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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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So it looks like Elon Musk officially owns all of Twitter now, and he's already fired the CEO, CFO, and policy chief. I don't have any strong opinions on this, but does anyone want to stake some predictions?

Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, which is encouraging to me, but I'd be concerned about the conflict of interest. I anticipate there will be some accusations of throttling unfavorable opinions about either him or his companies (RIP rogue driverless Tesla videos). I think the tension between unrestricted speech and a quality user experience will continue to be a problem, as I can't identify an obvious solution. Blue checkmarks are making hilariously cataclysmic remarks but I predict Twitter will remain a favored haven for the journalist class.

My opinion of Musk is very low, I think he's essentially a fraud, so I don't have much hopes for his ability to improve Twitter.

Even if he does end up being a competent leader, I worry he will simply be unable to do much. It turns out Dorsey was a libertarian-leaning idealist all along, and he was unable to push his own company in that direction, and had to wait until retirement to actually start making idealistic noises again. If Musk does do anything, we're going to see another round of "No Clicks For Hate" or that WSJ article about Youtube that triggered the Adpocalypse.

I think the best case scenario we can realistically hope for is that he drives Twitter into the ground.

Cost to launch a payload into space:

Space shuttle (USA): $54k/kg

Ariane 5 (Eurozone): $9.1k/kg

Proton (Russian): $4.3k/kg

Falcon 9 (Musk): $2.7k/kg.

Falcon Heavy (Musk): $1.4k/kg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competition

What a fraud. He definitely lacks the ability to execute.

This seems to be comparing the total cost of the space shuttle program to the advertised cost of the Falcon 9. Is there an actual apples-to-apples comparison somewhere, with a breakdown of how the figures were arrived at?

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