Elon Musk owns 9.2% of Twitter

I dunno, some people I’m friends with do post regularly, but a lot of them have become mostly lurkers over time.

This is just to say that I don’t think IG is different than Twitter in that way, a smaller percentage of people post the majority of content now.

People buying ads certainly think so. Or more specifically they think their brand or product denoted in the ad will be associated with the context in which it appears.

And they are the customers.

[No, we got away from the practices I mentioned above through discussion that did not take place in a "public" town square. Basically anywhere else, but certainly not the "public" town square. One reason, among many, is that a "town square" is not nearly as ubiquitous as you seem to believe, historically. Dominant ideas can easily and are frequently challenged on Twitter and in modern discourse generally, it's just not tolerant of the racist, awful ideas that some might want to discuss. It's not going to lead to progress to continue to discuss how one race is superior to another, for example, and yet that's all some groups seem to want to talk about.]

I would further love to hear what you think would happen if you did that while committing the "crime" of being black.

Getting made fun of on Twitter seems like a substantially less severe consequence than what would happen if you proposed radical ideas in the "public town square" throughout history.

That sounds like a free market. A government provides a minimal container and you’re free to create your own sub-pocket with your own rules inside of that structure. If you don’t like the rules of sub-pocket A (ex. Twitter), you can go create sub-pocket B (Truth Social). And they have no centralized style of rule enforcement because they are their own unique private enterprises.

Maybe the problem isn’t Twitter. Maybe the problem is expecting Twitter to act like an unbiased government when they’re not. They’re a for-profit sub-pocket with their own subculture. Just like Reddit, YT, FB, TikTok, etc. They’re all competing for eyeballs and ad dollars while independently enforcing their own rules.

I don't follow him that closely, how so?

The only problem is that the stock price was growing more than the revenue, so I’m not sure how fast it can keep up growing, and what the current employees are expecting.

Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly. Would they have been willing to, considering it almost certainly involves failing in explosive ways multiple times? That may be a risk they aren't willing to take.

Even if you say that someone like him simply enjoys work, it seems clear that he's often working an uncomfortable amount, in order to achieve his two stated objectives, which at least in his perspective are altruistic (and are objectively not the best ways for him to get richer.)

But the main point is the side comment: I’m having fun coding whenever I want to, but I strictly do non-payed hobby projects, as I don’t want to get into commitments ever again.

I work under the default assumption that most CEOs of successful companies, when taking actions on their company's behalf, are sociopathic assholes.

It's certainly true that Tesla wouldn't have been able to raise as much money from equities markets if Elon had been quieter.

I know for a fact the good engineers are sticking around because I know a bunch of them personally. I wouldn't say all of them are staying because of Elon alone but it generally factors into the calculation (along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse...)

Nah, it just doesn't work that way. Things don't happen until someone does them. Doesn't matter how easy the pitch is. Someone has to hit the ball.

In my experience most companies and governments are risk-averse and nobody wants to do anything until the mythical "someone else" does it. In the absence of a market equilibrium "defector" (game theory) it usually takes a government mandate or subsidy, and even that often fails if it results in "malicious compliance" like GM's EV1 debacle. (The EV1 was clearly sabotaged. It was intended to fail and when drivers actually liked it it was pulled, with GM even more or less confiscating and crushing them.)

The truth is that a significant proportion of the classical auto industry hated EVs. Some still do. The car industry is long wedded to the ICE and the good old fashioned "vroom vroom" as being essential to what makes a car a car, and everyone from unions to equipment makers to oil companies and petrostates had no interest in disruption.

There are still holdouts like Toyota that are just now being dragged into EVs and Koch Industries is still bankrolling anti-EV disinformation.

The reusable rockets thing was much worse than EVs. The space industry used to be smaller and was dominated by stolid mega-corporations with backgrounds in defense contracting that had absolutely zero incentive to change anything. The conventional wisdom in engineering was that current space launch tech was as good as it could get to the point that you had people authoring paper studies claiming that reusability actually wouldn't deliver much of a win (stop laughing!).

It took an utter lunatic to be willing to lose hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to disrupt space. As SpaceX worked on reusability they did so against a chorus of classical aerospace people and even NASA people claiming they would either fail or build a system that would be more expensive than disposable rockets.

I heard people continuing to make this claim even after F9 cores had been flown multiple times. They seemed to shut up when the video of those two Falcon Heavy cores landing in unison came out.

I think the Shuttle experience convinced everyone that reusability wasn't economically feasible. The whole industry had a bad case of learned helplessness combined with an addiction to cost plus contracts.

Edit: speaking of EVs:

I have this hypothesis that Elon's sort of kind of flirting with the alt-right and Trumpism was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Trump during the Trump era to possibly stop any attempt by Trump to kill either Tesla or SpaceX on behalf of his oil company and old school defense contractor allies. Elon may have decided that sucking up to Trump was the price of avoiding a backlash until Trump was out of office.

