The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center
from the what-the-fuck? dept
Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees were quoted about how much work it would be to do that cleanly, noting that there’s a ton of stuff hardcoded in Twitter code referring to that data center (hold that thought).
That same day, Elon tweeted out that he had “disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks.”
CNBC is running an excerpt from the new Walter Isaacson book about Elon that details what happened with the closing of the data center, and it is way, way, way crazier than even I expected. When Musk talked about how he “disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks,” he meant that entirely literally, in that he literally unplugged it, involving a series of improbable (and ridiculously dangerous and stupid) decisions that resulted with him under the floorboards in the data center pulling the plug, after multiple people warned him not to.
But, let’s take a step back. As the book details, Musk wanted to shut down the data center because he was in drastic “stop paying bills” mania at the time, and the Sacramento data center was costing the company $100 million/year. Also, apparently, the data center (which appears to be run by NTT) had told a Twitter employee that it did not think Twitter would be financially viable for very long.
The article starts out with a vignette that basically says everything you need to know about Musk. He had asked an infrastructure manager about moving the servers in Sacramento to one of the other two US data centers Twitter had, in Portland, Oregon. Then this happened:
Another manager at the meeting said that couldn’t be done right away. “We can’t get out safely before six to nine months,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Sacramento still needs to be around to serve traffic.”
Over the years, Musk had been faced many times with a choice between what he thought was necessary and what others told him was possible. The result was almost always the same. He paused in silence for a few moments, then announced, “You have 90 days to do it. If you can’t make that work, your resignation is accepted.”
The manager began to explain in detail some of the obstacles to relocating the servers to Portland. “It has different rack densities, different power densities,” she said. “So the rooms need to be upgraded.” She started to give a lot more details, but after a minute, Musk interrupted.
“This is making my brain hurt,” he said.
“I’m sorry, that was not my intention,” she replied in a measured monotone.
“Do you know the head-explosion emoji?” he asked her. “That’s what my head feels like right now. What a pile of f—ing bulls—. Jesus H f—ing Christ. Portland obviously has tons of room. It’s trivial to move servers one place to another.”
If it’s making your brain hurt to have someone explain to you some fairly basic issues about infrastructure, the problem may be with you, dude. And, yes, it may have been “trivial” to move servers around the last time Musk ran an internet company over two decades ago, but for a major service relied on by hundreds of millions of people, that also has a ton of sensitive data, it’s… not trivial at all.
But a cousin of Musk suggested to Musk that they just do it themselves, while they were flying from the Bay Area to Austin, and Musk literally had his plane diverted to go to Sacramento and try it out, leading to… whatever the fuck this is:
They were somewhere over Las Vegas when James made his suggestion that they could move them now. It was the type of impulsive, impractical, surge-into-the-breach idea that Musk loved. It was already late evening, but he told his pilot to divert, and they made a loop back up to Sacramento.
The only rental car they could find when they landed was a Toyota Corolla. They were not sure how they would even get inside the data center at night, but one very surprised X staffer, a guy named Alex from Uzbekistan, was still there. He merrily let them in and showed them around.
The facility, which housed rooms of servers for many other companies as well, was very secure, with a retinal scan required for entry into each of the vaults. Alex the Uzbek was able to get them into the X vault, which contained about 5,200 refrigerator-size racks of 30 computers each.
“These things do not look that hard to move,” Elon announced. It was a reality-distorting assertion, since each rack weighed about 2,500 pounds and was eight feet tall.
“You’ll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,” Alex said. “They need to be lifted with suction cups.” Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods.
Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to be moved.
The story gets dumber. Musk had a Tesla employee buy Apple AirTags to “track” the servers, and then the process of “moving them” should make everyone cringe:
Other workers at the facility watched with a mix of amazement and horror. Musk and his renegade team were rolling servers out without putting them in crates or swaddling them in protective material, then using store-bought straps to secure them in the truck. “I’ve never loaded a semi before,” James admitted. Ross called it “terrifying.” It was like cleaning out a closet, “but the stuff in it is totally critical.”
At 3 p.m., after they had gotten four servers onto the truck, word of the caper reached the top executives at NTT, the company that owned and managed the data center. They issued orders that Musk’s team halt. Musk had the mix of glee and anger that often accompanied one of his manic surges. He called the CEO of the storage division, who told him it was impossible to move server racks without a bevy of experts. “Bulls—,” Musk explained. “We have already loaded four onto the semi.”
The CEO then told him that some of the floors could not handle more than 500 pounds of pressure, so rolling a 2,000-pound server would cause damage. Musk replied that the servers had four wheels, so the pressure at any one point was only 500 pounds. “The dude is not very good at math,” Musk told the musketeers.
Note the pattern: a willingness to ignore the details of what could go wrong, YOLO it and just test it out, and the assumption that if nothing goes wrong when you do that, it means that everything is fine and nothing else could possibly go wrong.
I might never even ride in a Tesla after this.
And then this:
The moving contractors that NTT wanted them to use charged $200 an hour. So James went on Yelp and found a company named Extra Care Movers that would do the work at one-tenth the cost. The motley company pushed the ideal of scrappiness to its outer limits. The owner had lived on the streets for a while, then had a kid, and he was trying to turn his life around. He didn’t have a bank account, so James ended up using PayPal to pay him.
The second day, the crew wanted cash, so James went to a bank and withdrew $13,000 from his personal account. Two of the crew members had no identification, which made it hard for them to sign into the facility. But they made up for it in hustle. “You get a dollar tip for every additional server we move,” James announced at one point. From then on, when they got a new one on a truck, the workers would ask how many they were up to.
Remember, these are servers full of information, some of it sensitive, and Musk is basically hiring literally undocumented workers off the street and tipping them a dollar for each rack they can move.
And, if you think anyone at Twitter cares about the privacy of your data, think again:
The servers had user data on them, and James did not initially realize that, for privacy reasons, they were supposed to be wiped clean before being moved. “By the time we learned this, the servers had already been unplugged and rolled out, so there was no way we would roll them back, plug them in, and then wipe them,” he says. Plus, the wiping software wasn’t working. “F—, what do we do?” he asked. Elon recommended that they lock the trucks and track them.
So James sent someone to Home Depot to buy big padlocks, and they sent the combination codes on a spreadsheet to Portland so the trucks could be opened there. “I can’t believe it worked,” James says. “They all made it to Portland safely.”
This is… bad. Really bad. Like this could have been a massive disaster for an awful lot of people. This is the kind of thing that the FTC should go after Musk for. He was playing fast and loose with data that could have created very serious problems. And we have no way of knowing that the data was actually safe, despite the “big padlocks” from Home Depot.
