paulsurovell said:

I think God is OK with SAC.

The person you need to talk to is Kit O'Connell, Digital Editor of the Texas Observer. You can find them on Mastodon kitoconnell@kolektiva.social. As we didn't write this op-ed, it's not really up to us to defend it.  

jamie said:

paulsurovell said:

jamie said:

wow - you guys should have started a new thread for this!  I still have little idea what you guys are arguing about.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/magazine/gender-therapy.html

Whether this is good reporting (me) or dangerous reporting (@nohero).

ugh - again - new thread would have been great for this.

No, as I said, it's all related in Paul's mind.

We don't like Elon because we're "woke".

Plus, as I’ve shown, there have been ways of living with gender differences for thousands of years, without damaging the people, families, and communities involved and in fact honouring their roles in society. 
So: what else has been happening in the World of Twitter?

That Elon, he's such a sneak. 

HOW ELON MUSK IS AIDING THE US EMPIRE’S REGIME CHANGE OPERATION IN IRAN

Maybe we need an Elon Musk thread, he’s sucking the oxygen out of every single thing. I still believe he’s a dangerous individual.

Didn't read any of the letters, articles, or other materials recently discussed, and have no plans to, so have nothing to say on that. On the subject of twitter, however:

‘Sometimes Things Break’: Twitter Outages Are on the Rise (NYT)

"In February alone, Twitter experienced at least four widespread outages, compared with nine in all of 2022, according to NetBlocks, an organization that tracks internet outages. That suggests the frequency of service failures is on the rise, NetBlocks said. And bugs that have made Twitter less usable — by preventing people from posting tweets, for instance — have been more noticeable, researchers and users said."

Musk’s Twitter Owes Amazon Web Services At Least $70 Million (The Information)

Twitter has been late in paying Amazon Web Services for cloud services to power the social media app, prompting Amazon to threaten to withhold payments for advertising on the Twitter app, The Information reported Friday. Twitter also is late to pay AWS for cloud services it hasn’t used—to the tune of at least $70 million.

The developments complicate Twitter owner Elon Musk’s relentless quest to cut costs as the app’s advertising revenue has declined since he took over the company last fall. Years before Musk took over, Twitter made a contractual commitment to AWS for cloud services—regardless of whether or not the company used those services. But Twitter has barely eaten into that spending commitment and AWS won’t renegotiate the contract. Twitter also has failed to convince another cloud vendor, Google, to renegotiate an even bigger contract.

Everyone just remain calm.  Elon is going to have them rejigger the framistam. 

https://www.platformer.news/p/how-a-single-engineer-brought-down

lol -- why do I feel that Musk's takeaway will be to fire even more people? At some point it's just going to be him in darkened conference room (no lights to save money -- higher level genius thinking), and he's going to have a hard time figuring out who else he can possibly blame. Maybe it was the woke mobs.

"a complete rewrite"

what a douchenozzle.

A complete rewrite of Twitter's code?  He should use chatGPT to do it.  Because it can.  Speaking of which: when chatGPT takes itself public I'm buying 1000 shares and retiring.

PVW said:

Musk’s Twitter Owes Amazon Web Services At Least $70 Million (The Information)

Twitter has been late in paying Amazon Web Services for cloud services to power the social media app, prompting Amazon to threaten to withhold payments for advertising on the Twitter app, The Information reported Friday. Twitter also is late to pay AWS for cloud services it hasn’t used—to the tune of at least $70 million.

The developments complicate Twitter owner Elon Musk’s relentless quest to cut costs as the app’s advertising revenue has declined since he took over the company last fall. Years before Musk took over, Twitter made a contractual commitment to AWS for cloud services—regardless of whether or not the company used those services. But Twitter has barely eaten into that spending commitment and AWS won’t renegotiate the contract. Twitter also has failed to convince another cloud vendor, Google, to renegotiate an even bigger contract.

AWS should take Twitter offline like any other non-paying customer, but it's the case of if I loan you a little and you don't repay, you have a problem.... if I loan you a lot and you don't repay I have a problem.

dave said:

AWS should take Twitter offline like any other non-paying customer, but it's the case of if I loan you a little and you don't repay, you have a problem.... if I loan you a lot and you don't repay I have a problem.

$70M to AWS is a rounding error.  Please.

Steve said:

dave said:

AWS should take Twitter offline like any other non-paying customer, but it's the case of if I loan you a little and you don't repay, you have a problem.... if I loan you a lot and you don't repay I have a problem.

