Musk resigns as Twitter CEO, Linda Yaccarino takes over

[Hukhalia]

Aargh, you beat my clarifying edit...

model trains or actual public transport

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=501551&p=38497172&hilit=forsher#p38497172

High Speed Rail

marry me

[Archinstinct]

Musk's current (self-inflicted) predicament makes me wonder what the world's richest would get up to if they weren't constantly self-sabotaging themselves.

Probably some New World Order-illuminati type bullshit.

[Ethel mermania]

Me? I'd spend it. Mostly on trains.

model trains or actual public transport

Why not both?

[Forsher]

Aargh, you beat my clarifying edit...



viewtopic.php?f=20&t=501551&p=38497172&hilit=forsher#p38497172

High Speed Rail

marry me

Well, you have to remember I'd do this in NZ.

However, because I'm petty and since Elon Musk is richer than 2021 Jeff Bezos, I'd have some money left over. So, Bismarck, ND can get the HSR it deserves (though, it seems, either I'd need to downgrade the quality of the HSR or get someone else to pay for $140b Musk can't afford having built the NZ network):

The thing, and a lot of people miss this [...], everyone forgets about trains is that you don't have to build just branch lines.

There 120,000 people in Bismarck, or thereabouts, and it's on the way from Minneapolis to Seattle.

Of course, in practice, you normally build high speed trains for inter-urban commuting. But this is a choice. It's not the only reason you would build them.

But, if we wanted, we could easily use a high speed train, say, 350km/h, to turn Bismarck, Jamestown, Fargo, St Cloud and Minneapolis into a single, shared, labour market. In fact, why wouldn't we? As I pretty much remembered, 150km minimum distance to be more competitive than cars (or high speed busses) (I said 200km), so let's look at this:

• Bismarck (133,626) to Jamestown (15,849) is approx. 150km (so, about 26min at 350km/h).
• Jamestown to Fargo (248,591) is ca. 144km (so, about 25min)
• Fargo to St Cloud (194,418) is ca. 250km (so, around 43min)
• St Cloud to Minneapolis (3,690,261) is ca. 95km (while this is well within the 150km limit, note that this is about 17 minutes at 350km/h whereas Google Maps says it takes 70 minutes to drive; with a half hourly frequency that's 47 min vs 70 min)

That would create, with say five minute dwell times, a 126 minute trip. With 45 second dwell times, that'd be 114 minutes. By car, that takes six and a half hours, without traffic (well, 384 minutes... three times as long).

Of course, you argue, why would we spend, what, $180b to create a maglev HSR (which would quite likely be more like 400km/h than 350km/h) between two small cities and a rather larger one? Well, why would we build a motorway between them? No-one would do that for the purpose of commuting (given it takes the better part of seven hours to drive) so why does this section of the Interstate exist?

[ed. trying to price this section of the interstate in today's money]

$145b sounds like an awful lot of money to build 639km of track. But for 639km of track, it works out as about $225 million per km. And this compares with modern motorway construction costs, how? Well, The I-94 route is 687km, so we'd need to be building more cheaply than $209 million/km. And that sounds like a hell of a lot of money. And it is. But roads routinely get close to this figure. There's a notorious motorway in Russia that, in 2014, was priced at $200 million/km. But that was tunnels, which isn't likely to be the case here. So, how about an urban motorway project, given we've got to go through five cities? Well, um, this one in NZ was priced at $327 million/km, which (foolishly using CPI inflation) would translate to $268.73 million US today. Just eyeballing it, the actual urban distances involved here would be 90.57km, so that would be $24.3b (US) there, which means the remaining motorway must cost less than $202 million per km. Fortuitously, it looks likely that building would be cheap:

On Dec. 9, 1968, a new 11-mile segment of Interstate 94, linking downtown Minneapolis with downtown St. Paul, opened for the first time.