Again, because “it worked,” some people will argue that Elon was right to do it this way. But just because your crazily stupid move didn’t create immediate chaos doesn’t mean that it’s the right move.
And, of course, it didn’t really “work.” As we detailed, Twitter toppled over a few days later, and this excerpt admits it was because of the “server move.” The article does note that Musk himself eventually said he shouldn’t have done this and it did cause a fair bit of problems for the site, including the disastrous “Twitter Spaces” where Ron DeSantis tried to launch his Presidential campaign.
“In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake,” Musk would admit in March 2023. “I was told we had redundancy across our data centers. What I wasn’t told was that we had 70,000 hard-coded references to Sacramento. And there’s still shit that’s broken because of it.”
Yeah, I mean, maybe if you didn’t tell the person trying to explain stuff to you that it hurt your brain to hear the details, you would have heard them telling you things like this.
Even dumber is that the “lesson” that Walter Isaacson seems to take from this little episode is not that Musk’s impulsivity is a dangerous, out of control wrecking ball that is going to destroy some serious stuff, but that (ex)Twitter’s employees had to learn how to better “manage” the man-baby in charge:
His most valuable lieutenants at Tesla and SpaceX had learned ways to deflect his bad ideas and drip-feed him unwelcome information, but the legacy employees at X didn’t know how to handle him. That said, X survived. And the Sacramento caper showed X employees that he was serious when he spoke about the need for a maniacal sense of urgency.
There’s something to be said for pushing back on needless rules and bureaucracy, but it helps if you actually understand stuff before doing so, rather than doing something like this that had half a dozen ways it could have ended in serious disaster and possible tragedy. The fact that it “only” resulted in Twitter falling over every few weeks for months likely means that Musk and his supporters got the very wrong lesson out of this.
But the lesson I would take from it: have nothing to do with Elon Musk or any product he sells. It’s bound to be stupidly, unnecessarily risky.
Filed Under: data center, elon musk, privacy, sacramento, servers
Companies: twitter, x
Comments on “The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center”
Probably also related to the incident of deleted Xeets reappearing on the site and to more recent issues of older Xeets disappearing.
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Tweets. Just call them Tweets…..
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how about TwiXes?
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Left TwiX is better than Right TwiX.
Surprisingly resiliant to a muskRAT chewing on the electrical cables.
Every time I read something about Musk the idea that billionaires are some sort of geniuses and not parasites that happen to have inherited or built their fortune on precarious labor exploitation and either illegal or ethically questionable ways seem more and more distant.
Billionaires should not exist.
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Fundamentally, it’s a question of who allocates the money. If there’s one thing that communists managed to create, it’s a body of evidence that a system run entirely by a government is vastly worse than the imperfect capitalistic one. Yeah, you can get a crapshoot like current Xitter, enshittification cycle and so on, but at least there always are people with tools to replace what’s broken and to them it’s a matter of personal wishes and ego. I think, the question should be how to limit the potential damage rather than how to upend the entire system.
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Billionaires should not exist. There’s zero justification to have a negligible percentage of the world population retain more than half of all value produced while people suffer from hunger, health issues, lack of sanitation and other basic needs.
Not to mention the need for massive investments in preventing further climate degradation goes directly against the notion of unrestricted profit.
Whether this is solved by model x or y (ie: communism, socialism or whatever system you want to add) is up for debate but capitalism has shown over and over that it is part of the problem. Not that the idea itself is entirely bad but just like communism doesn’t account for the human factor (flaws and all), capitalism doesn’t as well.
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There is a common flaw in all political systems, they allow those with an elevated sense of worth to rise to the top and gather much of the wealth of society to themselves.
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It’s not as much an inherent problem with political systems but with credit, of which money is a specialized form. The final downturn was when gold coins (which at least had intrinsic material value) were replaced with bank notes, essentially government affidavits for a corresponding amount of gold. Just that the associated promise fell under the “I have altered the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further.” exception.
There is a lot more that you can do with money than capitalism as a political system. In fact, “socialist” and “communist” countries have their fair shares of “oligarchs” steeped in power and money.
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The entire reason gold was used as a currency is that it didn’t have any intristic value. It was a shiny rock with no use* outside of decoration, which made it a convenient way to store wealth.
*Yes, I’m aware that now we have uses for it as a commodity. That doesn’t really apply to the days when people still took the gold standard seriously.
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The gold standard was taken seriously till about a century ago, by which time people had figured out a bunch of uses. Tooth replacement, coloring glass and pigments, photography, electrical wiring, electroplating. The inflated price, due to speculation, works against some of these uses in practice.
“Intrinsic value”, though, is kind of a red herring. If the price of gold ever collapsed to its “intrinsic value”, it’d probably become about 99% cheaper. Better than 99.9999%, I guess, which is what paper money might lose were it valued only as paper. But either way, it’d be a major crash, and people would be freaking out.
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Why then is ancient history littered with the monuments and possessions of the politically powerful, with few remains of the life of the workers?
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Because credit and money are not a new idea?
Re: Re: Re:3 “I have altered the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further.”
About 1979 Lucasfilm moved their headquarters from the Edgemar Farms Egg warehouse across the street from Comcast/Universal to San Rafael, and hired Trained And Experienced^© people to move their Van Nuys ILM to San Rafael, a mile north of San Quentin.
I was called in to help move a large rotoscope i had built, and after a day or two of silliness, i sort of locked the hired moving foreman in the office with one task: an 18 foot box U-haul each morning. I managed 23 truckloads out of Van Nuys. Two things went wrong; sometimes no van in the morning, and when a manager walked up and started countermanding my forklift driver, we crashed a 25×11 foot tall blue-screen, 45 six foot florescent tubes shattered in all directions. George sent me a thankyou note, noting that nothing was injured, nothing broken.
Disclaimer: My Army MOS was 91U20, EEN&T Specialist, so i knew what i was doing
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There’s a big difference between the value produced and the value of the company. People like Musk don’t get to swim in gold a-la Scrooge McDuck. That value of the company is influenced by its leadership one way or another, there’s no getting around the role of the personality. That influence can be in the form of believing in products no one else does, or it can be this Xitter slow moving train wreck. Somebody has to make a decision what a group of people is going to do, someone has to own the tools. The problems you speak of can be solved through policy, it’s an issue of finding the balance between public and private needs. If either takes over 199% of the policy, you either get a suppression of individuality or an uncontrolled greed fest.
Those massive investments, funnily enough, can be profitable. Tesla is a prime example.
Communism has a compounding problem – that it’s a monolithic party. Not only does it not account for human factors, it gives you all the joys of a dictatorship.
