Not so much an incident, but an unsolved mystery in my life that I don't think I'll ever know the answer to:
A few years ago some friends of mine and I were going to a concert and left our cars in a parking lot in an office park near the arena and piled into one car.
When I came back a few hours later that night, there was a dead duck on the hood of my car.
It was still warm, there was no damage to my car, no feathers floating around anywhere, no blood on the duck (it hadn't been shot or attacked as far as I could tell), it was just there by itself on the hood of my car. It wasn't duck hunting season, and this is in a city with over a million people so not a rural area.
I've asked all my friends, family if they know what happened, but nope. No one has confessed anything, and at this point I think anyone of my friends would've fessed up.
I'm just baffled.
It was like a duck landed on the hood of my car and dropped dead a few minutes before I got there on a random weeknight.
I think he's this narcissistic and impulsive but he's always had some sort of buffer between his worst impulses and reality.
He was a VC bro that was able to sell a few unicorn ideas to employees and investors (which is no small feat). His investors at his other companies were able to help build competent teams around him and prevent him from pinballing between bad ideas and keep him relatively focused on their investment and ideas that would work.
As Musk's weath grew, so did his power. His need for investors (and the need to listen to them) diminished. Also weath and power attract an entourage who are willing to do/say anything to stay on Elon's good side.
Elon only only purchased Twitter because he was compulsively tweeting.
He signed a no due diligence contact because no one around him was there to say "that's a really fucking stupid idea, there's no rush to buy Twitter, take all the time you need." But he signed a terms sheet that no homeowner should sign before purchasing a much less a multi-billion dollar acquisition. For reference, an acquisition of a small company with an annual revenue of less than $1M annually takes 3-6 months to go through due diligence, multi-billion dollar acquisitions can take years. That's a seriously compulsive decision.
If he sold his stake after saying he was going to buy them, Twitter was going to sue his ass off for doing a pump and dump and intentionally destroying stock value. That would also open an SEC investigation. Both of those would show the public how fucking stupid Elon is in a court of law. That's simply not okay for a narcissist. They must feed their ego.
Now at Twitter, he doesn't have a large backing of investors that he has to listen to like in a normal VC situation, AND he thinks he's actually smarter than everyone around him and we can see the emperor has no clothes.
After being a lucky VC that got forced out of his initial investments right before the DotCom bubble burst Elon's main value was as a marketer.
At Tesla he was able to sell investors and employees a vision of a gas-free future. At SpaceX he sold his vision of exploring the stars.
Who is clamouring for the next great social media platform?
Who's asking for the next 'everything' app?
Who's asking a private company to be more involved in their day to day lives?
Users certainly aren't.
Tl;Dr: Elon was a lucky VC, who's main value was as a marketer and not as an ops/engineering specialist.
What's hilarious to me is a large part of the value of Twitter was the actual brand name "Twitter" and "tweets". Those terms are recognized around the world and pronounced more or less the same globally. That is something no other social media platform has ever been able to reproduce. It's always "posts", "likes", "messages", and "comments."
This is a literal destruction of value for absolutely no reason other than the fact that one guy think it sounds cool.
Throw this onto the pile of "Elon clearly doesn't know what the fuck he's doing"
Anyone who can't see that this is a bad idea is being willfully ignorant.
This is one thing continually overlooked when people bring up trade careers.
I agree, it's solid (and for me) fun & gratifying work. I really enjoyed my time in the field and wouldn't trade it for anything.
If it's a skilled trade you can make more money than a lot of recent college graduates as well.
But to your point, it WILL absolutely chew your body up over time and construction sites are an exceptionally dangerous work environment. You can do everything right and some asshole not paying attention can cause life changing injuries to occur.
My advice for anyone looking at going into the trades is to get a few years under your belt, get some certifications and then find your way into an office management position.
I'm baffled at how much they screwed it up. They really didn't need to change the formula much for the sequel to be a success. Just come up with a new portal or some excuse why the portal from movie 1 didn't close and do the same thing as the first movie.
Instead they did whatever they ended up doing in movie 2 and killed what could've been a fun blockbuster franchise.
Hell they could've adapted one of the the hundreds of fanfics online and it would've been a better starting point than whatever they ended up with.
And your perspective on transit is exactly why I want to spread the gospel so to speak.
I don't think most people here are bad for fighting against public transit, I genuinely think they're misinformed and have never lived anywhere with a functioning transit system.
I want them to see the light! It such a happier existence on my side of the fence and I want to bring everyone I can in to have a party.
I'm generally optimistic, things are shifting, and the younger generations understand much better than their older counterparts the benefits of solid public transit.
It's due to generations of propaganda that cars=freedom and how that's affected every aspect of American urban policy.
Most state government departments of transportation don't fund public transit and see cars/highways as the only available option to move people from point A to point B.
This affects every level of American life. So much so that not only is gas in the US not taxed at levels seen in other developed nations, it's subsidized.
Pickup trucks now are a defacto status symbol, and on roads where cars are getting bigger, many buyers who would consider smaller alternatives also buy bigger trucks and SUVs than they would have otherwise.
Additionally there's a loophole in the car efficiency standards that are more lenient on SUVs and trucks than cars. This has led most manufacturers to focus on marketing Trucks and SUVs rather than cars. GM and Ford current don't sell and have no plans to sell new cars in the US market. Their entire fleet is SUVs and trucks.
I will say non-automotive transport isn't really an option for a large portion of US Americans. Basically anyone who doesn't live within one of a few major cities will need access to a car for at least some of their transit needs.
The average commute in the US is 41 miles each day. This is largely along highways and stroads where cars are traveling 45-65 mph (70-100kph). Unless you have a death wish, walking, biking, and using a scooter isn't something anyone would do unless there were absolutely no options. If there is bus service (which isn't a given) it's usually infrequent (every 1-1.5 hours) and doesn't take you to where you need to go.
It's a systemic issue that's been implemented gradually over a few generations through policy and culture making. It can be reversed but it will take a generation or more to roll it back.
In my home state, the urban areas are trying to build out functioning transit systems, however it's difficult to get support as so many people think transit "brings the wrong kind of people" (aka poor and black people) to their neighborhood and fight it. But progress is being made. My city is breaking ground on a new BRT line next week.
Then when there is a cohesive project that could work and serve large portions of the state, the state government has killed it because "it only serves the cities and not the rural areas" although it very much is in the best interest of rural communities to have some sort of public transit.
We do have a train that runs service multiple times a day between the two largest cities in our state, with funding secured to expand it further. So that's a win.
The uphill battle we face in terms of transit is so many people have never experienced how great a functioning transit system is and won't look at those "socialist areas" (aka NYC, Europe, and parts of Asia) because they believe those places are evil, and if they can't use their car to get places they're having their freedom taken away from them.
Not so much an incident, but an unsolved mystery in my life that I don't think I'll ever know the answer to:
A few years ago some friends of mine and I were going to a concert and left our cars in a parking lot in an office park near the arena and piled into one car.
When I came back a few hours later that night, there was a dead duck on the hood of my car. It was still warm, there was no damage to my car, no feathers floating around anywhere, no blood on the duck (it hadn't been shot or attacked as far as I could tell), it was just there by itself on the hood of my car. It wasn't duck hunting season, and this is in a city with over a million people so not a rural area.
I've asked all my friends, family if they know what happened, but nope. No one has confessed anything, and at this point I think anyone of my friends would've fessed up.
I'm just baffled.
It was like a duck landed on the hood of my car and dropped dead a few minutes before I got there on a random weeknight.
I have no clue how, why or what happened.