This is fascinating and exciting to me, to be honest. Like a lot of people around here I'm sure, I've spent a lot of time thinking about Twitter's influence on our society and I can't say it's positive. The degree to which politicians all now depend on it unquestioningly bothers me a lot. The way our adversaries use it to subvert us is worrying. What it does to people's health isn't good.
Musk is the one billionaire that I honestly believe thinks of humanity's best interests in the big picture, long term. He's clearly identified Twitter and social media in general as a challenge to be wrestled with. Just really glad about it tbh.
> Musk is the one billionaire that I honestly believe thinks of humanity's best interests in the big picture, long term.
I could believe that he thinks he's that billionaire. However, his competence leaves something to be desired. Just yesterday, he had a peace proposal for the current Russo-Ukrainian war that boils down to "give Russia everything it wants" on the basis that that's what the eventual peace is going to be, the fact that the Russian military and milblogger sphere is in full-blown panic over Ukrainian successes in Lyman and near Kherson. Or take this case, where Musk and his attorneys have completely shot their credibility with the judge--in a case where there will be no jury, only the judge ruling on the merits.
In short, Musk does seem to have the tech-bro attitude of "I always know what the right answer is, and everyone who tries to tell me otherwise is an idiot." That is not the kind of person I want working towards humanity's best interests.
In terms of what you can buy with your money, Elon has them all beat. Any reasonable person would take Elon money in 2022 versus Rockefeller money in early 1900s. And Rockefeller's net worth was around 3% of US GDP, which is around $600 billion today - an amount that Elon will almost assuredly pass in his lifetime.
I also weight "success" with how much is inherited. Elon obviously inherited a ton, but Augustus literally inherited the most powerful state on the planet.
One of Elon's most visible projects (Hyperloop) is literally public transit.
One of Elon's most visible projects (Hyperloop) is literally public transit.
Elon does not actively work on the Hyperloop, and critics have argued it may even be a red herring that he put out there deliberately to distract from more realistic and well-proven high speed rail technology. What Elon (or at least the Boring Company) did work on, though, is the 'Vegas Loop', a sad joke of a project.
So the new narratibe, after all of Musks attics, is now of the billionaire pursuing humanities best that, human as we all are, had to be nudged to do that as well by honoring his acquisition of Twitter. I already how Musk would get out of it with his hero status intact, I guess I just got my answer, or at least a potential one.
What are you talking about, "new narrative"? We're not all narrative-driven bots, you know. I've been reading about Elon Musk since before anyone else I knew had even heard of him and have always admired his endeavours.
>The way our adversaries use it to subvert us is worrying.
Musk was basically repeating Kremlin propaganda a day ago on Twitter itself. If we're going to hand a platform to unaccountable billionaires maybe not to the one who is mentally unstable, is heavily invested in and praises autocratic adversaries for their working conditions and randomly accuses people of pedophilia.
Musk himself is probably the most prominent mental health victim of that site and if anything he should have logged out of his account instead of buying the thing
It you mean is that he will destroy Twitter, then I probably agree. Otherwise, the way he fools around social networks will not do anything good for humanity.
I agree that Twitter is awful, and I agree that there's no better man to absolutely drive it into the ground and pound it into irrelevance and bankruptcy than Elon Musk.
That’s one way of looking at it. From the investor (and thus valuation) point of view, you need to pay $20,000 lump sum to obtain a recurring interest payment of $100.
They spent 100 billion pounds on lateral flow tests alone. I enjoyed the free test kits as much as everyone else, but think of the infrastructure that could have paid for.
I thought it was £50bn and was the total allocated budget of NHS Test & Trace to include PCR testing and contract tracing, as well as LFT distribution etc. It has not been spent yet and with the current rolling back of testing the final cost should (hopefully) be well under that figure.
I still agree it's a gargantuan sum that could have been spent in many other important areas, but pandemic response is important too.
I 100% agree, now who you want to be the judge of bad/good wars? The UN w/ veto power for big countries? Maybe the international war crime court where "the US government has said that it will not cooperate with the ICC and has threatened retaliatory steps against ICC staff and member countries should the court investigate US or allied country citizens" [0]?
Don't get me wrong, as an American citizen, I enjoy my privilege very much. But, if I didn't have this privilege, I would fight as hell for amoral money or at least a fair international court.
Unless Russia decides to completely move off of "petrodollar"...they've already started to back RUBLE with gold and one of their largest oil suppliers, Rosneft, has moved to EURO as their default currency.