That’s sort of my point, in order to function well a government system needs to be dynamic, imperfect and diverse. It has to mimic humanity in its complexity. Simple solutions are almost always wrong.
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Communism is not a monolithic party. By definition communism has no party:
“Communism (from Latin communis, ‘common, universal’)[1][2] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement,[1] whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need.[3][4][5] A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes,[1] and ultimately money[6] and the state (or nation state).”
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
Keep in mind that China has a single monolithic party and they claim to have the same style of government as the USA — a Republic.
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And no country that called its system communism was actually communism. Instead they were Marxism, highly modified communism that led to the problems the Soviet Union so aptly displayed.
That’s not to say I think communism would work, just that there’s not been any large scale experiment with it yet.
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The problem with all egalitarian systems is that they lack the means of stopping those with the desire for power from taking control of society.
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Looks like capitalism has utterly failed by that metric.
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This is just my opinion, but I think a system like communism can only work on a scale of a few hundred people at most. The reason for this is that for communism to be really, truly successful, it requires everyone living under that system to be participating voluntarily. Communism requires that you sacrifice personal enrichment, to an extent, for the good of the collective. I just don’t think you’re going to find a ton of people willing to do that on a large scale. And then there’s the matter of children – sure, you might be on board with the communist ideal, but that doesn’t mean your kids will be; without new voluntary participants (whether children or immigrants), your egalitarian collective is going to quickly collapse or go authoritarian when it starts having to force the kids to comply.
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Which was what I was told by an actual communist. He lived in a communist “commune” in Germany and everyone there agreed that as soon as you start to get bureaucracies and hierarchies communism breaks down, so they had a strict limits on how many could live in their commune.
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Marxism is the communism envisioned by Marx. AKA the guy who wrote The Communist Manifesto. Communism as a partyless system was Marxism.
The core modification every ‘communist’ state makes is enforcing the economic changes via state control. Because communist theory did not involve a state government, the communist manifesto didn’t properly distinguish between the public ownership of communism and government ownership. The resulting conflicts had resulted in Marx opining on misunderstandings of the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” in various later writings.
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You connect a lot of completely unrelated issues and try very hard to pretend doing so makes any sense.
Capitalism has raised the quality of life for literally everyone across the entire world by orders of magnitude. It is literally the only system that has ever helped the poor. It is the only system yet that handles corruption and greed.
No it isn’t perfect. As you mentioned no system is. Happy to discuss ideas for doing better but no one I’ve ever heard does this. They just jump back to socialism or communism which actually have the problems they love to blame capitalism for.
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Literally every billionaire in existence today is worth that much precisely because capitalism rewarded their unethical (and in some cases, illegal) exploitation of the working class with more wealth.
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Uhm, no? Capitalism is about the agglomeration of production-relevant resources in a class-separating manner. The “quality-of-life” raise is more about the class mobility enabled by mapping everything through money. As for “orders of magnitude”: a week has 168 hours, the theoretic maximum work week (notwithstanding the notorious “I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed” line from the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch).
A single order of magnitude down from that would mean 16.8 hours, and nobody’s fulltime work week has arrived at that count yet.
A lot of what is being sold as “quality of life improvement” is snake oil that doesn’t actually affect quality of life but rather cost of life. Selling toxic waste to the masses is not capitalism but consumerism.
Capitalism does exist, but not really as a political system. It pervades all systems (including national and international crime syndicates) to varying degrees.
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If you use a lot of regulation to stop capitalist abuses and provide a strong welfare state you can get benefits for everyone in society. You also need to tax the top earners at a very high tax rate, to prevent things like billionaires sucking up all the money and hoarding it.
What we have now is not that. Republicans have spent decades dismantling regulations, allowing companies and people to abuse the system, often with impunity. (cough Elon Musk cough) (See also: Polluting the environment and ignoring climate change.) They also kept cutting taxes on the top tax bracket. During the entire post-WWII boom period (1950 – 1973), the top rate was 70% – 91%. Then Reagan came along and cut the rate first to 50%, then later even lower in the upper 30s. Loopholes inserted into the tax laws by lobbyists for the rich insure they don’t pay anywhere near that either.
At the same time they were also cutting welfare programs. All this combined stagnated incomes for almost everyone but the top earners, made it damn near impossible to get out of poverty and become a productive financial contributor to society and wiped out a large portion of the middle class. And I didn’t even mention our fucked-up medical system that puts most Americans one medical crisis away from bankruptcy.
What you’re defending isn’t the system we have now, while the people responding to you are criticizing the current system. This makes you look out of touch at best, carrying water for billionaires at worst.
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Whatever system there is. There will always be a tiny crew walking on the living corpses of humanity.
If a system arose of simply give share. We wouldn’t need a pyramid sysyem.
Mahkind is incable of ruling itself.
Hence a spiritual force God. Send His Son Jesus. To rule with a rod of iron.
Mankind will never rule the earth again, when Jesus returns!
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And a system where billionaires can keep the overwhelming majority of the rest of the fucking world in permanent poverty—that’s better to you?
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You do realize that market forces and trade are responsible for a billion people in Asia rising out of poverty in the past 30 years, no? OTOH, Mao was responsible for millions of people starving to death. A few idiot billionaires is a tolerable symptom.
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No. That was actually heavily state-controlled “market forces” along with heavy State investment.
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Mao was also a Musk-esque idiot who believed in moving fast and breaking stuff without any forethought.
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Cases in point: Great Leap Forward, Four Pests Campaign. Lots of “it’s not the fault of my instructions, you just did not do it properly” blame-shifting. Actually, it does not just remind me of Musk but also of a certain politician no longer active in U.S. government.
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By fucking changing the definition of poverty, VALIS.
Also, sacrificing your people to the altar of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism means you’re going to die in a ditch in the middle of Bumfuckinstan, Valis, because your leaders were stupid enough to start a costly war THERE.
If tyou want to die like that, be my guest. I don’t, and you fucking bootlickers shouldn’t get to dictate how I want to live OR die.
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Oh fuck yes! Humiliate that Hyman wannabe! Do something drastic to him! I’m going to cum!
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What system put so many of them into poverty in the first place? What system saw people come from the other side of the world and conquer them and strip them of their natural resources, strip the people who lived there of their culture, of access to their land and impose systems on them that created chaos and famine so people can have cheap fruit, spice, tobacco or so settlers can collect rent from people whose ancestors lived there for thousands of years? Sure is great that capitalism helped people recover from problems created by whatever system could be responsible for such horrendous treatment of humans done for profit.
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That’s the point. There’s no denying that most systems have their positive aspects but this outcome should be a huge red flag.
