This is a follow-up post and mostly written for Lukas. To everyone else, simply understand that you would have never have heard of JD Vance if it weren't for Peter Thiel. Seriously.
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Elon Musk: I support free speech! Unless it is speech mocking me.
His buddy Peter Thiel (fellow founder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook) took this to a new level. He supports free speech but when the Gawker outed him as gay he made it his passion in life to bring down the tabloid website... for which he succeeded by bankrolling Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the site forcing them into bankruptcy.
He is an early investor in a company that has cataloged all faces and is used by police (ok, I guess) to identify people and by private companies like Madison Square Garden to keep out any unwanted guests (bordering on Minority Report creepy).
It's safe to say, I'm not a fan but I thought I'd give him another chance so I watched this interview from a few days ago.
There are three main segments.
Politics. His libertarian/right-wing politics don't match with mine so it is not surprising that I didn't agree with him much in this section. Still, I expected worse.
AI and tech. There is nothing newsworthy in this section. He compared the AI bubble to the dot-com bubble and observed that the valuation of Nvidia is greater than the total revenue generated by AI. Nothing he said was provocative.
Higher education. This was by far the most interesting section. I found myself agreeing with most of his points (shocker). Thiel was repeatedly goaded into saying the government should offer no support to higher ed by the libertarian panel and he didn't take the bait.
Bottom line: I still don't agree on much but it was worth my time to hear his opinion.
I can't recall ever being so anxious before a debate. Perhaps its because there has never been so much at stake. with numerous polls showing the race a dead heat and 30 percent of the undecided saying this debate is what will help them make up their minds. That's enough to win (or lose) this race.
Historically these debates are overrated. Hillary beat Trump in 2016 debates. Kerry beat Bush in 2004. No impact on the final outcome. Obama lost to Romney in the first debate in 2012 but was able to come back to decisively win the next two debates.
The most famous debate moment of my lifetime was in the VP debates:
Even this debacle didn't have an effect; Bush crushed Dukakis less than a month later.
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The only debate that has really mattered was in June when Biden revealed his declining faculties. Like many of my fellow Democrats I realized that the motto "riden with Biden" should be changed to "Losing with Grandpa." I was surprised at how many of my fellow Democrats were upset with those of us who said he had to drop out. "You are doing more damage to Biden than the Republicans" is how one friend put it. I replied, "I belong to a political party, not a cult. My goal is to win and we can't win with this guy."
I even went onto FB and made a post about a beloved quarterback getting injured in the 4th quarter. If the goal is to win the game the backup must be put in the game. Even that was derided by several friends.
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Because of the expectations game, Trump simply has to show up and answer every question with "the border" or "inflation" and he will be heralded. So long as he doesn't call her a bitch on live TV he will seem restrained.
For Harris he goal is to appear authoritative, empathetic, and rational. She is all of those things but... but... there will be an attempt to paint her as shrill, patronizing, etc. A man can state something forcefully and be lauded for it. A woman doing the same can (and often is) regarded as a bitch.
There are more landmines in her path. Fortunately for her, Trump often likes triggering landmines. For that reason, I am cautiously optimistic.
After a long walk with Cujo it's now 5AM and the show is to begin.
Watch one minute from the most recent Overtime of Real Time with Bill Maher:
(It's supposed to start at 7:10. If it doesn't simply forward the video to that timestamp.)
First, the ridicule of Al Gore's work is unfair. I was a government contract worker when he pushed through his reforms. They most definitely eliminated paperwork (2-3 hours for just me, a lowly wx station supervisor) and definitely streamlined acquisition. Pre-Gore something as simple as requesting a stapler required insane red tape and approved stapler vendor suppliers. Gore could have accomplished more but the big cuts upset congressmen who liked that spending in their districts.
Ultimately, Gore's initiative cost me my job. Could the FAA justify human observers for a remote airport like Norfolk, Nebraska? Nope. The stations I managed: Dubuque, Sioux City, and Norfolk all closed.
And that's a good thing.
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Lukas, it's unlikely you follow Rich Lowry (the guy singing Elon's praise). Rich fancies himself a principled conservative who spoke and wrote against Trump as the Editor of the National Review - the premier conservative news/opinion outlet.
