Posts by MachDiamond

Twitter employees sue over lack of 60-day layoff notice

"No further income stream as advertisers drop out"

The biggest income stream for Social Media companies is often the sale of user information with ad revenue coming in second and everything else chasing those two from further back.

"Does WARN require payment of total comp or just wages?"

It will vary state by state, but most of the time it is total compensation. Many Dot Coms paid a very nominal salary and made the jobs more attractive through stock awards and other things such as education stipends, heath insurance and matching retirement funds. I have a suspicion that they don't have to keep providing coffee and snacks nor toilet paper and bottled water.

"While staff costs are usually the largest expense on a company's accounts,"

Usually is the key word. Usually companies look for premises at a good price. Dot Com companies look for a location with the most fashionable postal code/zip code. The staff will become very expensive in a city such as San Francisco since there would be no way to staff the company if people aren't paid enough to be able to live in the area. If the company were to have a small office in the city and allow staff to work from remote work sites, which could be their home or a small inexpensive office someplace with good cost of living figures, that could save tons of money but we have all heard about how much Elon doesn't like that sort of thing. He wants everybody in one room where he can see them all beavering away since he has no methods to evaluate them any other way.

Elon is saying the company loses $4mn/day. With only 7,500 people on the payroll, it doesn't seem like it was wages for the rank and file driving their losses.

Re: Idiot dot com'ers..someone not in the Bay Area I'd guess..

"This used to be called the "can do" attitude found in the USA, and AC is right. It is something we haven't had in the UK for about 50 years now. Some people might attribute it our lack of "vim" to "health and safety"."

There are plenty of example of Brits with a can do attitude, but not as many larger firms. Those large entities have curled up in a fear of failure and government that wants to extract fines. The whole "Health and Safety" pogram has devolved into the stupidest requirements that I've ever seen. It's nearly to a point where if there is even a rumor that work might be happening within a 5 mile radius, everybody must don a hard hat, boots and Hi-Vis vest. Even a surveying team working in the middle of a field will have on the full kit. Bonkers.

" I think he will have to lay off a lot more than 50% of Twitter's employees eventually."

When the cost of the office space an employee occupies exceeds their salary, you have a problem.

Cost cutting to bring everybody back

Just getting out of the leases for SF and NYC offices would likely save enough money to bring more of the employees back. It's an internet based company. They can be anywhere in the world that has good internet access. By not being in some of the highest cost of living areas of the world, Twitter could pay employees less while those employees would wind up with more money left in their pocket at the end of each month.

The lawsuits might wind up being moot, but they might also be necessary if Elon doesn't formalize his promises to pay people for the 60 days and continue another other benefits that were delivered at the time the employee was laid off (health insurance, Retirement fund contributions, professional memberships, educational stipends/contributions). There shouldn't be an issue with locking people out and paying them their salary in lieu of notice. It gives those people time to get the heck out of SF and other big cities where annual housing costs could feed, provide fresh water and clothe a whole village in Africa for a year.

Re: Connect the dots...

"Musk announced the intention to buy Twitter in April. Seems like that is a 6-month notice right there!"

Yeah, well, the lettuce didn't even have time to wilt between when Elon signed the contract and when he started trying to weasel out of the deal. I expect that plenty of people were betting it wouldn't happen even with wet signatures on a contract. The stock market certainly didn't believe it would be concluded up until it became obvious that a court was very likely going to force Elon to pony up and abide by what he agreed to do. Whenever there is a firm offer for the stock in a company to buy that company out, the market price of the stock goes up to within a few percent of that offer price.

Vonage to pay $100m for making it nearly impossible to cancel internet phone services

Never Autopay

Autopay has been sold to people as a convenience feature so they aren't wasting their time each month paying bills. Waste the time. Spend lots of time on the bills. A big reason is it keeps you connected to the things you are paying for and gives you a chance to re-evaluate whether you want to keep paying for them. If you have to look at your mortgage payment each month, you might spot that you could save a bunch of money by refinancing when interest rates drop to lower than what you currently pay.