I do like how social welfare systems work in Europe, particularly the northern part. But then again they do rely in exploitation of poorer nations elsewhere for resources in some portion. I’m not entirely sure what is feasible to solve the inequality issues other than heavy taxation of huge wealth.
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Permanent poverty is exactly what the USSR produced. I know that because that’s where my family is from. If you’re not part of what was called “nomenclature”, you’re screwed – a fridge, a TV, a wall carpet and an audio system is the limit of your possibilities.
The state had no interest in better resource allocation when they could do anything up to and including running your over with a tank to shut you up. The money went to all the military toys and garbage ideas. Capitalism is at least darvinistic – it might suck seeing something degrade, but it will be replaced because someone will have the ability to do so.
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Two things.
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Basically, again, what’s needed is balance, not simplicity of political one-liners.
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In terms of capitalism, this “extinction” will happen to the working class looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong before it ever hits the vulture class. Those rich motherfuckers can afford to hide from and ride out a societal collapse precisely because they’re the ones who would likely end up causing one. They won’t—can’t—hold out forever, but they’ll last a hell of a lot longer than a poor motherfucker like me.
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I meant products and businesses, not people.
People can find another job, that’s the point. If the one you’re doing is no longer producing something desired, yes, you get the boot. It’s likely not even going to be your fault. If you’re good, you’ll find another job, maybe even at a company that killed your previous one. Again, if you’re in USSR, you get your job security… but the customer gets garbage. That’s was the biggest problem – everyone’s got a job, most products are obsolete and of horrendous quality.
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Only if they can takes enough servants with them and along with their servants families, and provide for their needs. How many of them could keep their own support systems running by themselves?
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Of course not, but then that’s not the reality of it at all.
The only systems that have ever kept the entire rest of the population in permanent poverty are Socialism and Communism. Capitalism has literally raised the standard of living for all classes of society including the poorest. It is the only system that has ever helped the poor.
Having billionaires does not matter. They existing removes nothing from anyone else.
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Tell that to everyone who got evicted from their homes because they couldn’t afford to pay the rent. Tell that to every child in a family that can’t afford to consistently buy food.
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Indeed, what real world polities that labeled themselves communist thoroughly proved, as plenty of other polities have proven throughout history, is that authoritarian leaders are bad, and giving small groups of people sole input on dictating production and control of the output is bad.
None of that has any lessons that can apply to concentrating the economic production and distribution in the hands a a few capitalist oligarchs who also have heavy sway over the political apparatus, I’m sure.
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…like, say, an oligarch who has the ability to interfere in a foreign war (ostensibly on behalf of the side most people consider to be the instigator and agressor of that war) by telling one of his companies to shut off its service in a given area.
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Not where I was going, contextually, but exactly. No lessons.
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That’s also a government screw up on many levels.
One government failed to obtain a communication system for its military that would work should another hot stage of the existing war erupt. Something that was in the making for many months, years if one is to include the previous saber rattling.
Another government failed to secure a contract that would guarantee the donated system’s functioning as desired for strategic reasons. After all, SpaceX can’t enable its sats over a country that has not permitted it, and the problem is around a disputed for years territory.
The control over the situation was at the distance of a checkbook, and no adults were in the room to make a decision.
None of this absolves what Musk allegedly did, and i’d really like to know what the exact timeline of events was. In this quantum universe at least, the fact that the drone strike didn’t happen means that a good chance at preventing missile strikes from sea was lost.
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Never said it wasn’t. But when a single person can single-handedly alter a war between two countries—neither of which he resides in or works for—with a single decision involving one of the numerous companies he owns without needing to consult either of those two countries or the government of the country in which he lives, I would consider that to be a huge fucking problem.
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A problem made possible by so many people.
US space policy failed to develop an affordable launch vehicle > SpaceX did it because the basic tech for it was there for a few decades > US has the tech to transmit data using a phased array antenna > SpaceX made it practical and put it on its affordable launcher.
Again, it’s Darwinism. Somebody turned up with money and will and did something that was technically feasible but didn’t exist for politics, big money involvement and lack of vision reasons. Better yet, now that this happened, there’s other businesses doing the same and they will do what Musk failed to. A price was paid for this failure, but it’s not a permanent problem.
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How many irreplacable human lives were part of that price?
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We will never know. We don’t have a control group. We can count every missile launch and every victim, we don’t know what the alternative reality could be.
I know what this war is about, i hate it to my very core, i wish Musk didn’t do what he did, or someone else found another way of sinking the fleet.
The discussion initially was about competition and private ability to create it. AFAIK, the Ukrainians started to use other satcom terminals on their drones. By trying to take away, ultimately, the freedom to create competition, we would create a world where there’s no way to sidestep the decisions of a person in charge.
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And who do you think is taking away that freedom: a regular jackoff like me or a rich motherfucker like Elon Musk?
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Populist politicians with either a following of people high on social justice bitterness (well, that’s an upgrade from uneducated bums from a century ago with the desire to take away someone else’s property – though there’s some overlap with the crowd that thinks shop lifting is ethical), or a following of insecure little dictators with persecution complex.
Musk is very obviously the latter. Desires more fame, attracted to absolute power, needs constant ego stroking.
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Well if you keep advocating against the very system that allows that competition to exist then the answer here is both of you.
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When that competition is, quite literally, being paid to not fucking exist…
When billionaires have so much money they get to straight up buy regulation and competitors to simply ruin them…
When corporations build their continued fortunes on the suffering of others…
I’m starting to think Karl Marx had a point. A very violent one.
Re: Re: Re:10
I love when people who never saw the consequences of communism start simping for the worst of ways to implement the ideology.
Let me clue you in: somewhere within 2-3 decades after the start of the violent “take everything and divide it equally”, it would be almost mandatory to praise the wise leader of the country for providing something extremely mundane for a large engineering project. In USSR in the 30s-40s of the last century design bureau’s working on military planes were extremely happy to get a god damned flatbed truck for their needs. Probably will be something slightly different next time some poor country descends into this madness, however, whatever it’ll be, in a normal country it’ll be something you could rent or buy with ease.
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Re: Re: Re:11
It’s the same guy who thinks because the US and China exist he can’t fuck another guy in Singapore or something.
But sexual minorities would never express violent ideologies or inclinations, they’re clearly too wholesome for that!
Just flag and move on before he starts quoting Stephen Stone again.
Re: Re: Re:12
I’m flattered you hate me enough to see me like that.
But unfortunately, at least one century of colonialism has given the world the perfect capitalist dystopia known as Singapore.
The Cold War (and American meddling in Southeast Asia) has created a successful authcap regime that is often praised and learnt from.
