You can blame him for the stupidity of how he engaged in them, but a lot of people seem to think that if nothing else had happened there never would have been layoffs.
Big Tech got fat during the pandemic, it couldn't have kept on growing as people started leaving the house again.
I'm saying blame him for the things he actually did. Just like I said I said.
It's turning into a recurring gag for me to see another news article about some website (like reddit, for example) crashing and burning and my response is "Why would Elon Musk do this?"
Historically speaking we don't even know that science and technology will progress.
You know the weird trope in a lot of RPGs where an ancient artifact is this strangely advanced thing? If you think about it, that's happened before. After the fall of the Roman empire, Western Europe was in a dark age. People were living in the ruins of buildings they couldn't figure out how to build, and often those ancient artifacts were better than anything that could be produced by current technology. Imagine something like some of the Greek clockwork showing up in some dark age village.
That's not the first time that happened, either. The early classical Greeks were often living in the ruins of Mycenaean Greek castles, and after the bronze age collapse some of the societies in the region didn't even maintain writing as a technology, so there were artefacts that were impossible for the people of the time to reproduce with current technology.
We also saw the collapse of the Indus valley civilization that had things as advanced as plumbing and sewage systems, where those technologies were lost to the indian subcontinent until much later.
There are ruins in Zimbabwe which are incredible of castles made of stone, completely inconsistent with what we imagine when we hear the word "Africa" as well. It seems that the high level of technology represented by Great Zimbabwe was not comparable to later civilizations until relatively recently.
The Terracotta army created after the death of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty in China was on such a level of magnitude and precision that the following periods of the Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period simply couldn't have reproduced it.
The Moche civilization in ancient Peru was known for its elaborate irrigation systems, advanced ceramic arts, and complex social organization, but the civilization collapsed and with the end of that civilization much of their technologies were lost.
Many societies before us didn't see history as a straight line, but a cycle. If it's true that civilization existed for in some form for 100,000 years before recorded history began which is suggested by some things like the story of the 7 Pleiades sisters where one sister left to describe a 6 star constellation where 100,000 years ago there may have been 7 stars showing then it could be that such a worldview is mor consistent with reality than our modern one.
While our postmodern view of societies says that civilizations fail because things aren't progressing enough, the dark age Christians believed that their predecessors collapsed because of a lack of moral virtue. The Bronze Age civilizations blamed "Sea People". The Mesopotamians told stories about a great flood sent by the gods as punishment for hubris. Two American civilizations claim that our current world is either the 4th or 6th one to exist and the rest were destroyed in cataclysms.
I know it's easy to just rag on twitter, but I think that everyone needs to remember that a lot of the problems Twitter is facing are also problems that the entire industry is facing.
Ad rates are down across the board. You hear YouTubers talking about it, you here people who run websites talking about it, and that's just the way things are.
Everyone got really pissed off at Elon for the mass layoffs, but everyone seems to forget that every other company also did layoffs just a few months later.
In short, blame them for the stuff that he actually did, not systemic trends that affect everyone.
Man, that sucks. One of the other things for me is that you can buy decent headphones for like seven bucks with a 3.5mm jack. Most USB headsets are going to be a lot more expensive.
Does your phone support qi charging? That could be a solution if it does.
I think that there's a reason for it, and I think that that reason is that they've been selling battery vehicles for 25 years and they know full well that there's going to be major problems.
The reality is that until maybe this year or the year before, these were expensive toys for the 1% to show off about how virtuous they are with their $100,000 sports cars that were saving the planet.
The Fable of the ant and the grasshopper I'm referring to comes from Aesop's fables, a work collected around between 500 and 600 BCE.
It's been told and retold in many different languages around the world, and in virtually every example of the Fable being told, the story is basically the same: the ant works through the summer, and the grasshopper dances. Eventually the winter comes, and the ant survives and the grasshopper dies of starvation. For over 2,000 years the moral of the story has been but there's a work time for work and there's a time for play, that you need to work hard in the summer or you will starve in the winter.