If the vendor doesn't have your permission to automatically charge you bank account or credit card each month (or 2 weeks, quarterly, whenever), they are in violation of some banking acts if they do. I still use pre-paid cards for some bills. There's no way to charge those accounts when they run dry so that puts a certain amount of finality to a company charging for something you'd like to cancel. I can pay some bills such as utilities at the corner shop and since I'm there a few times a week, it's easy to do. It's handy when I've been paid cash for some jobs and don't want to deposit the money in the bank but still need to keep the leccy on.

"My sister joined a gym in Toronto and was tricked into signing up for a "lifetime membership" "

Tricked? Usually not. They spell out all of the terms and conditions in tiny little type on a big piece of paper that the vast majority of people don't read while hunting down the place to tick the "I agree" box and where they sign. If you don't bother to read contracts in their entirety every time before signing, you might not be able to get out of it by calling the credit card company to forbid the charges. Gyms will usually let you sign up for a one week free or minimally priced trial and have you sign a very straight forward release of liability so they don't get blamed if you hurt yourself. In the mean time, you can take the contract home and read it in your own time.

I took a class on contract law that was focused (pun) on the sorts of contracts that photographers might be presented with. The first advice was to never sign the client's contract and if you might, know what all of the warning signs are. Things like indemnity and warranties about the photos and delivery times. I looked at one that required images made of motels to be submitted within 8 hours of completion to the head office for processing where they'll decide if the images will be accepted and the photographer paid for the job. I ran away from that one. If I do a job, I get paid regardless if they can or will use the images. If they don't like my work, they can always not book me in future. The trick is to be able to spot these sorts of clauses and understand they are there for a reason. If they tell you it's just a formality, see if they'll accept you striking those terms out since they "are never enforced". Good luck with that.

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

I'm sorry

Please tell me the argument again for one consolidated government entity handling an entire country's health care being a good thing.

This is like NASA outsourcing data storage when the bulk of what they do is to collect and analyze data. If you can't do your primary job in-house, something is very wrong.

Why shouldn't NHS be able to handle their own data analysis? It's a massive entity. For them to hire a few people to set up the sorts of information they need to be the most efficient they can has to be much cheaper than paying some outside company to do if for a major profit. What's next, a company in another country hired to asses and collect taxes?

You'd think the UK is trying to one down the US. Just like the stories where some functionary downloads a whole load of PII to their laptop which then gets stolen from their car when they make a stop at their church on the way home for something. It's almost always the person stopping off at church when the laptop gets removed from the seat of the car where it was sitting in plain view. I guess those sorts of faux pas are the only way that information can plausibly show up at different government agencies that shouldn't have access to it.

Westinghouse sale signals arrival of a new nuclear age

I suppose

This will free up more resources within Westinghouse to concentrate exclusively on their business of licensing the Westinghouse name and logo to Chinese companies so they can slap it on even more sub-par devices for export.

It's good to focus on what a company does best.

UK facing electricity supply woes after nuclear power stations shut, MPs told

Re: Grid scale storage

"however it gives you an idea what you need to match renewable output to demand. "

If you stay with the status quo. Renewable energy can be a good way forward with EV's. If spot prices are transmitted down the lines or over the air, EV's that are plugged in can charge when supply drives the price down and not charge when demand is peaking. Given the range of most new EV's, they can make a great match to absorbing the output of a variable input such as wind and set to not charge when supply is constricted and therefore, the spot pricing is higher. Somebody that commutes during the week might be able to go from M-F without needing to charge if they start the week full so they can wait until there is a rate drop due to excessive supply. The power company is in a better position as they have a ready supply of load that will buy that power instead of needing to signal turbines to shut down to keep the grid balanced.

"Take the cost of a UPS capable of supplying 1 kilowatt for 1 hour, multiply by a thousand to get to megawatts, then multiply again to get to a gigawatt"

Ehhhhh, it scales much better than that example.