China’s strongarming and rather warlike dynastic method of diplomacy has managed to force a region into doing its bidding at diplomatic gunpoint. Oh, and an actual physical one through its merchant marine and navy.
Oh, and the Republican Party and its backers managed to export their shitty Nazi ideology that has become entrenched in various countries. Africa, at least one Southeast asian country, and now in Europe.
And this hot mess is now bleeding back into the US where Democrats are basically simping for how the CCP controls the people.
Outside of lone wolves, I’m sure. The majority of the LGBT+ movement rarely expresses such sentiments.
Then again, Hyman, your lot loves to say how much they’re willing to murder us all in cold blood…
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Re: Re: Re:13
Your celebration of violence is duly noted. Fly that freak flag proud enby!
Re: Re: Re:13
For someone scared shitless of the PAP you seem to leave a lot of breadcrumbs behind that make you easy to pick on. I thought you were supposed to be so downtrodden you couldn’t express murderous desires or something.
Re: Re: Re:14
There are some risks you have to take, unfortuantely, if you want your voice to be heard.
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Re: Re: Re:15
Oh on that I agree.
If we don’t make the cishet white boys feel uncomfortable we’d never get anywhere.
Re: Re: Re:11
The only thing I agree with Marx is that violence is necessary to start the process of regime change.
I’ve been fucking educated on how communism, as practiced in the real world, was such a massive shitshow that even the adherents of communism went back to capitalism and its attendant shittiness.
I’m still waiting on how to legally enact regime change when the rich fund voter disenfranchisement, propaganda, junk science and regulatory capture and would very much love to keep the status quo.
BECAUSE THE CURRENT METHODS EITHER DON’T FUCKING WORK OR DO NOT WORK ON A SHORT ENOUGH TIMELINE TO UNFUCK EARTH.
Re: Re: Re:12
Here’s the thing: once the monopoly for violence is lost, it doesn’t stop just because some good soul wants it to. It stops only when the last violence controlling lord standing decides he no longer needs it. It might take a generational change of violence lovers to arrive to this point.
Re: Re: Re:13
And if it doesn’t, the problem eventually solves itself.
Yes, I’m misanthropic enough to consider the issue fixable via the extinction of the human race through man-made violence.
Still, there’s the issue of legally overthrowing the status quo without resorting to violence.
The current methods don’t work, since the rich have enough resources to fund disinfo, regulatory capture, straight up buy or alter regulations and law, and drag out lawsuits long enough to bankrupt their opponents.
And I have zero faith in any other methods you might suggeat, simply because they take too long and there’s the off-chance that it might not be adequate for the future.
Don’t forget, the status quo is ALWAYS going to meddle no matter what you do.
Re: Re: Re:14
I’d prefer misanthropes with power struggle issues and planetary scale panic to stay as far away from any future defining actions as possible.
Re: Re: Re:15
Fortunately, I don’t see the point of being a politician.
The status quo, however, is full of these “misanthropes with power struggle issues and planetary scale panic”.
You might know them as Democrats, Republicans, the people in charge of Koch Industries, News Corp, Chik-fil-a, Hobby Lobby, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon…
And they’re the knes who want this sad state of affairs to continue.
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Re: Re: Re:10
Let me have your babies. Express love in its purest form that only two men can ever understand! I’m sure if you believe in Pride Month hard enough we can arrange for a womb to appear in my anal cavity. We can call it a boipussy.
Re: Re: Re:11
Why was this Pride Month content censored?
Re: Re: Re:6
Not relevant. The price would have been much higher had a private individual not had the freedom to come in and do it. Because the government would never have had any reason to.
Re: Re:
Not sure how you got from “billionaires should not exist” to “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. Raising taxes on the immorally wealthy isn’t going to automatically create a one-party state.
Re: Re: Re:
There’s nothing immoral about being wealthy. At any degree.
Re: Re: Re:2
If your wealth comes at the expense of the working class’s livelihoods (and lives), your wealth is incredibly immoral.
Re: Re: Re:2 Red herring
Tax progression on wealthy people is not “punishment” for being wealthy, it is distributing load according to ability.
Taxes are not a moral tool but a socioeconomical one.
Re:
It was the headiest of times, it was the headlessiest of times.
Guillotines work! They’re a proven solution.
Re:
Don’t forget the corporate welfare handouts to ‘create jobs’. Musk has never said no to government money.
I was planning to read Isaacson’s book about computer history until I started seeing him in the news and realized he’s a fucking idiot.
Re:
A useful one, though, since he seemed to get the musk crew to freely admit to every detail of all of their dumb shit while high-fiving him.
The CEO then told him that some of the floors could not handle more than 500 pounds of pressure, so rolling a 2,000-pound server would cause damage. Musk replied that the servers had four wheels, so the pressure at any one point was only 500 pounds. “The dude is not very good at math,” Musk told the musketeers.
i’m sorry, who is it who doesn’t understand math now?
Re:
And each wheel touches trillions of floor molecules so the weight on each molecule is billionths of a gram. Checkmate stupid CEO!
Re:
Unless the floor is perfectly flat, the weight is often carried by only three casters, and for short periods only two. Sheeting a removable tile floor to allow racks to be moved is not an unusual requirement, as it avoids finding the cracked tile by breaking it.
Re: Re:
Also, even if all four wheels are touching, if they’re on a single tile that tile is experiencing the full 2000lbs of weight. So wheels or not, it can still damage the floor. Musk, of course, was too stupid to understand this and demonstrated his stupidity openly.
I’ll bet he did damage tiles and NTT’s still trying to get him to pay for the damage.
I’m sure that unscheduled power interruptions on your server would not at all corrupt a write-in-progress… /s
Re:
I propose that we start using the tag /X. Similarly to the /s tag to communicate intentional satire, we can use /X to communicate intentional, irrational, entitled, ego-driven stupidity.
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Cutting The Red Tape
It sounds like the original server setup was a Gordian Knot, designed to protect someone’s job security. A move was supposed to take years, and cost tens of millions of dollars to perform. And then Alexander the Great came along and just sliced the knot in half with his sword.
This is how NASA spent a gazillion dollars over forty years, and lost the capability to send manned missions up to the ISS, while Space-X surpassed them.
Re:
Clearly you haven’t worked at a company with a big tech stack. Complexity creeps in unintentionally and is extremely hard to manage. Granted, Twitter probably had a bloated workforce with more tech debt than they should but you need some proof to assume malice.
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Yes, that’s exactly what someone who doesn’t understand anything about servers would think.
Re:
Not quite, this is closer to one of those wine bottle puzzles.
Musk did the equivalent of ‘solving’ the puzzle by just smashing the bottle over a bucket… yes, most of the wine still ends up in the bucket, but splatters of it don’t and now there’s glass everywhere.
