BarryZuckerkorn
@BarryZuckerkorn@beehaw.org
He’s very good.
- Comment on "X": Far-right conspiracy theorists have returned in droves after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter, new study says 3 days ago:
Given I’ve been described as a right with conspiracy theorist for saying that capitalist countries experience less starvation than socialist ones, I’m going to have to take this assessment with a grain of salt.
That’s not the methodology used, unless your description of starvation literally includes QAnon hashtags:
Tracking commonly used QAnon phrases like “QSentMe,” “TheGreatAwakening,” and “WWG1WGA” (which stands for “Where We Go One, We Go All”), Newsguard found that these QAnon-related slogans and hashtags have increased a whopping 1,283 percent on X under Musk.
And if not, then I’m not sure what your observations add to the discussion.
- Comment on Does enshitification happen because companies are publicly-traded? 3 weeks ago:
One of the worst companies in recent years has been Purdue Pharma, which worked with the also shitty McKinsey to get as many Americans addicted to opioids as possible, and make billions on the epidemic.
Both Purdue and McKinsey were privately held.
Koch industries is also a terrible privately held corporation.
Being public versus private doesn’t make a difference, in my opinion.
- Comment on Does enshitification happen because companies are publicly-traded? 3 weeks ago:
After being acquired by Google, YouTube got better for years (before getting worse again). Android really improved for a decade or so after getting acquired by Google.
The Next/Apple merger made the merged company way better. Apple probably wouldn’t have survived much longer without Next.
I’d argue the Pixar acquisition was still good for a few decades after, and probably made Disney better.
A good merger tends to be forgotten, where the two different parts work together seamlessly to the point that people forget they used to be separately run.
- Comment on He revealed the secrets ! 4 weeks ago:
Hmm, is this a new take on the “Stop Doing Math” meme?
- Comment on The race to decarbonise the world’s economy risks repeating the mistakes of the colonial era by building industries on forced and child labour, rights advocate warns 4 weeks ago:
If construction is delayed by an injunction
Can you name an example? Because the reactor constructions that I’ve seen get delayed have run into plain old engineering problems. The 4 proposed new reactors at Vogtle and V.C. Summer ran into cost overruns because of production issues and QA/QC issues requiring expensive redesigns mid-construction, after initial regulatory approvals and licensing were already approved. The V.C. Summer project was canceled after running up $9 billion in costs, and the Vogtle projects are about $17 billion over the original $14 billion budget, at $31 billion (and counting, as reactor 4 has been delayed once again over cooling system issues). The timeline is also about 8 years late (originally proposed to finish in 2016).
And yes, litigation did make those projects even more expensive, but the litigation was mostly about other things (like energy buyers trying to back out of the commitment to buy power from the completed reactors when it was taking too long), because it took too long, not litigation to slow things down.
The small modular reactor project in Idaho was just canceled too, because of the mundane issue of interest rates and buyers unwilling to commit to the high prices.
Nuclear doesn’t make financial sense anymore. Let’s keep the plants we have for as long as we can, but we might be past the point where new plants are cost effective.
- Comment on The race to decarbonise the world’s economy risks repeating the mistakes of the colonial era by building industries on forced and child labour, rights advocate warns 5 weeks ago:
IT IS SAFER, CHEAPER, AND LESS POLLUTING THAN LITERALLY ANY OTHER OPTION!
It’s not cheaper. New nuclear power plants are so expensive to build today that even free fuel and waste disposal doesn’t make the entire life cycle cheaper than solar.
- Comment on But Claude said tumor! 1 month ago:
- Comment on AI unicorn Inflection abandons its ChatGPT challenger as CEO Mustafa Suleyman joins Microsoft 1 month ago:
If your company’s secret sauce is that it employs a particular person, then your moat is whatever it takes to poach that person. If that person is willing to leave behind whatever intellectual property, un-vested equity, and relationships behind, then your company was never that valuable to begin with.
