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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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But, as I've said before, Elon has adopted just enough PodCaster Bro aesthetics to know that slight rephrasings of 1+1=2 obvious insights, combined with "thoughtful" pauses and idiosyncratic speech patterns can make you look deep to the midwits.

I don't get that impression from Elon's tweet. There's nothing deep or novel there, you're right -- he's regurgitating standard economic dogma. But stating something that is both true and obvious is not, at least in my worldview, somehow a knock against the person saying it -- particularly when it actually is a controversial statement among laymen: something like half the country supports rent control (varies from poll to poll). Maybe if he was phrasing it as if he was some kind of gigabrain genius and these were wholly original thoughts, I'd have a more negative reaction, but I didn't parse it that way.

I think I'm probably more pro-Elon than most people here, though I'm quite bearish on Tesla in particular wrt. their ability to deliver on their self-driving promises, SpaceX is just so impressive it kind of washes away those sins. Rocket companies are hard, Carmack couldn't build one, Bezos' Blue Origin is far from competitive, ULA is basically a joke, etc. I mean just look at this graph: https://x.com/FutureJurvetson/status/1792672666316665198/photo/1

Now, how much of SpaceX's success is due to Musk is a totally reasonable discussion to have, but even in the most cynical case, he at least hired the best people and set strategic objectives that led directly to capturing the overwhelming majority of the launch market and drove costs down an order of magnitude. And this is before Starship.

X/Twitter might be circling the drain and have no clear path to sustainability (let alone profitability) but some of my favorite poasters have been unbanned and I think you could argue his acquisition dragged the Overton window to the right, so I'm giving him a pass there as well. And there's something ironic about the legacy media claiming it's dead/dying when Biden announced his resignation on X/Twitter first.

With regards to Altman, he comes across as basically a grifter and technically unsophisticated, no disagreements there. I am not at all impressed by his leadership.

Can't stop laughing that twitter is glitching so badly I can't see the graph of his other company's performance

(Edit: now I can for five seconds until the page reloads with "something went wrong, don't worry it's not your fault")

Probably something in your browser settings (i.e. it is your fault); I get the same thing, but Nitter works fine which implies Twitter is working properly.

No, something went very weird for about 20 minutes: everyone was posting about it. Cleared up though.

No, something went very weird for about 20 minutes

I wonder if things blowing up take ~20-30 minutes to work their way through whatever cache system twitter has in place (ok, really more of a CDN system with multiple places all over the globe, but still). A throttling system were if something is throttled for 15 minutes, it starts getting replicated seems like an 80/20 solution to the kind of traffic spikes twitter gets.

It is ALWAYS DNS, always.

I mean just look at this graph:

Wow. The launch industry divides pretty evenly 9 ways now, huh? There's "everybody else in the world combined", there's China, then there's "SpaceX on Sundays", "SpaceX on Mondays", and so on.

X/Twitter might be circling the drain and have no clear path to sustainability (let alone profitability)

You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... sixty years.