I'd be happier to see the EV charging standards be updated for Vehicle to Grid in a more formal way. We will also need more places to plug EV's in while they aren't being used. Not high power, just 3kW or so. People can get paid to sell a certain amount of their car's charge when needed at a price they find acceptable and the car can recharge at night when rates are typically very low. Somebody in the right area with a good margin on buy vs. sell might not pay for the leccy they use in their car that often. This leads to a far more distributed source of backup power and utilities aren't buying and installing massive and very expensive battery farms.

I just got a screaming deal on about 2kWh of 18650 battery cells, a charger and 48v BMS from somebody giving up on a project and needing to shift a bunch of stuff they have prior to a long distance move. My plan is to power a small chest freezer in the garage with solar backed up with a battery, backed up with the grid if all else goes pear shaped. Longer term I'm hoping to power most of my workshop that way. There is little point to working up any home system where I am that will feed the grid as the government is thinking about regulations that make it not too cost effective. The permits and permissions are a major PIA too.

Re: Hmmm.

"An awful lot was due to Labour deciding that nuclear power = bad"

It's not just one party, it's every politician and every person that never bothers to learn anything about science in an age where there is YouTube, iTunesU and all sorts of shows from highly educated experts and any number of topics related to energy.

Re: "Nuclear waste is safe and not a problem if handled correctly"

"Sweden and Finland have already solved this issue by encasing the waste in bentonite clay and large copper casks followed by deep burial (0.5km) in stable and suitable geological formations.

"

The super-deluxe better solution is to work on ways to turn the waste stream into the input of another process. Burying the copper is not a great thing. We need all of that metal as we can get. The mass of copper needed per person is growing as the standard of living rises in traditionally poor areas and humans will insist on replicating faster and faster as time goes by.

Re: "that dealing with long term waste issues remains effectively unresolved, "

"Strange that given the answers are obvious that no one seems willing/able to put them into practice."

With the right level of cynicism, it's easy to see why it doesn't happen. We keep electing attorneys to political office and that overwhelming number of attorneys have zero background in science. If the problem can't be defined in one paragraph that can be emailed to them, they are never going to understand what you try to tell them or will be too disinterested on a TL:DR basis. Where it gets even more frustrating is it isn't the politician that's reading anything, it's their staff who then decide what to pass on or will create a summary if it's too long. Now you have a technoilliterate intern summarizing a highly technical explanation of something scientific to somebody that would reach for a law dictionary to find out what Ohm's Law is.

Just because something is not simple doesn't mean it's not very useful. Nuclear power has the potential to be very cost effective and far less expensive than it is today. If you strip away the lawyers the cost drops like a stone. There's also something to be said about a technology that has been highly reliable day in and day out.

Is burning coal cheaper? I don't think that can be said as many issues with it are pushed outside of the cost calculations. There have already been disasters involving ash piles turning into lahars. The ash piles are often radioactive and when the wind hits them, they can cause dust storms of material that is very bad to breath. The smog and particulate pollution cause health issues for hundreds of thousands and the cost of that is not tallied in the coal column.

Re: Hmmm.

"because you're having to train half the workers at the same time they're supposed to be building."

There is also the endless parade of lawsuits from the moment a plant is proposed and past when it's decommissioned.

Re: Hmmm.

"Sodium-cooled fast reactors do not require slowed down neutrons"

Nothing like a hot pool of liquid sodium to make a reactor just a wee bit more dangerous.

It's not just a matter of "spent" rods being useful in a fast spectrum over a thermal one. The solid fuel develops cracks and can go to pieces. There are also daughter products that kill fissioning by absorbing neutrons.

I'd really like to see Molten Salt Reactors being introduced. It's anticipated that some designs will be able to "burn up" the waste fuel from PWR's. Maybe the government (US and UK) can sponsor some qualified nuclear physics students so they can get an advanced degree in trade for doing some time on the project. A government spending money towards safe cheap energy production is a worthwhile investment. Much better than many of the things they throw money at. Like Elon needs to be paid to put up a new Tesla factory.

Re: Hmmm.

