Tag: Elon Musk

Twitter Becomes the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club. Good!

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I think this is highly significant.  As a veteran of tech startups I think Elon Musk has discovered why these companies end up as bloated SJW-infested day care centers.  Women.

Nerds are socially inept with women.  When nerds who found successful companies introduce women into their workplaces they soon allow themselves to be manipulated into handing over control to these parasites.  Maybe this will be the beginning of a wave of change in Silicon Valley; social media platforms that provide an actual service that people will be willing to pay a few bucks for as opposed to crappy sites that spy on you for the feds, regulate what you say and provide no meaningful social interaction.

Bring on the Geniuses.  Bring on the Future.

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Today I had to get in the asset statement for my business.  The government gets to tax the assets of a business.  Now if your business is selling books and photographs what are the assets of that business?  I would have said my brilliant mind.  There was no column on the form for that.  So, I put down the computer I type the words out on and the camera and lenses that I take the pictures with.

When I brought in the form the town official who looked it over asked me how much the desk and chair cost that I sit at and on.  She had me there.  Those things are so old that I really didn’t know how much they cost.  And by now the depreciation must have whittled them down to pennies.  So, we settled on a guestimate.

The fact that I’d waited until the last day is a feature of my psychology.  It’s one of the reasons I have been acclaimed as possibly the laziest man who ever lived.  It is also true that it sometimes makes my life rather difficult.  But having accomplished the task it renders me almost euphoric for having overcome the unimaginable gravity of sloth.

Here we are only a week out from the election.  I think the pundits and readers are almost beyond caring.  Fetterman, Oz?  Warnock, Walker?  Mastro, Laxalt?  Who are these strange people haunting our waking hours and promising to be able to solve all our problems?  To be fair, if the three Republicans listed are elected then suddenly Creepy Uncle Joe won’t be able to inflict anymore horrible judges on us.  We won’t have to pay even more trillions of dollars to Democrat friends selling windmills and solar panels.  So, I guess there is some reason to play this game.  But it does seem like a carnival act we’re exposed to every two years.

I just wish we had our own party and didn’t have to depend on Mitch McConnell and the other clowns like Mitt Romney that parade around and sell us out for graft and power.  But I guess we know that over time the next party will fill with rats just like the old one.  But even if we don’t replace the party, we should have a “sub-party” that allows just the normal people to get together and thrash out our thoughts on what needs to be done and decide who we want and don’t want to represent us.  And now that Elon Musk paid 44 billion dollars to liberate Twitter maybe he’ll be smart enough to build it into something that organizers can use to communicate with those people.

I mean if this social media is supposed to be good for anything it’s to allow tech geniuses to figure out what people want to buy and then put it in front of them to buy with the click of a mouse.  So come on Elon.  Sit down with your old PayPal buddy Peter Thiel and build an app that let’s non-progressives build a virtual town square where they can decide what they want in the real world and then make it happen.

I’m pretty sure we’d all pay five bucks a month for Twitter if it had some of the features of LinkedIn and Facebook.  Maybe it could have a movie feature like Netflix where premium entertainment could be ala carte.

And when you get around to it add our own PayPal and GoFundMe and while you’re at it our own Amazon.  We don’t care if you cheat us just a little just as long as we don’t have to hear the word “your pronouns” ever again.

The Metaverse?  Really?

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I read today that Meta (Facebook) is tanking on Wall Street because the Metaverse (Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a virtual reality existence for his customers on the internet) is meaningless nonsense that nobody would waste his time on.  So untold billions of dollars of corporate value has evaporated as supposedly one of the most valuable corporations in the world had thousands of highly paid computer scientists playing around with Oculus 3D headsets and video games.

I don’t know about anyone else but I have to wonder whether these geniuses maybe aren’t really all that bright.  I’ve always suspected that the federal government has used its seemingly inexhaustible supply of fake money to make Amazon, Google and Facebook horribly rich monopolies in exchange for the data that they mine from us.  Amazon was allowed to drive their brick-and-mortar competition out of business and Google strangled newspapers, television and every other advertising outlet.  And Facebook was allowed to get a piece of that action, as was, to a much smaller extent, Twitter.  But I think in the back of his mind Zuckerberg has always thought that eventually the jig would be up.  Google takes care of all the ads.  What is Facebook for?

So, he tried to answer that question by imagining a new world that was so flashy and fun that everyone would be glad to waste all their time just being CGI versions of themselves and flying around.  The only thing is it turns out it’s really just boring and ridiculous.  Who wants to sit around all day with a 3D headset on doing basically nothing?

Maybe the good news about all this is people are starting to wake up to the limits of living on-line.  What is accomplished by staring through a headset for hours at a time.  Is anything being produced?  Is anyone benefited?