Re:
And I quote from the article:
Doing something without care for the consequences of those actions is borderline sociopathic. This story doesn’t make Elon look like a conquering king—it makes him look like the dean of Dunning-Krueger University.
Re: Re:
Or Steve Urkel.
Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX are his Winslows. Enter Elon Musk, to set up something comically calamitous. Comical calamity ensues. Musk says “Did I do that?” and you have a sitcom that can keep going forever.
Re: Re: Re:
That’s an insult to Steve Urkel. You take that back.
Re:
Except after Alexander cut this knot, the ox cart kept dumping goods on the road, because the knot kept the whole handmade ox cart together. Alexander got the cart from his neighbor, whose land he was now managing. The old man, rather than build a new cart, had been patching the old one together just enough while making more and more runs to market. But Alexander didn’t understand what the knot did, and while the old man told him the knot was important, rather than traace the knot and understand everything it tied together, Alexander just cut the knot.
It doesn’t matter that it was built poorly. The backend Musk had is the backend Musk bought. Musk deciding he had a better backend because he said so doesn’t change that doing what he did caused problems which were not going to help retain users and advertisers, which he desperately needs.
I will remind you again, Twitter made money before Musk. Its not the fault of old management that Musk is bad at basic math.
Re:
Truly a genius move, to ignore all rules about handling sensitive data.
Re: Re:
And the consent degree!
And BUILDING SAFETY CODES.
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Well, there was the real problem that you do not put discs full of sensitive data into a truck for transport. Duplicating critical and sensitive data over a network, and then wiping the discs before moving the servers takes time, especially if you want to avoid data loss, or resurrecting deleted data, and have the option of bringing the server back up if switching it off causes issues. Never mind the minor issue of setting up address ranges in the destination center, and configuring switches and load balancers etc. for the new servers.
Musks approach was like throwing the contents of a china shop into a truck without proper packing, and seeing how much was broken at the end of the journey.
Re:
You really are the dumbest morherfucker here bro. And that’s saying something, what with the calibre of your competition.
Re:
I’m constantly impressed. There’s a few subjects on which you’re clearly uninformed and have baseless opinions that look idiotic to anyone working in the field. Yet, bam!, out of nowhere you reveal another subject you think you know yet express that you know nothing.
Is there a field in which you have any expertise?
Re: Re:
He’s a pro at being a moron.
… I can only say that that I hope his stupidness catches up with him and it doesn’t result in the serious injury or death of anyone but him.
Because this kind of behavior will get him or others hurt. Simply a matter of when.
I’m just glad he doesn’t have anything to do with food production and distribution… he doesn’t, right? (‘X’ is the character you put on bottles containing some kind of poison isn’t it?)
'Bad stuff is never my fault, only good stuff!'
“In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake,” Musk would admit in March 2023. “I was told we had redundancy across our data centers. What I wasn’t told was that we had 70,000 hard-coded references to Sacramento. And there’s still shit that’s broken because of it.”
How very in character that even in his ‘my bad’ Mr. You’re-making-my-brain-hurt tries to shift the blame to anyone but him. He didn’t make a mistake because he’s a blithering idiot who’s not even close to as smart as he thinks he is, if he made a mistake it’s because other people didn’t tell him just how stupid his idea of yanking cords out of servers was. That they tried to and he ignored them was of course on them.
Same man builds rockets...
… let that thought sink in.
Re:
Well, he pays others to build rockets. Spaces have learnt how to protect themselves from the man with the money, as have Tesla, which is probably why he is having fun destroying X, nobody there has figured out how to protect the company from the man with the money.
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Yes, we know.
He builds rockets, and he’s not afraid of the feds.
The same Feds who are paying him to build those fucking rockets.
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The people who financed Musk are probably wondering how to attach a garbage disposer to that sink.
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Technically, he doesn’t. By all accounts, Musk is the “idea guy” in SpaceX and doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with the engineering process. There are actual geniuses responsible for that.
Re: Re:
Also turns out that a lot of the innovative engineering SpaceX is responsible for is playing catch-up by 15-20 years. SpaceX engineers are picking up and finishing the work paused for about a decade and a half after the Cold War ended and the aerospace industry had contracted.
The commercialization of space enabled under presidents Bush and Obama allowed for SpaceX to seek financing outside of the space/military industrial complex sandbox.
Re:
Fortunately, Musk doesn’t build a damn thing, and reports are that the actual SpaceX engineers have apparently become quite adept at keeping him away from the real work while it’s performed by competent professionals.
Chesterton's fence
G. K. Chesterton wrote that in 1929. Ninety-plus years later, Musk hasn’t learned the lesson.
Re:
Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft are the world’s costliest natural experiments in Chesterton’s fence.
Secure?
I don’t care who you are, if the data center allows you in and you are not on the list of authorized personnel, it’s not secure.
Re:
Yeah, every external datacentre I’ve ever been to in the last, say, 15 years (my current role doesn’t allow me to go in person as I’m too far away, but I used to be in one at least once a week) won’t even let you in if you haven’t made a prior appointment. In emergencies I had to let them know that I was going ahead of me leaving, and then go through ID checks, etc. We’d regularly have problems when a supplier sent a different engineer on the day than the one that we were told to expect.
If they’re just letting whoever turns up go into the DC, that seems problematic even if they have adequate individual security on the racks themselves.
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Mike Masnick Malding Again
Elon rightly smelled bullshit that was being sent his way from useless box tickers and grifters. Mike is just salty that Elon doesn’t cuck to the bureaucracy.
500lbs is as much as 2 fat men, if the floor of your data center collapses from fat men, then you have other problems with your building.
Also all the “data privacy” is also bullshit, because the drives are literally encrypted unplugged, just more fear mongering.
$200/hr moving company is literally paying the going rate for an attorney, for a dude that is moving stuff into a truck, it certainly didn’t take him going to law school to figure out.
Re:
It’s 2000lbs, on a single panel. You and mush both do not comprehend basic physics. Hint, having multiple points touch the ground does not reduce the total weight of an object.
Direct physical access to something means infinite time to bypass encryption. Also, there is thing thing called the law, and rules and regulations.
Yes, the low rate of a single attorney is around $200 an hour. I would love to laugh my face off watching him defend himself against all his lawsuits for the the cheapest attorney he can find.
Hint, moving equipment worth tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars that is highly sensitive by using the cheapest person you found on facebook marketplace is a bad idea.
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Elon Musk is truly the gift that keeps on giving to TechDirt.
Dude unplugs a power cord and Mike writes 2,000+ frothy words about it. Lol!