“It had taken 10 years, 20,816 tons of steel, 321,00 cubic yards of concrete and nearly $80 million to complete, the Minneapolis Tribune reported. “By making driving between Minneapolis and St. Paul — and points in between much faster and easier, the freeway may tend to melt the Twin Cities into more of a single metropolitan area.”

That translates, being stupid again, to $36.8 million a km today. This is, obviously, vastly less than $202 million but I must stress that it's a very stupid conversion. Just for reference, $80m in 1990 by CPI is $158.42m in 2020, but by concrete product PPI it would be $197, i.e. 24% more. Whether this would favour or disfavour the comparison, I don't know.

But, in any case, my best estimate is:

• HSR: $145b
• motorway: $46.2b

[ed. I didn't base the NZ estimates on a maglev]

But, of course, one can be used to commute and the other can't, but both create interurban mobility. Is the extra value of the commuting worth nearly $100b more? Well, we might be able to look at that...

[ed. in the remainder of this very, very long post I try to estimate if a Bismarck HSR could make money with the only major urban area on the route being Minneapolis-St. Paul

I did use the same maglev prices to try and (much more crudely) cost several HSR proposals in the US:



I can't quite remember what all the righthand columns are about. I assume legspeed is the time duration of the average leg length. The lines that are in green have average leg lengths within tolerance (I don't remember what the upper limit is but my gut feeling is 750km).

Also, it turns out I've confused top speed for average operating speed. So, everything would be slower... even recalling that these are supposed to be maglevs not operating at their top speed for the whole thing.

(n.b. I abandoned the idea of Minneapolis to Seattle early on but forgot to edit the post to reflect that, but that's why Minneapolis to Seattle doesn't appear in my route table)

[The Rich Port]

Frankly, we could use more regulated speech considering the amount of dangerous falsehoods spreading around the public discourse, both from corporations trying to cover up their grabs for power and control and distortions of science in the name of profit and the wacko groups a lot of them support spreading anti-empirical conspiratorial nonsense.

i agree with you entirely until this point. currently the world is in the grip of capital and its sock-puppet governments, to permit such an ideological climate to further regiment discourse would be disastrous

there is no such thing as an unbiased mediator

You mean like... Twitter under Elon Musk?

[The Black Forrest]

Frankly, we could use more regulated speech considering the amount of dangerous falsehoods spreading around the public discourse, both from corporations trying to cover up their grabs for power and control and distortions of science in the name of profit and the wacko groups a lot of them support spreading anti-empirical conspiratorial nonsense.

i agree with you entirely until this point. currently the world is in the grip of capital and its sock-puppet governments, to permit such an ideological climate to further regiment discourse would be disastrous

there is no such thing as an unbiased mediator

Bias is an overused word. So what if a moderator has bias? What matters is if they dispense justice inline with the rules of the site. All to often; those who faced mod justice complain about bias.

Now are all mods without problems? off course not; most are volunteers. Usually; those who violate the policies because of their “bias” get sacked eventually.

[Seangoli]

marry me

Well, you have to remember I'd do this in NZ.

However, because I'm petty and since Elon Musk is richer than 2021 Jeff Bezos, I'd have some money left over. So, Bismarck, ND can get the HSR it deserves (though, it seems, either I'd need to downgrade the quality of the HSR or get someone else to pay for $140b Musk can't afford having built the NZ network):

The thing, and a lot of people miss this [...], everyone forgets about trains is that you don't have to build just branch lines.

There 120,000 people in Bismarck, or thereabouts, and it's on the way from Minneapolis to Seattle.

Of course, in practice, you normally build high speed trains for inter-urban commuting. But this is a choice. It's not the only reason you would build them.