I have also wondered if his Texas move and appeals to "red America" aren't a marketing ploy to sell that demographic on EVs, since obviously the latte sipping liberal crowd are already on board with the EV revolution. Tesla is capped at blue state early adopters if they can't cross over into the mainstream and that means selling the non-techno-nerd and non-progressive part of car culture.

No clue, just speculation. Elon is first and foremost a marketer.

For a single person, this is still a significant contribution (if we presume that Tesla would not have survivied without him), which just happened to also make him wealthy.

I would hope they wouldn't hate visit his twitter. But I didn't think it was a principle thing. I would imagine trust in a poll correlates with trust in the person putting on the poll. People who hated American Idol didn't hate call in options, even though they could have.

> It's usually some pedantic thing like a Twitter poll.

I think that's more because everyone here has a view of Elon that's mostly immutable. The minutia leads to interesting discussions (sometimes)

But sure, he's one of us because one of the many places he stays at is a prefab house that's right next to his work.

Obama to this day loves to brag about how he sent SEAL Team 6 to deal with enemies of the US; you can't do that either when you're just a successful author.

Hollande (former French president) also bragged to journalists, many times, about assassinating ISIS leaders.

These are "normal" leaders elected in democracies; it's much worse of course with more authoritarian regimes.

Real power is the power to kill other human beings and not suffer any consequence for it. We don't usually talk about that when discussing politics, but this is what aspiring leaders really crave.

However, read the book Charlie Wilson's War. Wilson had no money to speak of, but the book reveals the incredible power that he wielded, largely by sidling up to selective groups (like the Israeli lobby) and getting key committee appointments. And Wilson wasn't even a U.S. Senator! (Generally speaking Representatives have far less power than Senators)

This seems to be "Working As Designed" given the rules here. I wouldn't call it censorship or even heavy moderation. It's something else--self moderation? groupthink? I don't know. But it's likely the reason the place hasn't devolved into a sewer.

I totally believe great-grandparent post's take: "Any platform that embraces free speech will gradually become /b/." I think this is pretty hard to refute. Look at what happens every time someone gets banned from Platform X and tries to create "The Free Speech Version Of Platform X." The new platform gets populated by the latest batch of Platform X's cast-offs, and eventually and inevitably turns into a toxic stew of antisemitism, conspiracies, and bigotry.

There is nothing that says a public company must only be motivated by growth. Tesla's mission statement doesn't say anything of the sort and has done things that don't fulfill the idea of growth or profit at all costs.

Now you might argue that institutional investors don't care about that since there's an indirection between actual shareholders, but that's a related but different issue.

But trying to shut down a platform which is considered (by some) "critical infrastructure" might find you in a position where regulations restrict what you can do.

It's not a certainty but a possibility that this might happen (regardless of who is in power at the time.) Many politicians of different leanings use Twitter for communication.

I'm also not for absolute free speech, so yes, users should be banable in case of abuse.

The main thing I'm against is the fact we're taking for granted various methods of online communication (Twitter like broadcast, Reddit-like centralized forums, plus I'd actually put WhatsApp like instant messengers here). And they should just be dumb pipes.

They shouldn't try to add a ton of smart features they sell to <<other companies>>. Because their incentives are out of alignment with their direct user needs. They will serve whoever pays them instead of whoever uses them.

The classic enterprise software dilemma which in that case creates functionally horrible software. For online software it creates morally horrible software, instead.

That's fair--I was trying to avoid a lengthy rant.

> But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to.

I'll get to AAJC in a moment, but I want to address this first. My conclusion that MacKenzie Scott is a dilettante is based on timing. She donated a bunch of bunch of money to random racial justice organizations just a couple of months after George Floyd was killed, and again shortly after the "AAPI Hate" news cycle after the Atlanta shootings. But she has no track record of involvement with Asian communities or Asian issues in the past. There is no reason to believe she has any understanding of the issues facing Asian Americans, what they want, or who really represents their interests. She just up and decided to donate to a bunch of organizations purporting to represent minorities. That's the opposite of Bill Gates-style "informed philanthropy."

Ordinarily, uninformed donations merely risk being wasteful. In the context of identity-based organizations, however, they can be severely prejudicial to minorities. Asians, Hispanics, etc., all have specific interests. There are myriad internal debates within those groups about everything from policing to welfare. But wealthy white donors like MacKenzie Scott can effectively be kingmakers--their donations can completely drown out grass-roots support. And they create an incentive structure where the most successful organizations end up being the ones that make themselves attractive to donors like Scott, not the ones that are most effective at advocating for Asians or Hispanics.

> Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard.

It's undeniable that affirmative action and movements to end meritocratic admissions hurts Asians. If Ivy League student bodies perfectly reflected the country's composition, you'd eliminate about 60-70% of the Asians. In Silicon Valley it would be over 80%. As shown by the voting on Prop 16, Asian voters oppose such measures even in California. In Virginia, the end of meritocratic admissions at TJHSST resulted in Glenn Youngkin getting half the Asian vote--a remarkable result given that almost all Asians in the state live in heavily Biden-voting liberal Northern Virginia.