$70M to AWS is a rounding error.  Please.

That's almost a year of hosting fees for Twitter on AWS (according to 2020 stats of spending $7mil/mo.).  That $70 million is paying salaries and office expenses.

dave said:

That's almost a year of hosting fees for Twitter on AWS (according to 2020 stats of spending $7mil/mo.).  That $70 million is paying salaries and office expenses.

Don't get me wrong.  AWS should certainly pull the plug on Twitter (though, I don't know that anyone would notice because it sounds like that contract was for excess capacity that is not being utilized).  My point was that $70M was nothing to AWS in response to your comment that AWS had a problem because of the size of the debt.

Yes.  AWS would be in much worse shape if Netflix stopped paying.

Essay by a columnist for "Car and Driver" magazine, about Tesla, but it has a lot of relevance to Musk's overall approach to business. The column is "unlocked" for anyone to read, not just subscribers -

A 120-Year-Old Company Is Leaving Tesla in the Dust

"But the more I dealt with Tesla as a reporter — this was before Mr. Musk fired all the P.R. people who worked there — the more skeptical I became. Any time I spoke to any people at Tesla, there was a sense that they were terrified to say the wrong thing or anything at all. I wanted to know the horsepower of the Model 3 I was driving, and the result was like one of those oblique Mafia conversations in which nothing’s stated explicitly, in case the feds are listening. I ended up saying, 'Well, I read that this car has 271 horsepower,' and one Tesla person replied, 'I wouldn’t disagree with that.' This is not how healthy, functional companies answer simple factual questions."

I wonder if the "Twitter Files" authors are aware of this tendency?

There's also this about the corporate culture -

Tesla’s veneer of irreverence conceals an inflexible core, an old-fashioned corporate autocracy. Consider Tesla’s remote work policy, or lack thereof. Last year, Mr. Musk issued a decree that Tesla employees log 40 hours per week in an office — and not a home office — if they expected to keep their jobs. On Indeed.com, the question, “Can you work remotely at Tesla?” includes answers like, “No,” and “Absolutely not, they won’t let it happen under any circumstances,” and “No, Tesla will work you until you lose everything.”

But on the other hand, the cars make fart noises. What a zany and carefree company!

nohero said:

I read that people are trading in their Teslas even though the company has cut prices again. It’s amazing how one person can destroy something just because they are a colossal douchenozzle….

I didn't realize Tesla had also fired their P.R. department. Didn't Twitter do that too?

Whatever you do, don’t say Elon Musk is a lowlife a**hole.

paulsurovell said:

When the Richest Person in the World earned his riches by fighting climate change:

(1) It bestows a higher level of prominence on and public awareness of the person and how they earned their riches, than if they were 20th, 100th or 1,000th.

(2) It proves that fighting climate change can be good business.

Of course his haters, detractors and grudgers won't recognize this, but as I've said, they really don't care about fighting climate change,

Of course, that must be the reason. 

This kinda fits in here, as a long-lost business skill.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-06/the-phone-lady-mary-jane-copps-phone-anxiety/102015450

I reckon it should be taught as part of Business Communications.

nohero said:

 

Elon may have heard from his lawyers.

Yikes

did someone say douche nozzle?

This muskrat is a carbon copy of Trumpenstein … nasty sunovabitch.

Trump would never apologize.  I give EM that.

Interesting that this ‘lazy employee ‘ was voted Person of the Year, and was contacting EM to see if the acquisition contract terms would still be honoured (ie his employment), yet was so publicly humiliated. 
As if ‘typing’ can’t be done any other way than manually. 
What’s even more interesting to me is that The Guardian has reported (some hours ago now) his ‘next project’ will be an accessible restaurant in Reykjavik based on his mother’s recipes - so I’m not even sure if he is going back to work for EM. 
BBC has some lovely pix of Halli.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64884287 EM’s backflip

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64871183 initial report

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/07/elon-musk-twitter-employee-feud-haraldur-thorleifsson 

nohero said:

Elon may have heard from his lawyers.

joanne said:

I don’t think anyone would go back to work for someone like EM after being insulted and ridiculed on the internet like that. I still think EM is a product of the apartheid South African culture. Can you imagine being a slave owned by these people? I use the word “ people “ because I don’t want to insult the animal kingdom. 
No wonder he’s republican in nature, he might never admit it publicly but he’s a MAGA muskrat. Sick individual.

drummerboy said:

did someone say douche nozzle?

I think that was the Englishman in New York…