Posts by Flocke Kroes 4551 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007
Good, keep the liberal left laughing.
Do you remember 2015 when the lefties were laughing at Trump and his supporters non-stop and the raving loony right were begging us to take him seriously? I admit that joke ended with the election results. This joke has been running continuously since April 2014 and shows no sign of slowing down.
We knew he wasn't going to step aside when he started the poll. The only question was what stupid excuse he was going to tweet when the result became clear.
Do not picture us frustrated or angry. Instead we are laughing at the antics of a fool.
[Apologies to those who used to get something of value from Twitter and to those trapped by an H-1B visa.]
Expertise and resourcefulness are not enough to earn a living. Capital is also required. Berkshire Hathaway made money by lending capital in return for interest. If you object to usury please demonstrate: put your money where your mouth is - or better still, your pension fund in my wallet. I will pay you back the sum lent without interest when I am dead.
While we are at it the whole promise of crypto currencies is that you will get back more than you spend. Much more. Far more than you could get from other investments. Really, would tech bros lie to you?
One of my grandfathers did not exercise and spent the tail end of his life getting out of breath when trying to stand up. The other kept reasonably fit and active until he died at a similar age. He would have lasted considerably longer if he had applied the green cross code more consistently. Because of their examples I intend to be fit and healthy for the whole of my life or die in the attempt.
Here is how ChatGPT "wins" at chess.
With a normal business "breaking even" includes paying the bills. Twitter can get away with not paying many bills for a while but to come close to alternative break even Twitter would have to not pay the interest on its debts. Musk hasn't tried that yet. It would be a proper test of all the new lawyers he is hiring - if he pays them.
"Clean cut" is not the requirement for pushing lies. Mr Slob and Ms Scruffy can do it too, with the right preparation. The first step is to present a popular world view. People with that world view will select the character as a trusted source because he/she "tells it how it is". Once trusted, the character can transition to raving loony level Qonspiracy theories without losing trust.
The defence requires more effort than many are willing to take: any time you read/hear a story that you are happy to believe apply critical thinking. How do they know? Can you check directly? Consider the consequences and check for those consequences. Does the story contradict itself? What happens when you try to do internet searches on the topic when Google does not know who you are and what prejudices you hold? Although it is good practice to apply critical thinking to any report, humans have a bad habit of not thinking at all when the story confirms their own biases.
Musk has turned Twitter around. It was climbing - making a small profit. Musk came along and switched to a full powered powered dive by adding $13B of debt - far more than enough to wipe out any profits with interest payments. He drove away more than half of Twitter's existing revenue stream - deliberately so Twitter would not be beholden to advertisers and the whims of their customers. To some extent he brought in new advertisers - the scammers that the former staff would rejected for being scams. His attempts to bring in new revenue streams backfired in ways that were pointed out to him before implementation started: the verified blue check mark for anyone who pays a small fee even if they are clearly not the owner of the trade name they are maligning.
Next up: firing most of the employees, not paying redundancy and offering a potential promise (Funding secured!) to pay some of what he owes if former employees sign a giant gag order (Free Speech!). Add in not paying rent, hosting fees and any bills. You may find this an outstandingly shrewd business move but it brings in scorn from anyone who has been stiffed by non-payment of an invoice and drives away new and existing suppliers. Finally (well there is actually far more) Musk has been working hard at turning Twitter into the new Gab/Parler/Truth. Those platforms have microscopic user bases for a reason.
I am impressed by the skill of the former Twitter staff that the platform has survived this long despite Musk's best efforts. The direction Musk was taking Twitter was obvious months ago and he has worked hard to earn the consequences.
Hong-Kong import is likely a bad example too: unless you are careful you will get a region free pirate copy. Back when I worked there one clue was a much lower price and the film was thoroughly compressed to fit on a CD.
If you do need multi-region, use a USB DVD player and VLC. VLC cracks the decryption without setting the region code on the player. It does like to have a region code to select the preferred language audio and subtitle tracks but it never tells the drive.
The bottom end of X86 is fast enough for all but a small minority. Mid-range ARMs are more than fast enough for most people's use of a desktop and are fine for software development too. There is plenty of software available for common tasks. The mass market are staying with X86 for their legacy software and their phones for everything else. That is the barrier to sales of an ARM desktop (and people being able to earn a living from selling binaries compiled for one.)