"I wonder how much of that is due to real technological problems "

Part of the issue is a long gap where no new plants were being planned or built. Every power plant has a finite lifetime and it's important to plan decades in advance to keep up. Wind and solar are both very nice, but on a windlass night they aren't all that useful. Bobby Llewellyn goes all smilely and wiggly when he can say that all of the UK's power that day came from wind and solar or that sort of thing happens with more frequency, but he fails to point out the times when a large portion of the islands would be at an absolute standstill.

Some businesses make plans about what they'd do in case of a power outage, but I don't think I've ever seen talk of planning for outages on a regular basis or adjusting production based on electricity availability / spot pricing. It's just assumed that the vast majority of the time there will be electrons ripe for the picking.

Government by Gmail catches up with UK minister... who is reappointed anyway

Re: why do we accept it?

"That being said I would gladly stand against them, care to lend give me the £500 it costs to do so? Unfortunately I can't afford to throw that kind of money away."

That is getting to be more of the problem. It's not just the filing fee, but the cost to run any sort of campaign. If you win, it's committing a chunk of your life (and sanity) to public service where every decision you make and have made will be subject to intense public scrutiny often out of context. You might also wind up the target of a few nut jobs that just want the notoriety of attacking a public figure rather than out of any philosophical disagreement.

"> Hilary is on the LEFT

for small values of "left"."

Hilary is in her own box that's attached with squiggly line up and off to the left away from the main T.O.

Elon Musk shows what being Chief Twit is all about across weird weekend

Re: Just for context, Elon Musk tweeted:

"Tweeted from his personal account,"

According to SEC filings, Elon's personal Twitter account is considered an official source of news about Tesla. It's a double-edged sword. If they didn't make the filing, Elon could be in big personal trouble for saying anything with regards to Tesla that 'might' affect stock price. By declaring the account as an official source of information, they/he have to live by that as well. With Elon, it's not good either way. I think it's mostly a matter of who's on the hook for paying the fines.

Re: Just for context, Elon Musk tweeted:

"Nancy obviously has a security detail, but some or all of them would have been travelling with her."

As family members of VIPs are often targets, they usually get security as well.

The reason I question whether Mr Pelosi was on the drink again as it was said he was investigating noise from the break in. That's not something I'd do in his position. He clearest move is to get somewhere that is secure and call the police. The chances of a professional hit are too great for somebody in his position. Even if the alarm is triggered, he could be kidnapped in less time than it takes the cops to arrive and act if he's easily caught.

Re: Just for context, Elon Musk tweeted:

"Musk owns it lock, stock and two smoking barrels."

And the Saudi wealth fund and there are likely liens by the banks that loaned Elon money for part of the price.

Re: Just for context, Elon Musk tweeted:

Jellied Eel, Well stated.

I also wonder about the security at Chez Pelosi. Alarms and CCTV aren't barriers to criminals getting in and doing bad things. In this case it sounds much like it was a complete nut job that broke in and smashed the insider trading drink driver's head. I have to wonder if Paul was on the booze and let go of the hammer he was wrestling over since the police had arrived or just finally lost his grip. I wouldn't let go until the other guy was wrapped up by the cops or if I had a place to break contact and run away.

Does this house have no panic room? Did Nancy arrange this? You'd think the Pelosi's would have 24hr security given her position similar to the President and VP. If not officers from the Secret Service, then from another agency. What would have happen if the attack was done by somebody a bit more professional that wasn't as distracted by visions in their head? Even if an alarm had been triggered that person could have been long gone before police knew they needed to look for somebody.

Re: Seeing Musk acting directly makes me wonder ....

"It's not his money either."

A lot of it was, but the second in ownership stake is the Saudi investment fund. It wouldn't be all that good for Elon if he managed to burn the place to the ground and make them rather angry at him. At the very least, they wouldn't be as interested in going in with him on a project that might actually make money.

Elon borrowed around $13 billion from banks to pull this off so he has payments to make on those loans. More relationships he'd not do well to sour.

Re: Seeing Musk acting directly makes me wonder ....

"He is decent at impregnation."

He definitely has me beat there.

I have him beat in not being required to dole out child support payments and alimony all over the place.

Re: To be fair, automated driving is a much more complex problem

"Is that why Twitter works"

Twitter is what you do when you are not working (or not getting any work done).

