempts at launching one of SpaceX's massive Starships have generally ended with flames. At this point, what else should he — or anybody else — expect?

 

the destruction to the spaceport is "actually quite small"

good news though, he's also an environmental engineer.

Quote

Asked about the debris and the possibility of a lawsuit being brought by environmental groups, Musk conceded the event “did kick up a lot of dust, but … there has not been any meaningful damage to the environment that we’re aware of.”

also, it didn't self destruct when it was supposed to.
 

Quote

 

During a Twitter Spaces chat over the weekend, The New York Times reports, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that the company’s massive Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster only self-destructed after a lengthy delay after receiving the command.

The giant 400-foot stack of rocket and booster took off from the company’s launchpad in South Texas last month, boring a huge hole into the concrete below and sending debris raining down over a huge area.

But only after 40 long seconds of it uncontrollably tumbling through the sky was SpaceX able to trigger the rocket’s flight termination system.

It’s a shocking revelation, given the level of risk involved, and supports the theory that SpaceX may have rushed ahead to launch the rocket without doing its due diligence.

 

+
 

Quote

 

But it turns out that the explosion occurred much later than expected. During this weekend’s discussion, Musk revealed that the flight termination system, designed to destroy the rocket in case it lost control, initially didn’t kick in after an energetic event caused several of the rocket’s engines to give out.

“It took way too long to rupture the tanks,” Musk admitted, as quoted by the NYT, adding that “the vehicle’s structural margins appear to be better than we expected.”

For the company’s next attempt, Musk said SpaceX will make sure that “the rocket explodes immediately if flight termination is necessary.”

 

+

Quote

“We’ve probably got an 80 percent probability of reaching orbit this year,” he said over the weekend. “I don’t want to tempt fate, but I think close to 100 percent chance of reaching orbit within 12 months.”

 

['stache 21825]

I don’t think it blowing up is the story, I believe it was expected and maybe did better than they expected. But I really don’t care that people are calling it a failure, the right would do the same if Musk was a lefty, except ten times worse and nonstop on every one of their fake news networks. The real story seems to be destroying the launchpad and a bunch of stuff around it for miles. Seems really negligent, dangerous, and just disrespectful to the local ecosystem and nearby populations. Is it possible for anyone in the political right to give at least a little bit of a fuck about the environment? 

[SydneyCarton 48144]

1 hour ago, Captain Ron said:

He clearly thinks he can make no changes to twitter, add no value and then charge for the same thing we got for free before, because ... Elon.

 

Probably. And it's because he has not understanding of economics. You pay for things that give you value. People dentate to NPR because they get something in return. The tote bag is nice, but in the end, we understand the value of the content provided by NPR. $8 for a blue check that, because of Musk's own actions, means nothing doesn't give anyone anything of value. 

Which is ironic because while everyone assumes and he fashions himself as some kind of engineer, his fucking degree is in economics.

As for the rocket stuff, isn't him saying he expected it to blow up, and the explosion having caused significant damage to a national park or other areas, basically make him knowingly negligent and liable? 

[NoName 16367]

16 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

As for the rocket stuff, isn't him saying he expected it to blow up, and the explosion having caused significant damage to a national park or other areas, basically make him knowingly negligent and liable? 

that's what i was getting at with him saying dumb stuff just constantly. you don't think this is going to lead to a whole line of things in the lawsuit those environmental watchdogs are putting together?

---

think skinned man shows he is thin skinned, example #∞

once again, this seems applicable

Edited May 3, 2023 by NoName

[Chopper 17242]

1 hour ago, NoName said:

During a Twitter Spaces chat over the weekend, The New York Times reports, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that the company’s massive Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster only self-destructed after a lengthy delay after receiving the command.

I don't think they know if the rocket self-destructed because of a command or if it self-destructed on its own due to velocity on the way down.

[Samson's Wig 3194]

13 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

There are many people weathering the white supremacist shit, the incel shit, the advertiser exodus, the blue check bullshit, etc., because lots of people are addicted to social media and can't help themselves.

FIFY

These people won't leave just because Elon wants to be sued for brand disparagement.   Almost anyone left there now is either an incel/bigot/asswipe or has a full-blown addiction to the tech, an addiction it was purposefully designed to create.   They can't help themselves, and, like all addicts, they make up all kinds of excuses that sound good to their own ears as to why they're still hitting that sweet, sweet Twitter sauce.  Just put the fucking thing down. It's nothing more than a platform built to collect your data so others can sell you shit you don't need - just like every other social media platform.  But just like cigarettes and booze, it's not that easy.

 

Apropos of nothing, I'm currently seeking investors for my new luxury tech addiction rehab centers.  Along with the tech wellness centers, we're developing a new app that will help people who can't quit other apps get back to living in the sunshine, swimming in the sea, and drinking the wild air.  So long as they log their activity twice an hour on our app, the rest of their time will be free to pursue all that life has to offer, with suggestions for products based on their interests and activities delivered directly to them through the app so they don't have to waste any time elsewhere.  If they follow the program diligently, they'll never need to utilize any other app again!