If they backed their ruble with gold, the war would be over in a week. The Russian economy is functioning (barely) because they can print as much rubles as they need to pay the soldiers and factory workers.
This reminds me a bit of how "thumb+index finger together, other three fingers up" became a "white supremacy" sign last year. It is generally an interesting dynamic when an innocuous/unrelated symbol becomes a "gang sign", not necessarily because of the actions of a "gang", but because others (even opponents) see it being accidentally used. So the "gang" starts really using the (previously innocuous) symbol to spite/make fun of the opponents that originally noticed it. I have seen it happen both among "gangs" that I see as virtuous and "right" and among groups I view as morally bankrupt.
This isn't my observation. The OK sign was used explicitly to represent white supremacy by people who wanted to "troll" others into believing it was being used that way "earnestly". But using X symbol to represent Y is not something that is subject to earnestness nor irony - i.e. meaning follows usage, not the other way around (and that is not even considering the fact that a subset of people participating in the trolling did explicitly support white supremacy). That property is intrinsic to language. When you use a symbol to represent something, then it is being used to represent that thing. It is self-fulfilling. If I merely told you that some symbol X represented Y, then I would be lying. If I used symbol X to represent Y, and got a large enough group of other people to do it, then I am creating a new contextual meaning for symbol X. People reacting to its use are not "tricked". They are responding to a reality I have created.
I don't see that connection. What's the 'accidental use' you're implying here? How is using the "Z" not due to "actions of the gang"(=Russians)? Thousands of trucks of the Russian Army are using it accidentally or to mock the Ukrainians because the latter "imagined" seeing it? And then the athlete stumbled into a sowing machine?
You are reading a bit too much into my comment. The accidental use I am implying is that 'Z' seems to have originally stood for a merely administrative marking on forces in the west of Russia. The 'Z' evolving into a symbol of the conflict as a whole and the (Russian-perceived) righteousness is the new meaning. It turned from a administrative minutia (thousands of trucks being marked with it for logistics purposes) into a way to mock the opponent and rile up the supporter (how the athlete used it). However, according to the sibling comment, my comparison to the "ok hand sign" seems to have been flawed, because it seems the ok hand sign has been troll-ish from the very beginning.
I'm just trying to make sense of your comment. "because others (even opponents) see it being accidentally used", "the "gang" starts really using the (previously innocuous) symbol to spite/make fun of the opponents that originally noticed it" are your words, not mine.
I will try to rephrase, similar to my last comment. It seems the "Z" was purely administrative at first. But we see it on all the vehicles of people committing atrocities and associate it with the actions, not with administrivia. And the entities that want to perpetuate these actions notice and elevate the administrative symbol to a sign of their perceived righteousness.
Most people understand, if they're being honest, that we're not a xenophobic nation in the slightest.
I think the UK's anti-immigration sentiment is basically driven by chronic overpopulation in the South East. House prices won't come down despite near-constant development and congestion gets worse and worse. This is why the Scottish (for example), just don't get it. They simply don't have these problems in other parts of the union.
Young professional couples are stuck in an extortionate rental market or, if they're lucky, can spend most of their income on a mortgage on a fraction of the box they live in and still pay rent on the rest.
All that said, as a resident of the SE, the door should be open to Ukrainians. They're fighting a war on The West on behalf of all of us at this point and our problems are comparitively trivial.
Density in this country, even in the SE (where I also live), is not that high. The "near-constant development" is not a picture I recognise - in fact, we build precious few new homes each year, far too few, and the number is going down. In 2020 we only built 123k homes?
I recognise the issue with congestion, although I would contend that's a national issue. Oxford is probably as bad/worse as anywhere else. The cost of housing is a huge issue, but that's mostly supply/demand because we're not building anything like enough homes.
"Not xenophobic in the slightest" doesn't match my experience. Most English people don't even like Scots/Welsh/Irish, you don't have to go far overseas to find people we have a nationally visceral reaction to. I'm not sure anyone objective could see our English media / watch our sports / look at the workforce statistics / look at political leaflets in this country and judge us "not xenophobic". London is literally the only place I would consider that not being a huge issue.
Not that high compared to where? The whole of England itself is statistically one of the most densely populated countries on earth.
Interesting that you mention Oxford - Oxfordshire's towns and villages are being transformed by soulless new housing estates with no corresponding increase in public service provision; you can drive for miles from here and into neighbouring counties and not stop seeing them. I don't recognise this area at all compared to growing up.
