Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Musk: Twitter will have 1 billion monthly users inside 18 months

Re: Track record..

Well, if he doesn't care about losing $44Bn, can he chuck a couple of million my way? That's literally pocket change.

One billion users?

That's one person in eight, globally.

I'm trying hard to think of anyone I know who is a regular user of Twitter, let alone one person in eight, and I live in a first-world supposedly affluent* country. I don't see anyone flocking** to use it, and I seriously doubt that people in the "Global South" are going to prioritise this over struggling to feed themselves, avoid conflict, and cope with climate change, so you can probably rule out a good four billion people there. So the claim here, is that in first-world countries, every fourth man, woman and child, will be actively using Musk's Twitter which is rapidly becoming an ever more toxic wasteland.

His Muskiness really is bananas, isn't he? Has he decided to do the thing he claimed the former owners were guilty of, and count bots as genuine users?

*mis-government aside

**natch

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Re: I, for one...

It's very much like "respect", it means different things to different people.

To right-minded people, it means something very much like tolerance and acceptance, and acknowledgement that others might not be the same as you, but still have the same rights.

To bullies and other kinds of arsehole, it's used as a demand, "respect me, respect my opinion, do what you're told, respect your parents, respect the Church, respect your betters, you have no respect for authority", etc.

That's the problem with language, words aren't precise.

Re: Twitter “poll”

Did I say Elon controlled the bots? My implication was that whoever does control them may have a vested interest in rigging opinion polls.

Re: twitters dead

My point was quite simple. Describing legitimate concern over climate change as "hysterics" is pretty fucking heavily biased.

Describing over-hyped and heavily biased hard-right rhetoric about immigration, such as that by our own home secretary using the word "invasion" as hysterical is objectively accurate.The language used is as important as the message it carries.

By simply using the word "hysterics" to describe concerns about climate change, you are betraying your own, pretty obvious, attitude towards the science. Trying to weasel out with "I never said that" arguments doesn't fool anyone.

Re: Please keep going!

Seize all the assets he has in their jurisdiction, and prevent him from doing business in the world's largest trading bloc, perhaps? And probably put out a warrant for him so that he can't ever visit any EU territory without getting arrested?

Re: twitters dead

I think you just proved my point about false equivalence, because climate change is a demonstrable fact, and the UK has always been a country of immigrants. One of these two things is a real threat to, if not the existence of the human race, at least our way of life, and the other is an irrelevance used to hype up hate from people who don't like to see people with other skin-tones or who speak the same language as them.

If you identify with people who espouse the second point of view, you're probably one of those English people who occasionally embarrasses themselves by loudly telling Welsh people to speak English, when in Wales.

I'm not arguing that the Grauniad's half-page banner abut climate change that pops up over articles isn't mildly annoying, but you can also press the little 'X' in the corner to make it goes away if it offends your sensibilities that much. If you're about to try to claim that climate change either is not real, or is not a big problem, or is a matter of opinion, then you are sorely lacking the skills to critically evaluate information.

Re: “ Machiavelli thought the voice of the people tends towards insanity.”

My apologies if my recall of Italian history of the period is a little incorrect. It turns out that whole lot were indeed Florentine, and not Venetian. In this case, the esteemed Mr Musk would probably have had an "accident" involving a sword blow or two to the head during mass, a la Giuliano de' Medici, or some-such misfortune, given his attitudes towards his courtiers.

Re: Translation.

Tina Turner's lesser well-known hit...

(sorry, couldn't help myself)

Re: And to think that 30 years ago...

I refer you to my comment on the reply above this one.

My post wants downvotes. In fact, it positively gets off on them. Phwoarr, more please nurse! etc. etc.

Re: And to think that 30 years ago...

Go right ahead, unlike my namesake, I don't have such a fragile ego that it hurts me.

Re: Twitter's old moderation policy

When you use the word "globalist", do you mean it in the sense of the opposite of insular-nationalist-protectionist (a la North Korea), or do you mean it in the anti-Semitic "Jews control the world" nutjob sense? Enquiring minds demand to know exactly which variety of idiot you are.

Re: Very dramatic indeed, oh my

I'm genuinely curious to know how you would go about using a "hashtag" to post anything other than that "hashtag" itself? It's literally just an indexer. Are you suggesting that Twitter was being used to host CP, or link to sites hosting it? Because that would obviously be a criminal matter, and I honestly don't believe the former owners would not have jumped on this hard. If Musk has chosen to use his now much diminished staff to focus on this specifically, it does raise a number of questions, such as, metaphorically speaking, "who's flying the plane?"