It’s probably time for on-line companies to concentrate on a subscription model for services that people actually want.  Amazon at least sells stuff and ships it to you very quickly.  What does Facebook do besides spy on you?  Really, not very much.  At least when they weren’t suspending and banning conservatives, they had some rationale for saying they were a social networking medium.  Now they’re some kind of nanny state surveillance bureau to stop normal people from communicating with each other.

So, I’m interested to see what Elon Musk starts doing with his new domain after tomorrow.  Right now, Twitter is even more pathetic than Facebook.  But at least it knows it.  It doesn’t make enough ad money to show a profit and mostly it doesn’t seem like there’s anyone actually there watching.  Although it’s hard to tell because anyone I’d be interested in is shadow-banned by definition.

I’m hoping Musk starts out by unbanning everyone and eliminating the algorithmic bias against normal people.  Just starting with that might cause some interesting things to happen.  It might not make any people on our side suddenly stars but it might turn off the spotlight that currently shines on the Left.  I’d enjoy that.

But long term we might find out whether someone smart could make money running a town square for real and without a big government subsidy to pay the bills.  Somehow, I’m still hopeful that the idea of on-line communities can have some value.  Maybe all that’s needed is an honest broker allowing likeminded folks to form communities that can benefit each other.    Or maybe that’s a mirage and only government money keeps these things like YouTube afloat.  But it’s time to find out.

One thing I know for sure is that the Metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg imagines it, as some kind of free floating Holo-deck on the cheap isn’t an actual thing that millions of people will pay to inhabit.  And the idea that people will pay money to purchase virtual land in this absurd dreamscape is beyond ludicrous.  To me this exposes the juvenile sensibilities of the people running these companies.  The industry is deeply in need of adult supervision.  Maybe Musk will show himself to be in that category.

Twitter Cries Out!

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Supposedly Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter on Friday.  I don’t know if he is.  Things seem to go back and forth on the sale so often it’s hard to say for sure.  But I was interested in an article that quoted an open letter that some Twitter employees have released.  It addresses a rumor that Musk is going to lay off 75% of the employees of the company.

Now that caught my attention.  What a marvelous idea!  Reducing Twitter’s payroll to two thousand employees sounded like a brilliant way to focus the attention of those remaining employees on doing their jobs instead of practicing social justice.

But apparently not everyone views this situation the same.  The employees who wrote this open letter to Musk are not as thrilled as I am.  Here are some excerpts:

We, the undersigned Twitter workers, believe the public conversation is in jeopardy.

Elon Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation. A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation…….

We demand of current and future leadership:

Respect: We demand leadership to respect the platform and the workers who maintain it by committing to preserving the current headcount.

Safety: We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. We also demand safety for workers on visas, who will be forced to leave the country they work in if they are laid off.

Protection: We demand Elon Musk explicitly commit to preserve our benefits, those both listed in the merger agreement and not (e.g. remote work). We demand leadership to establish and ensure fair severance policies for all workers before and after any change in ownership.

Dignity: We demand transparent, prompt and thoughtful communication around our working conditions. We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires.

You know, that’s a lot of demanding going on there.  I have to assume they are speaking from a position of great strength.  Otherwise, it might seem that they are painting bullseyes on their backs with respect to the new boss firing them.

Now the interesting thing is that they released this letter but refuse to release the identity of the signatories until some critical mass is reached.  My guess is that will be never.

So, what will Musk do?  Well, I can’t tell the richest man on Earth what to do.  But if I could I’d tell him to change it to 80%.  I’m on Twitter and as far as I can tell the algorithms are so rigged in favor of the wokesters that getting rid of almost everybody working there would be an enormous improvement.

I think the real challenge is to find the real bottom number for employment there.  After all isn’t the whole point of automation and artificial intelligence that you leverage machines to do the work.  Maybe the real number is one thousand or a hundred or even fifty.  I think that’s where Elon should invest his time.  He should figure out just how small a company is needed to run Twitter and that may tell him whether the whole thing even makes sense at all.  Maybe he needs to change the “business model” for Twitter altogether and build in something more useful than just a message board for random humans.

And I think that’s what he intends to do.  My guess is he thinks he can do better than Meta, YouTube and even Amazon.  Maybe we’re about to find out if he’s right.

Elon Fires Rocketmen!

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This one is hilarious.  Apparently some employees at SpaceX were angered by Elon Musk’s un-PC comments and opinions, especially around the Twitter deal going on.  So they circulated an open letter berating Musk for embarrassing them.  Apparently they pressured other employees to sign the letter and some of these put-upon employees must have complained to management about being pressured.  Because the letter drafters have been fired.