Re: Broadly correct

"If Mudge's reports are accurate there may be a pile of baling wire and duct tape holding up key parts of Twitters infrastructure."

If that's the case, some temp tesla code monkeys seconded to Twitter for a few weeks isn't going to be adequate or useful long term. They'd have to be brought up to speed, provided there's anybody left that can do that, and then have to work out improvements, test, conduct reviews and finally have the code released. Perhaps they can do that in the time they are there, but who supports it afterwards? A new hire that has to learn all of the things the Tesla coders just did all over again with nobody around to explain things?

Besides all of that, if you were "asked" to leave your post at one job you might have liked to go over and help out somewhere else, you might decide that switching employers might be the better alternative. I've had that happen before and it was a nightmare. I spent all sorts of off-the-clock hours trying to get up to speed on the new stuff while at the same time trying to track what was going on with my permanent job so I wouldn't return and be dead in the water there. Of course all of that extra work wasn't appreciated in any meaningful way.

Re: Quality Review

"and just a few days ago, a colleague was having some issues with a program and I was helping to trace/he was convinced the problem was network connectivity"

A second set of eyeballs to help troubleshoot something as you outline is far different from the monstrosity that is likely what the code is to run Twitter and the things that need to happen. There never seems to be time or budget to stop adding "features" and do a bottom up rewrite to make it nice and clean again so it can be supported. This is why it can really be an issue to lose people and Elon is going to find this out and Twitter users may see a whole bunch of strangeness and outages.

Re: Quality Review

"That seems ripe for a case of Conflict of Interest being brought against Musk."

Elon will put on his Teflon® suit and sit in the dock for yet one more lawsuit against him. No big deal, they haven't imprisoned him so far.

Re: Bad code review

"It is absolutely sensible and useful for one of these groups to check the code of the other. Oh yes."

Given the stories of Elon's complete incompetence where it comes to writing software, how would he know?

Re: Bad code review

"My favorite thing is the reports that Musk has brought in a bunch of Tesla software engineers to look over the Twitter code."

While Elon looks to turf out all of the lazy bastards that pretend to work from the Twitter offices, he has people from a publicly traded company stop the important work they might have been doing to review code for their CEO's new non-profit purchase. Why haven't those people from Tesla been fired yet. Obviously, what they were doing at Tesla couldn't have been all that important if they can be sent elsewhere.

Zoom to mandate client updates every ninety days, starting Nov 1

Re: Insanity prevails?

"So those of us who use the last sane (constant update free) version of M$ Windoze (7) will once again be locked out shortly."

and users of W10 will be locked out 90 later forcing people to buy a new computer or stop using Zoom. I'm sure companies are going to love the dilemma. Do they issue new rugged laptops (super expensive) to everybody so they can use Zoom while everything those laptops are used for works fine on the "old" OS or do they issue a second cheap laptop to those people just to use for Zoom?

Once I have something set up and working for me, I hate to update. It's very infrequent that the updates deliver anything that makes my work get done faster and usually quite the opposite.

Self-driving truck startup TuSimple ousts CEO over ties to Chinese rival

But we already have autonomous trucks

They are called trains and there's no reason to run them on Hydrogen. Steel wheels on steel tracks lead to some really awesome fuel economy and they often run in 100 unit convoys.

This sort of thing is from pale skinny engineers that have never driven a truck. The long haul is very simple. The thing the drivers spend much of their time on is all of the paperwork, waiting in queues at distribution centers for their turn to back up and unload and finding alternate routes when there are closures or slow downs. The drivers are also keeping the contents of the truck secure (more or less) and are around to facilitate getting the truck to a repair shop. A quick look on Youtube shows all sorts of things that it's unlikely an autonomous truck would be able to sort out, but a human driver could deal with very quickly.

German cops arrest student suspected of running infamous dark-web souk

Registered users?

What rocket surgeons would register on a dark web sales site? It's the same thing as signing up at a warez site, stupid and possibly a trap.

NASA details totally doable, not science fiction plan for sending Mars rocks to Earth

Re: Won't Musk have started a city on Mars by 2033?

