For the scope of WebEx and Zoom, it’s… fine… mostly. I mean I hate that I can’t really full screen a remote screen share, so it could be better, but broadly speaking, video, audio, and screen sharing is fine. Not coincidentally, this is pretty much the only standalone stuff Teams bothered to uniquely implement, most everything else is built upon sharepoint…

It starts getting annoying for chat platform. You want to scroll back, it’s going to be painfully slow. You participate in cross-company conversations, oh boy you get to deal with the worst implementation of instancing to keep your activity segregated I have seen. Broadly speaking it just scales poorly at managing the sorts of conversations you have at a larger company. If your conversations are largely “forget it after a few hours”, you may be fine.

Then you get into what these platforms have been doing for ages, Lotus Notes and Sharepoint suggesting companies build workflows on top of their platform. Now the real pain and suffering begins.

His first term was pretty milquetoast during his term, at least in the ways that these stakeholders cared about. Yeah, he mucked with some trade relationships but largely backed down except for China, and China is a thorn in their side too. The economy basically looked similar to most presidential terms for the last 30 years (except for George W Bush, who had very subpar economic results). Yeah he did some horrible stuff and some incompetent stuff, but economically, his term was just fine (except for 2020, which derailed everyone).

The 2020 election, January 6th, and Trump’s continuing behavior in the wake of that, and the PJ2025 associates that swarmed around him should have been the sign that he was too dangerous to risk. However they could have still thought that Trump’s behavior was more of a show for riling up a base, and his second term would still give them a chance to have him shuffle off to a golf course while the big boys got what they wanted like usual.

This term, there just are no winners, at least domestically, and lots of losers.

People only like authoritarian when they get to be the authority. So these folks that are getting financially screwed also have no reason to believe they would get power in exchange.

It’s basically seeming like a bum deal all around.

Pricing of homes in food deserts has pretty much zero impact on the housing that could actually help low-income individuals.

The housing situation and relative benefits (and lack therof) to house residents in rural areas is just fundamentally distinct from the urban situation.

Especially now, selling a Model 3 to get something cheaper is going to be in “car is probably falling apart” territory. Those things are relatively cheap on the used car market now, less than you’d expect a random 2020 sedan to cost.

There’s a used car lot across the street from my neighborhood with like 3 or 4 Model 3s under $16k.

The Model 3 has been around long enough and priced low enough for it to be in the realm of “boring option of a car”, no more a status symbol than a Toyota Camry.

This is something I find baffling.

In my city, it’s generally a hotspot with dramatically increasing real estate costs and high occupancy, generally.

Except this one road, which has all sorts of vacant retail, with different owners, with thriving retail and/or residential pretty much everywhere around it. Even the gas stations are 50c a gallon cheaper there then going a mile north or south of it. I have no idea why that one road is different and looking like a dying city while being surrounded by exactly the opposite.

Having a home is not useful if living it in means you can’t feed yourself. You can find owned, unoccupied housing that’s been on the market over a year. The owners don’t want it, but no buyers want it either. If you freely gave a homeless man one of those houses without any further aid, he’d probably abandon it because he’d have to be within reasonable distance of a city to actually be able to survive.

Based on my experience, you managed to described like every rural estate situation I’ve ever seen. Household living in a trailer towed onto their parents land. That household probably doing a lot to take care of their parents. Then the parents die and suddenly some relative no one has heard from in decades comes along to really screw things up, often from an urban area with zero concept of the market realities of a poorly mantained house on rural land.

I get the whole “hoarding sucks” but it’s really only an urban problem. Go to a rural area and you can find plenty of housing stock for cheap.

6 months to offload a house is not always so easy.

I did a search around the area I grew up that is very rural and I checked 4 properties for sale, two of them under $100k and they’ve been listed for over a year. In urban areas there’s demand, but rural areas commonly have houses just no one wants on land that no one cares about. No distant LLCs want them so they are available, but they aren’t convenient to anything so no one wants them either.

I mean, he plainly explained that there’s a son bogging down the estate over the house. He might have said “worthless” but I’m sure it’s more like some land value and essentially zero structure value, so they might want to get a few thousand, while he blocks that transaction holding out for ten-fold. He also asserts the county tax assessments are not consistent with market value, and I think most people who have dealt with tax assessments can relate to the disconnect between realistic market value and tax assessment, one way or the other.

Or even if they did say “fine, you know what, take the property and we’ll take the rest and you can deal with trying to extract the value you think there is”, if he doesn’t agree to that you can’t really force it short of fully disclaiming yourself out of the entire estate. So if the man had $200k in other assets, then that would be an expensive thing to forfeit for the sake of not dealing with a busted house on a bit of land.

Because it is, they decided that AI upscaling is a good “enhancement” to digital zoom.

They consider the sin not to be using unapproved services using an unapproved service, the sin is the guy who got them caught.

Only for those willing to risk violating tax law, and by extension mostly people who feel like they can afford enough accountant and lawyer time to evade consequences if they come.

IRS also publicly said they would only be doing easy enforcement, i.e. only doing audits on lower income people who can’t drag it out and make it expensive.

So basically giving a green light for the rich and only the rich to keep the money they owe…

His wife even left him because he invested nearly all of the money from the PayPal IPO payout.

No, he was the one who filed for divorce, to propose to a woman 13 years younger than his first wife (he at 37 wanted to trade his 36 year old wife for a 23 year old wife). From papers served to his then-current wife to having a 23 year old fiancee was about 6 weeks.

Generally speaking, Musk’s business success is marked by being in the right place and the right time with someone else making the actual substantive calls about exactly how the business is run. When he gets opinionated and have businesses yield to his specific desires, it tends to produce bad results.

Even my work has better OPSEC on a random stupid meeting with nothing interesting. They review every attendee to make sure no one unexpected is in the chat.

Maybe he was wanked smart?

It’s even worse than that, it’s:

they’re dead to me

The statement becomes hard to understand if you just censored Vivian’s old name.

If you replaced it with “Vivian”, and “she”, then you change it so much that it becomes confusing what point Musk was trying to drive at, and/or diminish exactly how vile his statement was.

Yeah, I couldn’t imagine ever acting like that toward my child the way he acts toward her. Just flat out declaring your child dead to everyone and refusing to acknowledge who they are now, just because of what they chose to do with their own life… It’s pretty heart breaking.

He doesn’t even have an excuse of losing his path to a genetic legacy, he’s got a dozen living children who may still go on to have children. He’s neglected all of them until Luigi killed a CEO and suddenly he’s carrying one around like an ornament all the time, but still they got his genes, for better or worse.

Maybe 1970s Elon could have used a few more hugs, but this century it’s just too late.