But, if we wanted, we could easily use a high speed train, say, 350km/h, to turn Bismarck, Jamestown, Fargo, St Cloud and Minneapolis into a single, shared, labour market. In fact, why wouldn't we? As I pretty much remembered, 150km minimum distance to be more competitive than cars (or high speed busses) (I said 200km), so let's look at this:

• Bismarck (133,626) to Jamestown (15,849) is approx. 150km (so, about 26min at 350km/h).
• Jamestown to Fargo (248,591) is ca. 144km (so, about 25min)
• Fargo to St Cloud (194,418) is ca. 250km (so, around 43min)
• St Cloud to Minneapolis (3,690,261) is ca. 95km (while this is well within the 150km limit, note that this is about 17 minutes at 350km/h whereas Google Maps says it takes 70 minutes to drive; with a half hourly frequency that's 47 min vs 70 min)

That would create, with say five minute dwell times, a 126 minute trip. With 45 second dwell times, that'd be 114 minutes. By car, that takes six and a half hours, without traffic (well, 384 minutes... three times as long).

Of course, you argue, why would we spend, what, $180b to create a maglev HSR (which would quite likely be more like 400km/h than 350km/h) between two small cities and a rather larger one? Well, why would we build a motorway between them? No-one would do that for the purpose of commuting (given it takes the better part of seven hours to drive) so why does this section of the Interstate exist?

[ed. trying to price this section of the interstate in today's money]

$145b sounds like an awful lot of money to build 639km of track. But for 639km of track, it works out as about $225 million per km. And this compares with modern motorway construction costs, how? Well, The I-94 route is 687km, so we'd need to be building more cheaply than $209 million/km. And that sounds like a hell of a lot of money. And it is. But roads routinely get close to this figure. There's a notorious motorway in Russia that, in 2014, was priced at $200 million/km. But that was tunnels, which isn't likely to be the case here. So, how about an urban motorway project, given we've got to go through five cities? Well, um, this one in NZ was priced at $327 million/km, which (foolishly using CPI inflation) would translate to $268.73 million US today. Just eyeballing it, the actual urban distances involved here would be 90.57km, so that would be $24.3b (US) there, which means the remaining motorway must cost less than $202 million per km. Fortuitously, it looks likely that building would be cheap:

On Dec. 9, 1968, a new 11-mile segment of Interstate 94, linking downtown Minneapolis with downtown St. Paul, opened for the first time.

“It had taken 10 years, 20,816 tons of steel, 321,00 cubic yards of concrete and nearly $80 million to complete, the Minneapolis Tribune reported. “By making driving between Minneapolis and St. Paul — and points in between much faster and easier, the freeway may tend to melt the Twin Cities into more of a single metropolitan area.”

That translates, being stupid again, to $36.8 million a km today. This is, obviously, vastly less than $202 million but I must stress that it's a very stupid conversion. Just for reference, $80m in 1990 by CPI is $158.42m in 2020, but by concrete product PPI it would be $197, i.e. 24% more. Whether this would favour or disfavour the comparison, I don't know.

But, in any case, my best estimate is:

• HSR: $145b
• motorway: $46.2b

[ed. I didn't base the NZ estimates on a maglev]

But, of course, one can be used to commute and the other can't, but both create interurban mobility. Is the extra value of the commuting worth nearly $100b more? Well, we might be able to look at that...

[ed. in the remainder of this very, very long post I try to estimate if a Bismarck HSR could make money with the only major urban area on the route being Minneapolis-St. Paul

I did use the same maglev prices to try and (much more crudely) cost several HSR proposals in the US:



I can't quite remember what all the righthand columns are about. I assume legspeed is the time duration of the average leg length. The lines that are in green have average leg lengths within tolerance (I don't remember what the upper limit is but my gut feeling is 750km).

Also, it turns out I've confused top speed for average operating speed. So, everything would be slower... even recalling that these are supposed to be maglevs not operating at their top speed for the whole thing.

(n.b. I abandoned the idea of Minneapolis to Seattle early on but forgot to edit the post to reflect that, but that's why Minneapolis to Seattle doesn't appear in my route table)

As a person intimately familiar with North Dakota, I can say with certainty HSR would be a great idea that would be a great boon to the state. With that knowledge, I can say with great certainty that North Dakotans would reject the idea whole heartily because it is a good idea. Heh.