So, I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit.

Re: And so, Twitter died

If he wanted to do that, he could just liquidate the company. He owns it, he doesn't have to make it expensively and publicly fail.

The longer it goes on, the more he loses in operating costs, and moves like letting the hate-speechers back on just expose him to legal liability in multiple jurisdictions. That doesn't sound cost-effective to me.

Re: Autocracy

Exactly, and it can fall without the consequences you'd get when a government falls.

If you've made your livelihood on the back of tweeting, and have no back-up plan / alternative platform, then I'm finding it hard to have a great deal of sympathy. I have to do actual work for a living.

Re: Twitter “poll”

If you controlled an army of bots on Twitter, I'm sure you'd see no issue with how easily you can rig a poll either.

Re: twitters dead

If you want to equate established peer-reviewed climate science with hysterical rhetoric from racists, you go right ahead. "You do you" as the kids say. Don't get upset if others point out the false equivalence there though.

For what it's worth, one of those two publications is generally recognised as being much more reliable than the other, by any objective metric (for example, the number of corrections they are forced to publish, or whether they are regarded as an unreliable source by fact-checkers).

From an editorial stance, yes the Grauniad is a bit lefty-lefty, and some of the editorial is a bit unbalanced in that direction, but on the whole, the content is much more factually correct than that in the Heil.

If you can't establish this for yourself, then you need to go and take some classes on critical thinking.

Re: “ Machiavelli thought the voice of the people tends towards insanity.”

If Musk lived in the world that Machiavelli did, he'd be at the bottom of a canal by now.

Re: Translation.

What does race have to do with someone whose parents owned an apartheid emerald mine? No idea...

Re: And to think that 30 years ago...

Since I changed my handle, the systemic single downvote on every single post I make mysteriously stopped. Now, I'm not saying I found myself a personal troll, but I'm not going to mention his handle, or he'll twig...

Vox Populi?

Or vox troglodytae?

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Re: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Now, if only there was another novel, written in 1948 that had the idea of a dystopia with "view screens" that watched you back. Of course, that book was never written, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.

Think of it as a dry run for them "Metaverse"

A loss-leader, heavily promoted with advertising that offers nothing of any real use, and which nobody wants.

Anyone wanna buy a 3D TV? It has built-in HD-DVD and a handy compact flash card slot!

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

Wasn't the root of their problem that the failure mode of the reactor was to drop the moderator rods into the reactor, thus slowing down the fast neutrons enough to cause a runaway reaction? Exactly the same sort of fuck-up that happened with the "demon core" if I remember rightly. In this case, some smartarse plying with fire and using a pen to hold the moderator hemisphere above the core, and then accidentally dropping it and fatally irradiating himself in the split second it took him to pick it up again.

It's almost as if mid-century attitudes to safety around fissile materials were a bit lax. (The Chernobyl reactors were an old-fashioned design with no secondary containment or starters).

Re: spot price of electricity

I would expect that the effect, if this sort of thing becomes commonplace, would be to not only smooth out the power supply compared to demand and supply, but also to smooth out the variations in the spot price, especially if there are multiple operators competing with each other, and there's no cartel or monopoly pricing. That's probably going to bring the variation to well below 20% eventually. Early adopters will probably make a big profit if they get in fast enough though.

I also wonder where flow batteries fit in with this? How do their costs and efficiencies compare?

Japanese cubesat sends home pics from the far side of the Moon

Re: Bad Bento Box

Looks more like okonomiyaki to me.

Or possibly a very large takoyaki. Do we need to watch out for space octopuses on the Moon? Science demands to know!

JWST snaps first chemical profile of an exoplanet atmosphere

Re: Proof that Carbon emissions are good...

...I should add that stratospheric ozone is not man-made, and is produced by UV-C radiation splitting oxygen molecules (O2) in the upper atmosphere to form two oxygen radicals (O.), and then the oxygen radicals that are produced reacting with further molecular oxygen to produce ozone. If we stopped producing ground-level ozone tomorrow, this would have no impact whatsoever on the upper atmosphere, because mixing of atmospheric layers is prevented by the tropopause. It would, however, reduce smog, health, and environmental impacts. Which would be a good thing for everyone, except possibly those who would profit from producing ground-level ozone.

Re: Proof that Carbon emissions are good...

Ground-level ozone is toxic and causes photochemical smog. The ozone layer is in the stratosphere, where it has to be to block incoming ultraviolet light.

