The thing is, those investors are in a Catch-22 situation.

Tesla’s valuation is absolutely absurd. Even after all the value the stock has lost, it still has a P/E ratio of more than 100. Standard, boring, normal car companies that are well run have a P/E ratio of 7.

These investors have convinced themselves that Tesla deserves to be thought of completely differently than other car companies because they have a genius in charge.

If they ditch Elon, they have to admit that they’re just a normal car company, and the right price for their shares is $14 each or so, not the $270 it is now. But, if they keep Elon, they have to convince themselves that somehow their sales are going to turn around and their genius who happens to be a Nazi will somehow convince all the people who hate Nazis to buy cars from him.

What kind of engineering work? That’s a really broad category.

Like, are we talking aerospace engineering? Software engineering? Systems engineering?

I don’t think the interviews angle means anything. Just because he was able to convince a journalist he knew the right words doesn’t mean that he was actually contributing to the actual engineering of the rockets. If he spent 20 hours a week in engineering meetings, he might have absorbed enough to talk intelligently about it.

I also wouldn’t give much credit to employees saying that he did engineering work. This is the same guy who bought the title of “founder” when he bought Tesla, and loves using NDAs to muzzle people.

I’m not saying I have doubts about his actual engineering because I think he’s an asshole so he must be an idiot. I’m saying it because I’ve never heard him say anything technical that wasn’t basically Star Trek technobabble, and at the same time I have seen him do a lot of shady things to make it seem like he’s more involved than he is.

Do you think they would have prosecuted if it had been a low level employee doing the same thing? Running their own private email server, doing government business on that server?

I think they would have, that’s why I think it’s important to note that they chose not to prosecute her despite it being something that would have been prosecuted for other less powerful people.

Was it as big a deal as the GOP made of it? No. But, it’s still a rule that everybody else has to follow or they get charged.

Deciding not to prosecute isn’t necessarily the same as deciding it wasn’t criminal.

Given that Google probably trains their LLMs based on the content of people’s Gmail inboxes, how long until a prompt convinces Gemini to spit out Waltz’s emails verbatim?

Or, could use this profile:

• Former military officers
• Graduates of Virginia Military Academy
• Married men in their early 50s
• Men Living in Washington DC
• Fathers of teenage daughters
• …

Then microtarget ads that will be shown only to him. I can guarantee that a guy this bad at OPSEC doesn’t know how to use an ad blocker.

(And if you’re a North Korean hacking group, you make sure the ad has a malicious payload that gives you control over his computer.)

Hillary wasn’t prosecuted, though she probably should have been. But, she was grilled by government committees for many hours.

If Google weren’t under antitrust pressure, I think that would have already happened.

In many ways, a Google owner would probably make Reddit better for a while. Google cares a lot more about the data people are generating than making the site itself profitable. They could afford to run it at a loss for years, whereas Reddit investors want to ensure they make money soon.

But, I’m glad it might not happen. Then again, who knows what will happen to Google and antitrust in the Trump admin, where bribery is now perfectly legal.

I wonder how long it will be until one of these supposed “plainclothes agents” is shot. Part of the reason that cops wear uniforms is that it make it clear to the public that when they’re grabbing someone off the street it isn’t a kidnapping.

What I think is more important is that Carter was sincere and he lived his values.

I don’t even know what Clinton, Obama and Biden truly believed. They were so willing to compromise and work with both parties to get things done that whatever they believed didn’t really matter.

Even if Carter’s beliefs were on the right edge if the Democratic Party of his time, IMO it’s important that they were sincerely held, and that he wasn’t wiling to compromise. I think a lot of voters have been looking for that for a long time. It’s why Hillary Clinton was so unpopular, because she was seen as such a Washington insider. It’s also why some of Trump’s early supporters had previously been Bernie supporters. IMO Trump doesn’t actually have any sincerely held beliefs, but you can’t accuse him of compromising with the left just to get deals done.

Liberty in the USA, which hasn’t been all that libertyish for a while. It’s doing fine elsewhere.

Another idiot might come along, but cults of personality like Trump’s are rare. For whatever reason, idiots love Trump the way they haven’t loved anybody since Hitler. Even with Reagan it wasn’t this blind devotion.

Just look at how much infighting there was in the GOP before Trump came along. If he were gone, that would come back and they’d be tearing themselves apart again.

You need a Jimmy Carter.

I still have some hope that if there is an overwhelming support for democrats in the midterms, crisis might be averted. It will have to be overwhelming support, because the GOP are going to play every dirty trick possible to cancel elections, jail candidates, etc.

If that happens, impeachment and removal actually becomes possible. And, even if he isn’t impeached, a democrat controlled legislature could reassert their power and take his away. After all, these “executive orders” he keeps issuing are nothing more than memos from a boss to his subordinates about how he wants an agency to be run. They don’t have the force of laws, laws are exclusively within the authority of the legislature.

OTOH, I think the US is a profoundly sick country, and despite everything Trump still have a huge base of support, so a massive, overwhelming election for democrats is just about impossible.

It’s not so much that the tech just worked. Often it doesn’t work. The difference is that when it doesn’t work it’s not user-serviceable. Up until maybe 2010 or so, when things broke there was often something a user could do to fix them. But, especially with the introduction of locked-down mobile phone OSes, that’s not true anymore. Now it’s just “wait for an update”.

Some can’t. Computers weren’t commonplace until many GenXers were in their 20s, so some never learned. Those that did learn often learned the deep magic.

Silly millennial, even Boomers were using regexen in the 70s, and they were commonplace by the time GenX nerds started playing with them in the 80s and 90s. Your elders also know that regexen are fun but extremely dangerous, and should only be used in cases where they won’t make things much worse.

Write machine code? For what kind of processor?

That is one ability that doesn’t really belong. That’s much more of a Boomer thing. Not all boomers, obviously, but the ones who were computer experts were the ones who had to learn machine code. By the time even Gen X came along, assembler and C were already much more common.

That monitor was really underrated. I used it for decades for game consoles, VCRs, etc. after the C64 went obsolete.

I’m old enough to know why people used pencils for cassettes. It wasn’t coincidence. Count the number of teeth in the casette, then look at the number of facets on a standard pencil.

One of the biggest failings with a lot of idealist political systems (anarchism, libertarianism, communism, etc.) is that they try to do away with hierarchies and bosses. But, those are inevitable for great apes. A good setup provides a way to limit and manage the bosses that will inevitably appear. Yes, it legitimizes their power, but by acknowledging it, it also provides a way to limit it.