He remained principled until Trump came into power. Rich not only became a mouthpiece for Trump he purged all never-Trumpers from the National Review. I had been a loyal reader of the magazine since college but stopped when Rich turned it into a propaganda outlet.
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I like the idea of the government examining what it spends money on whetehr or not it can be done more efficiently. As I write in the next post, Former Republican New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg would be a good guy to do it... or... my political crush Pete Buttigieg.
My friend Lukas thinks Trump's idea of having Elon Musk audit the US government seeking efficiencies is a good idea. He also correctly predicted that I would disagree.
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I like the idea of a successful good person from the business world coming into politics. Michael Bloomberg was a very successful businessman who ran for mayor of NYC as a Republican. He won in the heavily Democratic city and did such a good job they suspended the two term limit to allow him a third term. (His Presidential bid in 2020 was a giant crash and burn, but I digress.) The point is that I am not opposed to people from with a business background going into politics.
Trump bothered me in that he was not a successful businessman. Had he taken his inheritance and placed into index funds he'd be much wealthier now and not have declared bankruptcy four times.
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Lukas is right that I do not believe Elon Musk is a good man. Disowning his 20 year old transgender daughter is his most recent personal failing. But I'll set aside his personal issues.
His purchase of Twitter exemplifies how someone's arrogance/ego can eclipse intelligence/judgment.
For those who don't follow let me summarize:
He offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share. ($4.20 was a joke about marijuana.) The problem? Twitter was not worth anything close to the $44 billion he was paying. When he realized he drastically overpaid he tried to back out. Since he had signed a contract the Twitter board held him to it so he reluctantly agreed. He convinced investment banks to pony up $13 billion in loans. Details here. The tl;dr? Twitter (now X) has seen its revenue decline so much that it is not making enough to even make the interest payments on its debt.
When Musk took over he eliminated 80% of the employees and Twitter was able to keep functioning. Some in Silicon Valley hailed his cost-cutting as visionary and it did start the trend of tech layoffs. While other CEO's like Zuck at Meta (Facebook) cut fat, Musk's cuts were flesh and bone. Sure it cut costs quickly but it resulted in a platform that became a toxic stew that advertisers abandoned.
He fed his seed corn to the livestock. It was great for an initial boost but very destructive in the long run.
A year ago he told advertisers and Disney CEO Bob Iger to go fuck themselves:
I won't go into his odd rightward lurch except to make to two observations:
Tesla, the solar company he founded, and SpaceX all became possible due to massive government subsidies. California leads the way in EV stations thanks to state and federal grants. Because California also taxes capital gains he moved to Texas and is moving his company headquarters from Delaware to Texas because Texas rules will allow him to do anything he wants.
Secondly, Elon has no problem following rules of rightwing governments like India. But when Brazil's leftwing government imposes rules Elon shut it down rather than comply. It will be interesting to see how the EU handles. X/Twitter is not complying with their rules (the safety people were part of the 80% Musk laid off). It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
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Musk is very anti-union. For many in the business community that's a plus. Given that roughly 30% of the government workforce is unionized there is no reason for them to remain silent when he goes after their jobs first.
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Bottom line? Elon Musk is not the right person to give advice on finding ways for the US government to save money. His horrible stewardship at X proves that his expertise in some domains does not translate well to social media.
A few weeks ago Elon decided that the companies that stopped advertising should be sued. His reputable law firm wouldn't file the case so he hired a lower tier law firm. He instructed X CEO in name only Linda Yacarino to put out this incredibly cringe-worthy video explaining it. It's worth 2 minutes of your time:
One of my favorite things to do is to go paragliding. To me it's better than skydiving because the ride is like sitting in a lawn chair in the sky.
My friend Vikram is an excellent paragliding pilot. Here he is the first time we went up:
If the weather is good the views are amazing.
To see how good Vikram is as a pilot watch us land. When we land I simply had to stand up. No running, no jumping.
There is another video out there from a different trip... the thermals were amazing and we went up and up... Vikram, any estimation on how high we were? I know what I remember but I think it has to be wrong.