I have been programming ARM for a very long time. I have actually used a couple of Apple computers. One had a 6502 CPU and the other a 68008. I have never done any ARM targeted development on an Apple computer. It used to be test and debug on x86 then use a cross compiler. Later ARMs became fast enough to host a compiler directly so I could use x86 as a terminal and ssh into the ARM system. Lack of an ARM CPU on the host system was not a barrier before Apple eventually switched to ARM. When that happened it was a complete non-event for me programming ARM.
The first barrier to ARM growing up was most people wanted to run legacy DOS/Windows binaries. Although that is still a significant requirement for some people a larger market opened up: people wanted to run software for which they had the source code. With the source code they could compile it for whatever architecture was most cost effective. The next barrier was boot code: ARM has a long history of requiring a boot loader created specially for every micro-controller and the board it is soldered onto. To some extent it is now possible to have a BIOS that will work with more than one specific variant of ARM chip and so have an ARM mother board that could in theory be upgraded by replacing the CPU.
The thing getting to x86 now is the thing that made x86 dominant decades ago: price. Intel used to be the cheap and nasty CPU. There were much better architectures around decades ago, but you paid for that clean efficient design because it performed so much better than Intel. As a result, Intel got used whenever price mattered. Intel got the big (cheap) market. Their R&D costs got divided by a much bigger market so they had the budget to improve. The others then had their R&D costs divided by a shrinking market and their designs stagnated.
Intel became an effective monopoly and priced to match. They created a vicious competitor for their own low-end chips: themselves. Any cheap CPU sold took away an opportunity to sell a high margin CPU. Any factory time spend making cheap CPUs was factory time not spent on making high margin CPUs. This left the bottom end of the market to others. It has taken decades, but the high volume of cheap ARM CPUs funded development of slightly better ARM CPUs. This repeated until ARMs became fast enough for more and more demanding tasks.
The performance/£ and performance per Watt gained such an advantage over Intel that Intel's biggest customers decided to solve ARM's problems for themselves. Apple have solved ARM's problems for Apple. Google, AWS and some others took a more community based approach. Apple is happy to use BSD licensed software but much prefer to create their own than share their work as would be required if using GPL software. The others can work with or around GPL: If the software never leaves their servers they haven't distributed it so they can keep improvements to the source code to themselves.
I would say that ARM getting to servers has been more to do with everyone but Apple deciding to work to some extent with each other.
His name is Ken Paxton. Last year I would have expected him to be busy avoiding the consequences of being indicted for securities fraud. These days, he is on the run to escape being served a subpoena.
If he does get indicted he can just run for the office of Attorney General. He will really need to step up the conspiracy theory tweets to win that race.
A generous value for a share is about ten times the annual dividends. So far Tesla has paid a total of $0/share in dividends. It can be sensible to speculate on what dividends might be paid in future. Based on how many cars and power installations Tesla could possible sell and at what margin, Tesla shares were (and still are) massively over valued. The obvious response to the situation is to sell shares you do not have (short selling) in the belief that the price will fall to a more reasonable value before you have to buy and transfer to the original purchaser. Tesla was seriously shorted before the tweet - to the point where Tesla would have got a poor deal issuing new shares to fund expansion. The tweet caused some investors to buy, raise the share price and hurt short sellers. Tesla issued new shares at the high price to fund growth, which combined with the evidence that funding to go private was fiction caused the price to fall again, hurting the recent investors.
CEOs of publicly traded are not supposed to tell blatant lies about their companies to make a quick billion bucks. That behaviour is reserved for private companies - which are less accessible to amateur investors (and SPACs which by-pass the protections intended for amateurs). Musk got a surprisingly mild scolding from the SEC as it is supposed to be the job to ensure amateurs can have some confidence in publicly traded companies and that your pension fund is not completely trashed by fraud.
On 2020-08-31 the stock split 5 for 1 and 2022-08-25 it split again 3 for 1. Back then, the share price would have been say $345 and if you kept one of those old shares it would have split into 15 modern shares by now. If you look up the price of what one modern share would have been worth back then you get the $23 you see in the article. At the time, $420 was a very believable figure for what would be needed to take Tesla private.