"Indeed, and just when failure is becoming clear on Projectn he announces an equally fanciful Projectn+1 to distract the fanboiz and keep the adulation flowing."

He does that a lot to distract from bad news so it breaks the news cycle. I think he keeps a list of off-the-wall stuff on tap to trot out when he needs a distraction.

Re: Won't Musk have started a city on Mars by 2033?

"It would probably be better / easier / cheaper to send a science lab to Mars and analyse all the samples in situ."

That's a big discussion when experiments are being evaluated to go on the rovers. They can't pack the whole lab and if they tried, they'd still wind up needing the analyzer they didn't bring with Murphy being such a bastard and all.

If they can get sample back to Earth, it just a matter of who gets dibs on the most expense material ever collected.

There are Apollo era moon rocks still under seal. With changing technology, they have wanted to have untouched samples available if there comes a time when a new machine might be just the thing to get answers for some burning questions.

Re: Won't Musk have started a city on Mars by 2033?

No, it was 2022 he was going to have the first cargo ships landing so there would be a foundation to start building the major portion of the million person colony in 2033.

"And it's unlikely it's going to be using single-use spacecraft."

The plan might be something reusable, but something might happen. There would need to be a completely spare rocket or 3 to steal parts from and all of the tools on hand to make repairs as well as whatever material handling equipment that could be necessary. If an engine needs to be swapped, it's still going to require equipment to do the removals and replacements along with whatever is needed to test for leaks or other things once the swap is complete.

There are endless problems that need to be sorted before there can be a manned mission to Mars. So far, Elon is only working on a rocket and everyone of them has crashed/exploded except one. He's a bit shorter on funds after this past week so SpaceX might have to slow down on development although they are betting the company on Starship at this point and the Raptor engines aren't passing qualification checks at much of a pace. The massive flash of green flames makes for good video, though.

"Before anyone could permanently move to Mars, we need 50 years of experience running a Mars base."

A bigger problem to solve is where to get Nitrogen to ship to Mars. There will be no growing of food there without bringing some in and it's also needed to bulk up the air supply in human occupied areas so they aren't running nearly 100% O2. The Apollo 1 tragedy is a good example of why it's very bad to have a 100% oxygen atmosphere. NASA was thinking that it would be so much easier to only need to seal the capsule if the pressure was 5.5psi which is enough to push oxygen into the hoomans.

While there is verified sources of water on Mars, the mining and purification will be a big operation. Total life support for any extended stay on Mars will require an enormous amount of mechanical pre-supply. Even those that talk about 3D printing everything never seem to see that it would take a bunch of equipment and energy to make the feedstocks to supply the 3D printers. They don't work on random regolith.

Re: China's Moon Mining is a better idea

"There's currently nothing up there that we need and can't get cheaper and easier here on earth"

There is a whole lot that can be done on the moon that can't be done on Earth. A real biggy is putting people on the moon for an extended period to evaluate the health effects of reduced gravity. There's speculation that crystal growth on the moon might lead to advancements in semi-conductors. Working in zero G has lead to some interesting results, but it also leads to an huge number of problems. Another great thing to put on the moon is virus research.

Re: China's Moon Mining is a better idea

"NASA has yet to land a rocket in reverse which BEZOS and Musk seem to have accomplished."

Long before Muck and Bezos, NASA was landing rockets. The computing power during the Apollo missions wasn't there to automatically land the astronauts and there also wasn't a way to scan the terrain for the best spot, but the Cambell's soup can of a lander did land under rocket power and take off again. Several other programs such as DC-X did work on VTVL rocket systems and several other small aerospace firms demonstrated landing rockets long before Elon and Jeff. The big launch companies could have done it, but felt the costs and risks associated with reusability were too high.

Re: Here's hoping that it will work out

"You'd think they'd actually test this in lunar orbit first"

It's not really cheaper. Weird as it sounds, the cost of going all the way to Mars isn't much more expensive than doing a lunar orbit project and there's the same amount of ability to recover from serious problems, zero. To test on Luna and then send something to Mars just doubles the cost.