That said, one of the issues surrounding it is that while travel to/from these cities would be far easier, the problem is that a lot of these cities are relatively sprawling for their population size, and public transport in cities is practically non-existent outside of a few of the cities, and even then it's not particularly expansive. Getting to Bismarck from the cities in two hours is not going to do you any good if you can't get around Bismarck at all, which you won't be able to as it's a mess of a city.

[Forsher]

Well, you have to remember I'd do this in NZ.

However, because I'm petty and since Elon Musk is richer than 2021 Jeff Bezos, I'd have some money left over. So, Bismarck, ND can get the HSR it deserves (though, it seems, either I'd need to downgrade the quality of the HSR or get someone else to pay for $140b Musk can't afford having built the NZ network):



I did use the same maglev prices to try and (much more crudely) cost several HSR proposals in the US:

(Image)

I can't quite remember what all the righthand columns are about. I assume legspeed is the time duration of the average leg length. The lines that are in green have average leg lengths within tolerance (I don't remember what the upper limit is but my gut feeling is 750km).

Also, it turns out I've confused top speed for average operating speed. So, everything would be slower... even recalling that these are supposed to be maglevs not operating at their top speed for the whole thing.

(n.b. I abandoned the idea of Minneapolis to Seattle early on but forgot to edit the post to reflect that, but that's why Minneapolis to Seattle doesn't appear in my route table)

As a person intimately familiar with North Dakota, I can say with certainty HSR would be a great idea that would be a great boon to the state. With that knowledge, I can say with great certainty that North Dakotans would reject the idea whole heartily because it is a good idea. Heh.

That said, one of the issues surrounding it is that while travel to/from these cities would be far easier, the problem is that a lot of these cities are relatively sprawling for their population size, and public transport in cities is practically non-existent outside of a few of the cities, and even then it's not particularly expansive. Getting to Bismarck from the cities in two hours is not going to do you any good if you can't get around Bismarck at all, which you won't be able to as it's a mess of a city.

Yeah, the intraurban part is a difficulty, yes. However, I believe (in one of the snipped sections) you can create enough value to justify HSR (based on GDP per capita differentials between the cities) based purely on intensifying (to no great degree) the walkable catchment of the train station.

I think inflated now was based on the population changes before and after the TGV. Should've called it something else.

Those are real GDP growth rates because discounting 100 years into the future is subject to attenuation bias.

[Gravlen]

Elon Musk asserts his right to not buy Twitter

Elon Musk has a "right not to consummate" his acquisition of Twitter and a "right to terminate the merger agreement," according to a letter from his lawyers to the Twitter general counsel Vijaya Gadde sent Monday morning.

Why it matters: While Musk has been tweeting about the deal being "on hold" for a while, this is his first formal, legal suggestion that his agreement to buy Twitter is anything other than legally watertight.

Between the lines: The letter from Musk is ostensibly about a dispute over data. Musk wants Twitter to provide him with information that will help him "facilitate his evaluation of spam and fake accounts on the company's platform."

The big picture: Thanks to the recent rout in technology shares, both Twitter and Tesla, which is the main source of Musk's wealth, are worth much less today than they were when Musk entered his initial bid of $54.20 per share. That means Musk is overpaying for the company, with money he is going to have difficulty finding.

The bottom line: There is zero chance that Twitter will simply accept Musk's assertion that he has the right to withdraw from the agreement. If he tries to do so, things are likely to get messy.

[Thermodolia]

Elon Musk asserts his right to not buy Twitter

Elon Musk has a "right not to consummate" his acquisition of Twitter and a "right to terminate the merger agreement," according to a letter from his lawyers to the Twitter general counsel Vijaya Gadde sent Monday morning.

Why it matters: While Musk has been tweeting about the deal being "on hold" for a while, this is his first formal, legal suggestion that his agreement to buy Twitter is anything other than legally watertight.