I remember very clearly when the Tweet was reported. Back then Musk had a good reputation, damaged only by his recent treatment of Vernon Unsworth. There was talk about Tesla's purchase of SolarCity in 2016 being fraudulent but Musk was found not guilty. For the first few days I was expecting for Musk to reveal how the funding was secured. After about a week I was wondering why the fuck he had not shown any evidence that funding had been discussed with anyone. Weeks passed and still no work from Musk about where this fictitious funding was coming from. Musk got fined by the SEC and I hoped it was over but he started trash talking the SEC. The reason he has investors at all is because the SEC place some limits on the lies CEOs are allow to tell investors. Musk's "short-seller enrichment commission" tweets convinced me that he intended to lie again and needed the next lie to be believed to maintain the ridiculously high share price.
From the start there was speculation the Saudis were the source of the funding. Musk only started to mention them in public after the judge had ruled "funding secured" was a lie - well after the Saudis had invested $1B in Twitter. The covidiocy did not start until early 2020, at which point I thought my expectation of Musk had hit rock bottom but he proved me wrong in April 2022 with the "woke mind virus".
This latest ruling combined with the current share price has convinced me that Tesla has the same stability as bitcoin.
I read it and was thoroughly shocked. I couldn't believe it. For a moment it looked like Tesla has responded to a journalist's enquiry but by the second paragraph all became clear - the admission was in a 10-K filing. Still, I did learn something unexpected from this story: Tesla has a press mailbox.
The big change they are working on is a new name so it does not identify itself as a criminal activity.
He used to be "Nambawan pikinini bilong Misis Kwin" in Papua New Guinea. I have not found an update for that. I hope "helper of cows" is still valid.
The way things are going, Twitter will be owned by its creditors. I doubt Musk can run up over $13B of new debt before the bankruptcy so the majority creditor will be the banks that lent Twitter $13B to buy out its old shareholders. The banks will effectively be buying most of what is left of Twitter for $13B. Before Musk took charge that could have been a good deal.
His genius was mainly bringing in investment, hiring good people and taking credit for their work. That worked fine when he and his workforce both wanted electric vehicles / to colonise Mars. As long as he brought the money others would let him take credit for their work.
For Twitter, Musk brought $13B of debt then drove away any competent employee not trapped with an H-1B visa. For some reason this new strategy was not as effective as the old one.
Musk started buying Twitter shares in early 2022. At that time he thought he was going to make Twitter better. Right up until shortly after signing the merger agreement Musk thought he could run Twitter and make a profit on the deal. Musk did not know he was going to bankrupt Twitter until the day he tried to squirm his way out of the deal.
It was clear to anyone who looked at the finance that Twitter was doomed. It was marginally profitable before Musk. Adding $13B of debt was more than sufficient to sink it. Putting someone with poor social skills in charge of a social media company adds a redundant path to bankruptcy.
By the way, the emerald mine was in Zaire - not South Africa.
The early stages of a planned bankruptcy involve running up as much debt as possible. In the UK, if it counts as trading while insolvent then Musk would be personally liable. Imminent bankruptcy can be spotted when workers do not receive paychecks. As far as I know, we are not there yet, but we are at the point where ex-employees are being promised1 what they are owed in return for signing a promise never to say2 anything bad about Musk for the rest of their lives. According to internet lawyers3 Musk treats twitter as his personal property so creditors will be able to get their money back from Musk instead of trying to squeeze blood out of the bankrupt corpse of Twitter
1) Jam tomorrow!
2) Free speech!
3) Still marginally more credible than Musk!
Perhaps these accusations of fraud were careless, not deliberate.
Sounds like databases need a field explicitly labelled: "Offensive notes".
Many years ago, doctors used secret acronyms for things that it would be awkward to explain to patients. CAAC was "Crazy as a coot".
Several dictionaries and acronym finders seem to think CGSM is real. I thought it was fiction. Anyone know for sure?
Some of the martian's comments are reasonably coherent and get replies from people who think they are communicating with a human. I am not sure if that is because a human sometimes uses the account, a human sometimes picks the best of several possible comments or if sometimes the random number sequence hits the right nodes of the travesty generator.