Essentially they wanted people to sign onto a letter that said, “We don’t like working for Elon Musk at a company owned by Elon Musk.  Gee who would have thought that management would be unhappy with employees staging an insurrection against the boss.  Shocking!  I guess they figured that Elon would say, “You’re right.  I’m stepping down as owner and CEO and let you HR flunkies run the company.  I guess he didn’t get the memo.

 

 

 

 

Larry Correia Blogs That Since Musk Bought Twitter His Account’s Been Unthrottled

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Larry Correia wrote a post on the unthrottling of conservative accounts on Twitter this week.

“So everybody knows about Elon buying Twitter, and we all know that Twitter has been a bunch of biased, censorious assholes.

What we did not know however was just how bad they really were. For years when conservatives/libertarians/non-progs complained, we got gas lit and told it was in our imagination. When our followers vanished, said they didn’t see our tweets, or our follower counts seemed to freeze and never grow, we were told that was just because we suck, and nobody wanted to listen to our evil right wing lies.”…

But now that Musk bought Twitter they unthrottled his account

“Then I started getting tweets from followers who are like, whoa, Larry is back on Twitter!

So I got curious and started asking about this, and then the posts started coming. Dozens of them. Oh yeah, I thought you weren’t on here! I thought you only posted like once a month! I never see you post. So on and so forth. It was remarkably consistent.

I knew I was throttled, but I had not realized just how bad it was. It was way harder than I thought.”

Well, it sounded so hopeful that I opened an account on Twitter.  I’m @orionscoldfire and I’ve posted one of my pictures and of course added my website address and the link to my photo account at Fine Art America (gotta make the donuts after all).

 

Free Speech or Not

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Watching the various talking heads screech and howl about Musk’s purchase of Twitter has been immensely amusing.  The lack of self-awareness (or the absolute lack of honesty, whichever it really is) has been breathtaking.  All of the things they are accusing Elon Musk of planning to do are all things they have been doing to conservative Twitter users for years.  Projection.

But all of this is happening at the same time that psychopaths in the administration, the Europeans and lying hypocrites like Obama are calling for even more restrictions on free speech.  Their smokescreen around misinformation and disinformation is a pretext for ending free speech.  They want to completely control the narrative around government actions like the COVID lockdowns and the BLM riots.

The timing of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter may be quite inconvenient for the Democrats.  I’m guessing they were depending on staging some shenanigans around the election to try and steal some seats.  If Twitter can’t be completely controlled it might interfere with their illicit operations.  And with Rumble now as an alternative to YouTube it seems possible that millions of people could be reached with information on all the dirt that is coming out on Hunter Biden, the election fraud investigations, the COVID disaster and all the bad news for the economy.

We’re living in interesting times.  The outrageous abuses that have occurred in the last two years, the lockdowns, the riots, voter fraud, the breakdown of law and order and now the stagflation crisis have shocked the usually complacent population into realizing just how radical the Left has become.  But at the same time the Left now owns all the power centers in the United States, and indeed the whole western world.  Because of this it may no longer be possible to fix our system.

We will have to watch from now to election day to see if the voter outrage will provide a powerful rejection of Democrat rule.  And then if it does occur, we have to watch what the Republicans can do with their new power over Congress to shape the actions of Biden’s policies.

Perhaps Twitter could play a role in helping people survive the rest of the Biden presidency.  If Musk can figure out a way to protect the Right from the crazies that run Twitter, then it really will be that public square he’s always talking about.  And without the crazies putting their thumbs on the scale, who knows, it might even be a place where little fish like me could get heard.

We’ll hear more about all of this soon enough.  Some early signs to watch for will be if Musk reinstates all the thousands of conservative accounts that were cancelled during the COVID pandemic and during the election fraud dust ups.  The next thing to watch after that is how much flak he gets from the government agencies trying to prevent free speech.  The Europeans are erecting barriers to free speech.  Twitter might have to build a wall isolating them from “disinformation.”  If he doesn’t then the European standards will destroy Twitter as a free speech site.

Twitter, Musk Redux

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Well, it appears that Elon Musk will get to buy Twitter and bring it private.  I hope it works out for him.  It seems like a crazy risk of a ton of money.  But what the hell do I know about any of this stuff?  There are two extra commas involved in his net worth versus mine.  So, kudos, you magnificent nerd and may you turn Twitter into some kind of futuristic electronic town hall where even Deplorables feel like they have a corner to congregate in.

But I fully expect that the Justice Department and the FDA will be plaguing Musk over every tweet that calls Fauci or Garland fascists.  But first things first.  Musk should immediately invite POTUS 45 back to his natural environment.  Trump needs to be tweeting 24/7/365 about all the things that were unfair and wrong.

The only problem is Trump is trying to tout his own social media site, Truth.  How is he supposed to replace Twitter if he goes back on it?  And how about the Gab guys?  What happens to them if Twitter becomes a viable option for social media for the Right.  It’s all very confusing.