Ozone is also not produced by burning hydrocarbons, and ground-level sources actually tend to be caused by electrical emissions, as it takes quite a lot of energy to split oxygen to form (highly reactive) O3*.

Your comment displays not only the basic inability to seek out and read the wiki page about ozone (I've not read it either, but I can pretty much guarantee these facts are on there), but also demonstrates that your tin-foil hat is badly fitted and some of the stupid is leaking out.

*Hey mods, I know I changed my handle, but can I have my silver badge back, so I can use the <sub> tag again?

Re: exacting precision

Technically, the former (in infrared wavelengths at least) is Raman spectroscopy, and the latter is transmission spectrography. There's no reason both can't be used together. True, occlusion is the only real way to determine if there is a planet there, but once you've determined tha, the variations in the Raman spectrum of the star/planet system as the planet orbits its parent's star, although small, could theoretically provide a diagnostic spectrum, and do it over a longer timescale than the short period when the planet is between the star and us (the observer), which could be a very short window of opportunity if the orbit is eccentric and not nicely aligned with us, or has a long period.

If it's sensitive enough, and you can separate the useful information from the background noise (selectivity), Raman spectroscopy could be used to detect atmospheres on multiple orbiting planets, as they move in and out of the range of view (to see the reflected light, they would need to be behind, or perpendicular to the parent star compared to the observer). I don't know enough about the sensitivity and selectivity of the method to answer this myself, but I probably know people who do/can.

I'll spell it that way, when Americans learn to spell aluminium.

Locked out of Horizon Europe, UK commits half a billion to post-Brexit research

Re: "the UK remains open to association"

Oh, and if the "you lost get over it" argument had any weight, the "eurosceptics" would have fucked off 40 years ago.

It's nice to see that they have finally caused the Tory party to rot from the inside-out though, like a maggot-ridden apple. Maybe if John Major has had the balls to expel them from the party in the '90s, they might be back in power as a moderate and responsible centre-right party rather than a shambling mess with the lowest poll ratings they have had in history (even after their "new-leader bounce"). Thankfully, after the next election, they will be gone for a generation. Which, incidentally, is probably how long it will take the country to recover.

Re: "the UK remains open to association"

There are a number of reasons why it was far from "lost fairly", apart from the "sidesism" (we won, you lost mindset), because, as far as I can see, we all lost.

Let's start with the fact that the referendum was expliclty non-binding, and to be legally binding would have had to be based on a supermajority, then we can talk about the rule-breaking from Vote Leave that would have been a criminal matter if the referendum had been a binding one, such as over-spending, opaque funding, use of campaigning proxies, and so on. Dodgy Russian money is only one part of this, but it certainly was a part, as was the whole Cambridge Analytica targeted propaganda stuff.

All of this is moot, of course because our elected representatives chose to take us out of the EU, and that was done legally (eventually). The real lie here was that this was done because of the referendum, and that mandated it, because it did not. David Cameron saying "we will respect the result of the referendum" after it had already been agreed explicitly that it didn't bind anyone to any action; even himself, as it turns out, after he metaphorically turned round and ran off the day after the vote. Plenty of other lies followed, such as the one that we had voted to leave the CU/CM (leave campaigners had actually claimed that this was absolutely not on the cards), that we had to invoke Article 50 right away, before deciding what form of "brexit" we actually wanted, and so on.

The whole thing was a total clusterfuck by incompetent populists; you may have noticed how the country has basically gone to shit since 2016, even moreso than under the ideological Tory austerity of the previous years, which itself provided motivation for people to vote to leave the EU as a way out, because they had been sold the lie that Tory austerity was the fault of the EU and not of our own government.

Re: "the UK remains open to association"

You couldn't elect a government on such a flimsy majority

Take a quick look at what portion of the vote the Tories got at the last election (I think it as about 42% or so, certainly not a majority), and you'll see that we never elect a government on a flimsy majority. It's a minority, but the horrible FPTP system turns this into a massive majority of seats in the HoC, which in turn means a hideously unrepresentative government which can claim a false mandate for all sorts of shenanigans. This is the main argument or a change to a form of PR to elect our representatives, so they are, you know, representative.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Tonight's Headline

Just chuck a rock in any direction in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea...

