Australian Atheists Forum

From the Wall Street Journal:

https://archive.is/mYQZq#selection-5971.0-5975.146

Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis

The banks were sniffing Musk's seat when he got up to take a piss.

The banks that agreed to underwrite a deal that even Musk said was overvalued did so largely because the allure of banking the world’s richest person was too attractive to pass up, according to people involved in the deal.

"Allure" is an interesting word. It makes capitalism sound like a romantic sub plot from a bad 80s soap opera.

It reminds me of another article I was reading yesterday about the factions in economics. Some of these people live in a weird fantasy land. Unfortunately they have a big influence on the real world, much more than they deserve.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-13/ ... /100531994

I'm pretty sure there won't be a human on Mars in my lifetime, may never. As for a colony on Mars, when put forward my Lone Skum, the idea is evil or stupid or both.

https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk- ... onize-mars

I'm 100% supportive of a Mars colony. Bring it on, lets do this, rah rah.

My only clause is that Musk and the whole billionaire class are on the first spaceship there. Won't need a second spaceship after that.

pipbarber wrote: ↑Fri Sep 13, 2024 7:43 am I'm 100% supportive of a Mars colony. Bring it on, lets do this, rah rah.

My only clause is that Musk and the whole billionaire class are on the first spaceship there. Won't need a second spaceship after that.

That's actually my biggest fear, they rape this planet until it is past the tipping point of no return, then they and their ilk leave taking an abundance of remaining resources with them.. Sounds like the plot of a Sci-fi moving (actually this is the plot of the awesome game Horizon Zero Dawn), earth becomes the slave planet serving the masters off planet (though in Horizon they don't even know it).

That said won't happen in my lifetime, or musk's or anywhere near it, so meh..

Neil D.T. actually said something similar to this, terraforming Mars makes no sense, the resources needed are FAR greater than the resources required to fix earth (not to mention most of those resources will be stripped from Earth to do it). So it makes zero sense, unless you slide into some dystopian sci-fi fantasy.

In answer to the thread title.....Elon isn't up to much at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... conspiracy

Fucking hell! Idiotic

pipbarber wrote: ↑Sat Sep 14, 2024 9:24 pm Fucking hell! Idiotic

Missed this post last week, just read the article. I long ago observed how twitter obsessives lose the ability to perceive the unreality of the content on the platform. There's this strange illusion that twitter IS the world. In earlier times there was a narrative that despite its small userbase (compared to, say, facebook), twitter was relevant because it was a staging ground for discussion among politicians, journalists, high-profile people. I thought this was bullshit even when twitter was at its peak. For a few months during those glory days I tried using it in the way others did... I tried to attract the attention of celebrity users, and thrilled when the likes of Maryam Namazie (ex-Muslim atheist leftist), Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes) and Andy Partridge (XTC frontman) replied to or retweeted my posts. But it was exhausting and I felt a bit pathetic, like I was some sort of stalker. Maryam Namazie was the only person I still followed, before I stopped entirely. I gave up after observing how much energy she wasted arguing with gutter-dwelling right-wing racist fuckwit trolls. This was more than 5 years ago. It was a nasty hellsite even then. When Musk bought the company, I had to recover my account in order to delete it as a protest.

I assume none of the worthwhile people are even active on xitter any more, but Musk seems to have a new delusion about his platform's relevance. This time he has the mindset of the conspiracy theorist, that the mainstream perceptions are all some kind of falsehood, that Reuters and AP and google and snopes and Kamala and the UN are all lying to you, but the TRUTH is here on xitter. He is also a narcissistic sociopath who thinks it's fantastic because he owns it. But what comes across in that Guardian article is just how badly ADDICTED he is to this drug-like fantasy tech toy. It's like a drug lord who is very VERY high on his own very large supply.

Another little insight in to the weird world of Musk. Hollywood is obviously a bit stung because they thought driving $US100,000 Teslas around was a great way to help the environment AND parade their wealth and status at the same time. They are very pissed off that Musk has now put a neo-nazi virtual bumper sticker on every Tesla, and it's a compulsory upgrade. Just wait until they find out that Teslas ALSO destroy the environment. What they really need to do is take public transport. Hollywood heads will explode.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifes ... 236007945/

But there's another aspect of this which is interesting. I think Musk is a bit jealous of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin et. al, because they don't have to make a physical product like he does. Something like Amazon Marketplace is a paradise for a rent-seeking oligarch like Bezos, because he doesn't even have to own the apartment or the mall in order to extract the rent. The sellers and buyers do all the real work, they are forced to use Amazon because it has monopoly powers and it destroys any rivals in the online marketplace.

It looks to me like the robotaxi is Musk's attempt to get into that sweet caper. You will be able to buy a robotaxi and operate it on the Tesla platform in the same way an Amazon seller or an Uber driver does, but Tesla takes a cut of every fare and Tesla sets the prices and the terms and conditions of the software. At first the selling points would be alluring: transport everywhere, so much cheaper than it used to be. It would be SO good that deluded, corrupted governments approving vast new suburbs wouldn't have to bother with pesky problems like trains and buses. Laggards in the legacy auto sector would sign licensing deals with Tesla to join the robotaxi platform, so Tesla will also get money from every Mitsubishi (or whatever) robotaxi sold. Then, when entire cities are addicted to robotaxis, the costs soar, surge pricing explodes, safety goes down the tubes, robotaxis will be shit and too expensive and only available in locations which are profitable to Tesla, and there will be no public transport to unfuck people's lives.

Governments are too stupid to stop this sort of thing by jailing Musk and Bezos and their ilk. The main impediment to it is that Musk's autonomous technology actually doesn't work. Even the more effective rivals are a long way from having a safe and reliable enough product to share the roads without causing robo-carnage.

Apparently supplying Starlink to America's enemies so they can use it to attack America's allies, who would have thought it?

https://imgur.com/gallery/i-cant-imagin ... re-j5i938X

Let's be clear, I attach no credit for this to Musk, there are some incredibly brilliant scientists working for SpaceX and any direct input from Musk would be a disaster. I think someone said once, it's a meme now;

"I am not en EV engineer, so when someone tells me about Tesla and how much of a genius Musk is I keep my mouth shut, I am not a rocket scientist, so when someone tells me about SpaceX and what a genius Musk is I keep my mouth shut, But what I am is a program developer, a coder, a computer science engineer, and when Musk talks about programming I can't help but think 'he's fucking idiot!' so I have to evaluate my thoughts on Musk being a genius based on that!"

This is amazing, and they are lucky Musk is so pre-occupied with X, Trump and the election that only thing he is doing is taking credit for it;

https://www.news.com.au/technology/scie ... 0df505e19e