And what about me?  Does this mean I have to start tweeting and hawking my products; my photos and my books on Musk’s free speech paradise?  Well, I don’t know.  I’ve never really figured out how to have my stuff discovered on mainstream platforms.  I’ve always done better in a rightwing ghetto.  It’s so much easier to be a slightly less small fish in a small pond.

I wonder how long it will take to find out if Musk can make this thing work.  Will he have to fire thousands of the blue-haired wine aunts and cat ladies that work for him in order to stop them from banning anyone who says that old bald fat men in wigs and dresses aren’t women?  Will the government shut him down if he allows scientists and medical doctors to speak the truth about what really happened during the COVID fraud?

Honestly, I have serious doubts whether he won’t regret throwing away that obscene amount of money for a company that doesn’t produce any tangible product and caters to a generation of crazy people who believe in things that even a village idiot thinks are too way out there.  I mean what happens if this is a scam and now Musk discovers after a few months that he just pays useless people to run a mad house that no one needs or even likes?  I mean, wouldn’t that make him the stupidest rich guy in the world?  I guess he’d still have the satisfaction of firing Jack Dorsey and fumigating his old office to cleanse it of the bedbugs that must infest that ratty looking beard of his.  And maybe if he fires 95% of the staff there, he could get the thing working efficiently.

So, as you can probably tell I’m conflicted about Musk’s Twitter play.  But in the back of my mind, I’m a little bit hopeful that a guy as smart as Musk is supposed to be, sees the diamond in the rough that Twitter represents and has a plan to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

But somehow, I think he would have been better off buying a 49% stake in Orion’s Cold Fire.  I would have settled for one billion.

Elon Musk and Twitter

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Everyone’s heard that Elon Musk has made an offer to buy Twitter and convert it into a privately held company.  And if you asked me my opinion about this situation I’d have to say, “What the hell is Twitter and why should I care?”  I looked up Twitter and what I learned is that it’s a social media website that allows any idiot to post a message up to a maximum of 288 characters long (but somehow this doesn’t count any enormously larger attached video clip).

But the proviso is that the poster has to be a brain-dead doofus.  For non-doofuses your every utterance will be scrutinized by uber-leftist social justice warriors who will report any violations against Democrat party talking points to the commissars at Twitter’s Ministry of Truth where you will be suspended either temporarily or permanently and then cast into the outer darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So, the supposedly smartest and richest man in the world wants to buy this company.  Why?  What will be accomplished if he owns this weird network?  Will he somehow level the playing field?  Will his employees allow this to happen?  Will the government allow this to happen or will they instead administer a death by a thousand paper cuts?  And is Twitter really of any value to the world?  Does it have an impact?

I have to confess I’ve never really understood the allure of a 288-character snippet of information.  That’s like forty, fifty words.  So far, this post is about 250 words and I haven’t really finished the initial idea.  If a tweet is really just a headline for an attached normal sized post, I guess that would make sense.  Is it just that Twitter has such a large user base that it acts as a global bulletin board?

Okay, but if you were the richest man in the world and also supposedly one of the most technologically savvy individuals couldn’t you just build something better from the ground up?    And you wouldn’t even have to do it alone.  Peter Thiel is another tech billionaire who is interested in free speech concerns with the social media platforms.  Couldn’t these two titans of industry capitalize on the demand of a public that is hungry for a level political playing field and build something much, much better than Twitter, YouTube or Facebook?  After all, much less savvy people have begun to create alternates to Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Surely the financial and intellectual resources that an Elon Musk or a Peter Thiel can bring to bear on this kind of opportunity must be considerable.  And if Musk is seriously considering buying Twitter, then he has identified it as a viable business opportunity.  He doesn’t need to spend tens of billions of dollars to create an exciting and profitable business that already has a large population of people who would make up its user base.  Probably one billion dollars would get the job done.  And what’s one crummy billion dollars to Elon Musk?

I hold out the possibility that Musk is hoping that Twitter rejects his offer and that he plans to build his own platform.  Maybe this whole bid is a publicity stunt to advertise his own entry into the social media business.  I hope it is.  Places like Gab and Truth don’t have the clout needed to compete with the established social media platforms.  And, honestly, it’s not enough to just provide a similar product.  Twitter and Facebook aren’t providing a satisfying product.  They thrive merely because they currently enjoy a monopolistic stranglehold on the niches they created.  What’s needed is something that provides a healthier environment for people on-line.  A truly honest marketplace of ideas would be that healthier environment.

So, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and any other entrepreneurs out there who see an opportunity in Twitter’s partisan methods; don’t try to fix Twitter.  Instead, bury it with a superior platform.  And make obscene amounts of money doing it.