weeblewobble

Pilots understandably don’t like it (invasion of privacy, exposes them to liability, etc) and they have labor power

People who’ve never seen one still understand that an Olympic-sized swimming pool is “quite big”. Which is the general impression people are trying to get across when they use that phrase.

People in the Olympics are the best athletes in the world. And I bet world class athletes need a big pool to compete in.

That gives you a pretty decent sense of the scale of an Olympic sized swimming pool without ever having seen one.

Which happens more often? : French general strike or imminent tether collapse?

Not fewer ads, lower ad revenue.

Existing blue check accounts get to keep them for free indefinitely. Only new ones have to pay

Wait you don’t get the login pop up anymore? I still get it constantly, makes twitter pretty much unusable when not logged in

"recall" is an overloaded term. the connotation is that theres a serious defect requiring the cars to be sent back to the factory, but often times its just like a firmware update. we should really have two different words for this.

it kind of like in the NFL, "injured reserve" used to mean the player cant play again for the rest of the season. then they changed it to 4 weeks, so now you hear a player "is going on IR" and it's not clear what that actually means.

He had time to read and signal boost a 100% fake news article about Paul Pelosi, so I'm skeptical of arguments based on how busy he is

> So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him

I think it's worth introspecting on where you got this impression and what "many Twitter employees" means. It seems to me there are many powerful people who want you to have this impression but that doesn't mean it's true. Twitter had thousands of employees and I'd bet a strong majority of them are not ideologues in the way you imagine. Just people who work 9-5 and value job security.

They had to delete the tweet which awarded a specific named transwoman "man of the year award". The tweet was cruel identity-based harassment and not worthy of defense, but it for some reason seems to have radicalized a certain segment of the tech elite. In fact it may very well have been the inciting event that led to Musk's purchase of twitter.

Anyway, having to delete your harassment tweet in order to keep tweeting is not a Maoist struggle session

Which ideologists are those?

thank you. it's the definition of a middlebrow dismissal

short $META?

In Seattle we have PCC, which is at least successful enough to have a bunch of different locations since my childhood. https://www.pccmarkets.com/about/

It's embarrassing and awkward, and you can just go get another job instead of going through all that

Doesn't really make sense to me. Since when has he ever cared about criticism? He had a binding merger agreement. He didn't have to do any 4-d chess to buy twitter. What establishment? What makes you think they were gearing up for a fight? They agreed to sell him Twitter

Initially the Twitter board didn't want him to buy twitter, but he made a big offer and they were forced to take it. He had already "won" by then. If anything all this stuff since has damaged the value of twitter, which he now owns.

But he says he wants to take the company private because if they fix their bot estimates it will tank the stock price. Which implies he "knew" the bot estimates were wrong (to the extent they were, which seems dubious based on available evidence) or in other words he was not misled

I think there's two answers to this question.

For Musk, the answer is pretty clearly that he thinks Twitter is poorly run as a business and has no respect or confidence in their management. He thinks he can change the company to make more money.

For all the VC types he's texting with, Twitter is broken because it bans people, and because (they believe) those bans are biased against conservatives. The ban (actually a suspension) of the Babylon Bee twitter account for a satirical article naming a specific individual transwoman "man of the year" seems to have been a radicalizing moment among the tech oligarchy

It seems like a lot of people (Rogan, the Thiel guys, Calcanis) are coming to him talking about free speech, and he kind of nods along, but I didn't really see anything that demonstrated his own passion for the topic. He seems primarily motivated by a belief that Twitter is poorly run as a business, and that it will be difficult or impossible to turn it around as a public company.

Quibi

Maybe a cliche around here but the book that popped into my mind when reading your list is Godel, Escher, Bach. Maybe not part 4 but the first three.

This book has a very specific thesis but the way it’s introduced is artful and perhaps even literary. The revelations sort of sneak up on you, planted as seeds and tended quietly

To me that part is pretty weak compared to the security disclosures. The "lie" is about whether or not Twitter executives are incentivized to delete bots (later on he says that Twitter is incentivized to keep bots out of mDAU because they don't click on ads so they'd tank the clickthrough rate, kind of blows a whole in Elon Musk's whole thing). In reality I'm sure there are multiple overlapping and contradictory incentives at play, but it's not really a falsifiable statement so not really something you can "lie" about.

The way it's framed ("Twitter lied to Elon Musk about bots") makes me suspicious of the whistleblowers' motives here. I know he's some kind of legend around these parts but I've never heard of him, so I'm just going by what I've learned today. Seems like propaganda to me, intended to maximally damage twitter and/or curry favor with Musk.

Probably not, because it's an opinion.

Easy to blame lazy overpaid ICs, but really this is an organizational problem. When I was at a big tech company I was on not one but two different teams that were created to build a poorly-thought-out product with no plan and no serious executive backing. Both teams accomplished ~nothing and were re-orged into non-existence within a year or so. We did work hard though, at least until it was obvious that we were going nowhere.

I never quite could figure out why they did this. Are these moonshots where they "fund" a bunch of "startups" and hope someone knocks it out of the park and produces enough revenue to justify all the failures? Or is this make-work for some executive to justify their headcount? Or maybe the company was so profitable that they were willing to fund non-profitable enterprises for PR or customer goodwill reasons?

> The in practice problem is that my ROI has been outpaced by the housing market's lunacy, and more recently, there's the problem of inflation.

What do you mean? Inflation is good for fixed-rate mortgage holders

It's just a word

I found a little more info about it but unfortunately no copy:

"‘SO, BANG GOES THE PERSONAL TOUCH’, Bath & West Evening Chronicle, 22 April 1978, p. 10. This is TP’s ‘Star Wars‘ piece that he tended to mention when talking of his years at the Chronicle, but I could not track it down when I searched the issues in the British Newspaper Library in Colindale, North London (now closed and moved to the town of Boston Spa). Perhaps it was in an issue missing from their collection, or I was looking in the wrong issues. Star Wars was released in London in December 1977, but only reached Bath the following April. Discovered by David Moger, to whom my thanks. CS"

Not trying to be glib but this literally already happened. The Southern states seceded (with a very similar mindset to those who want to secede today) and the federal government physically dominated them with guns.

Obviously a lot has changed since 1861 but it seems odd to act like it's totally inconceivable

My impression is that Musk's defense is pretty weak. This is mostly based on Matt Levine's columns so I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem like much to me. He's a known BS artist with a strong incentive to get out of this deal so I don't give a lot of weight to claims he makes without evidence.

Tangential, but I found Ev's recent Tweet about the Twitter/Elon mess totally perplexing:

"I'm sure there are legal/fiduciary reasons you have to say that [you are going to sue Elon to force the acquisition], Bret. But if I was still on the board, I'd be asking if we can just let this whole ugly episode blow over. Hopefully that's the plan and this is ceremony."

https://twitter.com/ev/status/1545588839363727361?s=20&t=4g7...

Why would Twitter want to just let this all blow over? Elon did a ton of damage to the company and they have a good cause of action.

They don't really have to recant it, just delete it. It's a pretty mean tweet anyway, not sure why its worth defending