In rehab today…

…to cure addiction to online Scrabble. A couple of quick links for the exceptionally bored…

CMP on the return of Mao-era propaganda-blaring village loudspeakers. One project…

…involves three daily broadcasts morning, noon and night [and] employs “internet + loudspeaker” cloud broadcasting technology.

And for those with an interest in tech cults – a critique in of the world’s richest/most tedious man, Elon Musk, in this thread (complete with lively comments).

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18 Responses to In rehab today…

  1. donkey says:

    Elon Musk’s rage comes from his legacy of abuse at the hands of his tyrannical father. But it’s more than that. It’s obvious that his maniacal drive to succeed comes from his inability to be at peace with being rejected and abused by his father.

    In fact, his rage is impotent rage. He cannot match the violence of his father, probably because he’s vowed to be the opposite of him. But his drives him into cycles of narcisstic, impotent self hate and reaction against anyone who questions his narrative. He has to live like the wizard behind the curtain and that’s just not how the world works.

    Since he’s not someone who would resort to violence, and cannot get himself to that level, he first lashes out by “being the best,” and being the world’s richest man. He also lashes out financially by trying to hound his detractors into silence.

    Elon Musk is a very damaged person. We don’t need to be fans of Elon Musk. He’s eventually going to end up like Howard Hughes and probably commit suicide or something.

  2. Chinese Netizen says:

    Wonder how that Twatter purchase is shaping up?

    Oh and while we’re talking about megalomaniacal billionaire dickheads with issues (out of so many), how about that Peter Thiel?

  3. Cassowary says:

    Cue the resident crypto bros turning up to defend Elon Musk’s, um, honour (?) in 3, 2, 1…

    In my experience there is quite a large Venn diagram overlap between crypto bros and Tesla fans. Both groups share the conceit that they are the only ones clever enough to understand why something that sounds far too good to be true, isn’t, because something something blockchain MARS! I would be happy to be proven wrong in this instance.

  4. so says:

    Practice drills by land, by sea, by air, facing Taiwan….keeping the population at home….repatriating foreign assets to shelter from sanctions….building airstrips in a chain…claiming all of an ocean from side to side, from top to bottom…expelling foreigners….scrapping epic games….preventing entry from abroad…installing surveillance and loudspeakers all over the place….

  5. Stanley Lieber says:

    @so

    If one were looking for “sell” signals on China, your post is it.

  6. Musk rat says:

    To be fair to Musk, it should be pointed out — Musk’s personality weirdness aside — that everyone selling electric vehicles is a con man: there is no way switching cars from burning oil somewhat inefficiently to burning coal much more inefficiently* and poisoning the environment with all sorts of very nasty heavy metals** is a step forward to less greenhouse gases and pollution. Add in the little fact that a quite large proportion of any car’s full carbon footprint is tied up in making the damn car and the damn battery in the first place, and we can see that EVs are always going to be at heart, utterly fraudulent.

    EVs are just a light greenwash while you kick the can of climate-criminal-shame-from-having-a-larger-footprint-than-the-old-solution downstream to powergen companies.

    One bright point in Musk’s con is he is using his dodgy funds and hype powers to do space exploration. Which, though it has a far worse carbon footprint, is of actual importance to humanity (certainly when compared to the triviality that is private car ownership).

    That said, I suspect Musk’s just a hollowed-out volcanic island short of being a real life Bond villain.

    *Coal would, in reality, be the only way to generate the huge extra amount of electrical power required for all cars to be electric. Renewables can’t even cover half of current demand. Nuclear takes 20-30 years to build and leaves you with an even more terrible waste problem 50 years later for the next few hundred millennia, plus there may not even be enough uranium, if everyone switched.

    **All batteries are awful pollutants and usually extremely short-lived. They can be recycled but most aren’t, because humans are like that. Tesla purportedly recycles them. YMMV.

  7. Kwun Tong Bypass says:

    Wow!
    Crypto-haters
    Facebook-haters
    Twitter-haters
    Metaverse-haters
    EV-haters
    ……….
    and now also Musk-haters??