Between the lines: The letter from Musk is ostensibly about a dispute over data. Musk wants Twitter to provide him with information that will help him "facilitate his evaluation of spam and fake accounts on the company's platform."

The big picture: Thanks to the recent rout in technology shares, both Twitter and Tesla, which is the main source of Musk's wealth, are worth much less today than they were when Musk entered his initial bid of $54.20 per share. That means Musk is overpaying for the company, with money he is going to have difficulty finding.

The bottom line: There is zero chance that Twitter will simply accept Musk's assertion that he has the right to withdraw from the agreement. If he tries to do so, things are likely to get messy.

Sounds like someone is getting buyers remorse

[Ifreann]

LMA, and I cannot stress this enough, O.

[Thermodolia]

LMA, and I cannot stress this enough, O.

This.

It’s quite awesome watching Musk burn through his billions

[Northern Socialist Council Republics]

LMA, and I cannot stress this enough, O.

Reminds me of something I read in a book in my childhood. I don't have the exact quote, because it's been years and I don't remember the title of the book anymore, but the general sentiment was:

"It's the quiet clients that you want, the ones that blend into the crowd, because they're the ones that will stick around for a long time."

Flamboyant media personalities running tech trends, on the other hand, come and go like dust in the wind. :p

[Ifreann]

LMA, and I cannot stress this enough, O.

This.

It’s quite awesome watching Musk burn through his billions

Dude can't even spend money without fucking it up and people think he's going to colonise Mars.

[The Alma Mater]

LMA, and I cannot stress this enough, O.

This.

It’s quite awesome watching Musk burn through his billions

Perhaps he wants to put aside 100 million for his ex Amber. Perhaps he wants to use her for breeding.

[Antipatros]

Maybe this Twitter thing was an attempt by Elon to offload a bunch of Tesla stock without people making a big fuss over it? He spent the last several years pumping Tesla super hard with the FSD/robotaxi talk.

It's hard to tell what he's thinking, honestly.

[Emotional Support Crocodile]

It's hard to tell what he's thinking, honestly.

I would hazard a guess at "ooh I can manipulate stock prices with impunity".

[Heloin]

Maybe this Twitter thing was an attempt by Elon to offload a bunch of Tesla stock without people making a big fuss over it? He spent the last several years pumping Tesla super hard with the FSD/robotaxi talk.

It's hard to tell what he's thinking, honestly.

Always assume he’s just a fucking idiot and everything comes into focus real easily.

[Forsher]

Maybe this Twitter thing was an attempt by Elon to offload a bunch of Tesla stock without people making a big fuss over it? He spent the last several years pumping Tesla super hard with the FSD/robotaxi talk.

It's hard to tell what he's thinking, honestly.

Always assume he’s just a fucking idiot and everything comes into focus real easily.

No assumptions necessary. He honestly is a fucking idiot.

[Heloin]

Always assume he’s just a fucking idiot and everything comes into focus real easily.

No assumptions necessary. He honestly is a fucking idiot.

As always I am vindicated.

[Prima Scriptura]

I honestly think Elon wasn’t going buy Twitter all along and was just trolling us .

[Ifreann]

I honestly think Elon wasn’t going buy Twitter all along and was just trolling us .

If he was it'll cost him a billion dollars, or more.

[Gravlen]

I honestly think Elon wasn’t going buy Twitter all along and was just trolling us .

If he was it'll cost him a billion dollars, or more.

Wouldn't you troll everyone if you could afford to piss away a billion dollars? Small price to pay...

[Ifreann]

If he was it'll cost him a billion dollars, or more.

Wouldn't you troll everyone if you could afford to piss away a billion dollars? Small price to pay...

True.

[Prima Scriptura]

If he was it'll cost him a billion dollars, or more.

Wouldn't you troll everyone if you could afford to piss away a billion dollars? Small price to pay...

Judging by his tweets, yes. He would pay a trillion dollars to pull of the greatest troll of the decade. That is his mentality.