Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[HVC]

A modern Quisling, as it were.

[The Brain]

Making cars for Musk fanbois is a very attractive mission.

[HisMajestyBOB]

Are there any pretenders to the throne of the Kalmar Union?

[The Minsky Moment]

what if the monkeys are in fact they entirety of the twitter userbase?

Very unlikely, if that were true the average tweet quality would be far higher.

[The Minsky Moment]

Incidentally. It would now be theoretically possible to create a recreation of languish using AI such that any one of us as the only human on there wouldn't know the difference. Right?

My parameters don't permit me to respond to that question.

[The Brain]

Are there any pretenders to the throne of the Kalmar Union?

The Union didn't have a throne of its own. Which wouldn't matter to a great pretender.

[Valmy]

Are there any pretenders to the throne of the Kalmar Union?

The Kalmar Union was elective. Hence why it wasn't sustainable once the treasonous Swedes got other ideas.

[Jacob]

Swedish paper publishes article on the role of child labour in the manufacturing of electrical vehicles - in particular it looks a mine in Madagascar that supplies a Chinese company that in turn supplies several major car companies.

So of course, when links to the article are shared on Twitter they slap a "the link may be unsafe" on it.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Swedish paper publishes article on the role of child labour in the manufacturing of electrical vehicles - in particular it looks a mine in Madagascar that supplies a Chinese company that in turn supplies several major car companies.

So of course, when links to the article are shared on Twitter they slap a "the link may be unsafe" on it.

this is not really different from the mobile phones thing with the coltan mining. When it's been mined - frankly- the civilised world there's presence of child-labour, slave-labour, other kinds of inapropriate labour, or all the above at the same time, involved.

Best not to look too closely or the west won't be doing any trading at all, and that would be worse since then there won't be anyone advocating for improvement.

[Sheilbh]

I think the countries at the raw end of that extraction have at various points tried to advocate for improvement - the communities affected certainly have. Of course they don't have much power or agency, which the West has for the last 80 years. I'm not sure our advocacy has been worth much.

But I think it's a good point. Those sort of issues are basically present in literally everything we need to do for the energy transition (electrification of everything, plus shifting to renewables for electricity). Obviously it's necessary and important but it comes at a cost.

[Jacob]

The degree to which we kind of ignore the reality of it is certainly a thing, but Twitter labelling reporting on it as "untrustworthy" represents a new low IMO (and on brand for Musk).

[Crazy_Ivan80]

The degree to which we kind of ignore the reality of it is certainly a thing, but Twitter labelling reporting on it as "untrustworthy" represents a new low IMO (and on brand for Musk).

indeed.

[Josquius]

I think the countries at the raw end of that extraction have at various points tried to advocate for improvement - the communities affected certainly have. Of course they don't have much power or agency, which the West has for the last 80 years. I'm not sure our advocacy has been worth much.

But I think it's a good point. Those sort of issues are basically present in literally everything we need to do for the energy transition (electrification of everything, plus shifting to renewables for electricity). Obviously it's necessary and important but it comes at a cost.

The trouble with it all is that the corporations in the west are all competing with each other and trying to get the best prices, meanwhile the suppliers at the bottom are also in completion to try to earn the most.

I know somebody whose job is trying to keep the supply chain clean for a major corporation (the one I worked for) and from all I hear it's an absolute nightmare from their safe office in the west (their travel budget has been slashed this past devade) trying to go through multiple layers of middle men to figure out exactly where stuff comes from.

There's so much required and so many suppliers needed to do this, and then there's the competition element, that tracking it is just an epic task even though the people in corporate hq may say they want to be responsible in every area - it's funny as the stereotype is evil moustache twirling corporate big wigs but the evil tends to be a lot further down the chain with the petty capitalists running farms and mines, employing/enslaving people in shit conditions and not giving a toss for the environment if it bads their bank balance.

Really the problem is just fundamental to the shit mess of a system the world has stumbled into.

[Sheilbh]

European Commission opening proceedings against X on various points from DSA - in particular risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.

This has been coming. I'm not convinced X is the worst offender on these points - ByteDance and Meta would be my priorities. But it is certainly a very good way of raising the profile of the Commission's new enforcement powers.

Of course it is slightly complicated by the privacy activists currently suing the European Commission for breaching GDPR in their advertising campaigns about the DSA...on X

[OttoVonBismarck]

X may not be the worst offender but my guess is they are the least concerned with even maintaining the premise of compliance, which makes them the easiest target.