    Come on guys!

  8. Chinese Netizen says:

    Bypass: You forgot Thiel hater. Which I proudly am. And not solely because he’s a homosexual that proudly backs and finances the political party that wants to see the likes of him burn in hell and become extinct.

  9. Mark Bradley says:

    @Kwun Tong Bypass

    For a split second I thought that was a poem from Knownot. It’s 4 am. Time to head to bed.

  10. donkey says:

    Chinese Netizen: Thiel likes the GOP because it’s the same group that funds his cocaine and orgy habit, or so I heard from one of his former kept men, sorry, uhhhh… boys. Yes, he likes em young.

  11. cryptocarbuncle says:

    I can prove detractors of crypto and blockchain wrong.

    There has never on earth been:

    an ability to send money for literally almost zero
    money that weighs nothing
    money that can be instantly verifiable without a third party “trust organization” like a government or a bank
    nor has there ever been a chain of securities and assets and information that cannot be censored by a third party.

    you can blah and bleat all you want about crypto bros and you are right. they are obnoxious and not all of them know anything, but to sit here and claim ignorance and then tell people that the very technology is a scam is not even worth my effort to detract you. you are a moron. plain and simple.

  12. Probably says:

    @musk rat

    You are obviously not very well informed about electtic vehicles. Whilst I agree that coal burning is not the best solution for power generation all of today’s global electrical requirements could be met by covering 1% of the surface of the planet with solar panels. Get a map of the world and colour in a 1% square to help visualise this. There are trash islands floating in the middle of the oceans almost as big as this.

    With regards to battery recycling they are removed from vehicles when they still have 80% life available. Like yoir mobile phone the batteries have a linear degradation over time. However there is a ‘second life’ purpose for these batteries where they are used as energy storage for places such as solar farms which only garner energy for 12 hours per day.

    Whilst we can agree to differ on our views of certain persons please do not post an anti-science diatribe.

  13. Mark Bradley says:

    “an ability to send money for literally almost zero
    money that weighs nothing
    money that can be instantly verifiable without a third party “trust organization” like a government or a bank
    nor has there ever been a chain of securities and assets and information that cannot be censored by a third party.”

    I generally am more positive about blockchain than most here because I did not enjoy getting my bank account frozen years ago and with a non custodial wallet that is simply not possible. Likewise, I do not enjoy seeing people in HK get their bank accounts NSL frozen either.

    However:

    1. Crypto right now is legally a commodity not money.

    2, It doesn’t cost “almost zero”. When the Ethereum or bitcoin blockchain gets clogged, mining fees spike and in some cases cost more than a SWIFT transaction. I’ve been avoiding this issue by using litecoin and bitcoin cash, as these do really cost almost zero but if their respective blockchains get hit with many transactions I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a spike there too. Plus if I want to use a stablecoin like DAI or USDC I pretty much HAVE to use the Ethereum blockchain in some cases, though in other case I can mitigate fees by using the binance blockchain which is more efficient but less decentralized too.

  14. Low Profile says:

    @Mark Bradley, crypto may be a commodity from a legal/political standpoint, but to an economist, money is whatever serves as a medium of exchange. However, a currency only has value so long as its users continue to have confidence in it (tried selling any Venezuelan bolivars lately?). Whether cryptocurrencies will earn and sustain mass confidence in the long term remains to be seen.

  15. Musk rat says:

    @probably
    For a self-styled science crusader, there’s a lot of faith-filled blue-sky thinking in what you’re trying to pass off as science. Generally I regard statements that require high levels of faith from the listener coupled with proffering low levels of fact as being religious in nature.

    Let’s run your science down:

    1. All of today’s global electrical requirements could be met by covering 1% of the surface of the planet with solar panels.