Genuinely can't speak to the xenophobia, rarely encounter it and don't let it go unchallenged when I do.
What sort of response is that? I'm sorry but yes, it is. You can very quickly look this up. Small island nations and city states aside, there are only a handful of major countries more populated than England.
I think this is a misleading impression: tabloids represent the views of the british establishment, which is atavistic, racist, and generally awful. I don't think the general population is so bad.
Who's "we", you and your nuclear arsenal...? Just sayin', let us know in advance so we can try to reach a place slightly less affected by the nuclear winter (sub-Saharan Africa? Patagonia? Who knows).
Most posts on HN about nuclear war are so comically exaggerated as to merit no serious treatment what-so-ever.
During the post WW2 era a persistent effort has been made to intentionally artificially increase the scare factor of nuclear weapons in hopes that they'll never be used, by exaggerating the end of the world potential.
You could hit Texas with all of Russia's nukes simultaneously and you'd still fail to kill everyone in that state. If you perfectly deployed all of Russia's nukes against population centers in the US, you'd struggle to kill half the population in that one country. The US and Russia set off ~1750 nuclear weapons in less than 50 years and the world barely blinked. If there were an exchange of several thousand nuclear weapons between the US and Russia (highly unlikely even in a nuclear war), the world would keep marching on, despite the vast destruction in several nations. There would be no nuclear winter at all, not even remotely close.
I don't disagree with the use of exaggeration tactics to keep nations from utilizing nuclear weapons. Maybe it's an effective tool. There's no sense in being scientifically ignorant on a forum like this one however, nobody here is deciding nuclear policy for Russia and the US, this forum isn't going to shape world opinion on nuclear weapons. There is zero potential for global nuclear winter from the world's present number of nuclear weapons.
Also, the nuclear winter scenario derives from weapons detonated at ground-level which has the effect of blasting tons of dirt into the atmosphere and blocking sunlight. Most of the weapons in the world's nuclear arsenal are aerial burst. Such weapons maximize the physical damage via heat and wind while minimizing the amount of dirt kicked into the atmosphere.
If you live in a tornado-prone area then you already know how to prepare for an aerial burst deployment. Go to where you would go for a tornado and shelter in place for 48 hours after the burst. If you survived the burst (note that folks who properly prepare for tornadoes die too) and you've sheltered in place for a couple of days afterward then you're likely to be fine. Sure, there's a greater chance you'll be dying at a younger age than you otherwise would have due to cancer, but those are probabilities. If you survive the burst then you'll likely be fine.
Sorry to add to the endlessly repeated refrain of online discourse, but: source?
> You could hit Texas with all of Russia's nukes simultaneously and you'd still fail to kill everyone in that state.
It's not hard to imagine pockets of holdouts who happened to be deep underground or whatever, but could you share the facts and analysis you're basing this assertion on?
> If you perfectly deployed all of Russia's nukes against population centers in the US, you'd struggle to kill half the population in that one country.
"Perfectly deployed," that averages 41 warheads for each of the above 146 counties. I can't find reliable assessments of the average size/yield of Russia's warheads, but directionally, I struggle to understand your claim that even perfect deployment of this nuclear arsenal would have a hard time killing half the US population. (As an aside, killing even 10% of the US population, so ~33 million people, in a nuclear strike would obviously be utterly unprecedented in the history of our species.)
> If there were an exchange of several thousand nuclear weapons between the US and Russia (highly unlikely even in a nuclear war), the world would keep marching on, despite the vast destruction in several nations. There would be no nuclear winter at all, not even remotely close.
Could you provide supporting materials to help me understand the confidence behind these claims?
If Russia is willing to use nukes over Ukraine, what makes you think it won't end in nukes any how? There is no way Ukraine is the stopping point if they are willing to use nukes to secure Ukraine.
Exactly. This reminds me Munich Agreement. Hitler got Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia because west was afraid of war. And yet he still started the war. It was even easier for him because Czechoslovakia was without system of border fortifications.
This is what Putin wants now. Defenseless Central and Eastern Europe. If he wants this agreement he needs to sacrifice something as well, so we have guarantees. He needs to get rid of nukes.
Even if we take your position at face value (which most would, it’s not controversial) that doesn’t invalidate GP’s statement. It just asserts that it’s the general case which applies to all geopolitical power dynamics.
“They” won’t stop unless someone stops them. That seems like a reasonable assertion whether you’re Ukraine or Yemen.