Re: Here's hoping that it will work out

"suggesting liquidating space spending to fix problems on Earth shows you're not actually looking at government budgets like a voter "

The sorts of problems that NASA works to solve are often directly applicable to issues on Earth. There is an enormous amount of technology spun off each year. The patent holder for solar roof tiles isn't Elon, it's NASA, although the patent expired some years ago.

'Chief Twit' Musk delivers bathroom furniture to Twitter HQ ... but not Tesla results

Re: Really?

"But he seems to have done OK with SpaceX, Russian priority or not."

That remains to be seen. Since SpaceX is private their books aren't readily available. The Raptor engines for Starship have had some serious issues making pretty green lights before going poof on the test stands. Without Raptor engines, there is no Starship, without Starship, Elon is saying they can't deploy the Starlink v2 satellites which means Starlink is in real trouble (it might never NOT be in trouble). SpaceX is betting the company on Starlink being a grand success. It's even more dire now as Elon made the biggest buy of a non-profit the world has ever seen which depletes his coffers. That's money that could have been reinvested into SpaceX and/or Tesla at crucial times.

Re: What a joker

"As much as a dislike twitter and what it represents, Elon should have kept his mouth shut with regards letting anyone go at this time. Announcing it like he has seems a tad cruel."

It's exceptionally stupid to announce any cuts. People with nice resumes they've been honing since April have been looking for new places to go and have left. Some have as they don't like Elon, but others to make sure they continue to have employment. Twitter has offices in some of the most expensive areas to be located so the people working there need a nice high paying job to live indoors. Elon is also well known for wholesale firings even if his fans say it's just getting rid of the lowest performing staff. Rumors were circulated that there would be a bunch of working groups being dissolved and the people dismissed so that would net a bunch of dolphins with the tuna since a group is likely to contain both top notch people and others that might only do just enough to keep their jobs.

When people leave a company, they take a certain portion of institutional knowledge with them. Lot's of people leaving over a short period of time will mean fewer people that understand why something is done a certain way and many of the ways of doing something that had been tried but didn't work. It will all have to be learned again and Elon will need to hope that lessons are learned fast enough to prevent the whole thing going down the drain. A government that's already had a chat with Twitter about what's permissible and what's not could have been amiable the first time, but if they have to have the same chat once again about the topic, fines could be involved. Bans are a possibility and even jail time for some sacrificial executive. Wasn't it India that chased after a bunch of local Twitter execs one time for something?

Re: Incorrect

"Also don't forget to mention that he was fired from PayPal."

There was X.com which sold to Cofinity who fired Musk and then eventually rebranded itself as Paypal after another acquisition. Elon didn't have any input into PayPal but owned stock from payments for X.com. There are some better tellings of the story, but the gist is that Elon didn't have anything to do with the Paypal that was sold to eBay. There are people from the chain of companies that Elon was directly involved in that have excised any mention of working at those companies from their resumes on LinkedIn.

Mark Tarppening and Martin Eberhard founded Tesla. Martin was supposed to get the first production Tesla Roadster off the production line, but Elon took it and eventually launched it into space perhaps as a final rude gesture to Martin. The car that Martin finally did get was a rebuilt wreck. A few of Elon's 'friends' got the first Roadsters. That gives one a keen insight into Elon.

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

Re: It’s toxic and it got nasty during the pandemic

"I’d delete my account if it didn’t contain a few obscure friends and family members who I’d entirely lose touch with if I do"

If my friends and family can't simply send an email or call me on the phone, I'm not going to make an accommodation to keep in touch with them. I don't even like Text so, of course, some sort of corporate advertising firm mediating my communications is right out.

Nvidia RTX 4090: So hot they're melting power cables

Re: Not surprised

">Maybe they should switch to XT90 connectors for GPUs.

Or just put battery terminals on them and we use jump leads"

Anderson connectors. I don't think that XT90's would be good enough. 50 amps takes a big chunk of wire to move and the voltage doesn't enter into it. For chassis wiring with some margin, 8gu is recommended.