Re: Tonight's Headline

Cases brought forward with no evidence other than that from what is known as a "hostile witness" tend to fall apart pretty quickly, so whilst in theory the CPS can prosecute a case that they may think is in the public interest, if the only witness they have doesn't want to give evidence, they can clam up in court, or just not turn up at all. This can in turn result in them being summonsed, but this can do nothing about them being mysteriously not at home when the police go to collect them, and whilst it is a civic and legal duty to go to court to give evidence, it is very rarely in the public interest to prosecute people for not doing so, especially within a justice system that has been pared to the bone by systemic underinvestment, austerity and decade-long pay freezes at a time of record inflation.

Re: Tonight's Headline

Whilst the Grauniad has made a fair few hilarious errors in its history, the narrative that it was somehow more prone to typos than any other publication was largely put about by the incumbents on Fleet Street, who didn't like the upstart over which they had little influence, and who were trying to draw an inference that because they had lots of money to employ proofreaders, that somehow made their journalism more trustworthy. That's fairly rich coming from the likes of the Daily Mail, which was pretty much founded as a rich-man's outlet for telling lies.

Re: Tonight's Headline

There was I, thinking that "proofreading" was the act of reading proofs, a "proof reading" would imply some sort of act where everyone sits in a circle and reads proofs to each other, which sounds like the sort of thing any actual proofreaders would run a mile to avoid.

As it happens, no, I don't work for the BBC, yes I do know people who do (and who do work on some of its flagship nature documentaries), and yes, I have done plenty of work in the past where part of my job involved all parts of the print process from laying out to proofreading. It’s shitty, poorly paid, and highly skilled work, and, incidentally, requires a firm grasp of the English language.

Nobody reading proofs would ever utter a sentence such as "let's do some proof readings," except possibly ironically, in the voice of an animated advertising meerkat, because it's just not normal syntax.

In 3 months time, it'll be back down to 2005 levels.

Re: Cue up music from Talking Heads and Brian Eno...

Thanks for that, Johnny Joke-explainer. I'm pretty sure that's who the poster to whom you were replying to was insinuating...

That's because Zuck spaffed all his money into shit VR that nobody wants.

Re: Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Men and a Man. Amen.

amfM shows more signs of intelligence than Musk to be honest, and I'm 99% certain that most of "his" posts are generated by a chatbot.

Re: In other news

I didn't even need to follow that link to know it's the Buffy swearing keyboard. That particular cultural reference dates not only that, but also me...

Re: In other news

Quick, time for everyone to head back to b3ta.com, the original well-spring of tasty internet memes...

Re: Tonight's Headline

It seems most outlets don't bother with proof readingers these days.

What a choice. Three months' pay, for no effort (and a fairly high chance that you'll be able to find another similarly paying job well within that timescale), or, over the next three months, earn the same amount by doing six months' worth of work for an arsehole megalomaniac, if the company you work for doesn't go bankrupt in that time, with your wages left unpaid.

A bit of an obvious choice, no? The only ones who are left aren't exactly going to be the "hardcore".

Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better

Are you part of the same club as Dave Gibberish? The "call everyone a fascist whilst not knowing what it means" club?

Let's face it : the Republicans are no longer a political party, they're a religion.

The view from outside that mire, is that US politics and religion are so intertwined that they are effectively inseparable. Which is heavily ironic, given the nominal separation of church and state in the US. You can count the successful US politicians who haven't professed belief in some supernatural entity or another on the fingers of one foot.

FTX collapse prompts other cryptocurrency firms to suspend withdrawals

Re: Has anyone seen my tulip bulbs? ASIDE

To be fair, all alliums, which include onions, garlic, shallots and leeks, contain quite a lot of sulphur*-containing compounds which make for the same digestive effects. Incidentally, ornamental alliums are one of the few flowering bulbs which are edible, although it's kind of missing the point of them.

*I refuse to use the IUPAC spelling, deal with it.

Re: Consenting adults. (Consenting by default?).

If you put your entire pension into "high risk" units such as crypto investments, then you are asking for a fall. Most contributory pensions allow you to pick the funds you put your savings into, and if you're not stupid, you will spread them out over "safe" investments that aren't expected to move much, standard ones which might make or lose a bit, and one or two risky ones, if you're young (or desperate) enough to afford that risk.

Fund managers who just dump the entire investment pot into one high-risk investment are almost criminally stupid.

Re: Has anyone seen my tulip bulbs? ASIDE

Yeah, don't eat tulips, or pretty much any bulb that isn't a species of onion or garlic*. Daffodils are similarly toxic, as are hyacinths and those big attractive amaryllis bulbs you see in the shops around this time of year

*edit - includes leeks and shallots