It doesn't matter whether you think it's the right thing to do on the whole. If you're an organization purporting to represent Asian interests, it's unconscionable to support policies that reduce Asian representation and are contrary to what Asians themselves want. But AAJC goes further than that. They sought to overturn a federal district court judgment in Virginia that found that changes to the admissions process of a public magnet high school were "racially motivated": https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/virginia/va... (p. 16). In that case, one of the Board members behind the policy indicated in a text message that the policy changes seemed to have an “anti Asian” motivation.

Can you imagine the NAACP ever throwing its weight behind policies intended to reduce Black representation, where there was evidence of "anti Black" motivation? That would never happen.

Matt Yglesias has written at length about organizations that lend Asian identity and political capital to generic progressive causes funded primarily by white mega donors like MacKenzie Scott. See this excellent article from Matt Yglesias about the "Asian" organizations opposing Andrew Yang: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r ("However, I think a more important point about Yang versus the activists here is that it reveals — and not for the first time — that progressive identity-oriented activist organizations often have very little connection to the groups they purport to represent.")

There is a long tradition of this. These organizations purport to represent minority groups, but by necessity work to advance the ideological interests of their mostly white benefactors. Yglesias references an excellent paper by Devin Fernandes at Johns Hopkins that deconstructs this phenomenon in the context of Ford Foundation using its donations to overhaul the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2....

As Yglesias writes about Fernandes: "Ford funds MALDEF because it wants to do Mexican-American political organizing — but it wants that organizing to reflect Ford’s vision, which means the group needs to be somewhat insulated from the views of actual Mexican-Americans."

AAJC is also skeptical of hate crime laws because of their purported impact on other groups: https://www.advancingjustice-aajc.org/press-release/groundbr.... They have also adopted the rhetoric of anti-Asian groups in calling Asian values regarding assimilation, work, and education, a "model minority myth.”

Scott's uneducated and irresponsible philanthropy contributes to the disenfranchisement of Asians in the political discourse. Her donations to organizations like AAJC not only drowns out the voice of organizations who don't make themselves so attractive to wealthy white people. They enable AAJC and others to actively campaign against the interests of the Asians they purport to represent.

They wouldn't give him a plan...which I bet he figured would happen.

The long-term conversation ended with him asking questions about rampant child abuse under the watch of the UN.

Get your facts straight.

BTW he did give them the money: https://fortune.com/2022/02/15/elon-musk-5-7-billion-donatio...

Well, one alternative would be that they have to decouple their front-end and back-end and provide open APIs to their backend (posts/tweets, friends lists, etc.).

Facebook/Twitter can moderate/censor whatever they want on their own front-ends, but they can't remove anything from the backend.

People/companies can build alternative front-end apps that access the fb/twitter graphs and censor in a different way - so that users have an alternative.

That and its excessive use on social media renders "Nazi" mostly useless as a descriptor, outside of those groups that explicitly and deliberately reference Nazi symbology and ideology.

this is a clear violation of the First Amendment, which makes it legal to publish lies.

This absolutist and judgmental attitude is what makes social networks hell. I wonder what your worst moment was and whether it happened offline or online, and how would you like to be judged for it by others.

Too many people cosplay the Old Testament God.

That may still not outweigh the privacy concerns.

But this thread is about location: ADS-B (dependent broadcast) and to a lesser degree MLAT (secondary radar interrogation response), both of which primarily operate on 1090MHz.

With an unmodified RTL-SDR you can receive both, not at the same time and you'll want to swap antennas since the ranges are so different, but still :).

PS. The RTL-SDRs used for ADS-B often feature a modification: an analog filter centered at 1090MHz, which removes all other data but makes the 1090MHz reception better. You shouldn't have the filter if you want to play around on other frequencies with the same device.

Fun anecdote: friend of mine's dad is a ~billionaire, and not only does he still fly commercial, he flies coach. And has family come pick him up from the airport. Epic tightwad. Never spends money unnecessarily. To his credit, he also works at the local soup kitchen once every week like clockwork. How he does that while maintaining a 90 hour a week schedule, I have no idea.

knowing who caused you harm and why is necessary in stopping it from happening again.

in the real world, society depends on neighbors working together towards a common notion of the greater good.

if I live in a community that I depend on and I cause chaos, I will feel the consequences.

if I am a foreign agent, I am decoupled from those consequences, and may even benefit by virtue of undermining an enemy.

if the bad actors out weigh the good actors, then society cannot function.

and if you see your neighbors as being as bad as your enemies, then your enemies have truly won.

I have no right to complete silence in my apartment block, but I do have a right to not have to listen to my neighbor's loud music at 3am in the morning.

I have no right to never breathe in second hand smoke, but I do have a right to not have to breath it in inside small enclosed rooms.

Our society and the law makes these kinds of trade-offs all the time.

Also, the issue isn't people having to read the speech, it is the speech negatively impacting people (sometimes severely if you are an Asian person that just got knifed on the street) in indirect ways. There is this false belief that speech can't be mortally harmful unless it's a direct call to violence, which I hope we can dispense with since the evidence doesn't line up with that narrative.