Decades ago a £1 note could be exchanged for an amount of gold equal in value to 1 pound (mass) of silver. There was a promise to that effect written on the note. For a long time the promise on a £10 not has been that someone promises to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds (presumably GBP). There is a signature purportedly of the chief cashier of the bank of England but it is not particularly associated with the promise. There is no mention of gold, silver or any exchange rate between GBP and precious metals.
The value of a promissory note for GBP is that many shops are willing to trade them for real goods and that many businesses will trade services for them. What you can get for £1 goes mostly down (with the occasional temporary up) over time. The Bank of England issues promises for GBP slightly faster than they receive them in the form of taxes. There is some hope that the BoE will not suddenly issue a huge quantity of extra promises very often which gives GBP some stability.
The value of bitcoins goes up when a new bunch of fools can be convinced to buy and keep them for a while. It goes down when a large number of those fools try to cash out at the same time. To some extent this happens with news reports and endorsements from famous actors, sportsmen and flamboyant businessmen. If you have more control over these events than other traders then it is possible to profit from bitcoin at the expanse of people who believe the hype.
The catch is that criminals will think twice before signing cryptocurrency over to Binance because Binance might decide not to credit their account with fiat currency in return. It is the reverse of an FTX which took fiat currency and did not transfer any 'real' cryptocurrency to the wallets of the creditors.
Workers on teams handling the social network's misinformation policy [...] were also eliminated
I skipped "policy" on the first pass and wondered why those jobs had gone. With a more literal interpretation - really eliminating people rather than the jobs they do - it made more sense as Elon expects such work to be done for free by volunteers and wouldn't want paid workers setting a bad example. Putting the "policy" back where it belongs dulls the sentence back to 'as expected' for what Musk intends Twitter to do: misinformation policy = amplify.
Because of the US military funding.
The US military does not want to end up in the situation again where their choices are between a United Launch Alliance Atlas rocket using Russian engines and a United Launch Alliance Delta IV with a launch cost of $450M. They fund the production of cube sats from small manufacturers and universities and pays for their launch with start-up rocket companies. As well as getting new launch vehicles off the ground it creates experience of satellite building that might one day lead to competitively priced satellites instead of the astronomical prices they have to pay now.
Suits are tailored to astronauts while on the ground. An off-the-peg suit is certainly better than hoping the capsule does not spring a leak or catch fire on the way home (one way to put out a fire is to dump the atmosphere). The suits plug into the capsule's life support systems. If there are only four sockets ...
Dragons hit the sea with a considerable bump. You might not need a flight suit but you will need a comfy chair your size. Dragon was originally intended to carry seven crew. NASA decided to go with a crew of 4 and more cargo. It is possible the hard points for mounting three more chairs are still there but the landing system is now only rated for 4 crew. All 7 would would land hard and only the truly desperate would use an improvised seat.
Sending a crew dragon with only one passenger up to bring the other three back could be done with made to measure suits and chairs but they would not get the extensive testing for a good fit. Better than a Soyuz with no cooling but not as good as a new Soyuz with the existing flight suits.
Although it is possible to return to Earth without a flight suit it has not been tried since Soyuz 11. There are some EMU suits on the ISS but those are good for 8 hours - only useful if bad things happen towards the end of the return journey. Those suits are getting old and require considerable bravery to use even within a short spacewalking distance of the inside of a space station.
Soyuz crews come with Sokol (Falcon :-) suits and you could wear one inside a Dragon capsule. When there has cabin pressure they recirculate air with the cabin. If the cabin depressurises then you have a two hour supply of bottled oxygen. Trying to extend that to six hours by killing the the other two crew members won't work because the oxygen supply is not sufficient to prevent a fatal heat build up.
I could not find much information about the Starliner flight suits. Presumably they connect to Starliner's CO2 scrubbers, oxygen supply, electrical power and LAN like a Dragon suit and would keep you alive all the way back to Earth. In theory the connectors could have been made compatible with each other but if that had been made a requirement then NASA would still be buying Soyuz seats to the ISS.
I did a quick look at older flight suits to see if both sides could have been required to use an existing standard. The ACES from the shuttle looks about as useful as a Sokol. The suits intended for the Orion capsule might be ready by Q2 2025. SpaceX has offered their own suits for use on Orion. Despite Elon's current popularity the idea sounds good to me. It would be nice if the first crewed Orion had a life support system that had actually been tested in space and it would be handy to use the same suits on Orion, Starship and Dragon. Compatibility with Starliner would be a bonus but I have not yet seen evidence stat Starliner will fly after they run out of Atlases.