It's wonderful that somebody reinterpreted the Fable for a modern kid's movie, but that does not change the original meaning of the fable. Aesop was a slave born in Greek society, a society that utilized slavery. It's not likely that greek society would have been super into a slave teaching their kids that one day the slaves would overcome their Athenian masters.
Aristophanes wrote many plays criticizing greek society a few hundred years after Aesop. The following was from his play "Ekklesiazousai", which was a comedy about what would happen if women took over the government. It's a sort of hilarious example of the difference between greek society and modern society for many reasons, especially this exchange:
Praxagora: I want all to have a share of everything and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; [...] I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. [...]
Blepyrus: But who will till the soil?
Praxagora: The slaves.
In Orwell's 1984, the main character's job was in the ministry of truth, ironically changing history to better suit the party. In this sense, replacing a 2500 year old fable with a 25 year old movie sounds more like that 1984 than simply citing the original fable.
Toyota in particular has been dealing with battery management and motors for 30 years. They'll be fine.
Unresolved problems of EVs include extreme cold performance without a heated garage, battery degradation and the massive social, economic, and environmental consequences as people end up with useless used cars you can't fix, grid problems in the event of mass adoption, and the realities of longer distance travel in a car that takes a long time to charge.
I'm in Canada but the problem is the same up here.
If our used car market looked like this, then I'd totally agree with you that the small cheap EVs wouldn't have much of a chance. Looks a lot like pre-gfc prices!
Markets have gotten a lot of things wrong in the past 20 years since the amount of money in the monetary system is distorting asset values and causing bubbles. FTX and Theranos being two great examples, but far from the only ones.
I said this a few years ago but it's becoming increasingly true now: If EVs become the hot new thing, I fully expect traditional automakers to come out on top. Particularly companies like Toyota who are really really good at building cars.
Thing is, it still isn't totally clear that EVs in the form of the traditional automobile will be the best thing. There's a good chance that all the major unsolved problems with them will cut the technology off.
Are you sure you've looked at a used car in the past decade? (Or maybe the problem is that American policies like cash for clunkers have left the entire continent with unreasonably expensive used cars... Last time I looked at used cars was like 2 weeks ago, and it was absurd. Something with 300,000km going for $15k)
My first vehicle was 500 bucks (and was a piece of junk but I loved it) but I don't even see anything remotely like that anymore.
Unlike most people, I've lived as an adult with just a bike. Finished college and started my career and worked for quite a while without a car.
You think you'd be ok with just a bike, but then it rains, or it snows, or it's a heatwave, or it's a cold snap. The bike is ideal when it's ideal, but it isn't usually ideal. Especially when you live in non ideal locations, which many people do.
And as for a car, sure if you have unlimited resources it's a great choice. But most people don't have unlimited resources. If they can make it to the supermarket and back and make it to work and back with an inexpensive alternative, a lot of people will use it as long as it's ok to.
For a surprisingly large class of people, a car isn't even an option -- even if they had a car given to them, they need insurance and gas, and licensing and oil changes and new tires and eventually you're walking.
Upgraded an e bike with a LI ion battery last year. Not big enough for what I'm talking about but that one's super light so something several times heavier could still be quite luggable with a shoulder strap.
Yeah, and a lot of people want to refinance their variable rate mortgage at 3% fixed.
It's too late for that.
Sun Tzu says that the wise general wants to attack where the enemy is weak and avoid where the enemy is strong. Waiting until the layoffs to get protection against layoffs and not expecting to just get laid off is the epitome of attacking the enemy where it is strong, and not unionizing when the company is on a hiring spree is the epitome of not attacking the enemy when it is weak.
SJ_Zero @ SJ_Zero @lemmy.fbxl.net Posts 8Comments 170Joined 2 yr. ago
You can blame him for the stupidity of how he engaged in them, but a lot of people seem to think that if nothing else had happened there never would have been layoffs.
Big Tech got fat during the pandemic, it couldn't have kept on growing as people started leaving the house again.