On Saturday, November 18, 2023 at 3:54:10 PM UTC-8, kmiller wrote:
On 11/18/2023 3:48 PM, Technobarbarian wrote:
On Saturday, November 18, 2023 at 2:40:05 PM UTC-8, bfh wrote:
Technobarbarian wrote:
It turns out that "freedom of speech" depends on your point of
view. Who knew? Our big "freedom of speech" advocate is fighting
against it.
"More Advertisers Halt Spending on X in Growing Backlash Against
Musk Warner Bros. and Sony have joined other companies in pausing
spending on X, formerly Twitter, over Elon Musk’s endorsement of >>> an antisemitic post."
"In a post on Friday night, Mr. Musk said, “The split second
court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear
lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this
fraudulent attack on our company.â€
X said that the research strategy used by Media Matters to discover
the advertisements that ran along antisemitic content was not
representative of how regular people use its platform. The
organization followed accounts that posted the content, then
refreshed the X timeline until ads appeared, X said in a blog post.
Only one of the nine posts highlighted by Media Matters violated
its content moderation rules, X added.
In a statement, Joe Benarroch, the head of business operations at
X, said, “50 impressions served against the content in the
article, out of 5.5 billion served the whole day, points to the
fact of how efficiently our model avoids content for
advertisers.†He added, “Data wins over allegations.â€
Media Matters said that it would defend itself from litigation by
X. “Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a >>> bully threatening a meritless lawsuit in an attempt to silence
reporting that he even confirmed is accurate,†said Angelo
Carusone, the president of Media Matters. “Musk admitted the ads >>> at issue ran alongside the pro-Nazi content we identified. This is
like getting mad at a mirror because you don’t like the
reflection. If he does sue us, we will win.†"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/technology/elon-musk-twitter-x-advertisers.html
I'm starting to wonder where the bottom is? How far down can he
drive the stocks in the companies he's involved with and is he
deliberately trying to drive down the prices so he can pick up some
bargains?
If I told Ellie once, I told him X number of times - get your mind and
mouth off that social media barrel of shitsoup and put it back on
rockets, cars, batteries, and tunnels. I want to see humans on the
Moon again before I kick the bucket.
--
bill
Theory don't mean squat if it don't work.
Probably the biggest reason for Elon's success is that he is very good at trolling. What troll wouldn't want to control his own personal troll pit? The Boring Company is really just another troll. He's a car salesman who hates public transportation.
He's looking for more places to put cars. Or, at least, pretending to look.
"Elon Musk’s tunnels to nowhere
The billionaire dug himself into a hole with the Boring Company.
By Avishay Artsy Dec 8, 2022, 7:00am EST"
"In late 2016, billionaire Elon Musk was sitting in traffic on West Los Angeles’s notoriously clogged 405 freeway while shuttling between one of his Bel Air mansions and SpaceX’s headquarters in nearby Hawthorne. Fed up with “soul-destroying
traffic,” he initially suggested adding another layer to the 405 before tweeting out an even more far-fetched idea: a 3D network of tunnels.
The idea is even more complicated than it sounds: Teslas would drive from the street onto elevator platforms called car “skates,” be lowered to tunnels below ground, and be propelled autonomously at 120 to 150 miles per hour to their destinations,
while their passengers relaxed. Thus was launched the Boring Company.
Musk’s new company bought a machine and started boring a tunnel under Hawthorne. An opening party for the test tunnel in late 2018 received mixed reviews. The path was bumpy; the cars did not drive themselves, and they never went faster than 40
miles an hour.
In the years since, the company built a 1.7-mile-long tunnel under the Las Vegas convention center, in which passengers are ferried back and forth in human-driven Teslas. Proposed projects in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore were scrapped. But
that hasn’t stopped cities large and small, in California, Kentucky, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere, from expressing interest in building tunnels for cars. But as Curbed’s Alissa Walker explains on Today, Explained, the company is continually ghosting
these cities once they bump into permitting issues or other infrastructural complexities."
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/8/23498861/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnels-finished
"The Boring Company (TBC) is an American infrastructure, tunnel construction services, and equipment company founded by Elon Musk. TBC was founded as a subsidiary of SpaceX in 2017, before being spun off as a separate corporation in 2018. TBC has
completed one tunneling project that is open to the public, as well as a test tunnel.
In 2021, TBC completed the Las Vegas Convention Center, LVCC Loop, which is a three-station transportation system consisting of 1.7 miles (2.7 km) of tunnels. As of July 2023, a segment to Resorts World is also open, and tunnels to Encore and
Westgate resorts are being finalized. The system is planned to expand to a total of 68 miles of tunnels in Las Vegas. TBC also completed one tunnel for testing in Los Angeles County, California. Many other TBC projects in cities across the United States
have been announced and subsequently cancelled or become inactive due to a lack of activity from the company.[4]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company
TB
Good thing they never have earthquakes in LA County. Oh, wait...
I stumbled on this article about the Boring Company recently. It's a fun read.
"I Took Elon Musk's Las Vegas Loop And It's Just As Dumb As I Was Expecting
The loop took 10 minutes of my life and I want it back."
By
Lawrence Hodge
PublishedOctober 31, 2023
https://jalopnik.com/i-took-teslas-las-vegas-loop-and-its-just-as-dumb-as-i-1850977564
This is a more detailed look at what's happening in Las Vegas. I think Lawrence Hodge is probably wrong about the financing, but it's a good description of what to expect.
"The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s mostly unreliable tunnel digging venture, has won the approval to expand its “Vegas Loop” system to — wait for it — 69 stations. Nice? Not really.
The tunnel system is Musk’s supposedly futuristic idea to alleviate road traffic by shifting some of that bumper-to-bumper traffic underground. The expansion, approved by the Clark County Commissioners, allows The Boring Company to construct 25 miles
of additional tunnels for a total of 65 miles and 18 additional stations.
The original vision for the Vegas Loop was 51 stations and 29 miles of tunnels — so this represents a pretty big vote of confidence in Musk’s idea of an underground network of Teslas whizzing through tunnels that are only slightly larger than the
vehicles themselves.
And it also represents a serious upgrade over the current reality of The Boring Company’s presence in Las Vegas, which is a paltry 2.2 miles of tunnels and five stations — most of which are clustered around the Las Vegas Convention Center and Resorts
World.
Of course, Musk’s promise to revolutionize transportation with underground tunnels is, in practice, rather underwhelming. Rather than being whisked along through a futuristic tunnel by an autonomous, high-occupancy shuttle traveling at impressive
speeds, riders instead are forced to sit in a Tesla operated by a human driver at speeds often less than 30 mph. Sometimes there’s traffic.
It bears repeating: Musk has simply recreated underground the same failed above-ground systems he claims to want to conquer.
I’m old enough to remember when this was supposed to be a precursor to the hyperloop, an ultra-fast system of pneumatic tubes in which levitating passenger pods would rocket at speeds of up to 720 mph. He sold many cities and states on this vision,
including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Maryland — only later to downsize its plans or outright ghost its governmental partners.
To score a permit, Boring had to agree to certain preconditions, one of which was high volume capacity. The company had to run a demonstration showing that it could move 4,400 passengers an hour. It passed and won and received the permit under the
category ATS, which stands for Amusement and Transportation Systems, which The Wall Street Journal notes is the same typically awarded to rollercoasters.
[snip]
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/4/23711032/elon-musk-boring-company-vegas-loop-expansion-tunnel
TB
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