Re:
Using the “describe bad things in generic terms to make them sound not so bad” tactic won’t work here, you sweet summer child.
Re: Re:
My favorite:
So, apparently, it’s now illegal for Jeffrey Dahmer to make himself dinner.
Re: Re: Re:
He was diappointed when after Coronavirus came around, the CDC said handshakes were unsafe.
Re: Re: Re:
There was one thread about this on the liberal blog Lawyers, Guns and Money where people were coming up with their own stooging riffs.
I saw: Ted Bundy says, “so now it’s illegal to ask for directions.”
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Did you get sad because the 50+ words exceeded your reading comprehension?
Don’t be, I’m sure there is a picture book somewhere than can make you happy again.
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Re:
Imagine still being straight white and male in 2023
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Re: Re:
Can’t! I’m a neurodivergent, nonheterosexual, noncisgender, plus-sized, BIPOC troon!!
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Re: Re: Re:
Then you should have no problems with making fun of straight white trash. Like you!
So, next time you get a new boss, first get a really good babysitter, to, you know, drip-feed the boss.
Cowboy transporting happens
In my early days at a company, we moved our HQ to another city about 30 minutes away.
I was tasked (by the IT Director) with transporting one of our servers (the one with the company’s product source code on it) between the old and new office.
After it was unracked, I loaded it into my ’97 Corolla and drove it up to the new HQ, unloaded it, and placed it in the new rack. This was ~2010.
I’m not an IT admin (though I have homelab experience), I’m just a software engineer that worked with that source code.
It was risk sure, but it was also just our company’s data (and not all of it). No customer info was on that server.
Re:
ObXCKD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
I’m pretty sure that well into the 2010s I was mirroring the RAID arrays on servers, boxing them up and FedExing them across the country because ‘server on on airplane’ had much higher bandwidth than our network connections. There was at least once that I wound up driving a rented minivan with a couple of RAID arrays in the back.
(Everything encrypted, and the originals not taken down until the mirrors were synced and verified. I’m not entirely senile just yet.)
This is what stands out to me among all the stupidity. Running a datacentre requires a lot of infrastructure where you have to make considerations as to redundancy, capacity, security, weight, etc. No datacentre will have 100% availability unless you’re running at 100% capacity, because these things take a lot of money to have in place if they’re not used. If you’re changing the way the datacentre is used, then the infrastructure also has to be changed, and that’s not always a simply as just adding something.
I can understand an egotistical bully like Musk to not care about such things and that he’s probably used to just shouting at people until they half-kill themselves trying to achieve things where such effort isn’t necessary with proper foresight and planning.
But, this so called genius is so confused by the basic operations of a datacentre that it makes his head hurt? He doesn’t understand that rack space is not the only thing involved with running a server? Wow.
By the way, for those who complain about the general move to “the cloud”, this is one of the reasons why things are going that way. If you need to expand or change things then you don’t have to fight with clueless management who refuse to authorise clearly required equipment and funding, while they can go and scream at Amazon or Microsoft if there’s an outage.
Choices: Right or Wrong
This article mentions a really interesting topic–just because you chose to do something a certain way and it worked doesn’t mean you made the right choice. And it’s the same the other way, if it went horribly wrong doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. How often are folks hugely celebrated for making the wrong choice or seriously condemned for making the right choice?
Re:
We’re still arguing about whether dropping nukes on Imperial japan was the right call or not.
And we have a ton of contextual information from American AND Japanese sources about the event, before the event and AFTER the event.
I have heard about chaos monkey engineering before, and netflix famously has a digital chaos monkey that randomly takes out servers, but I’ve never heard of a tech company with a literal chaos monkey in charge. In a mad way I guess it makes an organization more resilient and able to change.
Anyway, props to the ex-twitter employees that built a system robust enough to tolerate something like that without going down for good.
Hello, this is the Lock Picking Lawyer, and what I have for you today is….and it’s open.
Just saw this in the Guardian and the excerpt gives an idea of the “unique” knowledge he has:
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Awesome
All this stuff makes Elon sound awesome.
Re:
…said no mentally competent human, ever.
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What's obvious
Reading this article what’s obvious is you’ve never owned a company or had to make a payroll. Sometimes as an owner you have to just get shit done. When people tell you know you show them when there is will there is a way. Dude basically said if you can’t I will show you how to get it done.
Losing $ is not fun. Those servers were bleeding the company. Blood was draining too quickly and needed to be staunched. Problem solved.
Re:
Wrong on both accounts. Not only do I own a company and have to make payroll, but I’ve also moved my company’s servers from one data center to another.
Yes, you do. But as even Elon admits, this was not the proper way to “get shit done.” This was a ridiculous stupid way to get shit done that threatened the stability of the entire company.
Wrong. Those servers cost about $10 million a month. The company is still making somewhere in the range of $200 million a month. It was 5% of revenue. So, yes, if you want to save money, there are ways to come up with a plan to reduce the cost or shut down the data center properly.
I don’t think his 90 day demand was even that unreasonable. But walking into the data center, ripping out cables, and throwing the servers full of sensitive data on a truck, while destabilizing the rest of the company… is not a money saving tactic.
Two kinds of workers
From my 40 years of experience designing, building and operation 500 million dollar process and power plants globally, there are two types of employees. Those who tend to find reasons why something can’t be done and those who tell you how it can be done. We established a rule at the kick off meeting on every project. You cannot bring a “problem” to the table without also bringing solutions. No whining or complaining.
Re:
I’ve seen very, very, very stupid bosses say something like this, and it’s always for companies that are going to fail.
If you don’t let people highlight problems unless they have a solution, you get people hiding problems until it’s too late. If someone sees a problem, they should speak up, and let the team work on ways to mitigate it. Saying that you can’t present a problem without also presenting the solution is a very stupid way of managing. It’s managing for fear and failure.
Re: I don't need to know how to fix a car to know when one's broken
Problem: Elon is a physical manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Solution: Keep Elon distracted by shiny or otherwise attention grabbing things and away from anything valuable and/or with the capacity to cause damage, whether that be leadership positions, hardware or software.
Re: Two kinds of workers
Absolutely correct.
Everyone here is ignoring the fact that the naysayers were wrong. They claimed you couldn’t unplug servers (wrong). They claimed the floor couldn’t be opened (wrong). They claimed they couldn’t be moved (wrong). They claimed it was unsecure (who is going to stop a semi, remove a server rack, stand it up, boot it, crack the passwords/clone disks, and steal data? Even assuming you have a complete RAID. Please.) It ended up causing a whole day of downtime? Oh noes. One day of downtime is better than the years of complaining, discussions, useless meetings, and people acting as obstacles to getting anything done.