    That “could be” there denotes this is a faith-based, aspirational assertion. Using a science/fact-based perspective, you can really only honestly translate “could be” to: “is not currently”.
    Indeed using the “could be” = “is not currently” equivalence this second faith-based statement is equally true:
    “All of today’s global electrical requirements could be met by switching to dilithium-crystal-based power plants.”
    Sure there’s a few more wrinkles to iron out compared to solar. But the most important thing is it sounds plausibly sciencey and it’s legally true. 😉

    And so to the wrinkles: let’s replace your religious hypothesis with the actual facts of solar panel generation today:
    2.8% of today’s global electrical requirements are met by solar panels.

    So there’s the slight speed bump of having to cover the other 97.2% of today’s global electrical requirements before your solar panels hypothesis becomes a fact. I wouldn’t hold your breath if I was you. Also, assuming it will ever become fact (which is frankly, a stretch), by the time it does, global electrical requirements will have grown massively, thanks to all the new EVs (currently a mere 3% of global car sales) that folk like you champion.

    2. Battery Recycling
    So… you didn’t actually address the recycling question at all. Well side-stepped, you! Let’s face it, batteries are full of horribly toxic metals and chemical nastiness and prone to catching fire, so it’s best not to get involved: you’ll lose valuable green points. So pull a Belushi move: point over there and shout “Oh look, a baby wolf!” and drive off before they look back.
    So now that we’ve pointed out that you’re cherry picking the facts that sound good and burying the inconvenient ones in a landfill without comment…

    Let’s address the *ahem* “recycling” you did offer: there are currently about one billion cars on planet earth. EV batteries are supposedly rated for 10 years, so let’s be generous and say an average of eight years (that’s how long the Tesla warranty lasts).
    So every 8 years you get another billion batteries, so likely you’ll end up getting 125 million batteries to recycle every year. Does the currently-not-even-remotely-real “1% of the surface solar farm” need all that battery power? Got any sciencey data for that?

    And again: what do we do with all the toxic stuff when it doesn’t even work for the currently-not-even-remotely-real solar farm anymore?

    So, no, I’m not anti-science, but I can smell bullshit even when it’s been lovingly spray-painted eco-green by heavy industrialists and their fanbois. And so very, very many of the actions offered and/or supposedly taken to address the terribly real climate crisis have been obvious greenwash bullshit. EVs are just the latest.

  16. blockchainwhore says:

    I can send over US$1 million dollars on the bitcoin blockchain for .05 cents.

    Ethereum is crypto. It’s not bitcoin.

    Crypto is money. Commodities can be money. Gold is a commodity and it’s used as money.

    Nobody really knows what they are talking about when they talk about crypto. They talk out of their arses. Because they spend ZERO time actually thinking about it.

    One day, when you have no access to the “money” in your digital bank, printed by your “government,” and you can’t have any hope of having it ever again, you will maybe begin to understand that the “money” you got from your employer was never really yours. But the money in your blockchain wallet is yours. And nobody can seize it from you or tell you its worthless. Because it’s just not worthless. Go check the prices! Tell me more about it being worthless.

  17. Mark Bradley says:

    “ I can send over US$1 million dollars on the bitcoin blockchain for .05 cents.”

    Cool. But there have been times in the recent past where it cost ~$70 to do a transaction on average on the Bitcoin blockchain. It happened during the Chinese crackdown on mining which resulted in high mining fees until the mining difficulty was adjusted.

    “ Ethereum is crypto. It’s not bitcoin.”

    No shit. I never said it was. But its blockchain certainly can do more due to smart contracts.

    “ Commodities can be money. Gold is a commodity and it’s used as money.”

    I do generally agree with this.

    “ Nobody really knows what they are talking about when they talk about crypto. They talk out of their arses. Because they spend ZERO time actually thinking about it.”

    You including yourself in that statement?

    Because you didn’t say anything remarkable. You merely repeated what I said about frozen bank accounts and the benefits of non custodial wallets, but you say if in such an arrogant and evangelical manner that nobody will take you seriously.

    Reconsider your presentation style cause it is a turn off and this is coming from a guy using crypto RIGHT NOW! (How else am I going to bet on the WNBA and thinly traded and inefficient markets for bottom tier football games that the Jockey Club doesn’t offer?)

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