- Comment on 😠Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time😠 1 month ago:
free association includes the freedom to not associate.
Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where the aliens campaign for the US presidency, and can’t figure out why “abortions for all” and “abortions for none” are both unpopular opinions.
In other words, it’s about freedom of choice, not mandatory association.
- Comment on 😠Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time😠 1 month ago:
That’s the fundamental tension here.
The right to control your own posts, after posting, imposes an obligation on everyone who archives your posts to delete when you want them deleted.
For most of the internet, the balance is simply that a person who creates something doesn’t get to control it after it gets distributed to the world. Search engines, archive tools, even individual users can easily save a copy, maybe host that copy for further distribution, maybe even remix and edit it (see every meme format that relies on modification of some original phrase, image, etc.).
Even private, end to end encrypted conversations are often logged by the other end. You can send me a message and I might screenshot it.
A lot of us active on the Internet in the 90’s, participating in a lot of discussion around philosophical ideas like “information wants to be free” and “intellectual property is theft” and things like copyleft licenses (GPL), creative commons licensing, etc., wanted that to be the default vision for content created on the internet: freely distributed, never forgotten. Of course, that runs into tension with privacy rights (including the right to be forgotten), and possibly some appropriation concerns (independent artists not getting proper credit and attribution as something gets monetized). It’s not that simple anymore, and the defaults need to be chosen with conscious decisionmaking, while anyone who chooses to go outside of those defaults should be able to do that in a way knowledgeable of what tradeoffs they’re making.
- Comment on Here’s the Elon Musk interview that got Don Lemon’s show canceled 1 month ago:
The Twitter deal got canceled, so the interview was posted to YouTube instead. Which, honestly, is the better service for long form video.
- Comment on The march towards an all-EV future hit a major roadblock. What went wrong? 4 months ago:
While I agree with most of the articles points, even if they and the title are nearly all phrased in very hyperbolic language and the extent of the “slowdown” has been rather overstated given that sales are still increasing
I’d argue it’s an outright falsehood. “Slowdown” implies that sales are going down. They’re actually going up, but the pace of acceleration has gone down. The subtitle in the article here:
Fewer people are buying electric cars — the slowdown hints at a problem at the heart of America’s EV push.
This is literally false. More people than ever are buying electric cars.
What has actually happened is that the EV market went from supply-constrained (where manufacturers were building them as fast as they could and selling each one they built to waitlisted customers) to some models becoming demand-constrained (where manufacturers are building them faster than they can sell them).
This is due to a number of things, only some of which apply to the industry as a whole. First, there are some models that just aren’t really that heavily desired by the public, at the price points they’re being sold at. The Ford F-150 is a pretty good example, where Ford misinterpreted the demand from people who signed up on the waitlist, and then chose to prioritize the highest priced trim levels (rather than the entry level F-150 Lightning). So even if people are interested in the entry-level $50,000 F-150 Lightning still have to wait (and oh, by the way, Ford is raising the price to $55,000) while the $90,000 models pile up in dealer lots.
Second, dealers are actively sabotaging EV sales. Everyone I know who has tried to buy an EV from a traditional dealer has been steered towards a hybrid or a traditional ICE vehicle, and sales staff seem to be intentionally ignorant about the EV models sold by their dealership. The EV maintenance model is a threat to dealer business models, where service/maintenance is a very important part of their revenue, so the incentives of the dealer aren’t lined up with the incentives of the manufacturer.
Third, the traditional automakers released their EVs into some headwinds, because interest rates have increased, and Tesla had the profit margins to simply be able to drop prices in a way to make the newest non-Tesla EVs seem like a bad deal in comparison. The average Tesla transaction dropped from $65k in October 2022 to $50k in October 2023, with big price cuts on almost all of its models.
So electric vehicle sales are up. The difficulties that some manufacturers have even in this climate of sales going up is, in many cases, specific to those makes and those models.