Everyone here disagreeing with this is an over-trained under-competent button-pusher who can’t do anything without three different departments signing off on it, taking a course, and getting certified. It’s because of people like this we’ve never been back to the moon.
Re: Re:
No. People here (unlike you) recognize that just because you do something risky that doesn’t lead to complete failure, it does not mean it was the correct decision. If 99 times out of 100 you’re going to die jumping off a bridge, the one time you survive does not mean you were “right” that it was safe.
Most people understand that. You do not.
No. Elon himself admitted it resulted in MONTHS of instability, including multiple days of downtime, and embarrassing situations like the collapsed DeSantis launch party.
Lol. No. We’re just people who understand probabilities and risk and decision making, who can separate out the difference between the riskiness of doing something from the outcome of that decision.
Re: Re:
“Everyone here is ignoring the fact that the naysayers were wrong”
No, they weren’t. They said that it wasn’t possible to do the work in the timescale given without overworking people, taking massive shortcuts and major gambles. Which they were correct about.
Just because the gamble happened that time does not mean it’s the right thing to do. Ignoring the fact that you’re very wrong about the downtime (it was way more than a day of instability and embarrassing outages, just not as immediate as someone unfamiliar with DC operations would recognise), this isn’t a guaranteed win. He bet 00 on the roulette wheel and came out on top, that doesn’t mean it’s a good betting strategy next time you’re in Vegas.
Re: Re: I had experience in something similar...
I been in both sides of this stories. And I understand (in some scenarios) both of them.
A big company in Miami, a friend called me to help him to take decisions on how to move some servers. The dev and intra ppl quoted incredible absurd costs, including a 6k truck rental (for one day). an equipment rental to “properly” move the servers for like another 6k. and the moving would take months, having the infra spitted between the two sites. incrementing the building rental to 30k (having rental duplicated during the time).
Plus the after hours costs etc etc.
The moving was 5 blocks. The internet fiber still on same node (or one or two different, but still can assign the same IP). I called the ISP. I escalated the call and they agree to move the IPs to the new site at specific time.
My friend, couple of other friends and I we removed the switches, servers and took apart the two racks, put everything in Uhaul trailer (30 U$ a day rental). Loaded and unloaded at the new location. That was on a sunday. Saturday I did full image of all servers (we bough a Synology), labeled and removed all the HDD from the servers. Disks where transported in a car all padded in several bags. Then we put everything back together. ISP failed to do the IP swap at the arranged time, of course (att) but it was 2 hours latter.
Everything worked. It took us probably 12 hours, 5 ppl. (with food breaks).
What I mean is, I can relate to Elon, in a sort of the same scenario.
This went down from almost 80k and 2 months, to 12 hours. and 1k (plus 8k, since my friend give each of us 2k and a free dinner in a very fancy place).
Happily my story does not have any issues in a short or long therm. A year latter, all servers were moved to cloud services.
Re:
Yeah, I worked in those environments as well. Usually, they were the ones who would refuse cost of living raises for staff and sorely needed hardware upgrades, while somehow always finding money for sales commissions and CEO bonuses.
They’re always the ones I’d not trust for a second if anyone needs to use them, and I’d not dare do an audit of the risks associated with the shortcuts taken to deliver. Quite often, the guys saying “it can’t be done” are saying “it can’t be done safely, or even legally, at the proposed budget levels or timescales”, not that it’s physically impossible.
That’s my experience in I.T. anyway, I hope you’re not doing the same thing with power plants.
“Dude”‘s day beats your year.
Re:
I dunno. I haven’t destroyed $30 billion in value in just a few months like he has. I think that makes my year a bit better than his.
Basic physics, and economics
Just one of the many astounding aspects of thia story is his argument regarding the floor and point loads. We tend to forget (and maybe he did too) that he claims to have a degree in Physics and Economics!
Understanding point loads and capacity/deflection ratings is a matter of basic physics; it’s not “rocket science”. Mind you rocket science is basic physics too.
Then again, his application of the economics portion of his degree seems have gone for nought as it applies to X/Twitter.
Re:
It’s been fairly well documented that at SpaceX they have people who distract Musk with shiny things so that the actual engineers can do the real work.
With Twitter, we’re just seeing what happens when he manages to get rid of the people who know what they’re doing up front, and nobody who kept their job dares to get between him and the product.
It’s September of 2023, and now you’ve learned the lesson that Elon Musk is a dangerous maniac whose products are inherently untrustworthy? Not after the reports of privacy violations, not after the cars caught fire, not after the autopilot caused crashes, not after the recalls of hundreds of thousands of cars, not after the racism at Tesla plants?
With due respect, as a tech journalist, why were you assigned this article to write? An author of an article should be able to put the subject they’re covering into context and not just come to the party late, going “Wow, this Elon Musk guy’s pretty bad, huh? Anyone else seeing this?”
The book sucks, too. Not because it’s complaining about Musk, but because Mr. Isaacson clearly sat on the kind of thing you whistleblow to the FCC about until he could secure a book deal to cash in on it. There’s a distinct pattern of people turning “being a witness to a crime” into a payday instead of doing anything resembling attempting to secure justice, and it belies such a cravenness about the purpose of such information. He had a chance to, y’know, help address the crime he witnessed, and he decided to write a book instead.
Maybe if we had listened to the people who were warning about him years ago and promoted their voices, especially the ones calling out the discrimination — discrimination is just seeing what you can get away with against acceptable targets, usually before moving on to everyone else — he would never have been in a position to unplug the server racks in the first place. But no, it’s better to profit off the chaos. And that includes TechDirt.
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No. We’ve been reporting deeply on him for years. That does not mean we should not cover the latest details.
Because it’s my fucking site and I decide what I want to write about.
Yeah, that’s me. “Late” to the Elon Musk party. (Do some fucking research on my reporting).
I wrote about this story because of the specifics in that we did not know before, which go beyond what we already knew, and which are a VERY illustrative story about how Musk operates.
We didn’t just say “anyone else seeing this?” We’ve been reporting on Musk’s craziness for YEARS. Way before others did. And, as such, we’re going to keep doing that. I’m sorry you, a rando who clearly has never read our writing doesn’t approve, but, really, I don’t give a shit.
Like us? The people you’re mad at?
Lol. Fuck off you ignorant jackass.
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Such as, say, writing a book about it so everyone knows about the crime?
If you dont have conviction for your bad ideas, you wont have any for your good ones either.
People thinking musk is dumb are just shortsighted. His whole playbook is basically “try dumb things to see if it works”. Starting an electric car company is dumb. A rocket company is even dumber. Yet hes so sucessful is because some dumb ideas are actually genius in hindsight. And you dont know unless you try