The biggest advantage is that an aeroplane carrying a rocket can take off in weather that would keep a rocket from launching from a fixed launch pad. The plane can take the rocket to somewhere with nice weather for a launch. Launching from the ideal latitude for the destination lets you build a satellite heavy enough to use the full performance of the rocket.
On the other hand, if the rocket is seriously overpowered for the payload then it can launch from a non-ideal latitude and you can select* a fixed launch site with mostly good weather.
* In real life launch sites are built on nature reserves: no people around to complain about the noise and the rockets keep property developers away from the wild life.
Some electronics manufacturers would complete recent past orders at the new price when they dropped their prices. Some retailers would pass the savings on to recent customers. This was advertised as promise to convince people to buy now rather than wait for the inevitable lower prices.
I did not see a promise from Tesla in advance and I would not expect Tesla buyers to get much sympathy from the man who recently won the record for the largest personal fortune loss ($182B-$200B depending on who you ask).
Musk had a clear idea of where he wanted to go since before he was kicked out of Paypal. He wants to combine an online bank with a social media site with advert/purchase buttons. The idea is the social media brings purchasers who click on things. The clicks cause payments from the purchaser's Bank of Twitter account to the vendor and the vendor sends goods to the purchaser. Twitter gets a commission for the sale. As ideas go it has potential. If Twitter only gets paid for sales it is in their best interest to place ads only if they can lead to a sale rather than simply to drain the vendor's advertising budget.
The tricky bit is that this is never going to work with the staff he has left. It might have worked if he had started small, got the software working then bought Twitter for the user base. Starting with $1B/year interest payments will sink the project no matter what.
My personal theory is that Twitter is run by the second rank: a bunch of lawyers seeking to convert Musk's Tesla holdings into legal defence fees.
Honestly Twitter was never a money making venture, was it?
If you had made the slightest effort to find out you would have found Twitter made profits in 2018 and 2019. 2020 was a significant loss but 2021 was close to break even. A one-off fine of $750M ate that year's profits and a little more. So beyond all possible doubt you are either making stuff up without checking of being deliberately dishonest.
I have worked for a company not paying its bills before and got burned. Another employer started on a similar path so I got out fast. Colleagues who waited got burned. The time to leave Twitter was last year. This is not some opinion I pulled out of my backside. It is supported by evidence: Musk promised three months severance pay. If you believed that then perhaps you believe things like Full Self Driving will be ready real soon now or a P/E ratio of 35 is a good investment (IF performance remained constant it would take 35 years to recover just the purchase price of Tesla shares). At least it has dropped down from over 1000 at the start of 2021. Poor execution at Tesla is responsible for some of that drop but much of the market cap comes from Musk's name. Since signing the Twitter purchase agreement Musk has been going full hardcore at destroying the value of his name. He has already gone way beyond Gerald Ratner and shows no signs of slowing down.
Tesla are not the only ones working on automated driving. The others saw the problem and limited the technology they sold so that humans still have something to do that can keep them alert. Behind the scenes they are working on systems that do not require human supervision. For some reason, Tesla think is is fun to sell temporarily license software with a misleading name and sort of promise that it will be working real soon now.
The quick answer is 0kg.
The Earth spins inside a gravitational field made uneven by the Moon. This causes tidal bulges on Earth that rotate around the planet. Friction from the moving bulges heats the Earth. The energy for that heat comes from the Earth's spin, increasing the length of a day. Conservation of angular momentum requires something else to rotate more: that would be the Moon getting pushed into a higher orbit.
Over long time periods days get an average of 12µs longer per year and the Earth->Moon distance increases by an average of 22mm. Eventually one day will be one Moonth long - 47 current days.
Given the historical speed of Artemis progress Bill is right that they have to increase the pace or the Moon will get too far away for an SLS launch with reduced help from the Earth's spin. Clearly SLS and its predecessors were designed when the Moon was nearer and the Earth span faster. That explains why SLS can only get Orion to NRHO instead of all the way to Low Lunar Orbit.
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